Proof of gelid gust dusts all we see— the fence-lines, the avenue, the cars half-buried, the scatter of November’s leaves now sealed beneath a stilling plea. What survives survives by yielding: branches bow, the eaves let fall their weighted load in muffled thuds along the yard and walk— an elemental treaty now.
The world composes its reply to summer’s claim and autumn’s boast. No cardinal law, no thunder-host proclaims what drifts down from the lead-grey sky, yet everything it touches seeks to answer why it must comply— the wild rose hips, the window frames, the question lingering in its wake.
By morning all dispute is moot. The snow has made its argument without a word, without assent, soft-covering the curb and root, the path we thought was permanent, the streets where we were confident we’d marked our necessary route.
The musings began as I started my morning routine. Roused out of bed and heading to the shower, I found myself uttering, almost involuntarily: yet ever more. The words rose without prompting—perhaps because the task before me was ordinary, repetitive, and required no conscious thought. In such moments, the mind drifts, half-idle and half-aware, allowing stray phrases to surface without clear origin. But these three words arrested me. I repeated them aloud and wondered: three simple words, and yet they carried weight, rhythm, and an unexpected poetic resonance. Why?
After completing my morning ablutions, I returned to contemplate the phrase further and determined that some research was in order. Accordingly, I sought poetry and prose in which these words appear in succession—or in meaningful proximity—with appreciable effect. Once identified, I sought to understand the source of their force: the reason they ring with a power far exceeding their lexical modesty.
What emerged almost immediately was that the phrase yet ever more is no fixed formula of the poetic canon—no Miltonic thunder, no Dantesque refrain, no Eliotian motif. Rather, it appears sporadically—in seventeenth-century lyrics, Victorian nature poetry, and occasional elegiac verse—where poets employ it whenever they require a compact expression of endurance, paradox, or lingering emotional intensification. Its power lies precisely in this: three ordinary words capturing experiences that refuse ordinariness.
Early Instances: Paradox and Persistence
Consider William Strode’s seventeenth-century poem On Jealousie:
There is a thing that nothing is, A foolish wanton, sober wise; It hath noe wings, noe eyes, noe eares, And yet it flies, it sees, it heares; It lives by losse, it feeds on smart, It joyes in woe, it liveth not; Yet evermore this hungry elfe Doth feed on nothing but itselfe.1
The concessive yet introduces contradiction: jealousy ought to consume itself and die out. Yet—contrary to all reason—it persists. Evermore extends that persistence beyond temporal boundaries, transforming a human passion into an almost metaphysical condition.
A similar pattern appears in Archibald Lampman’s Hope and Fear (1883):
As when the sunless face of winter fills The earth—a moment misty bright— The sun streams forth in powdery light, A silver glory over silent hills;
And all the rolling glooms that lie below That sudden splendour of the sun, With shivered feet and mantles dun, In stricken columns skim the gleaming snow;
Yet far away, beyond utmost range Of sun-drowned heights, pine-skirted, dim, That fringe the white waste’s frozen rim, Hang ever ghost-like waiting for the change:
So often to the blank world-sobered heart Comes hope, with swift unbidden eye, And bids the weary life-glooms fly With shaken feet, and for a space depart;
Yet evermore, still known of eye and ear, With sullen, unforgotten surge, Hang ever on the waste heart’s verge, Time’s hovering ghosts of restless change and fear.2
Here the phrase marks memories that, though logically expected to fade, remain vivid—“still known of eye and ear.” Memory becomes not a fading echo but an enduring presence, resisting dissolution. The poem’s natural imagery—sunlight briefly breaking through winter gloom only for shadows to persist at the horizon—mirrors consciousness itself: fleeting solace does not erase deeper, lurking fears.
Structural analogues—but not direct antecedents—appear elsewhere in the tradition: George Herbert’s The Search (1633) repeatedly opens with “Yet can I mark…,” enacting concessive-persistence, while Christina Rossetti’s A Better Resurrectiondeploys yet as a pivot from desolation to expectation in the line “Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring,” generating a concessive-and-intensifying movement even without a full triadic form.
Tennyson and the Deepening of Grief
The pattern appears with particular frequency and force in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), where it becomes almost a structural signature for the poem’s central paradox: grief that does not diminish with time but deepens and transforms. Tennyson varies the pattern—substituting but for yet, altering the position of ever and more—while retaining its concessive–durational–intensifying logic.
In Canto XLI, contemplating his deceased friend’s spiritual ascent, he writes:
For tho’ my nature rarely yields To that vague fear implied in death; Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath, The howlings from forgotten fields;
Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor An inner trouble I behold, A spectral doubt which makes me cold. That I shall be thy mate no more,
Tho’ following with an upward mind The wonders that have come to thee, Thro’ all the secular to-be, But evermore a life behind.3
The phrase captures the poet’s fear that he will perpetually lag behind Hallam’s transfigured state—not merely left behind but evermore behind, the temporal gulf widening rather than closing. The concession is double: though he claims not to fear death itself, and though he strives to follow Hallam’s ascent, the doubt persists and intensifies.
Yet the most remarkable deployment appears in Canto CXXXI, where the pattern shifts from lamentation to affirmation:
And yet is love not less, but more;
No longer caring to embalm In dying songs a dead regret, But like a statue solid-set, And moulded in colossal calm.
Regret is dead, but love is more Than in the summers that are flown, For I myself with these have grown To something greater than before.4
Here yet introduces not mere continuation but transfiguration. Love persists and intensifies—”not less, but more”—becoming something greater. What began as lamentation has, through time’s pressure, become an enlargement of the heart.
Later Variations
Geoffrey Bache Smith, whose A Spring Harvest was published posthumously under J.R.R. Tolkien’s editorship, employs the phrase to capture beauty and grace in his Glastonbury:
The Queen that was, whom now a convent’s shade Imprisons, and a dark and tristful veil Enwraps those brows, that in old days were seen Most puissant proud of all that ever made The traitor honest, and the valorous frail.
Yet evermore about her form there clings And evermore shall cling, the ancient grace, Like evening sunlight lingering on the mere: And till the end of all created things There shall be some one found, shall strive to trace The immortal loveliness of Guinevere.5
Guinevere’s beauty, though shadowed by sorrowful penitence, persists; the phrase conveys a grace that resists decay, lingering like light upon the waters. The doubled evermore—first descriptive, then prophetic—creates a temporal dilation: what persists now will persist “till the end of all created things.”
Perhaps this explains why the phrase surfaced unbidden during my morning routine—in that liminal state when the mind is neither fully engaged nor wholly at rest, and truths we do not seek present themselves. A simple, repetitive task; three ordinary words; and suddenly a glimpse of what all these poets knew.
The Shape and Sound of the Phrase
The power of yet ever more lies in the internal mechanics of the phrase itself. Yet, is adversative; it signals resistance, contradiction, persistence against expectation. Ever erases temporal boundaries and opens a vista without limit. More introduces escalation—a rising degree, an intensifying condition.
Thus the phrase embodies a miniature logic of concession → duration → escalation, a compressed rhetoric of persistence against expectation.
