Dante
PART 3
“Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.”
–T.S. Eliot
Trying to discuss the Inferno in the space of an article is like trying to climb Mt. Everest in 20 minutes. Because this is so, it’s best to begin with an analysis of how to approach literature. When you pick up a book, what do you do? How do you begin? Obviously, let’s assume that the first thing to recognize is that any piece of literature proceeds from a specific time and place. It was written by real human beings. It is easy to say the names Dante and Shakespeare and forget that they were real men, blessed with unique talents or gifts, struggling in the real world as writers, who sat down first with blank paper, as any of us do. Any writer starts by facing a blank page.
Dante turned blank paper into The Divine Comedy. Shakespeare turned the same into Hamlet. It is remarkable what they were able to do, but the process of writing was the same. It’s important to remember that they were real men living in a real time. Thus, the first thing we must do is give ourselves some time to understand who the writer is before launching into a work. It is good to get a little background. You don’t need to read a whole biography, but it’s easy enough to consult a compendium. There are certain things you need to know.
Let me give you a few quick examples. I am not going to provide a complete life of Dante for you. I will, however, tell you about a few facts which are very important to know if you want to grasp the fullness of The Divine Comedy. First, Dante was born in 1265; he died in 1321. These are the years that define the life of the man. Why is this significant? It tells us he was a medieval, a man of the Middle Ages. This tells us things which help us when we look at the work.
What are these things? He was a medieval, an Italian, and a Catholic. His Catholicism is essential to understanding him. It’s just as important as knowing, for instance, that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s background was Puritan and that religious outlook permeated his writing. We have to define authors in a context. Of course, I have to caution you when reading background material. Much of what is written today is unreliable. As a rule of thumb, and there are exceptions on both sides, I say to look for something written before 1960.
Dante comes from a specific and well-constituted worldview. It is important to understand that modern man, educated in modern schools, goes out at night, looks at the night sky, and defines his world differently than the medievals. They are looking at the same stars, but not the same “thing.” Modern man first sees a scientific universe; he sees named stars at such-and-such light years away in specific galaxies or solar systems. There is a feeling of understanding due to modern science. And I think it’s fair to say that, for many moderns, there is a feeling of insignificance; what are we compared to the universe? It is all big, dark, and empty; there’s nothing out there but matter: gases, rocks, planets. Everything seems accidental. So the average modern man goes inside to drink, watch TV, and eat junk food to escape this harsh reality.
Medieval man, looking at the same night sky, would first see complete order. This is not from the viewpoint of science, but that of God. There were the nine spheres which made music as they moved, but they were all created by a Creator with a specific order. It was full and rich, not empty. Medieval man knew his place; he did not consider himself insignificant since he was a son of God, created for a specific purpose, playing an integral part in the created order. As a result, he would go to Mass and raise his family, and concern himself with whether there would be enough potatoes or whether the Plague would come around that year. He had real fears, but not the empty angst of modern man.
I emphasize this order because Dante reflects it in the poem. As he descends into the Inferno, he structures Hell in a specific way. This imaginative creation is very interesting; to a large degree, Dante has defined our conception of Hell in his writing. We take many of our visions of Hell from the Inferno: the torture, stench, pains, and suffering of Hell are all given order by Dante. The Inferno is ordered in circles just as there are spheres in the heavens. And Hell is an ordered place because it is a creation of God. As Dante and Virgil descend through the Inferno, they observe this logical and reasonable realm. This is a reflection of the medieval mind.
Further, as a Catholic, Dante’s main narrative in the work is the soul’s movement to God. Dante knew why we are here and where we are going. This is the basis of the Comedy. This is why the whole work ends at the top of the Paradiso, in the outer circle where we glimpse the Godhead. It is an astonishing moment. But it is the logical end of the work since that is the end of the purpose of the existence of the soul. We cannot understand this without some sense of the Faith.
He was not writing just to write; he was writing to tell a specific story. In fact, Dante said quite openly at some point, in a letter to a Northern Italian nobleman and patron, Can Grande della Scala, who took Dante in when the poet was exiled:
The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is “the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed,” for the development of the whole work hinges on and about that. But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically, its subject is: “Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice.”
