Alighieri, Dante The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri (1265
– 1321)
Type of Work:
Allegorical religious poem
Setting
Hell, Purgatory and Paradise; A.D. 1300
Principal Characters
Dante, the Pilgrim
Virgil, the Poet, and Dante’s guide
Beatrice, Dante’s womanly ideal and religious
inspiration
Story Overview
Prologue: Dante, realizing he has strayed
from the “true way,. into worldliness, tells of a vision where he travels
through all the levels of Hell, up the mount of Purgatory, and finally
through the realms of Paradise, where he is allowed a brief glimpse of
God.

The traveler sets out on the night before
Good Friday, and finds himself in the middle of a dark wood. There he encounters
three beasts: a leopard (representing lust), a lion (pride) and a she-wolf
(covetousness). Fortunately, his lady, Beatrice, along with the Virgin
Mary herself, sends the spirit of Virgil, the classical Latin poet, to
guide Dante through much of his journey. But as much as Dante admires and
reveres Virgil, and though Dante considers him to have prophesied of the
coming of Christ, Virgil is not a Christian. To Dante he represents human
knowledge, or unholy reason, which cannot lead a person to God. This infidel
may not pass into the highest realms. Thus, Dante is finally led to Heaven
by Beatrice, his own personal and unattainable incarnation of the Virgin,
who represents divine knowledge, or faith.

Pilgrimage: Terrified, lost “midway in
life’s journey” in the worldly darkness of error, Dante met Virgil, who
offered himself as a guide. Together they passed through the gates of Hell
inscribed with the terrifying words: “Abandon every hope, Ye that Enter.”
Dante, however, as a living soul who had not yet tasted death, was exempt
from such final despair. He found Hell to be a huge funnel-shaped pit divided
into terraces each a standing-place for those individuals who were guilty
of a particular sin. After passing Limbo, reserved for the unbaptized,
Dante observed and conversed with hundreds of Hell’s souls, many of whom,
guilty of carnal sins, were being whirled about in the air or forced to
lie deep in mud or snow, under the decrees of eternal damnation. Ciacco,
a fellow Florentine, implored of Dante “… When thou shalt be in the sweet
world, I pray thee bring me to men’s memory.”
In pity, Dante frequently offered to write
about those he met when he returned to mortality. These gluttons, seducers,
and robbers were, for the most part, either historical figures or Dante’s
personal acquaintances – and each one of them represented one of the apt
and horrible possibilities of Hell. For example, Alexander the Great and
Attila the Hun were found dwelling in Hell’s seventh terrace, forced to
grovel in boiling blood – a just end for those who in life loved violence.

In the very depths of Hell was Satan –
with three heads, each grasping a sinner in its mouth, and with three pairs
of wings that continuously beat over the waters around him, freezing them
into perpetual currents of ice.

Dante and Virgil cautiously climbed down
the body of Satan. About midway, they turned and scrambled out through
an opening (earth’s center of gravity) where all things were the opposite
of Hell: The sun was shining; it was Easter morning. Now hiking on in silence,
they finally arrived on the shores of the Mount of Purgatory, located exactly
opposite Jerusalem on the globe.

First and lowest on the mountain was Antepurgatory,
a place reserved for those spirits who were penitent in life, who had died
without achieving full repentance or without receiving the last sacrament
of the church. They were required to spend time there before they could
begin their arduous climb up the mountain. A group of those poor souls
who had passed away suddenly, unable to receive extreme unction, pled with
the mortal visitor to speak with their relatives and friends, urging them
to pray that their stay in Ante-purgatory might be shortened.

As the pilgrims entered Purgatory, an angel
inscribed the letter “P” on Dante’s forehead seven times, to represent
the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and
lust). As Dante made his way through the seven areas reserved for those
who committed each of these sins, the letters were erased one by one, and
the climb became less difficult.

Like Hell, Purgatory was arranged in terraces.

However, the inhabitants here could, through confession, repentance, patience,
and the prayers of the living, move on to higher realms after a time of
proper purification. In the first terrace (pride), the occupants bowed
down under huge stones which they carried on their backs, while reciting
The Lord’s Prayer, a fitting penance for haughty souls. Each terrace in
turn was designed to purge its dead souls of one particular deadly sin.

The travelers finally moved beyond the
seventh terrace. An angel directed them to pass through a huge wall of
flames; on the other side they would find Beatrice. Dante did not hesitate.

Emerging from the flames, he saw a mountain. At its summit, Virgil bade
Dante farewell, for this was as far as Human Reason would allow a non-Christian
to go.