The sound reinforces the structure. The assonantal /ɛ/ shared by yet and ev-er binds the first two terms, while the deeper /ɔː/ of more provides rounded closure. Jakobson’s “poetic function” is precisely this intertwining of sound and meaning: language calling attention to itself through patterned echo.6 The triad exemplifies it.
Linguistically, the force of yet ever more can also be understood in light of Michael Israel’s account of scalar meaning. Ever is a degree-based intensifier, signaling movement along an ordered scale without natural upper bound; joined to more, it expresses not mere continuation but continuation that deepens.7 Geoffrey Leech’s observations on foregrounded repetition likewise illuminate why paired or tripled intensifiers resonate in poetic contexts.8
But lived experience precedes theory: some feelings—grief, longing, devotion—intensify through time rather than diminish.
The Lived Experience of Persistence
The rarity of the exact triad is telling. Poets have long used its components in various pairings, but the compact English formula appears only occasionally, and often at moments of emotional endurance or spiritual intensification. This scarcity sharpens its effect. Each verified instance crystallizes a paradox: what ought to subside instead deepens.
This explains the phrase’s particular force. In three ordinary words, it captures something we already know but rarely articulate: the heart’s deepest experiences follow a logic all their own. They do not fade; they deepen. They do not lessen; they grow. For grief, for love, for memory, for beauty glimpsed and lost, time does not heal so much as intensify. What we carry becomes heavier, more present, more itself.
Linguist Michael Israel notes that words such as ever function as degree-based intensifiers, signaling movement along a scale rather than a fixed quantity. In his discussion of polarity items, he explains that their force comes from the way they mark increasing degrees without a natural upper limit, a feature central to English expressions of ongoing growth or intensification. This helps clarify why phrases like “ever more” feel open-ended and expansive: they point not to a single amount but to a process that keeps rising. See Israel, “The Pragmatics of Polarity,” in The Handbook of Pragmatics (Horn & Ward, eds., 2004), discussion of scalar semantics and polarity items. ↩︎
Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969), chap. 6, “Patterns of Sound,” esp. §§6.1–6.4, where Leech discusses foregrounded repetition, sound patterning, and the poetic heightening of ordinary lexical items. ↩︎
A skipping stone, chosen with care by human hand, breaks the still glass of lake serene; for stones remember what time forgets, and in their flight, recall all the more.
What does it remember? The molten cradle of its birth beneath the sea, the mountain’s shattering rise from the deep, the patient sleep in riverbed and shore. The warmth of the palm that cast it forth, the whisper of air between each skip— and how, in falling, it becomes again what it has always been: stillness beneath all motion.
THOMAS COUTURE – Los Romanos de la Decadencia (Museo de Orsay, 1847)
“Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi; populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus.”
“Well, then, a commonwealth is the property of a people. But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.”
— Cicero, De Re Publica I.xxv (39), trans. Clinton W. Keyes-Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Re Publica
The Romans named the commonwealth theres publica—the public thing. Ours has become theres mercatoria—the mercantile thing.
I. Form Without Spirit
Republics seldom die by sword or decree. They decay in silence—eroding first in spirit, then in habit, until only the forms remain. The flag still waves, oaths are still sworn, the Capitol dome still gleams in the sun. Yet beneath that marble permanence lies a slow petrification of the civic soul.
Cicero defined the res publica as “the property of the people”—a common good bound by shared agreement on law and justice. But when the people cease to agree on what law means, or what justice demands, the Republic endures only as silhouette. Its forms persist out of inertia, its substance preserved only in ritual memory.
We have reached that stage of endurance. The Republic survives, but uninhabited. Its spirit has withdrawn, its voice replaced by noise.
II. The Market’s Triumph Over the Polis
The hollowing began not in our politics but in our economy. The citizen was slowly replaced by the consumer; civic virtue yielded to commercial appetite.
This transformation did not occur by chance. It was conceived in the classrooms of Vienna and Chicago, where Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman re-imagined freedom itself as a function of the market. Their disciples translated this theory into policy through Ronald Reagan and their obedient acolytes, who proclaimed that government was the problem and private enterprise the measure of liberty.
The revolution was cultural as much as economic. In 1971, Lewis Powell—soon to be a Supreme Court Justice—sent a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning that American business faced an existential threat from critics of capitalism. His solution: a coordinated campaign to capture the institutions that shape public opinion—universities, media, courts, and legislatures. The result was a new institutional order: the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and a constellation of think tanks and lobbying arms that would spend decades re-educating the political class in the gospel of deregulation, privatization, and permanent growth.
By the 1980s this ideology had become orthodoxy. The social compact that once bound liberty to responsibility was rewritten so that profit alone defined the good. The public good became whatever advanced shareholder value and citizenship became an economic function.
Thus the res publica—the public thing—was supplanted by the res mercatoria—the mercantile thing. The Romans had no such term, for they could not imagine a world in which commerce would claim sovereignty over the commonwealth. But the new condition requires a new name.
The irony of this transformation is ancient and bitter. For most of Christian history, the merchant stood outside the moral order—necessary, perhaps, but suspect. The early Church Fathers—Ambrose, Tertullian, Leo the Great—condemned merchants outright, inheriting from Plato (Republic) and Aristotle (Politics Book VII, Ch. IX, 1328b-1329a) the conviction that trade was ignoble and inimical to virtue. By the Middle Ages, this judgment had softened but not disappeared. Augustine warned extensively against avarice, that “uncleanness of heart” which weighed down the soul and bound it to perishing things (Sermon 177). Aquinas, centuries later, distinguished carefully: exchange for necessity was commendable, but trading for profit was “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity” (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 77, Art. 4). Such trading, he wrote, had “a certain debasement attaching thereto”—it engaged the mind too much with worldly cares and withdrew it from spiritual ones (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 77, Art. 4). Wealth was a burden to be borne, not a sign of virtue. The Gospels themselves spoke plainly: it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24).
The Reformation reversed this judgment. Labor became a vocation, profit a sign of election, diligence and thrift the new sacraments of grace. The theological architecture of this reversal is visible in Calvin’s 1545 Letter on Usury, which systematically dismantled thirteen centuries of prohibition. Calvin reinterpreted Luke 6:35—”lend, expecting nothing in return”—as a call to charity toward the poor, not a ban on commercial lending. He dismissed Aquinas’s argument that money was sterile and consumed in its use as “too frivolous” and “childish,” insisting instead that money, like land, could legitimately generate return through productive employment. Most decisively, Calvin divorced usury from property rights and natural law, relocating its ethics in “equity” and “mutual benefit”—a standard flexible enough to bless commerce while condemning exploitation. Yet even Calvin betrayed unease: “it would be good to desire that usurers were expelled from the entire world,” he wrote, before immediately adding, “but since that is impossible we must submit to a common utility.” The tension was never resolved; it was merely buried beneath the momentum of markets.
What Max Weber would later identify as “the Protestant ethic” emerged: the doctrine of predestination created psychological need for visible signs of election, and worldly success became such a sign. Labor was no longer penance but calling; profit no longer suspect but evidence of grace rightly used. The Puritan divine Richard Baxter made this explicit: “If God shew you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way, (without wrong to your soul, or to any other) if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be Gods Steward, and to accept his gifts, and use them for him when he requireth it” (Christian Directory, 1673).
