I recently finished reading Dante’s Inferno, the first of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy. I am now immersed in the Purgatorio. It was something I had meant to do for years, and the lucid explanations of Franco Nembrini, together with the sumptuous illustrations by Gabriele Dell’Otto, finally prompted me to follow through. Whenever one approaches the classics, linguistic distance and cultural gaps can put one’s resolve to the test.
It was worth every minute of it. That reading rekindled a desire I had first known in adolescence, when I encountered the thought of Baruch Spinoza: the desire to understand the human soul and its inner movements. Spinoza’s Ethics has thus climbed back toward the top of my list of books to (re)read — a list, in any case, always far too crowded. Inspired by Dante’s unsurpassable depiction of sin, I found myself once again drawn to meditate on the problem of free will — whose existence Spinoza denies, while Christianity takes it as the foundation of sin, damnation, and redemption.
In the tenth canto of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil meet Farinata degli Uberti, a Florentine nobleman belonging to the political faction opposed to Dante’s own. Farinata is the first of the damned to prophesy the poet’s future.
An unavoidable question then arises: what did Dante really think about free will, if the future can be foreseen, even by a soul that has already passed into the afterlife? Which choices truly belong to us, and to what extent, instead, are we subject to the will of fate?
The Fire of Knowledge
The encounter with Farinata offers one of the most powerful images of human limitation. The damned can see what is to come, yet they are blind to what is happening. They possess prophetic knowledge, but without life; they contemplate destiny like spectators incapable of acting. It is a terrible irony: the intellect that once made Farinata proud becomes his prison. He can foresee, but not feel. Reason, severed from humility, hardens into stone. For the underlying sin of every damned soul is always the same: pride, the belief that one is sufficient unto oneself.
In Dante’s moral universe, this blindness to the present is part of justice. The soul remains free in life, but its freedom, once abused, hardens into form. Hell is not a cage imposed by God, but the eternal shape of one’s own will.
Divine foreknowledge, then, does not cancel freedom in Dante’s view: God may indeed see the whole, but every thread is woven by the human hand. The design is known, but the weaving remains ours.
Spinoza’s Challenge
Spinoza, by contrast, would have denied all this. In the Ethics, his absolute masterpiece, he writes that free will is an illusion born of ignorance: “Men believe themselves free because they are conscious of their actions, but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.” For him, every act is the necessary effect of an infinite chain of causes that stretches back to the very nature of God, or Substance. The sense of choice arises only from the limitations of our consciousness.
And yet his determinism is not despairing. For Spinoza, understanding necessity is the highest form of freedom. When we see that everything flows from the divine order, the passions lose their power. We are not inwardly free from causality, but in our understanding of it. Freedom is lucidity: the serenity of one who understands why things must be as they are.
If Dante begins from the Christian premise of fundamental human freedom, he does not deny that such freedom must be won or preserved at great cost. It is no coincidence that Charon’s boat, which carries the damned into hell, is so much heavier than the one guided by an angel, which escorts the souls destined for purgatory to the shore beneath the mountain. Dante concludes, however, that the overwhelming majority of human beings remain enslaved to disordered love, which degenerates into sin and condemns man either to damnation or, in the more fortunate cases — excluding the blessed — to a long otherworldly redemption. Man, though endowed with a divine spark of freedom, uses it wrongly in the vast majority of cases.
Spinoza does not deny the exceptional nature of virtue. The final sentence of the Ethics reads: “But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare” (Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt). But unlike Dante, Spinoza places at the foundation of his entire philosophy and worldview a logical chain of causes and effects — which in turn become new causes of further effects, ad infinitum — from which neither the human body nor the human mind stands apart. And yet he too admits the existence of a form of freedom to which man may aspire: freedom from the passions, from the slavery of endless desire, which prevents the human being from resting in what Spinoza calls the love of God.
