by Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest books in Western literature, integrates virtually all knowledge that preceded it; Greco-Roman history, medieval cosmology, theology, science, old Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic traditions, and Apocrypha.
The poem is a powerful map of symbolism, offering deep insight into reality, showing us that that every human being is a cosmos.
Dante’s journey, a descent through the Earth and ascent through the Spheres, is a deeply personal journey that effectively bridges the medieval and modern worlds.
This medieval model of the cosmos is not merely an external vision that would fail under scientific scrutiny, but it also serves as a map to oneself and one’s movement through reality.
#### Dante Alighieri and His Historical Context
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, living at the close of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th centuries. His Florentine origin is significant, as the nation of Italy did not exist at that time; Italy is younger than the United States.
While primarily famous for The Divine Comedy, Dante was also a successful poet of love poetry and a relatively unsuccessful politician. He wrote the poem during a crisis in his life, which he referred to as the midpoint, following his exile from Florence.
Dante’s period was one of tumultuous political strife in the Italian Peninsula. Two primary political factions dominated: the Guelphs, who supported the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor.
Dante’s family belonged to the Guelph party. After expelling the Ghibellines from Florence, the Guelphs further divided into the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs. Dante belonged to the White Guelphs, who sought greater independence from Rome, whereas the Black Guelphs advocated for strict papal control.
This political landscape was heavily influenced by the Investiture Controversy, a defining conflict of the late Middle Ages that recurred in waves. This controversy centred on the tension between spiritual authority and temporal power. The Pope, theoretically the one who crowned the emperor (a tradition dating back to Charlemagne), would use this power to influence the emperor. Conversely, the emperor, possessing military might, would compel the Pope.
This dynamic led to a confusion between authority and power in the West, partly because the Pope often acted as a civil authority, maintaining an army. This unresolved tension contributed to the delay in the formation of cohesive nation-states in areas like Germany and Italy until the 19th century. Even the German princes who supported the Reformation are seen as continuing this long-standing effort to neutralise the Church’s power and elevate the State.
According to a scriptural analogy, God established the Covenant with Israel such that the spiritual authority (priests), holding ritual power and managing sacrifices, did not possess land or direct rule. Their function was to be a spiritual authority, influencing the world without direct mechanical causes, such as physical force. The temporal power (kings) was meant to submit to this spiritual authority, acting as the arm for enacting laws based on guiding principles held by the priestly class.
In the West, this implicit structure meant the Church would judge individuals spiritually, then hand them over to the state for action, as seen in historical instances like witch burnings where the Church itself never executed anyone. However, a fundamental problem emerged in the West when the Pope began to act like a king, causing a "confusion of levels" that destabilised the system and could lead to revolution.
Dante ultimately sided with the Holy Roman Emperor in this conflict, earnestly hoping for the Emperor to intervene in Italy and restore order. He propagated this view and even blamed Constantine for the corruption of the Church. Dante believed a fraudulent document, the Donation of Constantine, which was thought to be genuine in his time, had been used to justify papal claims to temporal power over the Western Empire upon Constantine’s death.
For Dante, the Church’s possession of large amounts of temporal power corrupted its true purpose as the bride of Christ. Though a faithful Roman Catholic, he critically observed this corruption within his Church and society. His work reflects this perspective, offering a way to integrate the medieval cosmological model into one’s life to make sense of a world that seemed to be fracturing.
Following the Black Guelphs’ seizure of power in Florence, Dante was exiled and condemned to death in absentia by his own city. Florence officially revoked this death sentence in 2008. It was during this period of exile and crisis that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy.
#### Composition and Structure
The Divine Comedy is an apocalyptic vision at its core. It is divided into three main parts:
- **Inferno** (Hell)
- **Purgatorio** (Purgatory)
- **Paradiso** (Paradise)
Each of the three books contains 33 cantos (an Italian word meaning "song," akin to chapter divisions), with Inferno_having an additional prologue, making a total of 100 cantos.
The term "comedy" (Commedia) indicates a story that begins in a low state but ends happily, moving from bad to good. The modifier "Divine" signifies that it is not merely about an earthly life but encompasses the entire story of redemption and salvation, as experienced by one man. Inferno contains jokes, often of a crude, bodily humour nature, such as demons farting like trumpets. In contrast, Paradiso contains no jokes.