In America, this theology found its most radical expression: a nation that declared itself divinely ordained to prosper, its wealth evidence of providence rather than plunder. The monastery yielded to the countinghouse, the community of faith to the individual of conscience; and the Temple to the money-lenders’ tables. The merchant was redeemed and enthroned, and the marketplace declared holy ground. Yet in this sanctification lay the seed of perversion. What had been a warning against excess became a theology of excess; what had been humility became self-justification. The camel, still unable to traverse the eye of the needle, now claims the needle has widened to accommodate its girth. Thus, through inversion disguised as progress, the old economy of salvation became the new salvation of economy.
Interlude: The Shining Hill and the Idol of Gold
Perhaps this explains the American paradox: the Republic imagined itself a shining city on a hill, a light unto nations. Yet what if that light was never the flame of civic virtue but the glitter of commerce—the reflected gleam of Mammon’s altar? The founders spoke of liberty, but liberty yoked to profit soon ceases to be freedom and becomes appetite enthroned. The idol of gold, once condemned by prophets, now governs the temples of exchange. Thus the Republic mistook the radiance of avarice for the light of grace, and called its marketplace a sanctuary.
If Mammon once ruled the countinghouse, he now reigns through the circuit and the screen.
III. The Digital Usurpation
If the market stripped the Republic of its moral substance, technology has stripped it of its perceptual one. The Internet, once envisioned as a global commons, has been enclosed by a handful of private empires: Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and X.
These companies now mediate nearly every act of citizenship—our speech, assembly, education, even our perception of truth. They claim to connect the world, yet in practice divide it into markets of attention and identity.
Their infrastructures are not neutral. Algorithms decide what can be seen, heard, and believed. Platforms that once promised dialogue now amplify division because outrage is more profitable than understanding. Truth has been outcompeted by virality.
Consider the architecture of a Facebook feed. It does not present information chronologically or randomly, but according to a hidden formula designed to maximize “engagement”—a euphemism for time spent, which translates to advertising revenue. Posts that trigger anger, fear, or tribal affirmation rise to the top; nuance sinks. The algorithm knows no truth, only metrics of return. The result is a kind of epistemic Darwinism in which the most emotionally inflammatory content survives and the most thoughtful perishes unseen.
This is not a bug but the business model. The platform does not sell connection; it sells attention. And attention, in this economy, is harvested through the deliberate fragmentation of shared reality.
What Orwell feared as censorship has become something subtler: curation. The public square has been replaced by the private feed. We are no longer silenced—we are distracted. And distraction, as the tyrants of old never mastered, is the most perfect instrument of control.
IV. The Propaganda Apparatus
Every empire needs its heralds. In the modern order, propaganda no longer marches beneath banners; it wears the costume of journalism.
The Murdoch media empire—Fox News, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial arm, The New York Post, The Times and The Sun in Britain, Sky News in Australia—has perfected this form of propaganda as entertainment. It does not so much persuade as condition.
By flooding the public square with grievance, spectacle, and especially fear, it transforms political life into perpetual theater. Its message is not ideology but emotion: outrage as identity, resentment as belonging. The goal is not to convince the citizen, but to exhaust him—to make deliberation impossible by ensuring that no common truth remains to deliberate about.
The method is simpler than it appears: repeat the lie, normalize the outrage, monetize the attention. Truth becomes just another narrative competing for airtime—and in that competition, truth is structurally disadvantaged. It cannot offer the satisfactions of tribal belonging that propaganda provides. Thus the empire does not need to censor; it merely drowns signal in noise until citizens, exhausted by the effort of discernment, surrender their capacity for judgment altogether.
The old tyrannies burned books; this one drowns them in noise.
V. The Corporations as Princes
It is no longer sufficient to speak in abstractions. The hollowing of the Republic has addresses, headquarters, and quarterly reports.
Sphere of Life
De Facto Sovereign
Instrument of Power
Speech & Assembly
Meta, X, Alphabet
Algorithmic reach, moderation, shadow banning
Commerce & Supply
Amazon, Apple
Infrastructure, logistics, payments
Knowledge & Memory
Google, OpenAI
Indexing, generation, curation of information
Currency & Capital
BlackRock, Vanguard, JPMorgan
Financial concentration, policy leverage
Imagination & Desire
Disney, Netflix, TikTok
Narrative control, aesthetic conditioning
News & Ideology
Fox News / News Corp
Manufactured outrage, narrative distortion
These are not metaphorical princes. They set policy without election, levy fees without representation, and administer justice without appeal—the very acts that once defined sovereignty.
Together they form what might be called The Architecture of Dominion: a network of powers that administer daily life more effectively than any elected government, yet without transparency, consent, or accountability.
VI. The Capture of the Political Class
The final conquest of the Republic occurred when its political machinery was wholly absorbed by the same forces that had already claimed its markets, media, and imagination.
The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission declared that corporations possess a First Amendment right to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. With that ruling, the barrier between wealth and sovereignty collapsed. Money became speech, and therefore power.
In the years that followed, the American two-party system—already in steady decline as a functional mechanism of representation—was captured outright by oligarchic interests. Campaigns became open auctions, legislators became bought investments, and policies became returns on capital. The parties now differ chiefly in the rhetoric by which they justify serving the same donors.
This demolished the Republic’s ancient defense against oligarchy: the principle that political power derives from citizenship, not property. The legal fiction that corporations are persons—a doctrine conjured by nineteenth-century courts without constitutional warrant—had long troubled the boundary between civic and commercial power. But by extending this extra-constitutional invention to include nearly unlimited political spending, and by declaring money itself to be speech, the Court completed a transformation built not on constitutional text but on judicial fiat. The voices of oligarchs and corporations alike could now be amplified a thousandfold, a millionfold, beyond those of ordinary citizens. When one man’s wealth can purchase more speech than a million voters combined, citizenship ceases to be a meaningful source of political power. What had been a legal convenience became a political weapon—the final triumph of cash over voice, of property over person, of the res mercatoria over the res publica.
This was the Republic’s silent coup. What had once been government of the people became government for the shareholders. The Republic remains as ritual; oligarchy rules in fact.
VII. The Cultural Surrender
While these structures were forming, the culture itself underwent a moral inversion. The intellectual skepticism of the twentieth century—postmodernism’s denial of objective truth—escaped the universities and entered the bloodstream of public discourse.
What began as critique of power became the abdication of reason. Truth was replaced by “personal narrative,” knowledge by “perspective,” and moral judgment by performative empathy. The result is not liberation but solipsism: each of us sovereign within our own unverifiable reality.
Hannah Arendt understood that totalitarianism does not begin with the camps but with the collapse of common worldliness—the destruction of the shared reality that binds men together. She called it organized loneliness: a condition in which individuals, isolated yet interconnected, are governed by narratives they no longer believe but cannot escape. It is the perfect soil for manipulation, for in such loneliness the appetite for belonging overwhelms the duty of thought. The algorithm merely perfected what ideology began: it manufactures isolation and then monetizes the yearning to escape it.
