Discovering Dante, Start with Fear

Dante's Path
by Bonney Gulino Schaub, M.S., R.N., Richard Schaub, Ph.D.

(Page 4 of 4)

Discovering Dante

Assagioli died in 1974, and we never got to meet him. But in 1990, after many years of studying and then teaching his work, we felt irresistibly drawn to deepen the bond we already felt with him by visiting his home city of Florence, where his papers are archived. We were both self-employed, and we couldn't really afford to take the time off from work, but we knew we had to go for us it felt like a pilgrimage and so we went, determined to stay for a month.

The very day we arrived, we went where all the tourists in Florence go to the Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore, the main cathedral). Crowds pour in through the door on the right and out through the door on the left, but the inner vastness of the Duomo dwarfs all human activity. In such a magnificent space, you wonder where to look first. Our immediate instinct was to go toward a large painting on a side wall, and the result of that fortuitous choice has been both many years of study and the writing of this book.

The painting was di Michelino's Dante and His Poem. It shows the sage and poet Dante holding his poem The Divine Comedy, while depicted around him are the three realms of the journey descending to hell, climbing the mountain of purgatory, and entering into paradise.

We stared at Dante. He stared back at us. He seemed to be saying: "Here is the map of all the human worlds. Take the journey and discover what I found." We felt a deep and immediate emotional connection with that painting but didn't yet understand its source.

Two weeks later, we were sitting in the library archives of Assagioli's home in Florence. We'd come to Florence because we'd instinctively felt the need to be closer to the teacher we'd never met. We'd called to request access to the library as soon as we arrived, but we'd also been told that a previous American student had stolen from the archives and so we knew there was a good chance we wouldn't be allowed in. For several days we got no reply, but then, out of the blue, the library secretary returned our call, and we made an appointment to meet her.

We spoke to her in simple, bad Italian, and she graciously spoke back to us in a few words of hesitant English. Then, in the middle of the conversation, she smiled, turned around, and got us the key. Perhaps our gratitude for Assagioli's work had come through to her.

We returned to that small, sunny library again and again. As we read Assagioli's intimate notes about his early work, his imprisonment by the Fascists, the death of his son, his spiritual experiences, his scholarly explorations, his search for practical methods to help his patients, we began to feel deeply attached to him and privileged to have access to his handwritten thoughts and feelings in a place so imbued with his gentle spirit.

Assagioli had read books in five languages (Italian, French, German, English, and Sanskrit) and had written notes in all but Sanskrit, which made many of them difficult for us to read. We discovered, however, that in his later years, once people from around the world began to seek him out, his notes were increasingly written in English. He referred to many mystics, artists, saints, philosophers, poets, and political thinkers, and he was always trying to synthesize these sources. As his work continued, he arrived at a way of being, an openness to higher consciousness, that brought him increasingly frequent experiences of illumination. Again and again in his notes we found brief jottings that said simply, "Joy, overflowing joy," "Gioia," or "Silent joy."

One day, we were talking with a former student of his, now a doctor in Florence, about our research, when he suddenly asked, rubbing his fingers together, "Can you feel the joy?" To this day, many years after Assagioli's death, his students, now psychiatrists and psychologists all over Italy, still become animated with humor and gratitude when they talk about him.

It was in going through Assagioli's notes that we discovered his deep identification with Dante. Not only with the literary Dante of the Duomo painting or the Dante of the spiritual journey to hell, purgatory, and paradise described in The Divine Comedy, but with the Dante who, despite a life of exile and loss, had emerged as a purposeful and enlightened teacher.

When we returned from Florence, we plunged immediately into an intensive study of Dante and his poem. We read The Divine Comedy many times in many translations and slowly began to get past the obstacles to understanding presented by his fourteenth-century historical, literary, and religious references. We began to see that Dante's hell was a catalogue of our fears, his passage through purgatory was the road to liberation from those fears, and paradise was the realm in which we explore higher consciousness.

To Make It Real, Begin in Hell

Dante took one third of The Divine Comedy to describe in painful detail all of the hell impulses in human nature indifference, lust, addiction, greed, rage, pride, violence, fraud, betrayal behaviors that were described as "sins" in the Middle Ages but are behaviors we still engage in and encounter every day at home, at work, in the neighborhood, in the nation.

Hell is a place we want to get out of. It's old news. We hear about it in our daily papers and on the nightly news. It's in our city, in our town. People hate one another, betray one another, and kill one another. They are stupid, addicted, obsessive, and unbelievably insensitive. They're full of rage or pride. They cheat and lie and on and on. Our history books contain stories of slaughter told side by side with accounts of the advances and discoveries of creative humanity. Scientists discover how to split the atom and then use that knowledge to build the most destructive bomb the world has ever known. We just can't seem to keep hell out of our behavior.

The relevance of Dante's exploration of hell is brought home to us again and again as despairing clients who've been through hellish experiences ask, "What's wrong with people? How can they do this to each other? Where is God in all of this? If God exists, and He let this happen, then I hate Him." The recurrence of hell in human affairs makes us all doubt humanity's long-term chances for survival. But the very fact that it is so ubiquitous is actually the reason that our spiritual journey needs to include the exploration of this darkness. Because, if hell is all around us, the answers we arrive at will be required to hold up in the face of the pain, suffering, and loss we encounter every day.

The challenge is: How can we love the whole thing? It doesn't seem possible, since the full cycle of life birth, growth, decay, and death is not itself lovable. Birth and growth are easy to love, but decay and death are easy to fear. One half of life is lovely while the other is fearful. Fear is planted firmly in the middle of our existence. It seems that nothing can change it. Throw what you will at it art, religion, science; fear just swallows them up and stares back at us. It just is. It is an eternal state.

Start with Fear

That's why Dante's acknowledgment of hell is, in a way, so reassuring. His very humanity, all his questions, doubts, fears, and emotional reactions, are incorporated into the map he draws for finding states of higher consciousness and harmony in living.

Have you ever seen one of those maps of a public transportation system that indicate with an X or a circle "You are here"? That's what Dante does. He tells us that we must start from wherever we are. We do not have to suppress our emotions in order to be more spiritual, and we do not need to suppress our mind in order to have no thoughts or only good thoughts. Instead, we have to develop self-knowledge about our emotions and mind just as they are, and that mental development will ultimately lead to changes in our feelings and our physical states. There are no shortcuts from being lost to being found, and although we can get good guidance from many sources, it is, in the end, only we ourselves who can develop our own mind. Enduring spirituality cannot be imposed from without. It's an inside job.

Both Dante and Assagioli tell us that our personality and our spirituality cannot be separated, that our mental/emotional development and our spiritual development are aspects of a single activity. We have encountered many people who dabble spiritually and get nowhere. Unfortunately, at the first moment of crisis, their unrealized spirituality blows away like dust. One reason for this might be that they were never really committed to transformation in the first place. Another reason, however, might be that in their seeking they were attempting to deny their own experience and doubts while trying to conform to the dictates of a particular religious or spiritual system.

We won't make that mistake. Let's follow the guidance of Dante and Assagioli, and let's go to hell together ... for the sake of discovering paradise and a way of harmony.

Copyright © Bonney Gulino Schaub, Richard Schaub, Ph.D.

About the Author

Bonney Gulino Schaub is one of the country's foremost practitioners of holistic nursing.

Dr. Richard Schaub has more than thirty-five years of experience as a psychotherapist and also teaches meditation and clinical imagery.