There are also some historical circumstances which make The Divine Comedy more understandable. Dante lived in a troubled and difficult historical period in Italy. There were very strong city-states at war during this time. Within the individual city-states there was also turmoil and disruption. Political questions and problems loomed large.
Dante was born in Florence, the city he loved. He is probably the most famous Florentine in history. Yet, born in 1265, he was exiled in 1301 and never allowed to return. There is a painting in the great Duomo in Florence where Dante is holding The Divine Comedy with Florence behind him, gates closed. He was sent on an embassy to the Pope, and while he was gone, there was a change of government; the new government forbade his return. He spent the last 21 years of his life in exile, a pilgrim, a wandering soul who could not find rest in his native city. This fact influences the work.
Thus he writes The Divine Comedy from the perspective of the pilgrim soul. Dante the Pilgrim, the character in the book, wanders throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio because Dante the poet knew what it meant to be a wanderer.
You cannot read The Divine Comedy without knowing this fact: in 1274, when Dante was nine years old, he was invited to a May Day party at the home of an Italian nobleman named Folco Portinari. He went to the party and saw the eight-year-old daughter of Folco named Beatrice. He instantly fell in love. This is his own description; we must take him at his own word. He never really got to know her. She married someone else. They had very little contact. And yet he held the image of that beauty. It became for Dante the symbol of all that is good, pure, and virtuous in this world. In one sense, it is fascinating; Dante married another woman named Gemma Donati. Yet we never hear of her; she is not mentioned in the work. Throughout the work, the vision of the woman he adores is Beatrice. (You can imagine how happy his wife must have been!) Curiously, for much of the time Dante was in exile, his wife mainly stayed in Florence. Eventually the family went with him, but they were separated for a great period of time.
There is something else going on here regarding the question of literary tradition. Dante was not here inventing something out of whole cloth. There have never been many original minds. Dante took something and adapted it. He was writing after the time of the chivalric romances in which the knight chose a lady whom he loved and in whom he saw all that was good, pure, and noble. He may indeed marry someone else, but that was merely domestic life, not the higher ideal vision. We are talking about the literary tradition of the Arthurian romances. Remember Lancelot chooses Guinevere as his inspiration even though she is married to someone else. Dante is writing in this tradition.
Of course, Dante is writing in many traditions. He is also writing out of the epic tradition. He knew Homer and respected him and Virgil. He had studied them thoroughly. He knew the Iliad and Aeneid. He follows the rules of the epic in The Divine Comedy. An epic begins in the middle of the story. How does the Inferno begin? The very first line of the poem:
Dante was writing out of the popular literary forms of his day. Further, he is proving himself as part of the Western tradition. There is a great moment in the first circle of Hell, reserved for the classical souls who were good men that lived before the Incarnation and thus did not know Christ. The first circle of Hell is, on a natural level, a very pleasant place to be. Dante and Virgil there visit Homer, Ovid, and others. They tell Dante they are glad to meet him and treat him as an equal. This is probably the most glorious example of arrogance in all of literature. As Dante is writing it, he is basically saying: “These classical authors are my buddies; and, further, they recognize how good I am.” Is this pride? It’s difficult to say. Is it proud to be aware of your own greatness? He was one of the greatest poets ever, and he knew it. He was as great as Homer and Virgil. Indeed, we have added him to the list. I don’t think it is pride but if it is, then much of that pride is wrung out of him as he makes his journey. (In the Purgatorio when he visits the souls being punished for pride, he suggests that he himself will one day spend time in that place.)
We begin to see, as we go through the work, that we have a personal confession of Dante. In a curious way, it is in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions, for Dante is telling us about the mistakes he has made. Thus, it is logical that we begin with a descent into Hell, the place of vice, error, and sin. It is one of the glories of literature: Dante, without having to sin himself, reacts to it, is tempted by it, and comes to understand it. He moves on without being able to escape it completely, for he remains human, but his understanding is deepened. This is why context is important.