This is the perfect cultural soil for the new oligarchies. For when truth dissolves, authority no longer needs to justify itself—it merely needs to define what truth is today. The relativist becomes the authoritarian’s unwitting ally.
Thus language itself has been weaponized. Freedom means security; dissent becomes hate; lies become “alternative facts.” The corruption of meaning precedes the corruption of law, and the res publica fades from speech before it vanishes from life.
VIII. The Retreat of Education and Virtue
At the heart of every Republic lies paideia—the education of the soul toward wisdom and citizenship. We have replaced it with credentialing and metrics, with the pursuit of “outcomes” rather than understanding.
This transformation, too, bears a lineage. Milton Friedman’s 1955 essay, The Role of Government in Education, proposed the idea of school vouchers as a mechanism for privatization under the guise of parental choice. It took root during the backlash to desegregation in the 1960s and matured in the 1980s and 1990s as “school choice” and “charter reform.” Education was recast as a competitive market rather than a civic institution.
The language of civic formation gave way to the rhetoric of productivity. The so-called “education crisis” of the 1980s culminated in A Nation at Risk (1983), which declared that public schools were failing to serve the economy. From that moment, economic utility supplanted intellectual cultivation as the standard of success. The humanities—once the Republic’s nursery of conscience—were defunded, mocked as impractical, or harnessed to “skills-based learning.”
In higher education, the same logic prevailed. University boards filled with corporate executives who treat knowledge as a commodity and students as clients. The algorithm now decides who is admitted, how teaching is evaluated, and which disciplines survive. The classroom itself has become a data laboratory: outcomes tracked, performance engineered, curiosity quantified—education reduced to the management of metrics rather than the cultivation of mind.
A high-school English teacher is evaluated not by her students’ capacity for insight but by “value-added metrics” derived from standardized test scores—metrics that reduce King Lear to a datapoint in a district’s performance dashboard. A university professor knows that thoughtful, difficult texts will harm her evaluation scores, and that those scores will determine her career. The algorithm optimizes for satisfaction, not formation; for comfort, not growth. Thus the institutional incentive is to teach what pleases, not what challenges—to produce consumers of education rather than citizens capable of self-governance.
Washington, in his Farewell Address (1796), warned that morality and religion were the “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. Adams wrote in an October 1798 letter that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and was inadequate to govern any other. We have tested that hypothesis—and proved them right.
IX. The Political Consequence: Empty Institutions
What remains of politics is theater. Legislatures deliberate for the camera; executives govern by fiat; courts arbitrate between corporate interests. Public authority survives as ceremony, while real power migrates to the unelected oligarchs: the financial houses, the data lords, the platform barons, and the propaganda merchants.
The façade of republican government still stands, but within it resides an empire of bureaucracy and capital—not the civil service devoted to civic stewardship, but the corporate bureaucracy of extraction and surveillance. The old tyrants ruled through fear; the new through dependency. The oath of allegiance has been replaced by the click of “I agree.”
We live under what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarianism—a system in which corporate and governmental power fuse seamlessly while citizens, intoxicated by consumption and misled by propaganda, mistake submission for freedom.
X. The Present Condition: The Hollowing Complete
Consider the life now administered by algorithm: a gig worker’s income depends on maintaining a five-star rating from customers who can destroy his livelihood with a single click—customers who are themselves strangers with no accountability for the judgment they render. A young professional’s romantic prospects are curated by an app that reduces human beings to swipeable commodities, optimizing not for companionship but for the addictive dopamine loop that keeps users returning. A family’s access to housing hinges on a credit score calculated by a private company using undisclosed factors—a score that can deny them a home without explanation or appeal.
This is governance without government, sovereignty without accountability. We have comfort, but not character; connection, but not community; information, but not understanding. The Republic’s architecture remains, yet the light that once filled it—the shared moral imagination of a free people—has gone out.
This is not collapse but inversion: the Republic turned inside out, liberty administered by those who profit from dependence. The Republic endures as interface, its promise reduced to user experience, its citizens reborn as users—forever clicking “I agree.”
XI. Memory as Resistance
And yet, memory remains—the one province not yet colonized. Memory is the Republic’s last frontier: the remembrance that truth exists, that words have meaning, that citizenship is not consumption but conscience.
To remember rightly is to resist silently. For the memory of the Republic is not nostalgia but defiance: the assertion that what once was good need not remain lost.
Yet remembrance need not remain abstract; it begins in quiet acts of fidelity. The decision to read a book rather than scroll a feed. The choice to speak in full sentences rather than in slogans. The cultivation of attention in an economy designed to fragment it. The insistence that words still mean what they have always meant—that truth is not “my truth,” that justice is not self-interest dressed in virtue’s language, that freedom is not the absence of constraint but the capacity for self-government.
These are not grand gestures. They are the quiet practices by which a republic is inhabited rather than merely remembered. And from such practices, carried out by enough citizens in enough places, the Republic becomes possible again.
Within the small fidelities of teachers who still teach the canon, of local journalists who still pursue fact rather than traffic, of congregations that maintain common worship in an age of private spirituality, of small business owners who measure success by craft rather than scale, of librarians who curate knowledge rather than data, and of parents who guard their children’s attention from the platforms’ harvest—within these scattered practices, the memory of the Republic endures not as doctrine but as disposition, not as ideology but as habit.
XII. Coda: The Seed Beneath the Ashes
The form of the Republic may endure, but its substance has subsided into memory.
So it seems. Yet memory, if guarded, may become seed once more. The founders built not merely a machine of government, but a moral architecture designed to house what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. The machine still stands. It awaits habitation.
The Republic will rise again only when its citizens once more deserve it—when they reclaim the courage to speak truth, to resist convenience, and to hold power, even digital, financial, and propagandistic power, accountable to the moral law that no algorithm or Supreme Court ruling can repeal.
Until then, the Republic remains—its monuments intact, its meaning in exile. But even exile is not extinction. For memory, like embers beneath the ash, waits for the breath of the living to make it flame again.
The question is not whether the forms of the Republic shall endure—they shall, embalmed in marble and lit by the flicker of screens. The question is whether we shall prove worthy to reinhabit them.
Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci c. 480-450 BC depicting the myth of Odysseus tied to his ship’s mast in order to resist the enchanting song of the Sirens.
When the ancient image of Odysseus[1] bound to the mast comes to mind—ears open to the Sirens’ song, body restrained by rope and loyalty, the ship cutting forward through perilous waters—it becomes a figure for how medieval Christendom conceived its relation to the classical past. Bound by faith’s restraint, the medieval mind sailed amid pagan wisdom’s dangerous beauty, listening but not surrendering, drawn forward yet always compassed toward the harbor of divine truth.[2]
It is a noble image. And yet.
What if the mast itself—the very bonds—were not divine protection but human construction? What if the Sirens sang not of destruction alone but of truths that authority feared we might comprehend? What if the rope that held Odysseus was tied not by wisdom but by terror—terror of what might be discovered in the listening, in the surrender, in the unrestrained voyage into mystery?
The Pattern Returns
In The First Why, I proffered that the doctrine of original sin emerged not from divine decree but from human fear—fear of questions too vast, of mysteries authority could neither command nor contain. Eden was not humanity’s fall but humanity’s awakening: the first trembling articulation of consciousness reaching beyond certainty into the perilous freedom of knowledge.
