(poem, c. 1320)
In our present usage, “comedy” usually refers to a work that is humorous and causes us to laugh at ourselves and others. But when Dante used the word to describe his epic poem The Divine Comedy, he had a higher definition in mind. For him, a comedy was a work that began with harsh and tragic realities but ended with great joy and the triumph of the good. Such is an accurate description of his poetic journey through the harrowing environs of hell toward the ultimate good—the beatific vision of God. So successful was Dante’s telling of this comedy that later commentators applied the modifier “divine” to describe the work. His epic poem was popular in his own time, and he is now universally recognized as one of the very greatest writers of Western civilization. As T. S. Eliot has written, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third.”1
The best known and most widely read of the three portions of The Divine Comedy is the Inferno, which tells the story of Dante’s journey through hell. Perhaps its popularity comes from our fascination with the way in which Dante has made eternal punishments fit earthly crimes. Guided by the great poet Virgil, Dante journeys down into the deepest abyss of hell and sees the judgment being meted out to sinners of all stripes, guilty of every kind of sin. Dante’s hell is peopled not only by many famous historical personalities but also by his own political enemies, who suffer for their malfeasance and corruption. The judgments are harsh but they fit the crimes. No wonder the inscription that he sees at the gates of hell reads: “Abandon hope all who enter here.”
The Inferno is the portion that most students are introduced to in college lit surveys, but unfortunately few venture further into the next two portions of The Divine Comedy and therefore miss out on many unforgettable moments in both Purgatorio and Paradiso. In Purgatorio, Dante emerges from hell and is guided up the mountain of purgatory, a place where sins are punished but where, unlike hell where the sentence lasts forever, the purpose of this chastisement is not punishment but cleansing and purification in anticipation of the ascent into heaven. Purgatory is the place where believers are perfected, an extrabiblical theological concept very popular in the Middle Ages.
Once Dante has climbed the mountain of purgatory, he is ready to be ushered into the presence of God, but Virgil, being a virtuous pagan but not a Christian, can travel with him no longer. Instead, the saintly Beatrice, with whom Dante had a special spiritual attachment before her untimely death, becomes his guide through the nine spheres of paradise and to ultimate union with God. Dante’s grand images of heaven include rapturous light, the music of the spheres, the mystic rose, and a great eternal dance.
Born in 1265 in Florence, Dante Alighieri was broadly educated, as witnessed by his excellent grasp of the medieval Catholic theology of both the Dominicans and the Franciscans and his knowledge of ancient philosophy and science. A major turning point in his life occurred at age nine, when he first met Beatrice. He was immediately attracted to her, but they did not meet again for nine years and then only a handful of times thereafter. They rarely spoke to each other and they both married others. But he loved her from afar throughout his life with a spiritual rather than physical passion. She was his ideal woman, and through loving her Dante believed he had learned how to love God more fully. One of his early works is a collection of poems in her honor, La Vita Nuova, or The New Life (1295). Even after her death, she continued to act as his muse.
Dante was banished from his hometown of Florence in 1302 because of his involvement with the White Guelphs, the losing side in a drawn-out political and military conflict between two rival factions in the city. Forbidden to return and too proud to later accept a conditional pardon, he spent time wandering around Italy and central Europe and eventually settled in Ravenna, where he lived the rest of his life in exile. The fruit of this exile was The Divine Comedy, which he probably began about 1306 and did not finish until shortly before his death in 1321. Upon his death both Florence and Ravenna vied to become the resting place of the now-famous poet. Florence thought it had prevailed when Pope Leo X intervened on their behalf, and Dante’s coffin was delivered to them by the city fathers of Ravenna. They later discovered, however, that they had been duped and the coffin contained the remains of someone else!
The Divine Comedy was the first great poem written in Italian, the language of the ordinary person, rather than Latin, the language of the priest and scholar. It gave an aura of dignity to the Italian language and opened the door for others to write serious literary works in their native tongue. Dante’s epic poem was an immediate sensation among his contemporaries, and has remained a classic down to our time. In the twentieth century alone there were more than fifty different translations of Inferno into English!
The poem works effectively on a number of levels. First and foremost, The Divine Comedy is a creative work of poetic genius and intricate structure. Dante shows great imagination in ordering the afterlife around the seven deadly sins and the virtues that are their positive counterparts. Mirroring the medieval fascination with numbers, and especially with the number three (symbolizing the Trinity), he structures of the entire work around it.
There are three major parts: Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory), and Paradiso (heaven). Each contains thirty-three cantos (Inferno has an additional introductory canto). Each stanza in each of the cantos also reflects the trinitarian fascination with the number three, as there are three lines in each one, a rhyme scheme we now call “terza rima.” (Chaucer borrowed this same technique for The Canterbury Tales.) Nine, which is of course the result of multiplying three with itself, is also an important number: the number of circles of hell through which Dante passes on his descent through that dark kingdom and the number of spheres in paradise. Seven, the traditional number of perfection, is used for the seven stages through which he passes on his ascent of the great mountain of purgatory, seeing sinners being cleansed of the seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, and lust).
But there is much more here than numerological symbolism, for Dante’s work, though about the divine realm, is also thoroughly human, filled with both compassion and indignation. Throughout his poetic journey Dante crafts scenes of humor, horror, pathos, and transcendent vision. Even those who cannot accept Dante’s theology can revel in this adventure of the human soul in search of ultimate reality.
The poem also functions as a searing critique of the corruption he had seen firsthand in Florentine politics and religion. Dante used his verse as a platform for expressing discontent with the political status quo and taking satirical revenge on his enemies. This can especially be seen in Inferno, where he peoples hell with corrupt rulers and popes of the past as well as those who would have been recognized by his contemporaries. He spared no wrath at his enemies, and used his poem as a weapon in his continuing battle against political injustice.
Politics had been in Dante’s mind long before he fashioned his comedy. He had been involved in the local politics of Florence, an activist fighting against political and clerical corruption. One of his earlier books, De Monarchia (On World Government), argues forcibly, in anticipation of later political developments, for the separation of church and state. He clearly saw the dangers of investing secular government with God’s blessing and authority or allowing the church to steer the ship of state. When he came to write his comedy, he took aim at those who had misused such power for their own gain. He even placed the current pope, the power-grabbing Boniface VIII, in one of the circles of hell!
Perhaps most profoundly, though, The Divine Comedy is a spiritual autobiography and by implication a guidebook of sorts for the reader’s own spiritual journey. From the very first verse, Dante announces himself as the main character of his epic poem. It begins, “Midway through the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.” Dante is both himself and everyman, a fallible pilgrim who is as shocked and bewildered and inspired by what he sees and experiences as his readers. As he learns, so do we. Although Dante undoubtedly took the traditional Christian understandings of heaven and hell seriously and, almost certainly, literally, he was less interested in trying to create an accurate diagram of the afterlife than he was in pointing toward the vices one should avoid and the virtues one should embrace in their place. The Divine Comedy is therefore a profoundly moral tale, intended to be a mirror in which readers might see themselves and be warned of the consequences of a life lived in selfishness, greed, lust, and pride.
In a letter Dante wrote to a contemporary, he explained the purpose of his poem: “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of bliss.”2 Dante wanted to use his creative gifts to remind readers that they had an immortal soul and help them put aside their sin in order to discover the joy that might be found in the union of the soul with God, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”3