The Line Running Through the Heart of Every Man: Brothers Born Centuries Apart

“Memory was once regarded as the mother of the Muses: Mnemosyne mater musarum. I can testify that it is really so, that when perfection summons, it is untrappable except as the detail recalled…” (The Land of Ulro, Czeslaw Milosz, pg 11).

As stated in the previous entry, Dante is the patron saint of all those who only visit their homelands in memory – Milosz being one of those who pray to Saint Dante for strength and inspiration. Such a distance from one’s homeland, a distance of the time and space of forced exile, is the mother of the Muses which informed the poetry of Milosz: whose aim was to capture a significant and precarious century which most others had swept under the rug as finally overcome when the Berlin wall fell leaving only Democratic freedom within the purview of the globe.

Dante adds to the conversation of exile a pre-democratic (once again, democracy in the modern sense) look. Dante himself was a white Guelph who opposed the presence of the Pope in Florentine politics. Dante was part of a movement which would eventually lead to the enlightenment and the separation of religious authority and political authority which makes possible the modern American Democracy.

Dante’s discontent with the political situation of his day arises from a concern with corruption in the church. The realization that a religious government was prone to corruption was also a concern for Pride, that a Pope could put himself above the needs of God, and when he does so politically he corrupts an entire nation. In some ways, his discontent is one of Ideological Absolutism, which, since the birth of Christianity had manifested itself in Religious terms, but since then has reared its head in secular forms. In short, despite Dante’s role in bringing forth the enlightenment, his desire to do so was born from a concern that he thought would be removed by removing religious authority. This concern did not disappear. Whereas Dante assumed religion would still play a major role in people’s lives, hence balancing political tyranny, the institutions that arose did not maintain religious authority in any way, allowing secular Ideology to merely replace Religious Ideology.

Such a move was incomprehensible to a Europe that had been understanding its politics within religious contexts for a millennium – incomprehensible to all except Tocqueville. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was published in 1835 and talked much of a perceived possibility of great decline in the spiritual characteristic of America – one that for better or for worse we all must admit, has come true – 173 years after he first published. This merely goes to show that democracy was not always considered the only option for political justice, despite the modern trend, it was considered by many foundational thinkers in Western Civilization, as a dangerous turn – one that always comes before tyranny according Plato.

Hence, after three entries, we have finally concluded the introduction to a most interesting problem, which challenges a paradigm once thought unquestionable. Our allies in this questioning range from the former Soviet Union, to Imperial England, Renaissance Italy, and even Ancient Greece. The thing they all have in common is exile. Solzhenitsyn from Russia, Milosz from Poland, Dante from Florence, and Plato from Athens (Plato being the only one exiled FROM a Democracy in leau of execution, which was Socrates destiny).

Exile brings from the fore what exactly caused all these people to bring the best critiques. Exile means you have no home, nothing to lose, no national language, no cultural pressure – you are allowed to be a voice of all, of yourself, and of none simultaneously standing outside culture, outside history, and yet inside the vision of all. The memories, usually painful, of their homeland and of their loss, are the motivations, the Muses, that drive them with otherworldly fervor and power. They, unlike us, understand what it is to lose it all, to walk but be dead and this inability to lose any more, to understand what it is at stake gives them an omnipotence and wisdom beyond their peers.

Finally, from ambiguity, we are free to rise to a particular question. The question is exile. The frame is 20th century ideologies including democracy. The people are Milosz, Dante, Tocqueville, Solzhenitsyn, and Plato. Together they form an unbroken line which runs through the heart of every man. They share a destiny, a pain, and an insight which, if we are to be free thinkers, we must confront as the possibility that there is an option outside of our current system, which may allow the soul to ascend to greater heights.