[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Here in Texas (as in Memphis last weekend), the leaves are caught in that middle space between when their colors change and when they fall. One by one, the ground receives what the trees lose, and the cycle of life passes ceaselessly on.
As the spirit of fall gives way to winter, this last week found me diving headlong back into Dante’s Divine Comedy as I prepare to lead a small group of friends through the text starting January 1, 2024 (if you would like to join the virtual class, which will meet once a week, or receive the class outline, let me know!).
In revisiting the text, I was also led to the Cartoon Network series Over the Garden Wall, which can be interpreted as a modern cartoon version of Dante’s journey through the Inferno. For anyone familiar with Inferno, you will love watching the series and drawing similarities; for anyone familiar with the show and not Inferno, the opposite is also true: reading Inferno will give you an ever deeper appreciation for Patrick McHale and the genius cartoon. But I digress.
With the leaf activity outside and the spirit of Dante revived inside, there is an image used by Dante (and Virgil… and John Milton… and C.S. Lewis) that I have loved for a while and find myself once again reflecting on. It is the image of leaves fallen from a tree—once-living things separated from life. Reflections on that image are the topic for today’s essay.]
Shortly after Virgil leads Dante downward into the Inferno, the pair come to the river Acheron, where the ferryman, Charon,1 shuttles souls into their eternal misery. Watching as Charon signals to all on his cursed shore to get on the boat (and smacks those who fall behind with his oar), Dante likens the souls to leaves lifted off a tree:
As in the fall when leaves are lifted off,
one drops—another—till the naked branch
sees all its garments lying on the earth,
So the bad seed of Adam one by one
toss themselves from the shore at Charon’s sign,
as hawks returning to the master’s call.2
This image—the one of the dead like leaves falling from a tree—is one that Dante takes from his guide’s (i.e., Virgil’s) work, the Aeneid. In Book VI of the Aeneid, when Aeneas goes to find his father Anchises in the Underworld, Aeneas makes a similar comparison while standing on the shores of the Acheron:
A huge throng of the dead came streaming toward the banks:
mothers and grown men and ghosts of great-souled heroes,
their bodies stripped of life, and boys and unwed girls
and sons laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.
As thick as leaves in autumn woods at the first frost
that slip and float to earth, or dense as flocks of birds
that wing from the heaving sea to shore when winter’s chill
drives them over the waves to landfalls drenched in sunlight.
There they stood, pleading to be the first ones ferried over,
reaching out their hands in longing toward the farther shore.3
While Virgil’s simile focuses on the number of leaves, Dante focuses on their motion. Virgil’s leaves slip off the tree; Dante’s leaves toss themselves off. In the second half of the simile used by each, Virgil presents an image of many birds in migration as a consequence of nature; Dante presents the image of hawks returning to their master’s call.4
In the seventeenth-century shadow of these two great poets, John Milton adds to the simile’s record in Paradise Lost, likening the legions of fallen angels that followed the rebellious Satan to autumn (i.e., fallen) leaves:
Of that inflamed sea, he stood and called
His legions, angel forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks…
…So thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of their hideous change.5
A few hundred years after Milton, C.S. Lewis (a student of Virgil, Dante, and Milton) would pick up the simile for his purposes and add his own twist. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis likens modern man—whom he called Men Without Chests6—to branches (rather than leaves) who had rebelled against the tree and thereby separated themselves from their source of life:
The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they have destroyed themselves.7
In this ancient simile, we see a mirror that sheds some insight into our modern meaning crisis. Cut off and disconnected from our roots, we are withering and wonder why. We’ve assaulted the idea that things like objective Truth, Beauty, and Goodness exist without realizing we’re only assaulting ourselves. We are the branches who have rebelled against the tree. We are the souls who leap into Charon’s boat and condemn ourselves to eternal misery—we are the autumnal leaves that drop by our own doing.
And it is only by the grace of God that we can hope to be reattached.
—
P.S. The story is somewhat tangential, so I did not include it in the above, but all this talk of trees and branches and leaves reminds me of the story of Tantalus. In Greek mythology, Tantalus tries to trick the gods into eating his son (…yeah, I know…). As punishment, Tantalus is tossed in Tartarus and forced to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit just out of reach and the water always receding just before he can take a drink.
Now that I think of it, maybe his story relates more to the above essay than I first imagined. Tantalus, like us, is condemned to longing for what he cannot do on his own, just as we, the separated leaves, long to be reattached to our tree—restless and unable to reach it ourselves.
When St. Augustine outlined the idea of Original Sin—sin being a word that means to miss the mark—his idea was essentially that, like leaves fallen from the tree of God, we were forever severed from our fully realized form (the tree, our telos, as Aristotle would have put it) when Adam and Eve misused their free will to disobey.
From that point on, like a leaf with eyes but no legs, we are fated for all eternity to intuit—see—home while never quite being able to return of our own accord. We are, thus, in Augustine’s eyes, a massa damnata (or a mass of perdition, condemned crowd), except by the grace of God, which gives us hope of being reattached to our tree.
Without God, there is no hope. And that is why above the gates of Hell the words are written: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”8
Charon and his oar in this scene (as imagined in Dore’s picture) symbolically serve to sever the cord between souls and their divine origin and resting place. Once souls pass over the Acheron, and Charon’s oar chops the thread, their connection to God as their telos and end is cut, and there is no going back.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III, lines 112-116.
Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI, lines 348-357.
Homer, too, uses the simile of men like leaves: “Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn, the wind sheds upon the ground, but when spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines. Even so is it with the generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away.” Homer, Iliad, Book VI. Of course, it’s possible that Homer may have borrowed the image from a still older poet in the lost chambers of history. One thing we do know (with reasonable certainty) is that Dante was unaware of Homer’s use of the simile because Dante did not have direct access to Homer’s work.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 300-303, 311-314.
Lewis used a term to describe how modern man has had the seat of the soul—the chest—hollowed out by the rise of a rationality that focuses only on the quantifiable and measurable at the expense of the qualitative and indescribable.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 44.
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III, line 9.