The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy

Authorship

The Divine Comedy (Italian: Commedia, later christened “Divina” by Giovanni Boccaccio), written by the Father of Italian Literature, Dante Alighieri, between 1308 and his death in 1321, is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem’s imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church. It helped establish the Tuscan dialect in which it is written as the Italian standard.

Dante was born into a noble family in Florence. His father died when he was only a child, but his mother took the greatest pains to have him educated. He made progress early not only in the study of classical literature but also in music, drawing, and horsemanship. At the age of twenty-five he fought gallantly in two battles.

But even before he distinguished himself in arms, he had at a Mayday festival fallen in love with the lady who was to inspire him to write his Divine Comedy. When he was only nine years old, he met a girl of his own age, Bice or Beatrice, who became his lifelong love but who died at a young age. He never ceased to love her all his life and to honor her in his literary works.

At the age of thirty-five, he was elected chief magistrate of Florence but his political life ended in disaster. His house was destroyed and his property confiscated. He and his friends were sentenced to perpetual exile with the provision that if they returned to Florence, they would be burned alive. He passed the remainder of his life wandering all over Italy, eating the bitter bread of dependence. The greater part of the Divine Comedy was written during this time of poverty and privation. He died at the age of fifty-six, having been exile for nineteen years. Tardy recognition came after his death; his countrymen, who had closed their hearts and gates against him while he was alive, now anxiously sent embassy after embassy to recover his remains for burial in Florence.

According to the Società Dantesca Italiana, no original manuscript written by Dante has survived, though there are many manuscript copies from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (more than 825 are listed on their site). The oldest belongs to the 1330s, almost a decade after Dante’s death. The most precious ones are the three full copies made by Giovanni Boccaccio (1360s), who himself did not have the original manuscript as a source.

The first printed edition was published in Foligno, Italy, by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini on 11 April 1472. Of the 300 copies printed, fourteen still survive. The original printing press is on display in the Oratorio della Nunziatella in Foligno.

Setting

The poem is written in the first person, and tells of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting during the Easter Triduum 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. Therefore, the story happened in the places that you may see after life: in Hell, in Purgatory and in Heaven.

Characters

Principal character:

Dante- the one who had a journey in the circles of Hell, Inferno: He sees how the sinners suffer because of their peccadilloes. He meets some significant people such as popes, persons in the bible, the great historians and philosophers who are pagans for not believing Christ, and some relatives of him. He also passes through the Purgatory, Purgatorio: He meets some people who are neutrals (do not have a side, not a sinner but not a believer of CHrist). And he goes to his final destination, the Heaven, Paradiso: he meets the good ones, the saints, the believers of God, Mary and Jesus and the mightiest of all, God.

Secondary character:

Virgil- the escort of Dante though the circles of hell and the terraces of Purgatory. He saves Dante from the wild beasts, a lion, a leopard and a she-wolf, which are depictions of temptation towards sins. He can’t go through the Heaven for he is not a believer but a pagan.

Beatrice- the escort of Dante in the spheres of Heaven. She is the second guide in Dante’s journey. As they ascend to the spheres of Heaven she becomes more beautiful because they are closer to God.

God, his angels and the good people- these are the people who dwell in the spheres of Heaven. Even if all the living things are in Heaven they have levels of being closer to God because some souls are more spiritually developed.

Satan, his followers and the sinners- they are the kindred who lives with the flames of Hell which has nine concentric circles getting smaller and smaller. As the circles get smaller, the punishments of the sinners get deadlier and more fatal.

Other people wandering in the Purgatory- the puzzles souls who roam in the mount of Purgatory. They are the ones who are lost, who are confused. The new souls also wake up here after they died.

Some saints and significant people who also lived in real life- Dante encounters them in the three realms of the dead. Because some are pagans, others are Christian propagators and some are sinners.

Animals that signifies virtues- these are the lion which depicts temptation of sin, the leopard, which signifies violence and ambition, and a she-wolf which represents lack of self-restraint.

Summary

The Divine Comedy has three parts so I made my summary into three sections so it will be more vivid to see what happened in the story.

Inferno

The poem begins on a night before Good Friday in the year of 1300. Dante was lost in the woods. He was threatened by beasts: a lion, a leopard and a she-wolf, which he cannot evade in going to the straight way toward salvation. He was saved by Virgil, a pagan and they begin their journey to the underworld.

Dante passes through the gate of Hell, which bears a description that tells that all who enter there must abandon all hopes. As they walk towards hell, they encounter some Opportunists, the people who did nothing in their lives, neither for good nor evil. Mixed with them are the outcasts who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels. They are attacked and their blood was sucked by the insects such as wasps, hornets, maggots.

Then Dante and Virgil cross the Acheron River to Hell which Charon guards. Dante faints and finds himself already inside the realm. The circles are concentric, representing a gradual increase in wickedness, and culminating at the center of the earth, where Satan is held in bondage. Each circle’s sinner is punished with the relation to their sins. Those in Hell are people who tried to justify their sins and are unrepentant. They have knowledge of the past and future, but not of the present.

After passing the nine circles of Hell, Dante and Virgil, with no one to talk to, quickly move on to the center of hell. Condemned to the very center of hell for committing the ultimate sin (treachery against God) is Satan, who has three faces, one red, one black, and one a pale yellow, each having a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor. Satan himself is represented as a giant, terrifying beast, weeping tears from his six eyes, which mix with the traitors’ blood dreadfully. The two poets escape by climbing down the ragged fur of Lucifer, passing through the center of the earth, emerging in the other hemisphere just before dawn on Easter Sunday beneath a sky studded with stars.