Finally, we must understand the title The Divine Comedy. Even the simplest titles are often great clues. The Divine Comedy tells us much about the work. The great epics tended to be serious; the great Greek and Roman poets wrote tragedies. Dante wrote a comedy and, in fact, he himself simply called his work the Commedia. This does not mean that it includes lots of jokes. (It does include much that is humorous, and there are moments of low comedy funnier than much of what you find in modern farce.) Overall, though, comedy means structure, meaning even though the work is serious the journey does not end in destruction, pity, fear, or loss. It will end with reconciliation or a vision of glory or joy. I won’t say it’s a happy ending in the modern sense of the word, but it does reflect happiness in an Aristotelian or Thomistic sense, for the journey ends with a vision of the greatest good.
We thus know where we are going as we read through it. The title tells us. The comedy in this case, however, is a divine one. It is thus a spiritual journey, not one in this world. We will, however, recognize things from this world as we go through it.
It was also written in what would be the vulgar tongue for Dante. The great classical writers wrote in the classical languages. Even Dante wrote many of his serious prose works in Latin. He wrote poems in Latin. When he got to this work, however, because he aimed at a wider audience, he decided to write in Italian, thereby establishing Italian as a literary language. It was a common language, written for the people, not for literary eloquence. Dante proved what could be done with the vernacular. In that sense, although the work is tied to many traditions, it is also a very experimental work. He climbed on the shoulders of the giants who went before him, but he also created something new.
You need to spend some time with any work before you dive in. Some sense of background is crucial. Some guidelines, however, are also necessary. Here are some clues for reading. First, it is a complex work. Do not be intimidated by it. The first time through is like meeting for the first time someone who will become a good friend. Don’t try to understand everything in the first reading. The first time through, just try to get a grasp of the basics: what is going on, where are we going, and what is happening. What’s the story? Where do we start? Where do we end? Whom do we meet?
As you come back to the work, as with any great work, it continues to open up. It offers you more and more, the way a good friend does. Why are old friends the best friends? We haven’t worn them out; on the contrary, we’ve spent so much time with them that we discover more facets of them. It is the movement from simple understanding to complex understanding to real appreciation and deep love. This is what real friendship is about. It’s what a good marriage should be. It’s the same with a great work of literature.
Here is Dante, again from the letter to Can Grande della Scala, explaining how to look at the work. He says that the meaning of the work is not simple:
The meaning of this work is not simple for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it, and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the other allegorical or mystical. And to make this matter of treatment clearer, it may be studied in the verse: “When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.” For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thralldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical.
The first thing you must then do is read it for the literal sense. What do the words themselves mean? We must start with the words themselves. But we must also know the overall structure of the work before we begin. For instance, Dante is obsessed with the number three. It’s easy enough to know why: Dante the poet honors the Trinity throughout the whole work. Thus, the design of the work uses threes. Most obviously, the poem is split into three parts. It is not a single work. He divides the after-life into three realms: the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso.
The whole thing is made up of 100 cantos. After an introductory canto, there are 33 cantos for each section. He then designs the verse form of the poem as the tercet, in Italian terzina. The stanzas are all three lines each. The rhymes link together: ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, etc. Thus, everything links together. But you will notice this use of threes everywhere in the work. Even at the very end, during the final vision of God, there are three interconnecting globes of light. Right from the start, he’s leading us to the final vision of God as the Trinity.
Here is something essential: there are two Dantes in this work. There is Dante the poet, the man writing the poem, looking backward, telling us something that happened to him. He gives us the date. The Divine Comedy begins on the eve of Good Friday, 1300. It covers three days. It ends on Easter Sunday. He makes this journey through Hell, up Mount Purgatory, and through Heaven in three days. Dante the storyteller tells us about something that happened to him; in fact, Dante the poet started writing the poem after 1300. He finished it just before his death in 1321.
At the same time, the main character is named Dante. He is his own principal character and he is looking back on himself. So we have Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim. Dante the poet knows things and often portrays Dante the pilgrim critically. The man who begins the journey is not the man who is writing the poem. Dante the pilgrim who begins the journey has much to learn. We get it almost instantly.
Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.
Notice where we begin. He assumes he is halfway through his life. (He would die earlier than he thought.) But he uses the plural in the first line. It is the journey we all take. The words suggest that all of our lives are a journey. The second line, however, returns to the singular. Now Dante is telling us his personal perspective of the journey that we all take. We see he had been sleeping for he awakens in a dark wood. The dark wood is a poetic image which calls up a primal fear in almost all of us. This is why so many fairy tales involve children being lost in a dark wood. Dante is a grown-up, but a child spiritually and emotionally. The sense of wandering harkens back to the reality of free will and choice.
How hard it is to tell what it was like, this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn (the thought of it brings back all my old fears),
a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
He’s terrified. He wants to get out of there. Further, he’s at a hill. He looks up and sees a mountain. He decides to try to get out of the woods by climbing up the mountain, but his path is blocked by three savage beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. These beasts won’t let him pass. They’ve been interpreted a thousand ways; you can choose an intelligent commentary. He is told he’ll be stuck there until the greyhound comes to save him, but he doesn’t understand what that means. Then we realize that the story hasn’t really started yet: it begins when Virgil appears.
Virgil tells Dante not to worry, that he has come to guide him. We then find out that the real action of the poem has begun earlier, in Heaven. The Blessed Mother went to Santa Lucia and told her to find Beatrice since Dante needed help. (Three women, a healing parallel to the three beasts.) So Dante hasn’t been abandoned. Beatrice goes to Virgil in the First Circle of Hell. In the Second Canto, Virgil explains how she got there:
I am Beatrice, who urges you to go;
I come from where I long most to return;
Love moved me, as it moves me now to speak.
When I return to stand before my Lord,
I’ll sing your praises to Him many times.
And then she spoke no more.
These little moments are exquisite. The poem is filled with them. Dante is not telling us by commentary how to interpret these moments; he is letting us realize the scene imaginatively. It is beautifully done. One of the problems with The Divine Comedy is that the verse is so simple, and moves so quickly because of the interlocking tercets, that a reader can almost read it too quickly.
If you want to read it with a medieval mind, remember that we lack the patience of those who came before us. They loved long stories and would savor them slowly. We have to slow down to appreciate the richness of what is being presented to us. It is absurd to eat lobster bisque at the same rate you would eat a McDonald’s burger. The latter, at best, may simply fuel you for a few hours; the former is something to savor slowly. Dante is lobster bisque. Savor it slowly.
Why Virgil? Many commentators point out that Virgil guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory, while Beatrice guides him through Heaven. That is only partially accurate. There is actually a third guide who takes him through to the heights Paradise. The number three again.) But why is Virgil the first guide? Why the classical world? Virgil, to the medievals, represented reason. He was the Roman poet of reason. The Greeks had grand passions that at times were depicted as going out of control, hence the greatness of Greek tragedy. Virgil, however, was reasonable. In order to get out of the dark wood, the first thing to do is to exercise reason. Virgil is thus the guide.
He is a poet, however, not a philosopher. This implies that an awakening of the heart is also necessary. Thus, to move forward, we must begin with human feeling that is deeply and profoundly understood. Hence, we have Virgil, a great poet and man of nature and reason. Sometimes we know people who have lost their way and are wandering; a purely natural means may be their first help. It may be a friendship, a human connection, or a piece of music, an emotional connection. These things won’t get us all the way to our final destination, but they may start the process.
Curiously, at this point, Beatrice cannot come to the pilgrim Dante. He is not yet ready for the grace she represents. Grace is prior to nature, and it perfects nature, but we must start with nature. We must use reason to get ourselves out of the fixes we have managed to get ourselves into. Hence, Virgil is the guide. Yet there are things Dante the pilgrim understands which Virgil does not. In Canto Three, we enter the vestibule to Hell itself and hear the screams of anguish from below. It’s a great and terrifying scene. First we see the inscription above the gate:
I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY,
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL GRIEF,
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN RACE.
