When looking for the truth about a complex subject, I look to those ten or so authors whom I deem the greatest time-tested geniuses of our human race, and then I see what they have to say. If one is patient enough, they rarely fail to give satisfactory and often surprising answers.
One of these great geniuses is Dante Alighieri, and his masterpiece is the Divine Comedy. Of course, it is about the poet’s spiritual journey, how he gets from a pretty dark place on earth to truth, happiness, and salvation—what we call heaven. But it is not an autobiography; it is a guidebook. The author didn’t write it so that we could find out how he made it to heaven; he wrote it to explain how we can.
On May 4, 2015, Pope Francis asked us to read Dante because he considered him “an artist who still has much to say and offer to those who desire to travel the way to true knowledge, to the authentic discovery of self, of the world, of life’s profound and transcendent meaning. The Comedy can be read as a great itinerary, a true pilgrimage... It represents the paradigm of every authentic voyage in which humanity is called to leave behind what Dante calls “the little patch of earth that makes us here so fierce” (Par. XXII, 151) in order to reach a new condition marked by harmony, peace, and happiness.” Bishop Robert Barron said he first read it in 1990, and it changed his life.
When it comes to Dante’s Comedy, there are many insights to be pondered and learned. But here we want to listen to Dante’s answer to our question: “What Should You Do To Overcome a Mid-life Crisis?” If I am not mistaken, here are four of Dante’s answers.
1) Find the Appropriate Guides
If you are reading this, you are probably about halfway through your lifetime journey, or at least so you think. It’s a fascinating but crucial time. It is a moment in our lives when we begin to take stock of what has gone before (probably quite different from what we imagined) and then try to plan a strategy for the “second half.” The problem is we are not ready for the “second half.” Our education, training, and nature were aimed at our “ascent”: ascent in knowledge, psychological power, capacity to build relationships, commitment to a career, and what we thought was life. But no one taught us how to face the descent.
Dante, too, experienced this. Though he started writing the poem around 1308, the poem is set in the year 1300, and Dante was born in 1265. So in the Comedy, Dante places himself at 35 years old, which the medieval world considered mid-life (this they borrowed from Psalm 90 of the Bible, which states: “Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty if we are strong; they pass quickly, and we are gone. Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.”) By the time he began to write the comedy, he had already achieved what most people would consider great success: he was considered a great poet and writer and had achieved the highest office in Florence politics. But because of false charges and in-fighting, he was exiled from Florence in 1301 and, unbeknownst to him, was never to return. Then, Dante understood that something wasn’t right: the ideals and dreams of his young life seemed to have vanished; time, circumstances, and the world had crushed his dreams. He was feeling entirely lost.
So, the Divine Comedy begins in the middle of a mid-life crisis. In the famous first lines of the first canto, Dante writes (I will use John Ciardi’s translation for all of the quotes in this essay):
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say…
(Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.)
How does Dante react? At first, he tries to escape the situation on his own. He finds a hill robed in the early morning sunlight, giving him hope. Three times, he tries to ascend the hill, but each time, he is stopped by beasts who symbolize his sin, limitations, and dysfunction. He is about to give up:
I wavered back; and still the beast pursued,
forcing herself against me bit by bit
till I slid back into the sunless wood.
Then, just when he is about to succumb to a life in a “sunless wood,” a guide arrives. It is the Roman poet Virgil, Dante’s favorite poet and literary hero. Virgil tells him he is trying to escape his mid-life crisis incorrectly. In other words, we will no longer be able to progress by “white-knuckling it” and taking easy shortcuts. Virgil says: “He must go by another way who would escape this wilderness,” and promises to be his guide. Very soon after, we discover that there is another guide, too, the one who sent Virgil. That is Beatrice. But more of that later.
With this very brief summary, Dante reveals two fundamental truths about our spiritual journey, especially in midlife.
The first is our need for a guide. Without a guide, without accompaniment, we will never get out of the holes we dug (or dig) for ourselves. Dante, however, presents us with two guides. First, there is Virgil. He represents, I think, all the best of what human wisdom and reason can give us. When we are stuck and have no way to go, we have to look for guidance from those rare and unique human beings who are masters in the art of life. If we are lucky, we might find one living among our friends or acquaintances. But more often than not, strange as it may seem, these guides have already passed away; we can only meet them and learn from them through their books. Just as Virgil was for Dante, our best guides can very well be not someone we know in our lifetime but someone who has been able to transmit through the ages great human truths that, for some reason or another, touch and inspire us. The great theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, in his book of aphorisms “The Grain of Wheat,” wrote: Of the best there are only very few, and this is why these have the grace of being inexhaustible: Plato, Goethe, Mozart, Rembrandt, Bach… Nothing gives me so much pleasure as my ability to extricate from the chaos of history the four or five figures who together represent for me the constellation of my own ideas and mission. I certainly agree with this idea. In Dante’s “constellation,” Virgil would have been the first star. Especially when we need help to guide us through the rough times in life, we should all have our select “constellation” of stars, those “best” whom we choose to guide us. When faced with today’s complicated challenges, the serious Catholic who does not have his favorite authors or books, the ones that inform him and guide him, can become a “lost” Catholic.
