Dr Greta Sykes – The Sacred and the abyss

Sykes LE Mag Vol Two Nov-Dec 2023

Download PDF Here

Live Encounters Magazine Volume Two November-December 2024.

The Sacred and the abyss: Reflections on Dante, Nietzsche and Pasolini
by Dr. Greta Sykes.


Dante Alighieri

I spent a week in Verona to study Italian. While walking above the river Adige I discovered a Dante exhibition in the castle San Pietro overlooking the town. It was entitled ‘Paradiso – Dante Profeta di Speranza’ (Paradise – Dante the prophet of hope). It was the third part, the previous two having been ‘inferno’ and purgatory’, of an initiative by L’Associazione Rivela. It made use of artwork from a new edition of the Divine Comedy by the publisher Mondadori with art work by Gabriele Dell’Otto and a commentary by Franco Nembrini. Many young volunteers were brought together to study the text and explore its meaning for themselves.

The exhibition’s aim was to use Dante’s poems as a point of reference and support for the participants human, cultural and spiritual growth. Each of them was able to bring their own existential questions, their search for the fullness and meaning of life to the poems. They engaged with visitors to the exhibition to explore how they understood Dante’s thoughts and open their eyes to the present-day relevance of them. The great poet became the prophet of hope, that is, a credible and contemporary interlocutor, whose words and concrete experiences of love, pain and suffering can help young people to become capable of facing life’s journey with hope and courage:

Canto 1
To soar beyond the human cannot be described
In words. Let the example be enough to one
For whom grace holds this experience in store. (L70-73)

For the past three years I have been working on my third novel ‘Eve meets Dante’ (to be published in 2024). I became inspired by the Divine Comedy and the journey Dante (born 1265) undertook to overcome the suffering that threw his life into disarray and poverty. He was exiled from Florence due to political intrigues never return to his hometown or face certain death. He remained a forever traveller, homeless and suffering severe poverty. His ability to transcend a bad luck story into one of extreme beauty remains unique in literature and, perhaps, can only be compared to Friedrich Nietzsche’s transmutation of suffering into insight.

Dante positions the adventures of his travels through hell, guided by Vergil, against the backdrop of his love for Beatrice, a young woman he met as a nine-year-old and could never forget. He only saw her a couple of times but was smitten. When at the age of twenty-one the now married Beatrice fell ill and died, Dante was heartbroken for weeks. His poet friends had to persuade him to leave sorrow behind and seek refuge in his poetry. It is likely that Dante’s exile led him to develop the intense and passionate focus to write a book in verse that speaks to all humans looking to find sense, truth and meaning in a chaotic world.

One may think that medieval times did not have the advantage of modern science and technology. Yet the belief that such knowledge should lead to our world being a better place, or ought to be a better place, was already shattered during two world wars. Extra-ordinary as it seems we still face similar problems to life in Florence seven hundred years ago, such as homelessness, poverty, wars and elites that care little about making any genuine change by creating more equality. The belief in technological fixes, AI and the power of science is being misconstrued into a toxic fog of narratives that are created by wealthy companies, spun by the media into daily repetitions and regurgitated by government staff.

Dante was thirty years of age when he was elected one of the city’s six priors. He held office from 15th June to 14 August 1300. As one of the priors he had to join a guild. He joined the Physicians and Apothecaries who also accepted poets. The priorate was the highest office in the Republic of Florence. The position only brought me trouble, Dante later said. The quarrels between the aristocracy or grandis and the rising merchant classes represented by the guilds were a constant issue which widened into political turmoil.

Dante fell victim to these struggles between different factions that even involved pope Bonifacios. He was condemned to death by being burnt on the stake. He spent the rest of his life being a traveller in the regions of northern Italy such as Emilia Romana, Piemont and the Veneto. His most famous work The Divine Comedy written at the time of Chaucer, but in a language still spoken by Italians today, remains the cornerstone of the Italian cultural tradition. The experience of seeing it presented by young people engaging with it using their own perspective illustrates the work’s 700-year relevance.

The divine comedy is written in three parts, the inferno, purgatory and paradise. In a poetic form called terzo rhima made of a verse of three lines it delves into the punishments for people Dante considered bad and pleasures for those who he considered good. It is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, the concepts of heaven and hell and the seven deadly sins. With this work of poetry, Dante transcended his pain of lost love, loneliness and suffering into a work of art. Dante’s divine comedy influenced many British poets and writers to engage with the themes he raises. Chaucer mentions it in the Canterbury Tales. John Keats, Shelley and Byron as well as TS Eliot made references to Dante in their work.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Seven hundred years after Dante’s God was declared dead by several philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, Heidegger and philosophy tutors at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. They were challenging the whole notion of philosophy having anything to do with morality. Imbued with ideas of logical positivism developed by the Vienna school. Freddy Ayers declared moral judgements to be mere expressions of personal preferences. Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism saw the modern person’s mode of perceiving themselves as ‘thrown into existence with nothing to hold on to’ at a time when two world wars had left Europe devastated.