The prohibition against eating from the Tree was never divine. It was human anxiety projected backward onto the dawn of consciousness, then used across millennia to condemn the impulse to seek, to know, to ask why.
The pattern appears again, centuries after Eden’s invented fall, in one of Western literature’s most celebrated works. In Inferno XXVI, Dante presents Ulysses—not honored for cunning or for his journey home, but condemned—placed in the eighth circle, wrapped in flame, punished for what Dante calls the final voyage: a crossing of boundaries, a reaching beyond limits, a refusal to accept that the Pillars of Herakles marked the edge of permitted human striving.
And the question returns with urgency: whence does this “divine prohibition” truly come? Divine command—or human fear?
Dante’s Condemnation
The scene in Inferno XXVI is among the most powerful in all of Dante’s Comedy. Speaking from within a tongue of flame, Ulysses recounts his final voyage to Dante and Virgil. Old, having returned at last to Ithaca, he finds himself restless. Neither fondness for his son, nor reverence for his aged father, nor the love owed to Penelope “could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world, and of the vice and virtue of mankind.”
Thus moved, Ulysses gathers his aged companions and sails westward, past Sardinia and the Pillars of Herakles, “where Hercules his landmarks set as signals, that man no farther onward should adventure.” There he exhorts his crew:
“O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand Perils have come unto the West, To this so inconsiderable vigil Which is remaining of your senses still, Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge, Following the sun, of the unpeopled world. Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.”
Ulysses tells how he “did render my companions, with this brief exhortation, for the voyage, that then I hardly could have held them back. And having turned our stern toward morning, we of the oars made wings for our mad flight.” After many months, a mountain appears—distant, dark—“it seemed to me so high as I had never any one beheld.” Yet joy turns swiftly to despair: “For out of that new land a whirlwind rose, and smote upon the fore part of the ship. Three times it made her whirl with all the waters, at the fourth time it made the stern uplift, and the prow downward go, as pleased Another, until the sea above us closed again.”[3]
As pleased Another. As Divinity decreed.
Dante, ever precise in his moral architecture, places Ulysses among the evil counselors—those whose intellect and eloquence lead others astray. Virgil names the crimes: the deceit of the Trojan Horse, the theft of the Palladium, and the guile that brought about Achilles’ death (the latter bound in later traditions to stratagems shared with Diomedes). These are the ancient transgressions of cunning; yet the final voyage is Dante’s own invention, extending the sin of false counsel beyond the Homeric mythos and into the metaphysical.[4] In daring to pierce the boundary divinity had fixed—the western limit of human striving—Ulysses becomes not the exemplar of curiosity but of hubris: the brilliant mind mistaking unbounded knowledge for sovereignty.
Critics have long split on whether Dante admires or condemns Ulysses; the poem itself stages that ambiguity, withholding the name of this bolgia—false counsel—until the next canto, so that the rhetoric of heroic quest swells before the juridical label arrives. Barolini notes this “both/and” design: Dante’s style confers grandeur even as the setting is Hell, letting admiration and censure coexist in productive tension.[5]
The Search for the Prohibition
But searching for the source of this prohibition—where, precisely, the gods forbid passage beyond the Pillars—one meets an unexpected thing.
Silence.
Herakles, during the tenth labor, reaches the western edge to seize Geryon’s cattle, setting two pillars to mark the furthest point of achievement: a monument, not a ban. Yet older traditions recall that these were once called the Pillars of Cronus—boundaries of a world still ruled by Titans and Time. When Herakles raised his own in their place, the frontier passed from divine to heroic custody, from the cosmic to the human. The divine threshold became a human one: the boundary of the gods transformed into the horizon of mortal striving. The limit is capacity, not decree.
Roman writers—Pliny, Strabo—treat the Pillars as the edge of the known, beyond which lay Oceanus. Unknown, yes. Unknowable, no. Unexplored, not forbidden. Plato places Atlantis beyond the Pillars. Its destruction follows moral corruption and imperial tyranny, not navigation through a strait.[6] The boundary violated is ethical, not spatial. It is precisely the confusion of those two that allows authority to recast natural exploration as spiritual transgression.
Perhaps, one thinks, a classical voice does warn against the west. Pindar, writing nearly a millennium before Dante, seems a candidate in Olympian 3. Praising Theron of Akragas, Pindar writes that the victor “touch[es] the pillars of Herakles,” and adds: “Pathless the things beyond, pathless alike to the unwise and the wise. Here I will search no more; the quest were vain.”
At first glance, a prohibition. Look closer. The poet exalts Theron’s virtue by comparing it to Herakles’ reach: the victor’s deeds have touched the pillars themselves, but he dares no further. Beyond lies not sin but silence. The poet halts not for fear of divine censure, but from reverence for proportion—the stillness that follows the uttermost word.
Pindar returns to the same image elsewhere, in Isthmian 4, praising the Theban Melissus: “Through their manly deeds they reached from home to touch the farthest limit, the pillars of Heracles—do not pursue excellence any farther than that!” Again, the admonition is one of measure, not interdiction. The poet counsels proportion in achievement, not fear of divine wrath. The Pillars mark not punishment for trespass but the culmination of human excellence: the utmost reach of mortal aretē, beyond which praise, not perdition, would fall silent.
We read here little explicit theological weight, rather a poet’s choice to observe measure, not a divine command to halt forever. Yet I acknowledge this is itself an interpretation, one shaped by my conviction that human consciousness reaches naturally toward mystery rather than transgressing against sacred law. Ancient readers, steeped in traditions of divine order, may have heard prohibition where I hear proportion. The Greek μάταιον πέρα carries shades of meaning—“vain,” “futile,” but also potentially “reckless” or “transgressive.” The ambiguity is real—even a metaphor can accrue normative force within a sacramental worldview. What remains clear is that Pindar offers no explicit divine interdiction, no Zeus commanding sailors to turn back, no cosmic punishment awaiting those who venture west.[7]
The Transmutation
Observe what Dante has done. Between Pindar and the Inferno lies a revolution not of geography but of metaphysics: the rhetorical limit has become a theological one. Where Pindar’s vain was the futility of excess, Dante’s mad flight is the hubris of trespass. What for the Greek was decorum becomes, for the Christian, disobedience.
In this metamorphosis of meaning, boundary becomes law, and poetic restraint is recast as divine architecture. He has taken Pindar’s rhetorical metaphor—a poet’s statement about the limits of praise—and transformed it into a cosmic prohibition about the limits of knowledge. He has taken “Here I will search no more; the quest were vain” (the poet’s restraint) and transmuted it into “None may pursue it; you will be damned” (the theologian’s absolute).[8]
The transmutation operates at every level:
Pindar: a metaphor about achievement. Dante: a literal geographical boundary.
Pindar: the poet’s personal choice. Dante: God’s universal command.
Dante has performed an alchemical transformation: he has taken the raw material of a poet’s metaphor and transmuted it into divine law. He has literalized what was figurative, universalized what was particular, divinized what was human, and weaponized what was wisdom.