But of course, there are not only books. Perhaps even more importantly, Dante describes the second type of guide, our “Beatrice” guides. They are living people who love us and have the knowledge to guide us. Beatrice is, of course, the love of Dante’s life, and in the Comedy, she is a symbol rich in meaning. However, one of the most essential meanings is that of the human or spiritual guide who loves us. Dante portrays her as the ideal of the wise and prudent Christian friend, the true Christian mentor, or an excellent Christian spiritual director. And she is all these by her love and wisdom. Only with both qualities is she capable of leading Dante out of his crisis and to God. In his excellent book, The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper concurs: “There is no way of grasping the concreteness of a man’s ethical decisions from outside. But no, there is a certain way, a single way: that is through the love of friendship. A friend, and a prudent friend, can help to shape a friend’s decision. He does so by virtue of that love that makes the friend’s problem his own, the friend’s ego his own. For by virtue of the oneness which love can establish he is able to visualize the concrete situation calling for decision, visualize it from, as it were, the actual center of responsibility. Therefore, it is possible for a friend –only for a friend and only for a prudent friend- to help with counsel and direction to shape a friend’s decision or, somewhat in the manner of a judge, help to reshape it.
Such genuine and prudent loving friendship (amor amicitiae) –which has nothing in common with sentimental intimacy, and indeed is rather imperiled by such intimacy- is the sine qua non for genuine spiritual guidance. For only this empowers another to offer the kind of direction that –almost!- conforms to the concrete situation in which the decision must be made.”
So let this be our first recommendation from Dante for our moments of crisis: we need guides. This truth is even more pressing when we, like Dante at the beginning of the book, consider that we no longer need guides because we already have experience, are already “successful,” and know the ways of the world. Perhaps when we don’t feel the need for guides – or when we are most embarrassed to ask for them – is when we most need them.
2) Accept that the journey you must face is not up but down.
In the very first canto of the Comedy, Virgil tells Dante: “He must go by another way who would escape this wilderness.” This “other way” is not up but down. This utterly surprising fact is Dante’s second lesson for us. As was mentioned near the beginning of this essay, in the first half of our lives, our education and training followed our natural maturation: everything was aimed at our “ascent.” Nevertheless, the second half of life is a descent: our sun is declining and heading towards its final setting. Unlike the ascent half of our lives, there are no “descent” schools.
It is perhaps not easy to describe this “other way,” but what that might look and feel like is symbolically portrayed in the Comedy by Dante’s cosmic geography. The direction which Dante must take is no longer to go up but to go down. In other words, to progress towards everything that gives life meaning (truth, peace, joy, and love), Virgil tells Dante they must start by descending. What does this descent mean?
The first two sections of the Comedy, the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio,” give us the answer. The entire narrative implies that at a particular moment in our lives, the only way we can progress is to return into ourselves and seriously face not only the natural wearing down of our physical and psychological strength, but also the faults, mediocrities and sins of our past lives. It is the paradoxical evangelical “growth” in humility, which, being growth, is decline.
Let us quote again from Von Balthasar’s “The Grain of Wheat:”
Almost everything in the usual guidelines for spiritual progress is based on the unspoken principle: I must grow. When religion is not founded on security anxiety, the impulse toward “higher culture,” “spiritual refinement,” and so on, often plays the decisive role. We can live our whole life without ever realizing the meaning of: I must decrease. Not decrease exteriorly and grow interiorly; not decrease through mortification in order to increase in virtue according to the spiritual man; not decrease in “appearances” in order to grow in “essence”; but quite simply: he must grow, I must decrease.
Only those who accept the truth of their declining years can live them fruitfully. Faced with this truth, we can either resist, ignore, or accept it. We know that our mortal condition demands that our natural powers will begin to fade with the passing of the years. Eventually, they will fade so much that we will die. That is the truth, and, as St. Teresa of Avila once famously quipped, “Humility is truth.” We can either continue vainly to delude ourselves, or we can humbly accept our ineluctable journey toward our God-given death and, therefore, try to profit from it.
Dante poetically describes this journey by accepting the difficult but liberating paths of none other than Hell (where he confronts all of his dysfunctions) and Purgatory (where he accepts to work on correcting them.) Only through this painful way will Dante be fit not only to ascend the small height he initially saw at the beginning of the Comedy but also to ascend to Heaven. “Descendite, ut ascendatis, et ascendatis ad Deum” (“Descend so that you can ascend, and ascend to God”) wrote St. Augustine in Book Four of his “Confessions,” and that is precisely what Dante describes.