Though Spinoza arrives at a form of thought that is difficult not to call mystical, especially in the fifth and final part of the Ethics, the love of God, as he understands it, is anything but the state of a man stupefied by one catechism lesson too many. The love of God is the ultimate understanding — penetrating to the most hidden corner of the soul — of the necessity of all things being exactly as they are. In this, it is not altogether unlike the experience Dante describes in the final canto of the Paradiso, when he recounts his vision of God.
Between Two Lights
Placed side by side superficially, Dante and Spinoza seem opposed: one grounds freedom in moral choice, the other dissolves it into the geometry of being. And yet both intuited that true freedom arises from knowledge and from the acceptance of reality for what it is, with nothing added and nothing taken away.
For Dante, to know means to purify the will until it desires the good. For Spinoza, it means to purify the mind until it understands necessity. From this follows the only human will that can truly be called free. In both cases, freedom is not license, but harmony.
In a world obsessed with choice — more possibilities, more control, more noise — this idea sounds surprisingly modern. We can choose endlessly, and yet feel less and less free. Freedom is not a matter of the quantity of options, but of the quality of one’s vision.
Science seems to support Spinoza: the brain decides before consciousness becomes aware of it; impulses and social conditioning shape us more than we imagine. And yet no discovery has erased the lived experience of freedom.
Perhaps freedom is not the power to rewrite nature, but the power to interpret it: to act with awareness, to transform impulse into intention, to meet necessity with grace. In this sense, Dante’s theology and Spinoza’s philosophy complete one another: the former invites us to choose the good, the latter to understand it as necessary.
Both lead us toward consciousness, which remains the highest form of freedom.
Farinata could foresee Dante’s exile, but he could not alter his own fate. His tragedy was not ignorance, but pride. Knowledge without humility becomes a prison.
Perhaps true freedom lies not in mastering destiny, but in consenting to it; not in bending the world to our will, but in bringing the will into accord with what is.
When Dante rises from the darkness of hell to the mountain of purgatory, the soul re-educates the will through toil and love. Punishment becomes ascent. At the summit of Paradise, freedom and joy coincide. The blessed no longer choose between good and evil: they love the good naturally. Their will and God’s will are one and the same. Freedom, at last, is harmony: not rebellion against necessity, but perfect accord with it.
The Negative Nature of Free Will
This final part is deliberately more philosophical and contemplative, though grounded in firsthand experience through what has by now become an almost daily practice.
Desire is the nearly constant condition of the human mind. We are always seeking something: goals, small or great pleasures, relationships, victories, relief from any number of mental torments. Always, throughout our waking life.
And yet accounts of mystical experiences, throughout the literature of every century since writing began, unfailingly report that peace is reached in certain moments when, suddenly, the soul seems sufficient unto itself and sees itself — perhaps for an instant, perhaps for a handful of instants — exactly as it is, without imagining it ought to be something else.
It is hardly my invention that every culture in the world contains traditions that have made the search for, and prolongation of, these states of consciousness one of the primary purposes of their existence. Beneath a cover of contradictions, disparate traditions, and many stories of deviance born of overtly spiritual desires later gone astray, there runs through history since time immemorial the current of esoteric traditions, which have accompanied humanity in the search for the highest states of consciousness.
To put it briefly: in order to follow the basic principles of spiritual discipline — at least far enough to reach the stage at which one contemplates the madness of one’s own mind, endlessly writhing in a vortex of desires — it is not necessary to go anywhere far. I have personally been doing this for some time through an app designed to foster meditative introspection. It is called Waking Up, and it was created by the American neuroscientist Sam Harris. I am not including any link, because anyone interested can easily find it, nor am I concerned here with discussing Harris’s merits or public persona. I am interested only in the product he created and that I use in the search for a personal benefit that is in no sense economic.
Waking Up is a collection of meditative and theoretical spiritual paths, among which the user is free to choose those that seem best suited to his or her own disposition. They are intended, provided they are pursued with some constancy, to help one become a more attentive witness to the nature of one’s own mind. To describe meditative experiences precisely — even the effort itself — to someone unaccustomed to them is like trying to explain what it means to be in love to someone who has never been infatuated with anyone: either one has known it or one has not. There is no such thing as almost being in love, just as there is no such thing as quasi-meditation or being almost pregnant.