JUSTICE IT WAS THAT MOVED MY GREAT CREATOR;
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
AND HIGHEST WISDOM JOINED WITH PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I SHALL LAST ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YOU WHO ENTER.
A fine inscription. We know we are on our way to Hell. Notice it begins with “I.” We are obsessed with the self; this is how Hell announces itself. But it acknowledges that it did not create itself. The Gate of Hell itself announces the Trinity. The last line is, of course, famous: Hell lacks hope because there is no getting out. We hear the shrieks for the first time.
Hell is unbearably noisy. It is intolerable cacophony. It is astonishing how much noise is involved in Hell. Dorothy Sayers, one of the famous translators of the work in English, comments, in her Introduction, about the noise of Hell:
...the sighs and wailing, the howls of Cerebrus, yells of the hoarders and spendthrifts, the splashing and bubbling of the streams, the shrieks of the Furies, the sibilant voices of the suicides, sizzling like green wood on the fire, the thunder of the cataract, the sniffling and blowing of the flatterers, the quarrels and shouts of the Malebranche, the confused roar of the speaking flames, the teeth of the traitors, chattering like storks: all the hideous, intolerable clamor of Hell.
She was obviously a creative writer herself. Hell is a noisy place. If you want an example of how hellish the modern world has become, consider the noise. The noise prevents us from thinking; it confuses us. In Hell, all of the senses are assaulted. I won’t go into detail about the stench. It suffices to say that it stinks. It is awful. There are moments the two wayfarers cannot continue descending because of the putrid flames coming from below. Virgil and the pilgrim Dante hesitate just so the nose can adjust. Poetry is sensuous; it impacts the senses. Few have done it better than Dante.
Dante is making this journey to learn. As he descends, he is confused and tricked. These damned souls are good at deceit. Let us look at the most famous of all the encounters, in Canto Five. It is the meeting with Francesca da Rimini. We are in the circle of the lustful. All the lustful souls are flying about endlessly like birds; they had been animalistic, hence their punishment resembles their sin. (Dante uses a device called contrapasso; it means something like the law of Divine retribution. The punishment fits the crime. As you sinned, so are you punished.) Having become animal-like by obeying their lower passions, they forever fly around like birds. It is not grand animalism, though; it reminds one of Shakespeare’s phrase “sparrows…are lecherous.”
Francesca and Paolo stop to talk to Dante. Paolo never says a word. The woman does all the talking. Paolo, however, gasps and moans and sighs while she is talking; he listens to her for all eternity. She lays it on with a trowel; she insults Paolo while talking about their great love. Simultaneously, she attempts to seduce the pilgrim. This is her story, the story of a married woman with her husband’s brother, as they read about the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere:
One day we read, to pass the time away,
of Lancelot, how he had fallen in love;
we were alone, innocent of suspicion.
Time and again our eyes were brought together
by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.
To the moment of one line alone we yielded:
it was when we read about those longed-for lips
now being kissed by such a famous lover,
that this one (who shall never leave my side)
then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did.
Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.” And all the while
the one of the two spirits spoke these words,
the other wept, in such a way that pity
blurred my senses; I swooned as though to die,
and fell to Hell’s floor as a body, dead, falls.
What has happened? She has seduced him just as she seduced Paolo. Dante the pilgrim feels sorry for them, as most readers do. What we have here, however, is God’s justice. As the pilgrim continues to descend, he will learn to look at all these sins in the face and understand that the sins are his own (and our own). Dante comes upon this scene of seduction and is seduced by it; he is filled with sympathy. Having made that mistake, he loses consciousness, reason. He himself falls. Virgil revives him and will not abandon him. Dante the pilgrim learns the lesson and moves on, but he will keep making mistakes throughout his journey.
The pilgrim is all of us. He is man going through the world. The pilgrim is tempted by sin all the way through Hell. He has much to learn, just as we do. We encounter sins in our journey, fall, and find death; yet we also have the hope of being revived and restored.
(To be continued.)
Current Issue