For us, this descending journey often takes the form of a patient acceptance of a long, humbling road of self-revelation – I discover and accept who I really am (and not what I dreamed I would be) – and then the disciplined and slow purgation of my ego-centered ways, in whatever form these may have taken in the past. They are the roads of humility – and often humiliation – but also the roads of truth and liberation. To go up, we have to go down, or, as the Lord taught: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” Of course, this acceptance is not easy or pleasant, and one rarely succeeds independently. As our first answer told us, we need a guide with wisdom, and love, to accompany us on our way.
3) Stop Making Excuses and Accept Your Responsibility
A third critical piece of advice we can glean from Dante accords neatly with our second point above. At some point in our lives, we must stop looking for excuses. It is the hard reality of freedom and responsibility: our actions are our own, and there are no more excuses. I choose three examples that Dante offers us in the Comedy.
The first is a famous passage from Canto Five of the Inferno. It is the first level of Hell proper, and it is where we find those condemned because of their sin of lust. Since the lustful permitted themselves to be carried away by their passion, in hell, they are constantly whipped around by strong winds. Dante can speak to Paolo and Francesca (real-life lovers discovered and murdered by Francesca’s husband). Only Francesca speaks. She tells Dante that they are in hell because they read romantic literature together, and allowed themselves to be carried away by the narrative and seduced into playing the parts of the adulterous Lancelot and Guinevere. Francesca explains it in a way that says, given the natural laws of Love, she and Paolo couldn’t help themselves. Dante reacts:
The other spirit, who stood by her, wept
so piteously, I felt my senses reel
and faint away with anguish. I was swept
by such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell.
Why did Dante faint? I think the answer is a valuable insight for our topic. What neither Dante nor the reader yet understands is that in the entire Inferno, even though the damned concede that they belong in Hell, they all (if I am not mistaken) refuse blame for their downfall. They always justify themselves, one way or another. Here, Francesca blames her downfall on romantic writing and the nature of love (“something bigger than both of us”); she refuses responsibility. In his youth, Dante had been a writer of the same type of verse, and he faints because he realizes that he, too, has sin and responsibility to bear. Francesca and Paolo never consider that they might not have turned the next page in their book, but Dante does realize he could have decided to write something else. Our actions and decisions have consequences.
A second famous example is Dante’s meeting with Ulysses. Ulysses is suffering in the regions of Hell reserved for the fraudulent, and he is there for leading his old and weary sailing crew to their doom by using his legendary gift of persuasion. Ulysses remembers the stirring speech – seemingly so noble and true – with which he exhorted his men:
‘Shipmates,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand
perils have reached the West, do not deny
to the brief remaining watch our senses stand
experience of the world beyond the sun.
Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes,
but to press on toward manhood and recognition!’
With this brief exhortation I made my crew
so eager for the voyage I could hardly
have held them back from it when I was through.
Like Francesca, Ulysses is shirking responsibility. He brags about his noble attitude, but he won’t consider that he did it for an ignoble cause. The sun into which he led his faithful followers – past the known edge of the world – was a false god of his ego. Ulysses admits that he abandoned his country, son, and even his wife Penelope to go on his “manly adventure” but never admits his responsibility for them or his sailors. His pride causes sorrow for the first and death for the last. But Ulysses remains unmoved. Watching him, Dante understood that he risked being the same type of man: magnanimous but irresponsible (his exile and refusal to return to Florence caused many problems for his family.) His excuses were personal and political honor, but he discovered they were insufficient.
A last example is in Canto Sixteen in the Purgatorio. It is the circle of those purging away the capital sin of anger, and Dante meets Marco the Lombard there. Marco converses with him, and they both agree that the state of things in the world is deteriorating. But then he tells Dante that it is a mistake to seek to blame society, others’ lack of virtue, or even fate (“the heavens”) for one’s situation. Brother,” Marco says, “the world is blind and you are its true son.”
The spheres do start your impulses along.
I do not say all, but suppose I did—
the light of reason still tells right from wrong;
and Free Will also, which, though it be strained
in the first battles with the heavens, still
can conquer all if it is well sustained.
You are free subjects of a more immense
nature and power which grants you intellect
to free you from the heavens’ influence.
If, therefore, men today turn from God’s laws,
the fault is in yourselves to seek and find.
