AUTHOR: DANTE ALIGHIERI
DATE: 1320
Dante Alighieri completed his epic, visionary three-part poem, The Divine Comedy, in 1320 after working on it for some twelve years. A rich allegory drawing on existing religious, classical and secular literary sources, the extraordinary first-person narrative tells of the protagonist’s journey through the three realms of the dead: Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio) and Heaven (Paradiso).
The piece serves as a landmark in several respects. As a work of literature, it has a place in the very highest ranks and for seven hundred years has been a cornerstone of the Western canon, such that T. S. Eliot was moved to note: ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.’ (See Dante in Love: The World’s Greatest Poem and How It Made History by Harriet Rubin; Simon & Schuster, 2004.) Dante’s decision to write the poem not in the Latin favoured by other writers of the age but in vernacular Florentine marked a step-change in literary tradition, opening up the work to a much larger audience and helping to establish the foundations of the modern Italian language. But the poem also had a profound impact on the popular understanding of religious teachings. Dante was rooted (though not uncritically) in the Roman Catholic traditions that then dominated European life, and The Divine Comedy did perhaps more than even the Bible itself to mould perceptions of the afterlife, especially concerning the nature of Hell (‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’).
Born in 1265, Dante grew up in the Italian city-state of Florence, which was at the time a hotbed of political intrigue. He became an apothecary, although this seems to have been as a way of entering one of the professional guilds necessary to build a political career rather than through any great passion to practise pharmacy. In addition, it probably appealed to his literary instincts, since apothecaries often doubled as booksellers. Although never in the forefront of his city’s political life, he sided with its papal-supporting Guelph faction in the long-running conflict with the Ghibellines aligned with the Holy Roman Empire. After the Ghibellines were defeated, the Guelphs split into rival factions, resulting in Dante’s exile from his hometown for a good many years, during which time he seems to have first conceived the idea of The Divine Comedy.
At first, though, it was not ‘divine’. He called his work only Comedia, the Divina being added much later by another great Italian writer of the period, Giovanni Boccaccio. In terms of the poem’s structure, the three books – or Cantiche – total some 14,233 lines and a hundred cantos (33 each in ‘Purgatorio’ and ‘Paradiso’, and 34 in ‘Inferno’).
The action takes place between just before dawn on Good Friday and the following Wednesday in 1300, with Dante the Narrator enjoying the company of three guides on his spiritual journey. For the visits to Hell and Purgatory, he is accompanied by the great Roman poet Virgil, while his chaperone in Paradise is Beatrice, an idealized woman based on a real person Dante had known in his youth in Florence. He had romantically longed for her but she died at a young age.
The epic adventure begins with the famous lines:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
So starts his descent into Hell, which is made up of nine concentric circles, each filled with a different ‘class’ of sinners (exponents, respectively, of lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery). Each pays the price for their crimes against God, the horrors of which are described in hauntingly graphic ways. The first circle, meanwhile, is Limbo, where the spirits of the unbaptized dead and ‘virtuous’ non-Christians reside, less violent than the other circles but eternally sad and without hope of ascending to Heaven. Indeed, this is where Virgil resides.
Next, it is to Purgatory, a steep climb up a mountain that encompasses seven terraces, each corresponding to a different one of the seven deadly sins. Here, Dante ruminates on the nature of sin and its roots in love – love that is deficient, disordered, perverted or in excess of what is moral. The ascent of Purgatory also presents the author with the opportunity to critique what he regards as the failings of the Catholic Church and to ponder on wider contemporary political issues, which provided Dante with a rich vein of subject matter given his experience of political exile.
CHAUCER
Dante’s adoption of the vernacular was a landmark for not only Italian literature but for the language itself. His choice was pivotal in moulding the development of a national lingua franca. Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales – another of the touchstone works of world literature – is often credited with having done something similar for the English language when he chose to write in Middle English rather than the expected French or Latin. His near contemporary, Thomas Hoccleve, would describe him as ‘the firste fyndere of our fair langage’. Yet Dante made his bold step almost eighty years earlier.
At the peak of the mountain, Dante and Virgil arrive at the Garden of Eden, a manifestation of the pre-Fall innocence that the trip up Purgatory is designed to recapture. Dante is then joined by Beatrice, who goes with him to Heaven, guiding him through its nine celestial spheres, all the way to the Empyrean – the seat of God (where St Bernard guides him for the very last section). Along the way, Dante meets several sanctified figures, including Thomas Aquinas, Saint Peter and Saint John.
As well as the obvious influence of the scriptures on this theological journey, Dante took inspiration from elsewhere too. The cosmological aspects of the work owe much to the ideas of Ptolemy, for example, while Aristotle served as Dante’s philosophical bedrock. The influence of Homer and, of course, Virgil is clear as well. But Dante took his disparate influences and mixed them together to create something entirely unique and without precedent. For centuries – even now – our collective vision of Heaven and Hell tends to be rooted in what he presented in The Divine Comedy.
Its influence upon others that followed has been immeasurable. Dante’s fingerprints are in evidence across vast swathes of the cultural production of both the Reformation and the Renaissance but they extend further too. One may wonder, for instance, whether John Milton could have written Paradise Lost without Dante having come before him. William Blake reintroduced the work to a new audience in the nineteenth century hungry for Romanticism, while modernists like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot also counted Dante among their formative influences. Joyce even said: ‘I love my Dante as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.’
Aside from the artistic merit of his work, Dante helped change the way literature was consumed. By writing in the vernacular, he won a much wider audience than if he’d written in the Latin of the elite. By daring to take this course, he paved the way for others too, not least Boccaccio and Petrarch. But in broader terms, The Divine Comedy can be seen as a leap forward towards the modern age. It is a product of bravery that melded religion, mythology and politics – the heavenly and the earthly – in the most striking verse, laying the path to a new sort of literature and way of seeing. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges makes the case succinctly, describing The Divine Comedy as ‘the best book literature has ever achieved’.