Divina Commedia

Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains Italy's greatest poet. He was born in the city of Florence, in the region of Tuscany, Italy in the spring of 1265. He wrote the Divine Comedy (Commedia) from 1308 to 1320, completing the work the year before he died. The Divine Comedy is one of literature's boldest undertakings, as Dante takes us through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and then reaches Heaven (Paradiso), where he is permitted to partake of the Beatific Vision. Dante's journey serves as an allegory of the progress of the individual soul toward God. The work is arranged in 100 cantos in 3 parts, 34 for the Inferno, 33 each for Purgatorio and Paradiso. The work is written in groups of 3 lines, or tercets, reminiscent of the Trinity. While Dante was critical of the Catholic Church as an institution, his writings remained faithful to his schooling by the Dominicans, where he learned the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274). The Divine Comedy signaled the beginning of the Renaissance. The Commedia by Dante had everlasting impact on Italy, for the Tuscan dialect became the literary language of Italy. He died in political exile in Ravenna, Italy in September 1321.

That is all short history about Dante Alighieri, the Italy’s greatest poet. As he wrote about his journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso to partaken of Beatific Vision with help of Virgil (author of Aeneid), the real reason he made such outstanding poet was for Beatric, the woman he admired all his life.

 

Background of Divina Commedia

Throughout the Middle Ages, politics was dominated by the struggle between the two greatest powers of that age: the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). Each claimed to be of divine origin and to be indispensable to the welfare of mankind. The cause of this struggle was the papal claim that it also had authority over temporal matters, that is, the ruling of the government and other secular matters. In contrast, the HRE maintained that the papacy had claim only to religious matters, not to temporal matters.

In Dante's time, there were two major political factions, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Originally, the Ghibellines represented the medieval aristocracy, which wished to retain the power of the Holy Roman Emperor in Italy, as well as in other parts of Europe. The Ghibellines fought hard in this struggle for the nobility to retain its feudal powers over the land and the people. In contrast, the Guelphs, of which Dante was a member, were mainly supported by the rising middle class, represented by rich merchants, bankers, and new landowners. They supported the cause of the papacy in opposition to the Holy Roman Emperor.

The rivalry between the two parties not only set one city against another, but also divided individual cities and families into factions. In time, the original alliances and allegiances became confused in strange ways. Dante, as a Guelph, was a supporter of the imperial authority because he passionately wanted Italy united into one central state. In his time, the fighting between the two groups became fierce. Farinata, the proud Ghibelline leader of Florence, was admired by Dante, the Guelph, but Dante placed him in the circle of Hell reserved for Heretics. Dante's philosophical view was also a political view. The enemy was politically, philosophically, and theologically wrong — and thus a Heretic.

Virgil was considered the most moral of all the poets of ancient Rome. Virgil's Aeneid was one of the models for Dante's Inferno. It is said that Dante had memorized the entire Aeneid and that he had long revered Virgil as the poet of the Roman Empire, especially since the Aeneid tells the story of the founding of the Roman Empire. Furthermore, in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, he writes symbolically about the coming of a Wonder Child who will bring the Golden Age to the world, and in the Middle Ages, this was interpreted as being prophetic of the coming of Christ. Thus in the figure of Virgil, Dante found a symbol who represented the two key institutions: the papacy and the empire, destined by God to save mankind.

 

Structure and Story

Divina Commedia is composed of 14,233 lines that are divided into three canticas (Italy – cantiche) – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) – each consist-ing of 33 cantos (34 for Inferno). An initial canto serves as an introduction to the poet and is generally considered to be part of the first cantica, bringing the total number of cantos to 100. It is generally accepted, however, that the first two cantos serve as a unitary prologue to the entire epic, as well as the opening two cantos of each canticas serving as a prologue to each of the three canticas. The number three is prominent in the work, represented here by the length of each cantica. The verse scheme used, terza rima, is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ....

The poet is written in the first person, and tells of Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante's ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman whom he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition which is highlighted in Dante's earlier work La Vita Nuova.

The structure of the three realms follows a common numerical pattern of 9 plus 1 for a total of 10: 9 circles of the Inferno, followed by Lucifer contained at its bottom; 9 rings of Mount Purgatory, followed by the Garden of Eden crowning its summit; and the 9 celestial bodies of Paradiso, followed by the Empyrean containing the very essence of God. Within the 9, 7 correspond to a specific moral scheme, subdividing itself into three subcategories, while two others of more particularity are added on for a completion of nine. For example, the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church that are cleansed in Purgatory are joined by special realms for the Late repentant and the excommunicated by the church. The core seven sins within purgatory correspond to a moral scheme of love perverted, subdivided into three groups corresponding to excessive love (Lust, Gluttony, Greed), deficient love (Sloth), and malicious love (Wrath, Envy, Pride).

 

Inferno

The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in the year 1300, " middle in our life’s journey I went astray" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita). Dante is thirty-five years old, half of the biblical life expectancy of 70 (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate), lost in a dark wood (understood as sin), assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade, and unable to find the "straight road" (diritta via) – also translatable as "right way" – to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain). Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a "low place" (basso loco) where the sun is silent ('l sol tace), Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin's punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life.

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious. These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante's Hell: Upper Hell, beyond the city of Dis, containing four indulgent sins (Lust, gluttony, avarice, anger); Circle 7 for the sins of violence, and Circles 8 and 9 for the sins of malice (fraud and treachery). Added onto these are two unlike categories that are specifically spiritual: Limbo, within Circle 1, contains the virtuous pagans who were not sinful but were ignorant of Christ; and Circle 6, containing the heretics who contradicted the doctrine and confused the spirit of Christ. The circles are put to 9, with the addition of the Satan completing the structure of 9 + 1 = 10.