Without going into the wonder such experiences can produce, it is still possible to describe what one notices on a more ordinary level during practice: stilling the mind is worse than merely difficult. It is practically impossible, especially for a beginner. Trying to still the mind is like trying to stop a flooding river by stepping into it. The purpose of these practices is not to stop the mind as such, but to deepen the sense that there is something in us beyond body and thought.
I cannot say exactly what this “something else” is, but I can say, on the basis of the glimpses that sometimes appear while one is immersed in the river, that it is truly worth seeking, without succumbing to the temptation to explain it. The very attempt to explain is already a thought, and it immediately throws us back into the habitual mechanism of the mind — precisely what one is trying to slow down through practice.
Though I will not attempt to explain what this “other” is, I can briefly describe what the first steps toward its faint glimmers look like in concrete terms. Very simply, the repeated act of bringing attention back to the object or process on which it is meant to rest during practice has another side to it: it loosens the desire attached to the thought that has burst into the mind and is then allowed to go, whatever it may be. For every single thought is bound up with some form of desire. This is not something one can prove through argument, but something each person can verify for himself.
And it is precisely this loosening of the grip of desire that is the most interesting part of a well-structured meditative practice carried on over a sufficiently long period of time. By loosening the grip of desires and of our habitual mechanical reactions to external stimuli, a man’s consciousness grows clearer and may, perhaps only after a very long time, come to see reality for what it truly is, free from the interference of mental distortions.
One of the sharpest insights I have encountered on the nature of spiritual work comes from George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. I will not comment on the personality attributed to him by various sources, but only on this profound intuition: one cannot free oneself from one influence without submitting to another at the same time. The remark was addressed to his Russian disciple P. D. Ouspensky in the course of a discussion about what he called the Work — that is, a way of living meant to lead the followers of his school, the so-called Fourth Way, toward the ultimate meaning of existence, true spiritual realization. I have always found this statement much deeper than it appears at first glance: we speak endlessly of freedom, but freedom from what?
If I reflect for a moment, is there any action of mine that is not determined by some motivating cause? If I am here now writing an article for this blog, it is because I can delegate the running of my business to someone else, which frees me from the demands of daily operations and allows me to bind myself to the desire to express my thoughts on deeper matters. But I am still following a desire: the desire to express myself on the subject of free will. Or I may go swimming around lunchtime instead of going home, because my wife loves cooking and relieves me of that task — but I do so because I desire to swim. I free myself from the duty of cooking, which I would otherwise fulfill because I want to eat, only to bind myself to the desire for physical activity, for active contact with the water.
What is there in my actions that is not the fruit of some desire I follow, even if that desire drives me toward the sacrifice of discipline? The answer, if one listens carefully, is deafening: nothing.
This, perhaps, is what Spinoza meant when he argued that the illusion of human freedom lies in our failure to see the causes that move us to act. Man calls freedom the act of following those causes that lead him toward whatever mental representation of pleasure happens, at that moment, to seem most convincing. And the most merciless measure of his slavery lies in the fact that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that representation of pleasure changes constantly, according to mood and God knows what mixture of external circumstances. It is in this extreme variability that man lacks will: he possesses no stable inner image of pleasure or, to put it in Christian terms, of the good.
What the practice of spiritual discipline promises to the traveler who seeks it and then embraces it is not the disappearance of the bond with the material and emotional reality that surrounds him and permeates him inwardly. That would be an ontological absurdity, since nothing can exist in a vacuum. What it promises is only a progressive strengthening of the inner image of the good, of ultimate pleasure — that is, serenity, peace with the world and with others.
This proceeds, as it does for a tree that is to grow soundly, through the pruning of what is unnecessary, through the removal — or at least the moderation — of useless desires or, which amounts to the same thing, the indulgence in superfluous thoughts.