#### Literary Innovations and Major Touchstones
Dante’s work is notable for its innovations and drawing upon three primary literary traditions:
1. Vernacular Poetry and the Invention of Italian Language:
Dante was a pioneer in writing poetry in the vernacular, at a time when Latin was the dominant language for all significant Western European texts. He consciously aligned himself with Virgil, who wrote his great epic, the Aeneid, in Latin, which was the vernacular in his time, while Greek was the prominent literary language.
Dante is credited with effectively inventing the Italian language. He achieved this by crafting a literary dialect, incorporating elements from Latin, his native Florentine dialect, and other Italian dialects. This process is akin to how Shakespeare and the King James Bible influenced the English language.
1. Romantic Poetry, Troubadours, and Courtly Love Tradition: _
The Divine Comedy has roots in the Romantic poetry of the troubadours and the courtly love tradition. Dante was part of a new movement known as the "sweet new style". Beatrice is a crucial figure in the Comedy_, serving as Dante’s great Muse and the catalyst for the poem’s events. Dante claims to have met Beatrice only twice: once at age nine and again at eighteen. Their love was not mutual, and she died at 25. A key characteristic of the courtly love tradition is the unattainability of the beloved. Dante remarkably integrates this tradition, which was considered "weird and almost non-Christian," even declared heretical at one point for its "religion of Love" aspects, into his Christian epic.
2. Greco-Roman Epic Tradition:
Virgil’s Aeneid serves as a main touchstone and justification for Dante’s narrative approach. The Aeneid, like Homer’s Odyssey, features a descent into the underworld. Dante incorporates elements from Aeneas’s descent into the underworld, weaving them into his own journey. He also freely references and utilises Greco-Roman mythology, populating Hell with figures from Greek and Roman myths, including characters from the Iliad, Odyssey, and Seven Against Thebes. These figures are depicted in Hell for blaspheming God, often shown as cursing Jupiter. This demonstrates a Christian integration of classical mythology, contrary to the misconception that early Christianity rejected all old stories.
3. Judeo-Christian Apocalyptic Tradition:
This tradition, originating in ancient Judaism (particularly Second Temple Judaism and the Book of Enoch) and continuing into early Christianity (with the most prominent being the Apocalypse of St. John or the Book of Revelation), is a crucial launching point for The Divine Comedy. Apocalyptic narratives typically begin in a state of severe adversity, such as persecution or exile, after which a vision of the cosmos’s eschatological reality is granted. The word "apocalypse" itself means "the pulling back of the curtain".
Two defining features of the apocalyptic tradition are:
The Guide: The individual experiencing the vision of the afterlife or eschatological reality is almost always accompanied by a guide. In some Christian apocalypses, this guide is an archangel, St. Peter, or the Virgin Mary. Dante innovatively deviates from this by choosing Virgil, a pagan, pre-Christian poet, as his primary guide. Virgil guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory. He departs at the threshold of the Earthly Paradise, as he cannot enter fully into the identity of Christianity. Virgil is sent by Beatrice, who is herself prompted by the Virgin Mary and St. Lucy. St. Lucy is important as one of Dante's heavenly patrons and the patron saint of blindness and poets. This connection highlights a central theme in the Comedy: Dante’s spiritual blindness and the gradual recovery and strengthening of his sight. Later, in Paradise, Beatrice hands Dante over to St. Bernard for his ascent into pure contemplation, as even Beatrice cannot guide him further. This succession of guides illustrates a divine procession of grace descending through different levels of reality.
The Descent into the Underworld: The concept of descending into Hades or the underworld is well-established in this tradition. Precedents include First Enoch, where the wicked and rebellious "stars" (fallen angels) are punished. Fourth Esdras (also known as Second Esdras in some numberings) explicitly depicts Ezra being taken into Sheol and shown famous sinners and their punishments. Other later Christian apocalypses, such as the Apocalypse of St. Paul (or Visio Pauli), also feature clear descents into the underworld and were popular from the 2nd century AD. The Gospel of Nicodemus, an Apocryphal text, describes Christ’s harrowing of Hades, freeing the people there.