And having manufactured the prohibition, he uses it to condemn Ulysses—and by extension, to condemn the impulse that drives all genuine seeking: the refusal to accept inherited boundaries, the courage to test whether limits are actual, the sacred audacity of the question why.[10]
The Pattern Exposed
The same alchemy appears in both Eden and at the Pillars:
Human limits. We are confused. We cannot sail farther.
Establishment of a marker. The Tree. The Pillars.
Sacralization of the marker. God commanded. God ordained.
Prohibition. Thou shalt not eat. Thou shalt not pass.
Damnation of transgressors. Original sin. Hellfire.
Who, then, says the boundary is divine?
Not God. No interdiction is carved into Atlantic stone; no oracle forbids the western sea.
Man does. Man, fearing the unknown, converts the edge of his knowledge into the edge of knowable reality, projects that fear onto the cosmos, and calls it Heaven’s will. Dante maps a theology onto ancient geography, then condemns the figure who reveals—by sailing—that the map was never the territory.
The Confusion of Boundaries
A distinction must now be made—one obscured by Dante’s condemnation and too often blurred by the weight of tradition. Not all boundaries are alike.
There are indeed limits that must hold: moral boundaries, ethical prohibitions, the restraints of justice and compassion that preserve the fragile order of human life. These are not inventions of fear but necessities of conscience. When Plato’s Atlanteans are destroyed, it is for crossing such limits—for turning power into tyranny, order into domination, knowledge into conquest.
But there are other boundaries—geographical, intellectual, imaginative—that exist only until courage or curiosity dissolves them. The confusion of the two, the moral and the cognitive, is the mechanism by which authority sanctifies its own caution. When fear disguises itself as wisdom, exploration becomes transgression, and inquiry is punished as sin.
To say “You shall not murder” is a moral imperative. To say “You shall not question” is a spiritual abdication. To say “You shall not seek beyond this sea” is fear pretending to be faith.
The first protects the sanctity of life; the second denies the dignity of mind. The danger lies not in reverence for limits, but in mistaking the boundary of understanding for the boundary of being.
What Dante Should Have Condemned
Yet acknowledge what Dante perceived, even if he misdiagnosed it. Ulysses does not merely sail west—he abandons. His own words convict him: neither “fondness for his son, nor reverence for his aged father, nor the love owed to Penelope could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world.”
This is not the voice of responsible inquiry. This is desertion dressed as aspiration.
More: he does not invite his companions to shared discovery. He compels them with wile. “I made them so eager for the voyage that I could hardly have held them back.” That is manipulation, not collaboration. He leads aged men—veterans who have survived “a hundred thousand perils”—not toward a harbor but toward drowning, chasing his private hunger for knowledge while calling it their collective destiny.
The crew never chose. They were moved by rhetoric, not conviction. And they died for his vision, his restlessness, not their own vision or desires.
This deserves condemnation. But this is not what Dante condemns.
Dante does not separate the ethics of the voyage from the fact of the voyage. He does not ask: “Should Ulysses have crossed while abandoning family and compelling his crew?” He seemingly declares: “No one should cross at all.”
The distinction collapses. The how becomes the whether. And in that collapse, all boundary-testing—however careful, however collaborative, however mindful of those we bring with us—becomes suspect. The reckless voyager poisons the well for the responsible one.
This conflation serves authority perfectly. For if seeking itself is the sin, then seeking carefully changes nothing. The prohibition need not distinguish between Ulysses’ abandonment and another’s care, between manipulation and genuine invitation, between private obsession and shared venture. All become folle volo—mad flight—equally damned.
What Dante should have condemned: voyaging that sacrifices others to one man’s will; that mistakes obsession for calling; that abandons the near for the distant without reckoning cost.
What Dante does condemn: voyaging at all past the Pillars, regardless of manner or motive.
The question is not: May we seek? The question is: How do we seek without becoming tyranny in the name of discovery?
That question remains open. It remains difficult. It is the question that matters—the one Dante forecloses by manufacturing a prohibition that makes the crossing itself, not the manner of crossing, the transgression. In doing so, he protects neither ethics nor truth. He protects only the boundary. Yet in condemning the voyager, Dante reveals himself as one.
The Poet’s Presumption
The irony deepens… Ulysses is punished for eloquence that led others past a supposed divine boundary. Yet what is the Comedy but an unauthorized exploration of realms beyond mortal knowing—Hell, Purgatory, Paradise—undertaken by the poet’s own authority?
When Dante the pilgrim expresses hesitation about his journey, saying “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul,” the poem supplies him with divine sanction. Virgil assures him that Beatrice, sent from Heaven, has authorized the journey. The pilgrim goes with blessing, guidance, permission. In effect, Dante the poet does what Ulysses does: sails past accepted limits, trusting language and vision to bear him where, by his own logic, no living man may go.
Hence the canto’s peculiar power. Dante is drawn to the mariner he condemns, troubled by him, unable to treat him as simple villain. In Ulysses’ folle volo, he glimpses his own presumption mirrored; in the crew-stirring rhetoric, he hears the echo of his own ingenium poeticum; in the final overturning “as pleased Another,” he contemplates the judgment he too might face for like transgression.
He virtually admits as much in Paradiso II, where the skiff that once was “the little vessel of my genius” in Purgatorio I grows into a vessel fit for the open, uncharted sea. “O ye, who in some pretty little boat, / eager to listen, have been following / behind my ship, that singing sails along, / turn back to look again upon your shores; / do not put out to sea, lest peradventure, / in losing me, you might yourselves be lost.”[11] The imagery reprises the condemned voyage of Inferno XXVI, but now under divine auspices: “Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo, / and Muses nine point out to me the Bears.” The difference is authorization, not direction. Dante transforms the mad flight into a sanctified one—but his caution betrays awareness of the danger. The admonition to “turn back to look again upon your shores” acknowledges that the line between revelation and presumption remains perilously thin. His journey too might founder “as pleased Another.”
The poem clears the pilgrim of presumption within its fiction, while the poet remains exposed outside it. This is the poet using poetry—that ancient art of mythical theology where truth and falsehood intermingle—to enforce a prohibition while simultaneously transgressing it. Dante wields the dangerous power of poetic invention to declare what is divine and what is forbidden, all while demonstrating that such declarations rest on nothing firmer than the poet’s own creative authority.[12]
The Vindication of History
One date suffices: 1492. Columbus sails west into the Atlantic from the coast of Spain—not literally through the strait at Gibraltar, but past the conceptual boundary the Pillars represented. No whirlwind. No mountain issuing wrath. Land. The “pathless beyond” proves unexplored, not forbidden; unknown, not unknowable. Yet the same civilization that vindicated Ulysses also cloaked conquest in new sanctities, confusing discovery with dominion. The moral ambiguity remains. History vindicates the crossing, not every consequence of the crossing.
The truth endures nonetheless: the boundary was human limitation—of ships, of courage, of knowledge—dressed in borrowed sanctity. Each voyage, each map, each act of inquiry refutes Inferno XXVI’s decree. History does not wholly vindicate Ulysses, but it exposes the fiction of divine interdiction.
The question of who may sail is answered: all may. The question of how we sail—ethically, justly, without turning discovery into domination—remains open.