 

Purgatorio

Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the undergloom, to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world. The Mount-ain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere, created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan's fall created Hell (which Dante portrays as existing underneat Jerusalem.) The mountain has seven terraces, corresponding to the seven deadly sins or "seven roots of sinfulness." The classification of sin here is more psychological than that of the Inferno, being based on motives, rather than actions. It is also drawn primarily from Christian theology, rather than from classical sources. However, Dante's illustrative examples of sin and virtue draw on classical sources as well as on the Bible and on contemporary events.

Love, a theme throughout the Divine Comedy, is particularly important for the framing of the sin on the Mountain of Purgatory. While the love that flows from God is pure, it can become sinful as it flows through man. Man can sin by using love towards improper or malicious ends (Wrath, Envy, Pride), or using it to proper ends but with love that is either not strong enough (Sloth) or love that is too strong (Lust, Gluttony, Greed). Below the seven purges of the soul is the Ante-Purgatory, containing the Excommunicated from the church and the Late repentant who died, often violently, before receiving rites. Thus the total comes to nine, with the addition of the Garden of Eden at the summit, equaling ten.

Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the Christian life. Christian souls arrive escorted by an angel, singing in exitu Israel de Aegypto. In his Letter to Cangrande, Dante explains that this reference to Israel leaving Egypt refers both to the redemption of Christ and to "the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace." Appropriately, therefore, it is Easter Sunday when Dante and Virgil arrive.

The Purgatorio is notable for demonstrating the medieval knowledge of a spherical Earth. During the poem, Dante discusses the different stars visible in the southern hemi-sphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various timezones of the Earth. At this stage it is, Dante says, sunset at Jerusalem, midnight on the River Ganges, and sunrise in Purgatory.

 

Paradiso

After an initial ascension, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical, as in Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology. While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based on different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theo-logical virtues.

The first seven spheres of Heaven deal solely with the cardinal virtues of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice and Temperance. The first three describe a deficiency of one of the cardinal virtues – the Moon, containing the inconstant whose vows to God waned as the moon thus lack fortitude; Mercury, containing the ambitious who were virtuous for glory and thus lacked justice; and Venus, containing the lovers, whose love was directed toward another than God and thus lacked Temperance. The final four inciden-tally are positive examples of the cardinal virtues, all led on by the Sun, containing the prudent, whose wisdom lighted the way for the other virtues, to which the others are bound (constituting a ca-tegory on its own). Mars contains the men of fortitude who died in the cause of Christiani-ty; Jupiter contains the kings of Justice; and Saturn contains the temperant, the monks who abided to the contemplative lifestyle. The seven subdivided into three are raised further by two more categories: the eighth sphere of the fixed stars that contain those who achieved the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and represent the Church Triumphant – the total perfection of man, cleansed of all the sins and carrying all the virtues of heaven; and the ninth circle, or Primum Mobile (corresponding to Medieval astronomy of Geocentri-cism) which contains the angels, creatures never poisoned by original sin. Topping them all is the Empyrean that contains the essence of God, completing the 9 fold division to 10.

Dante meets and converses with several great saints of the Church, including Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Saint Peter, and St. John. The Paradiso is consequently more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, Dante admits the vision of heaven he receives is the one that his human eyes permit him to see, and the vi-sion of heaven found in the Cantos is Dante's own personal one.

The Divina Commedia finishes with Dante seeing the Triune God. In a flash of un-derstanding, which he cannot express, Dante finally understands the mystery of Christ's divinity and humanity, and his soul becomes aligned with God's love.

 

Thematic Concerns

The Divina Commedia can be described simply as an allegory: Each canto, and the episodes therein, can contain many alternative meanings. Dante's allegory, however, is more complex, and, in explaining how to read the poem. He outlines other levels of meaning besi-des the allegory: the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical.

The structure of the poetry, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and nume-rological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines, which are relat-ed to the Trinity. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante's skill-ful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; his bitter de-nunciations of Florentine and Italian politics; and his powerful poetic imagination. Dante's use of real characters, according to Dorothy Sayers in her introduction to her translation of the Inferno, allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to "make room in his poetry for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety."

Dante called the poetry "Commedia" (the adjective "Divina" was added later in the 14th century) because poetries in the ancient world were classified as High ("Tragedy") or Low ("Comedy"). Low poems had happy endings and were written in everyday language, whereas High poems treated more serious matters and were written in an elevated style. Dante was one of the first in the Middle Ages to write of a serious subject, the Redemption of Man, in the low and "vulgar" Italian language and not the Latin one might expect for such a serious topic. Boccaccio's account that an early version of the poem was begun by Dante in Latin is still controversial.

 

Dante’s Personal Involvement

In his allegorical description of sin (in the Inferno) and virtue (in the Purgatorio and Paradiso), Dante draws on real characters from ancient Greek and Roman myths and history, and from his own times. However, his own actions often also illustrate the concepts he is discussing. For example, Dante shares the fleshly sins of the damned at several points in the upper circles of Hell. At the first circle where the virtuous pagans who pursued honor above all else are punished by eternally knowing they have fallen short for their lack of faith, Dante shares with them their love of honor, as evidenced by the word "honor" being used repeatedly in the Canto.

Although the Divina Commedia is primarily a religious poem, discussing sin, virtue, and theology, Dante also discusses several elements of the science of his day (this mixture of science with poetry has received both praise and blame over the centuries). The Purgatorio repeatedly refers to the implications of a spherical Earth, such as the different stars visible in the southern hemisphere, the altered position of the sun, and the various timezones of the Earth. For example, at sunset in Purgatory it is midnight at the Ebro (a river in Spain), dawn in Jerusalem, and noon on the River Ganges.