In Dante's afterlife, all souls, even those in Hell, are awaiting the general resurrection and the last judgment. This is particularly relevant when considering Limbo, the first circle of Hell. Limbo is reserved for righteous pagans, unbaptised children, and righteous Muslims, such as Saladin, whom Europeans in the Middle Ages greatly admired as a virtuous and honourable knight. Limbo is described as a relatively pleasant place, devoid of torment. Its sole affliction is the lack of Christian hope, which is defined not as a vague optimism but as a specific hope in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.
This condition for those in Limbo, particularly the long-term implications of lacking this hope, is a significant theological point in the Comedy. Dante also presents "weird exceptions" to his own rules, such as placing the Roman Emperor Trajan, who persecuted Christians, in Paradise, wrestling with incongruous aspects of tradition. The Divine Comedy is not intended as a literal manual of the afterlife; rather, it is an artistically powerful work that has profoundly shaped the imagination regarding these concepts.
#### Themes and the Journey Through the Three Books
The overarching theme of The Divine Comedy is the idea that man is a microcosm, and Dante’s personal journey serves as a map to understanding oneself and one’s journey through reality. It is a process of transformation, reflecting an ontological hierarchy of being and how God manifests at different levels of reality.
Sin as Weight:
A central metaphor throughout the entire Comedy is that sin is weight; the graver a sin, the heavier it is, pulling one downwards away from ascent.
1. **Inferno**
The Inferno begins with Dante’s descent into the abyss on Good Friday. He is lost in a dark wood, allegorically facing his own sins and those of the Florentine and Italian people, represented by three beasts that block his path. To be saved, he must first descend through Hell, mirroring Christ’s harrowing of Hell, finally emerging on Easter morning on the other side of the world.
Inferno is fundamentally about confronting sin. A key concept is that sin erodes one's personhood. Those in Dante’s Hell have ceased to be human, having so strongly identified with their sins that they have become their sins. This state is described as "locked from the inside," meaning the inhabitants are there because they choose to be. The gruesome and horrifying punishments in Hell are not arbitrary; each punishment precisely reflects what the person became through their sin, effectively showing the sinner living with the consequences of their actions. In some instances, Hell is depicted as being perpetually stuck with others who share one’s sin until the Day of Judgment.
Dante arranges sins in Inferno in a particular hierarchy. The heaviest sin is treachery to one’s lord, with the Devil depicted at the very bottom of Hell, gnawing on the heads of three infamous traitors. Conversely, one of the least severe sins is adultery. Sins in Inferno are broadly categorised: those that make one more like an animal (driven by instinct) and those that make one more like a demon (involving the misuse of rational faculties), descending all the way to Satan.
Initially, Dante, the character, feels pity for the suffering souls in Hell and frequently faints. However, Virgil rebukes him, making a clever pun on the Latin word pietas, which encompasses both "pity" and "piety". Virgil tells Dante that if he possessed "real pity" (or true piety), he would be glad to see these people punished, implying that Dante’s soul is disordered if he cannot turn away from sin. The aim of Inferno is for Dante to reject sin, to see it for what it truly is, and ultimately to see himself.
.2 **Purgatorio**
Purgatorio is about rejecting sin and becoming purified. The Mountain of Purgatory has seven tiers. While sin is still understood as weight, the scheme here follows the seven deadly sins. Pride is at the very bottom, representing the first and worst sin from which one must be purified, as it is the sin that most aligns one with Lucifer.
As Dante ascends the mountain, an angel burns seven P’s (for peccatum, meaning "sin" in Latin) onto his forehead. These P’s gradually fall away as he progresses, symbolising the purification from sin. Importantly, every soul in Purgatory desires to be there and is content to undergo the purification process.
Dante’s depiction of Purgatory is considered gentler compared to earlier, more horrifying medieval versions. Purgatory is also seen as the beginning of Paradise, as those in Purgatory are destined to eventually reach heaven.
3 Paradiso
Paradiso_ depicts Dante’s sight being strengthened, preparing him to finally achieve the vision of God. This section becomes increasingly complex to grasp as Dante grapples with depicting cosmic realities and holiness. In Paradise, there are levels or tiers, reflecting the idea that individuals receive "as much God as they want". This concept suggests that one's ultimate destination is where one truly desires to be.