And this is precisely what Dante’s damned — Farinata among them — have lost forever: the possibility of renouncing what is superfluous. For what, in life, is more superfluous than pride, the common root of all the sins punished in Hell? It is the indulgence in the intransigent pride of one’s own position that condemns the damned to Hell, a dimension in which the possibilities of the present are lost and the whole future is already written, like music played by a broken record. It is by clinging stubbornly to oneself, to a version of the refrain that echoes through the centuries as “this is just how I am,” that man loses himself beyond recovery.
It is this loss of self that is represented by the damned soul’s inability to see the present: the veil between the damned and the present is the damned soul itself.
For the one who refuses to submit to a higher order, life is reduced to a mechanical carousel leading toward a destiny of which we are not masters. We lose the possibility of actively participating in our destiny the moment we cling to what Dante calls sin according to the Christian tradition and what, in more modern terms, we might call inner rigidity, narcissism or neurosis.
This is what I have called, in the title of this section, “the negative nature of free will”: not the absence of a desire that moves us, but the priority granted to the desire for harmony, to the desire for truth — a priority that does not emerge by forcing it into first place, but by gradually, very gradually, taking strength away from superfluous desires.
There is, in us, a constant illusion that we know where we are going, though life continually proves otherwise, starting from the non-spiritual planes of existence.
I am, for example, fairly familiar with the history of science, especially physics, because of my education. And anyone who knows anything about it knows perfectly well how unpredictable, before the fact, the advances leading to modern physics really were. At least half of the great discoveries came like bolts from the blue to scientists who were trying to resolve the difficulties in existing theories, forcing them to rethink their conception of the world entirely. Relativity, which destroyed the concept of the ether, is only one of the most famous examples.
And yet, for some reason, we behave constantly like scientists who refuse the possibility of any paradigm shift. We are forever determined to believe in the ether — and worse still, each of us wants to keep believing in his own. We are certain that life ought to unfold according to what we think is right. Yet, like the development of scientific theories, life presses on relentlessly, leaving behind those who fail to adapt.
True freedom has the face of a man who tries to conform himself to truth and is willing, for that purpose, to question his own convictions. The face of the damned is that of emotional rigidity unwilling to bend before truth, stubbornly persisting in its own pride.
The free man does not live in some vaguely defined vacuum of desires; he is subject to the desire to seek truth and, through accepting it, peace with the world.
The road to change is very simple to describe, but very difficult to put into practice. I stress the point: simple, but difficult.
Primum vivere, deinde philosophari
I am intentionaly emphasizing a distinction: simple, but difficult.
Man, generally speaking, prefers to devote himself to something else: what is complicated, but easy.
I use “complicated” and “easy” in the sense suggested by two things: vanity and laziness.
What sounds refined, intellectually demanding, and adorned with such attributes tends, as a rule, to win the admiration of the world, which is easily hypnotized by quantity; it is easy to indulge the admiration of those who see us taking on any complicated project.
At the same time, what is simple yet profoundly devastating — such as the anguish of death or the recognition of our continual slavery to our incessant desires — makes us want to look away. That is what I mean by “simple, but difficult.”
That is perhaps why I ended up reading the entire Inferno once a high school Italian teacher, Franco Nembrini, prepared an edition with a precise paraphrase alongside the original text and a deliberately simple commentary, accessible to anyone patient enough to devote themselves to Dante. The essence of the Comedy’s message, like that of the Ethics, does not lie in complexity. It is no accident that both works are written in a deliberately constraining style: terza rima tercets in the one; axioms, propositions, and demonstrations in the other.
The structure is highly restrictive and, almost as though by design, limits the mind’s tendency to wander into excessive interpretations. For the essential message of these works lies in the vibrations that reading should awaken in the heart of the reader, not in intellectualistic digressions.
I find the problem of free will, just like that of the nature of consciousness to which it is so intimately bound, one of the most fascinating in all of existence. But I like to think it is one of those challenges destined never to be fully grasped by the intellect, because man has a terrible shortcoming: he tends to settle for theories, whereas life demands that certain experiences be lived directly by those who desire them enough to truly seek them.
Mirko Serino
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