Where Falsehood and Truth Intermingle
Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us that medieval poetry was mythical theology: a sacred art in which truth and falsehood coexisted, and the boundary between invention and revelation was porous. The poet was not a chronicler of fact but a mediator between visible and invisible worlds, speaking through symbols that both conceal and disclose.
Dante knew this inheritance. His Commedia stands at the summit of that tradition, where poetic creation becomes theological architecture. Yet it is also within this architecture that the seeds of prohibition germinate. For once poetry begins to impersonate revelation, its metaphors may acquire the weight of law. What begins as symbol can harden into creed; imagination becomes instrument.
This is poetry’s two-edged majesty: it reveals and it binds. The same creative power that illuminates hidden truth can also consecrate human invention as sacred limit. Thus Dante’s genius, which mirrors divine creation in its ordering of chaos into cosmos, risks sanctifying the very boundaries it imagines.
Mythical theology is a realm where poetry contemplates itself as revelation. Within that realm, Ulysses’ voice—his call to seek, to know, to pass beyond the Pillars—cannot be silenced entirely. Condemned in theology, he endures in poetry. Even wrapped in flame, he speaks the human truth that divine law cannot wholly suppress: curiosity, though punished, remains indestructible.
The Gates Swing Forward
The gates of Eden swing but one way—forward. There is no return to innocence, only passage through mystery into understanding. The Pillars of Herakles, like Eden’s gate, were never meant to bar humanity’s path but to mark its progress. They stand not as barriers but as thresholds: what one age feared to cross, another calls the beginning of wisdom.
The boundary moves because we do. What once signified the edge of the world becomes the center of a new map. Description becomes prescription only when fear mistakes ignorance for law. The theology of limit—whether spoken at Eden’s tree or the western sea—was never divine decree but human hesitation draped in sanctity.
When Ulysses sailed beyond the Pillars, he did not violate divine order; he fulfilled the order implicit in consciousness—the law that bids the mind test its own horizon. Dante condemns this as hubris, yet his own poem enacts it, proving that imagination cannot be confined by its own prohibitions. Even in Hell, wrapped in flame, Ulysses speaks words that outlive the sentence: “Ye were not made to live like unto brutes.”
Poetry, in condemning him, exalts him. It cannot extinguish what it illuminates. The forbidden voyage becomes the necessary one; the mad flight becomes the first step of reason; the flame of punishment becomes the light of revelation.
Thus the gates, like the Pillars, stand not immovable but ever-receding horizons—each one marking the reach of human comprehension, and beyond it, mystery. Every passage enlarges not merely the world, but the human possibility within it.
The Answer
From whence, then, the Divine Prohibition? From man.
From man, who meets the edge of knowledge and mistakes it for the edge of knowable reality.
From man, whose faltering courage becomes Heaven’s boundary in his telling.
From man, who fears the unknown and projects that fear upon the cosmos.
From man, who must have limits and thus declares them divine.
From man, who damns those who cross and return with news that the gates were never locked.
What is divine is not the prohibition but its contrary: the impulse to question, the courage to seek, the will to sail beyond every human-erected pillar into the waters where truth awaits those who leave the harbor.
Pindar said he would search no more—his quest were vain—in praise. Dante hears “no more” and renders it sin—to go further—in knowledge. History has judged between them.
Eden’s gate and Herakles’ pillars were never barred by divine hands—though human fear has kept them closed in consciousness for millennia. The truth they conceal is simpler and more radical: they were never legitimately closed at all.
Coda: Bound by Reason, Not by Fear
Consciousness asks why. To condemn the asking is to condemn consciousness. To prohibit the reaching is to prohibit our humanity. To damn the voyage is to damn the very quality that makes us more than “mindless brutes.”
The first why rose in Eden. Another why at the Pillars. The whys continue—each a small rebellion against inherited certainty, each a voyage into the unknown, each a test of whether the boundary was ever real.
It was not real. It never was. The “pathless” was merely unwalked. The “forbidden” was only unlived. The “mad flight” was simply the first—until repetition made the forbidden familiar.
We were born to ask, to seek, to reach, to voyage. We were born to test boundaries and find them crossable. We were born to stand at every pillar authority declares ultimate and ask:
Who says we must not pass—the Divine, or man in his fear, in his need for control, in his terror that we might return with news that the prohibition was always empty?
Return, then, to the image with which we began: Odysseus bound to the mast, sailing through waters thick with song. The proper binding is not the rope of fear, which holds us rigid against all that we might learn, but the rope of reason—supple, strong, deliberately chosen. We tie ourselves to the mast not to prevent the hearing but to survive it; not to silence the Sirens but to pass through their song transformed rather than destroyed.
This is the wisdom the medieval image hints at but does not fully speak: we must indeed be bound, but by discernment, not deference. The Sirens sing truths as well as dangers, and the task of consciousness is neither deaf submission nor reckless surrender, but the perilous passage between—listening, testing, reaching forward with eyes open to wonder and consequence alike.
Without asking permission, claiming no sanction but the native authority of consciousness, we sail.
The sacred path is forward—into uncertainty, into wonder, into the endless unfolding of mystery. Each passage widens the horizon; each voyage enlarges not merely the world, but the human possibility within it.
[1] The essay uses Odysseus and Ulysses interchangeably—the Greek and Latin names of the same figure—since the change of name mirrors the change of cultural frame examined.
[2] The image of Odysseus bound to the mast occurred to me while reading Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953), particularly Chapter XII, “Poetry and Theology,” which examines the relationship between Aristotle, Aquinas, and Albertino Mussato in defining poetry’s place within medieval Christian thought. Although the image was often used by medieval writers as a moral emblem—the anima rationalis bound by reason and faith to resist the sirens of sensual pleasure or deceptive wisdom—it struck me differently. For the scholastic mind, the figure of Odysseus symbolized the proper relation to pagan learning: the faithful scholar tied to the mast of doctrine, able to hear the beauty of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil without being lured from the safe course of orthodoxy. This reading coheres with the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework described by Curtius, in which poetry, though ranked low for its use of sensible image, retained dignity as a vessel of mythical theology—the first and most natural attempt to speak of the divine through story. My own use of the image reverses the traditional emphasis: the mast, once a symbol of protection, becomes a symbol of constraint; the rope, once virtue’s safeguard, becomes fear’s instrument. The voyage through pagan beauty, for me, represents not perilous flirtation with error, but the necessary passage of consciousness through mystery, risk, and discovery toward the harbor of truth.
[4] On Dante’s Christian reinterpretation of Ulysses, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953), esp. ch. 12, “Poetry and Theology.” Medieval commentators such as Benvenuto da Imola and Boccaccio read Dante’s Ulysses as a moral exemplum: the pagan seeker whose insatiable intellect leads to spiritual ruin. For Curtius, this transformation marks the medieval synthesis of classical myth with Christian teleology—where the Greek hero’s transgressive voyage becomes a cautionary allegory of the limits of human reason before divine order.