Yet, another poet who lived in exile only a couple of decades earlier also struggled with the notion of the loneliness of existence and a turning away from the established Christian church. In the 1880s Nietzsche had left behind his love affair with Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima after they had moved to Bayreuth. Nietzsche moved to Turin and fell in love with the town. It fulfilled his need for a classical and majestic environment.

He returned to the Renaissance to rediscover his spiritual soul. ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ is followed by ‘Beyond good and evil’, both works around the same set of ideas that were on his mind. Nietzsche who was struggling with a number of illnesses embraced the Italian environment in Turin where he often went to hear Verdi’s music. Verdi’s music spoke to him in a lighter spirit and a natural joyfulness which he found lacking in Wagner’s darker, mystical and romantic music. Nietzsche had moved from romanticism to embrace the Renaissance, containing for him powerful aspects of modernity, like liberation of thought, disdain for authority, and the triumph of education over arrogance. His philosophy under the influence of Verdi and a return to Immanuel Kant moved towards a longing for a joyous perspective for all of humanity.

In ‘A prelude of the future’, the subtitle of ‘Beyond good and evil’ he demolishes human pretensions, lies and judgmentalism. Similar to Dante’s evocations of peoples’ suffering in inferno to sharply outline wrongdoing, Nietzsche exposes falseness with gusto only to celebrate a way forward that can free humans from the nausea of pettiness, prejudice, and envy. Lonely and antisocial as he lived his life now in his writing he expressed the deepest love for humanity. He wished a person to be ‘superhuman’ in their ability to overcome negativity, depression and nihilism and instead to develop the strength to feel enjoyment and fulfilment. Written in poetic aphorisms show him struggling to find a way to embrace Christian values and ideals without endorsing its institutions.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Like Dante and Nietzsche, Pasolini was first and foremost a poet. Growing up during the rise of Fascism in Italy, he was born in Bologna in 1922 and began early in his life to agitate against Mussolini. He stood by his mother who was treated badly by her fascist husband. He wrote poetry in the Friolean local dialect which, like other local dialects, was forbidden by Mussolini. After the war Pasolini moved to Rome. While making his movie ‘Erotic stories from 1001 nights’ he witnessed the destruction of the old town of Sanaa to make room for a new town development. This event had a marked influence on him. It confirmed for him the suspicion that global consumerism was the new fascism in that it worked to eradicate traditions, local culture, language and uprooted people from their belonging.

Pasolini saw himself as a Marxist who understood tradition and culture as lived by ordinary people in their villages as providing the background and inspiration for progress and a better life for all. ‘I act more modern than all those who want to modernise, by searching for our brothers and sisters who are not with us anymore.’

‘The real intolerance comes from consumerism, which is, with its apparent generosity of the multitude of goods the worst, evil, cunning, coldest, and unforgiving form of intolerance. It bears the mask of tolerance and through its very falseness affects people on a deeper level than the fascism of the Mussolini type which was open and in your face violence.’ Yet the mask of the consumerist fascism comes off immediately whenever those in power see it as necessary. The mask of tolerance can be withdrawn, as it is in the case of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and thousands of others who have suffered at the hands of the elite.

Pasolini sees the consumer society as a dictatorial civilisation. It has realised the old fascism successfully by making it look ant fascistic, liberal, benign. Modern so-called antifascists only support the mask of liberalism and are therefore happily embraced by the elite who will send the police to support them. The writer Ignazio Silone saw what was happening and prophesised:

‘When fascism returns it is not going to say ‘I am fascism’. It will say ‘I am antifascism’.
The totalitarianism of our consumer society cannot allow any perspective outside itself. It must dominate totally. Social networks must be censored, if they permit alternative views. Views that manage to become public are quickly condemned and cast into abomination by calling them conspiratorial or antisemitic. Bit by bit a world view is put together that tells us that truth is a lie, that we need to go to war to create peace, that men can be women and women can be men.

The sacred is absent from this world. Dante, Nietzsche and Pasolini, all deeply spiritual poets, viewed the Sacred as a deep sense of belonging in nature through love and embracing tradition and ritual as they naturally evolved through human history. Otherwise only the abyss is left. All three poets and philosophers spent a lifetime of their philosophical thinking on finding and comprehending the Sacred or the Divine. They recognised that without it a human society will fall apart, become bereft of meaning and purpose, other than making money.


©  Dr. Greta Sykes

Greta Sykes’ third novel called ‘Eve meets Dante’ is coming out this autumn with Pegasus. It is a story weaving together the fates of extraordinary women from antiquity to the Renaissance. Her other novels also cover the story of women. Her 2016 novel of a family’s life during the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic was followed in 2020 by her story of Mesopotamia and the Goddess Inanna. Greta’s poems have been published in numerous anthologies, the latest is called ‘Under Siege’, available at the British Library. Greta’s essays are accessible at academia.edu and liveencounters.net.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.