Dante realizes that if there are problems in the world or our personal lives (our mid-life crisis lives!), we should look for the cause in ourselves and not look for excuses. As Shakespeare was to put into the lips of Cassius, about three hundred years later: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
4) Do Not Concede to Sloth
Let us look at one last piece of advice Dante proposes for a mid-life crisis or any experience we might have similar to it. We find it in the very middle of the Divine Comedy. Smack in the middle of Purgatory (Canto 18), exactly halfway through Dante’s long journey and right in the middle of his life, with what does Dante meet up? The sin of sloth, or laziness. It is poetic and psychological brilliance on the part of Dante, for it is typical of the middle-aged person to begin to “take it easy.” In our journey through life, as experience and deceptions pile up, one of our greatest temptations is to concede to fatigue and abandon the courage necessary to confront our challenges. Perhaps it is the attitude expressed in the famous song: “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”:
The sun is hot and that old clock
Is movin’ slow and so am I,
Work day passes like molasses
In winter time, but it’s July.
Pour me somethin' tall an' strong,
Make it a “Hurricane” before I go insane
It’s only half-past twelve but I don’t care
It’s five o’clock somewhere…
That is something like a small poem I wrote for my 53rd birthday:
So now, you say, they’re fifty-three
These years that have rolled over me?
Well, mix some whiskey
In my evening tea.
In the moment of his mid-life and the middle of his journey to resolve his crisis, Dante, like most of us, must deal with sloth.
What is sloth? According to the Catholic Catechism, #2733, “Spiritual writers understand acedia as a form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, carelessness of heart.” In 2094, we get a fuller description. In describing the sins against the love of God, it mentions – “Acedia or spiritual sloth goes so far as to refuse the joy that comes from God and to be repelled by divine goodness” and “lukewarmness is hesitation or negligence in responding to divine love; it can imply refusal to give oneself over to the prompting of charity.”
Dante struggled with this vice for much of his exile. And what does he propose as the remedy as he enters the circle of sloth in Purgatory? As in all the stages of Purgatory, Dante sees a Marian example of how to deal correctly with the vice. It is the Visitation, the episode in the Bible when Mary goes in haste to her cousin Elizabeth. He then notices the secular example: Cesar, who, during the conquest of Southern France and Spain, left his besieging army at Marseilles with Brutus to go off with the rest of his army to take Lerida. What does Dante learn from these examples? The message is clear: one of the best antidotes for sloth is, like Mary and Cesar, to have a mission; feel invested in a mission.
As we have seen, as we enter into the second half of our lives, a natural temptation is to start “taking it easy.” Often, we translate this with the business or career term of “retirement.” However, Dante’s solution proposes the opposite attitude, especially during the second half of our lives. We must find our mission, our “raison d’être,” or slowly we will concede to a life of decadence and uselessness; we end up wasting what should be fruitful years. This attitude is described earlier in the Comedy by some of my favorite lines of the entire poem. In the Inferno, Canto 24, verses 47-57, we read this:
My lungs were pumping as if they could not stop;
I thought I could not go on, and I sat exhausted
the instant I had clambered to the top.
“Up on your feet! This is no time to tire!”
my Master cried. “The man who lies asleep
will never waken fame, and his desire
and all his life drift past him like a dream,
and the traces of his memory fade from time
like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.
Now, therefore, rise. Control your breath, and call
upon the strength of soul that wins all battles
unless it sink in the gross body’s fall.
There is a longer ladder yet to climb:
much is not enough. If you understand me,
show that you mean to profit from your time.”
There is much wisdom in these lines. If we do not want our lives to be consumed “like smoke in air or ripples on a stream,” we must be invested in a mission in the second half of our lives.
Dante’s proposal may be accurate, but the obvious question for anyone battling a mid-life crisis is, “What mission?” The answer to this will differ between different people. But returning to the circle of sloth, Purgatory Canto 18, Dante gives us an answer that should apply to everyone, no matter their particular mission. Near the end of this canto, Dante hears the penitents saying:
“Faster! Faster! To be slow in love
is to lose time,” cried those who came behind;
“Strive on that grace may bloom again above.”
Whatever our particular mission may be, all must be invested in what Dante calls “amor” (“love” or “charity.”) Time, he says, should not be wasted by being “slow in love” (the actual text in Italian is “little love,” “poco amor.”) As we saw in our definition of from the Catechism, sloth is exactly this “poco amor”: hesitation or negligence in responding to divine love; it can imply refusal to give oneself over to the prompting of charity.”
Conclusion
What should you do to overcome a mid-life crisis? Dante provides us with four wise and practical answers to this question.
1) Find appropriate guides to help you through this difficult time
2) Humbly accept the downward curve of your journey and its implications.
3) Stop making excuses and accept responsibility for your past and future life.
4) Reject sloth and embrace love.
We all have only one very short life to live. But half of this life is still before us when we go through the turbulent waters of mid-life. If we do not want our lives to be consumed “like smoke in the air or ripples on a stream,” apply these suggestions from Alighieri Dante, one of the very few genuinely great geniuses of our human race.
“A much taller ladder”….. yikes. Great article Fr Bruce.
Lots to ponder, thank you!