[5]Teodolinda Barolini, “Inferno 26: The Epic Hero,” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries), 2018. Barolini shows why readers might feel both awe and censure here. Dante inherits a split Ulysses—Virgil’s trickster versus Cicero’s lover of knowledge—and he writes the canto so that both currents run strong. The style is spare and elevated, granting Ulysses real grandeur (“we made wings of our oars”), yet the moral frame is still Hell. Crucially, Dante delays naming the sin—fraudulent counsel—until the end of Inferno 27, letting the thrill of the quest speak before the verdict falls. In Barolini’s terms, Dante’s pedagogy is “upside down”: Ulysses becomes a classical stand-in for Biblical trespass (what Paradiso 26 calls the “going beyond the mark”), even as his eloquence and ardor unmistakably stirs admiration, both the reader’s and Dante’s.
[7] Pindar, Olympian 3.43–46 andIsthmian 4.19–21. In Olympian 3, Pindar closes: ἐνταῦθα παύσομαι· μάταιον πέρα (“Here I will stop; beyond is vain”). Ernest Myers, The Extant Odes of Pindar: Translated into English with an Introduction and Short Notes (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 13: “Now if Water be the Best, and of possessions Gold be the most precious, so now to the furthest bound doth Theron by his fair deeds attain, and from his own home touch the pillars of Herakles. Pathless the things beyond, pathless alike to the unwise and the wise. Here I will search no more; the quest were vain.” Compare Andrew M. Miller, Pindar: The Odes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 43: “If water is supreme, and of possessions gold inspires the greatest reverence, now Theron to the utmost bounds has made his way through deeds of worth and grasps, from his own home, the pillars of Heracles. What lies beyond is closed to sage and fool alike. I shall not seek it out; to do so would be futile.” Miller observes that Theron’s “victory at Olympia has carried him, metaphorically speaking, to the uttermost limits of the earth.”
The same motif reappears in Isthmian 4, where Pindar praises Melissus: ἀνορέαις δ᾽ ἐσχάταισιν οἴκοθεν στάλαισιν ἅπτονθ᾽ Ἡρακλείαις· καὶ μηκέτι μακροτέραν σπεύδειν ἀρετάν — “Through their manly deeds they reached from home to touch the farthest limit, the pillars of Heracles—do not pursue excellence any farther than that!” [Diane Arnson Svarlien, trans., Pindar: Odes (1990).] Here, too, the Greek speaks not of interdiction but of proportion: μηκέτι (no longer) and σπεύδειν (to hasten, to strive eagerly) suggest sufficiency, not prohibition. The admonition is one of measure — aretē fulfilled, not forbidden. In both odes, the Pillars of Herakles mark the end of proportionate praise, the poet’s own horizon of utterance, rather than a divinely sanctioned frontier of trespass.
[8] Dante’s transformation of Pindar’s poetic self-limitation into divine proscription marks a philosophical shift that Curtius characterizes as the theologization of classical form. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953). In the medieval synthesis, metaphor becomes architecture: the rhetorical limit hardens into ontological structure. What had been decorum in antiquity becomes ordo under theology—a transmutation of aesthetic proportion into moral law. This process reflects the scholastic habit of reading all boundaries as mirrors of divine order. The result, as the essay observes, is the elevation of poetic restraint into cosmic prohibition: a passage from the measured silence of the poet to the juridical silence of the theologian.
[9] Dante quotations from Inferno XXVI follow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1 (Inferno) (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 278–83. Longfellow’s rendering preserves the elevated archaism and moral gravity of Dante’s diction—particularly in phrases such as “O brothers,” “mad flight,” and “as pleased Another”—which later translators often soften. The choice of Longfellow aligns with the essay’s argument, for it retains the language that best reflects Dante’s conception of Ulysses’ daring as folle volo (mad flight) and the moment of divine retribution, “as pleased Another,” that seals his fate.
[10] Medieval commentators often reinterpreted Odysseus within a Christian moral framework, reading him not as the Homeric hero of cunning endurance but as an emblem of human intellect overreaching its divinely appointed bounds. As Ernst Robert Curtius observes, the Middle Ages transformed classical figures into moral exempla: pagan virtue became the testing ground of Christian humility. The Odyssean voyage, once the image of homecoming through adversity, became for scholastic and allegorical readers a warning against curiosity unrestrained by faith. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages; also Dante’s Epistola XIII, where he explicitly links poetic audacity to theological order, framing the poet’s vision as divinely sanctioned where Ulysses’ was not.
[11]Paradiso II.1–15, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 13–14. Nautical tropes of the navis animae (ship of the soul) and the iter mentis ad Deum (voyage of the intellect) were commonplaces of medieval allegory; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1983; first published 1953), 129–130. Dante consciously develops this traditional image across his poem. At the opening of Purgatorio (“To run o’er better waters hoists its sail / The little vessel of my genius now, / that leaves behind itself a sea so cruel,” I.1–3), his craft is still the modest bark of poetic endeavor. By Paradiso, it has become a great ship fit for uncharted seas. The metaphor thus mirrors his ascent: from the cautious voyage of intellect to the audacious navigation of revelation. The passage recalls Ulysses’ “mad flight” yet recasts it under divine command—“Minerva breathes, Apollo pilots me, / and Muses nine point out to me the Bears.” The poet’s self-awareness is unmistakable: his Commedia itself is the vessel that dares the deep, sailing the perilous waters between revelation and presumption.
[12] Dante’s assumption of the right to speak divine architecture into being belongs to a long and ambivalent lineage of the poeta vates—the poet as prophet, divinely inspired seer, or “maker” whose word partakes of creative authority. The Roman poets had already blurred the boundary between artistry and revelation: Vergil’s Aeneid opens with invocation to the Muse as a divine source of vision (Arma virumque cano… Musa, mihi causas memora), and Ovid identifies poets as vates Pieridum (‘prophets of the Muses,’ Amores 1.1.5). Cicero in De divinatione (1.34) describes those who prophesy (vates) as being inspired by divine impulse (divino afflatu), operating in a state of mental excitement. The Christian Middle Ages inherited and transformed this conception. Augustine (De doctrina Christiana 2.40) appropriates pagan learning as the Israelites took gold from Egypt—valuable truths embedded in error, useful when rightly directed toward God. By the twelfth century, poets such as Alan of Lille and Bernard Silvestris (on whom see Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century [1972]) employed allegory and mythic language to express theological truths, with Bernard seeing himself as divinely inspired to reveal God’s plan through poetic creation (Cosmographia). Yet both remained within the framework of philosophical theology, subordinating poetic vision to revealed doctrine. Dante advances a bolder claim: he does not merely allegorize theology but constructs the cosmic order through poetic authority, fusing inspiration with auctoritas. In this, Dante absorbs the classical vates ideal into Christian prophecy, theologizing poetic form itself and claiming for the poet a quasi-prophetic role that his twelfth-century predecessors carefully avoided.(Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Chapters XII & XVII especially). Thus Dante’s Comedy becomes not commentary upon divine order but its imaginative enactment. He does what no theologian could—uses the poetic voice to legislate the unseen, transforming the inspired seer into the architect of the cosmos itself. In this sense, Dante’s poeta vates completes the very pattern the essay describes: the human word assuming divine prerogative, the maker creating not merely song but structure.
Northcoast Antiquarian 