Dante noticed a beautiful garden nearby,
and began to explore it. A young woman appeared to inform him that this
was the Garden of Eden – and there, across a river, awaited Beatrice. But
the woman called out to Dante, demanding that, before entering the stream,
he stop to acknowledge remorse for his sins and confess them. Hearing her,
Dante was so overcome with remorse that he fainted and had to be carried
across Lethe, the river of forgetfulness of past sins.

On the other side of the river, accompanied
now at last by the beautiful Beatrice, Dante discovered that Paradise was
divided into various spheres orbiting the earth. Each of the first seven
(the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) represented
a particular virtue, and those who in life had exhibited this virtue became
its inhabitants. Ascending through the spheres, Dante encountered various
famous saints, martyrs, and crusaders, in addition to many of the just,
the chaste and the meditative. One soul he greeted was Cacciaguida, his
own great great grandfather, who had served as a crusader in the previous
century. This ancestor addressed him: “O my own blood! 0 grace of God poured
forth above measure! . . . ” and then went on to reminisce on the earlier
glory and splendor of Florence, and to lament its present fallen state.

Dante next followed Beatrice past the Fixed
Stars, where many of the Apostles dwelt. These men, in turn, questioned
the poet, examining his opinions. Dante offered complicated treatises on
the duality of Christ (that he is both human and divine) and earthly versus
godly love, and explained then modern scientific theories to account, among
other things, for moonspots.

At last Dante was conducted to the ninth
heaven (outerspace), where he received grace, and was permitted to gaze
upon divinity and hear the angels’ chorus. Beatrice then departed the reverent
admirer, who witnessed the entrance of the triumphal Christ, followed by
Mary.

Then, in union with the divine, Dante was
left alone to behold the glory of God on his throne. “O how scant is speech
and how feeble to my conception,” he gasped in a final, striking, poetic
description of breathless awe.

Commentary
“The Divine Comedy” is an epic poem brimming
with information and eloquent literary devices. (The word “comedy” is used
here in its classical sense – to denote a story which begins in suspense
and ends well.) The lengthy work combines Dante’s vast knowledge of classical
Latin writers (Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca … ) and Greek philosophers
(Plato and Aristotle) with his readings from the religious and theological
classics of Catholicism (Augustine, Thomas Acquinas … ).

Some awareness of medieval symbolism and
imagery can greatly enrich the modern reader’s understanding and enjoyment
of Dante’s personal, visionary odyssey through the realms of the dead.

For example, the significance of certain numbers figures importantly in
both the structure of the work and the geography of tile netherworld. Tile
number three symbolizes the trinity; the “perfect” number, ten, was obtained
by multiplying three times three, and adding one (which represented the
unity of God). Furthermore, Dante’s work is divided into three canticles
(the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise) and each canticle is then divided
into thirty-three cantos. These, added to the book’s general introductory
canto, make for a grand total of one hundred, or, the square of ten. The
poem’s rhyme scheme, which Dante invented, is known as “terza rima” (third
rhyme), where rhymed lines are grouped in interlocking sets of three (aba,
bcb, cdc, etc.)
In addition to this obsession with numbers,
the reader should also fathom the notion of ancient courtly love. Most
poetry of Dante’s age was written in praise of a woman whom the poet had
chosen as an ideal, but with whom he was not intimate nor even necessarily
personally acquainted; a pure love, an unattainable inspiration. Dante
had met Beatrice Portinari at least twice, but had no intention of developing
a relationship with her. She was married, as was he. “If it pleases God,”
Dante had written in the third person, “he will write of Beatrice, that
which has never yet been said of mortal woman.” This, in fact, Dante does
in The Divine Comedy, placing his lady in the highest realms of Paradise.

Almost as much as he loved Beatrice, Dante
loved Italy; and one of his greatest beliefs was the equal importance of
the Church and the State. He became disgusted with the corruption of the
Church by politics during his lifetime. In fact, it was while he was in
political exile from Florence that he wrote this masterpiece, its complete
title being “The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by Citizenship,
Not by Morals.”
Dante also believed in matching writing
style with the material being treated. Thus, in Hell, the language is faced
with common, sometimes revolting phrasing. Then, in Paradise the speech
turns much more ethereal and lofty. (Curiously, Hell was and remains –
the most popular of the three books.)
By using common expressions and the language
of his native Tuscan dialect rather than the traditional Church Latin,
Dante created a revolutionary work. His comedy, rich as it was in multilayered
medieval allegory, set fire to the then radically modern idea that literature
– works meant primarily to be read rather than retold or enacted could
be made both accessible and popular. So highly regarded was this comedy
that it earned the eventual title of “Divine.”