What if metaphysical realism is true? Taoism is not Christianity, and Dante was a Christian, not a Taoist.

The Tao Of Dante

By A.G. GANCARSKI

In our ongoing tour of Dante’s Paradiso on this blog, one of you the other day, Liam, said you can see the seeds of nominalism within these late cantos ofParadiso, by which he meant (correct me if I’m wrong, Liam) that the metaphysical system Dante constructs here is so complex and baroque that it collapses under its own weight. That is, it makes sense that people would be attracted to a simpler way to understand the relationship between God and the world than the “metaphysical realism” of Dante and the Scholastics.

I can see the point, but what if metaphysical realism is true? Yes, Dante’s construct in Paradiso is quite complicated, but is there a way to make it simple enough to be understandable, and in a way that the ordinary reader can make use of in his life? This is a question I’m going to have to face when I sit down this fall to write my Dante book.

This week, I stumbled across a book that gave me real insight into this problem. As you know, we moved to a new house recently. The moving process unearthed, so to speak, books of mine that have been out of sight and out of mind for a while. One of them is a book I bought five years ago, when I was reading about Taoism and its parallels to Orthodox Christianity. The contemporary Orthodox priest-monk Damascene wrote a book called Christ The Eternal Tao, in which he interprets the basic Taoist message in Christian terms. The basic idea is that outside of the Hebrew tradition, Taoism is the most complete understanding of what Christianity teaches, and, rightly understood, prepares one to accept the truth of the Gospel. The book by no means teaches syncretism, but rather identifies aspects of Taoist thought that correspond to the way Orthodox Christianity understands the spiritual path. Tao simply means “the Way”; in Chinese bibles, Jesus’s words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” come out as, “I am the Tao, the Truth, and the Life.” For Taoists, yielding to the tao is the path to restoring harmony between body, soul, and the cosmological order, which isn’t necessarily deistic.

You can easily see how this corresponds to what Dante has been after: life as a struggle to reconcile our own souls to the cosmological and metaphysical order, which is laid down and undergirded by God. In the beginning of the Commedia, Dante finds himself in a dark wood of confusion and fear, his escape routes blocked; he has lost the “straight path” — that is, the tao. In Dante’s thought, as in Christianity, if we follow the tao of Christ, we will find our way out of our own dark wood, and move steadily toward enlightenment — which is to say, union with God — culminating in gaining heaven.

Anyway, the volume I found on my shelf the other day is called Vitality, Energy, Spirit: A Taoist Sourcebook, translated and edited by Thomas Cleary. It is a collection of essential writings from the Taoist tradition. I’m not quite sure why I picked it up, or why I turned to the pages that I did, but what I read there illuminated the Dantean teaching in a way that I want to share.

....................................

Read more: www.theamericanconservative.com