Purgatorio

People who sinned but prayed for forgiveness before their deaths are found in Purgatory – where they labor to be free of their sins – not in Hell.

Dante starts the ascent of Mount Purgatory at sunrise. Ascending higher, he encounters those too lazy to repent until shortly before death, and those who suffered violent deaths (often due to leading extremely sinful lives). These souls will be admitted to Purgatory thanks to their genuine repentance, but must wait outside for an amount of time equal to their lives on earth.

The gate of Purgatory is guarded by an angel who uses the point of his sword to draw the letter “P” (signifying peccatum, sin) seven times on Dante’s forehead, bidding him to “wash you those wounds within.” The angel uses two keys, silver (remorse) and gold (reconciliation) to open the gate – both are necessary. The angel at the gate then warns Dante not to look back, lest he should find himself outside the gate again, symbolizing Dante having to overcome and rise above the hell that he has just left and thusly leaving his sinning ways behind him.

From there, Virgil guides the pilgrim Dante through the seven terraces of Purgatory. These correspond to the seven deadly sins, each terrace purging a particular sin in an appropriate manner. Those in purgatory can leave their circle whenever they like, but essentially there is an honor system where no one leaves until they have corrected the nature within themselves that caused them to commit that sin. Souls can only move upwards and never backwards, since the intent of Purgatory is for souls to ascend towards God in Heaven, and can ascend only during daylight hours, since the light of God is the only true guidance.

His ascent of the mountain culminates at the summit, which is in fact the Garden of Eden. This place is meant to return one to a state of innocence that existed before the sin of Adam and Eve caused the fall from grace. Here Dante meets Matelda, a woman of grace and beauty who prepares souls for their ascent to heaven. With her Dante witnesses a highly symbolic procession that may be read as an allegorical masque of the Church and the Sacrament. The procession forms an allegory within the allegory, somewhat like Shakespeare’s play within a play. One participant in the procession is Beatrice, whom Dante loved in childhood, and at whose request Virgil was commissioned to bring Dante on his journey.

Virgil, as a pagan, is a permanent denizen of Limbo, the first circle of Hell, and may not enter Paradise; he vanishes. Beatrice then becomes the second guide, and will accompany Dante in his vision of Heaven.

Paradiso

After an initial ascension, Beatrice guides Dante through the nine celestial spheres of Heaven. These are concentric and spherical. Souls are allotted to the point of heaven that fits with their human ability to love God. Thus, there is a heavenly hierarchy. All parts of heaven are accessible to the heavenly soul. That is to say all experience God but there is a hierarchy in the sense that some souls are more spiritually developed than others.

While the structures of the Inferno and Purgatorio were based around different classifications of sin, the structure of the Paradiso is based on the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues. In Heaven, the levels are classified into spheres.

The ninth sphere, the Primum Mobile (“first moved” sphere) is the abode of angels. Dante sees God as a point of light surrounded by nine rings of angels and is told about the creation of the universe.

From the Primum Mobile, Dante ascends to a region beyond physical existence, called the Empyrean. Here the souls of all the believers form the petals of an enormous rose. Here, Beatrice leaves Dante with Saint Bernard, because theology has reached its limits. Saint Bernard prays to Mary on behalf of Dante. Finally, Dante comes face-to-face with God Himself, and is granted understanding of the Divine and of human nature. His vision is improved beyond that of human comprehension. God appears as three equally large circles within each other representing the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with the essence of each part of God, separate yet one. The book ends with Dante trying to understand how the circles fit together, how the Son is separate yet one with the Father but as Dante put it “that was not a flight for my wings” and the vision of God becomes equally inimitable and inexplicable that no word or intellectual exercise can come close to explaining what he saw. Dante’s soul, through God’s absolute love, experiences unification with itself and all things “but already my desire and my will were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed by the Love that turns the sun and all the other stars”.

Evaluation

Many things that composed the story must be explained and understood. I got this from an Italian critic when I researched about the epic:

Thematic concerns

The Divine Comedy 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 (see the Letter to Cangrande [3]), he outlines other levels of meaning besides the allegory (the historical, the moral, the literal, and the anagogical).

The structure of the poem, likewise, is quite complex, with mathematical and numerological patterns arching throughout the work, particularly threes and nines. The poem is often lauded for its particularly human qualities: Dante’s skillful delineation of the characters he encounters in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; his bitter denunciations 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 “L’Inferno”, allows Dante the freedom of not having to involve the reader in description, and allows him to “[make] room in his poem for the discussion of a great many subjects of the utmost importance, thus widening its range and increasing its variety.”

Dante called the poem “Comedy” (the adjective “Divine” added later in the 14th century) because poems in the ancient world were classified as High (“Tragedy”) or Low (“Comedy”). Low poems had happy endings and were of everyday or vulgar subjects, while High poems were for more serious matters. 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 language as 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.

For me, here’s what I want to talk about which I want to give emphasis:

The punishments in the circles of Hell:

Studies shows that each sin’s punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, fortune-tellers have to walk forwards with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because they tried to do so in life. Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is. So, Dante wants to show not only the traditions, beliefs and customs of a Christian towards afterlife but also his idea of what will happen to the sinners when they die. And this is similar to the line, “ It’s payback time” which is use to some action movies.

The significant people who actually lived in real life that Dante used in the epic:

I think, Dante wants to show who committed sins in which he saw when they were alive. And this people were placed by Dante in the Inferno. And of course, the people who Dante believed to be good persons are can be read in the Paradiso part of the epic. This shows the real character of the people he lived with.

Lastly, this epic really fascinates me because it has a perfect construction not only the structure of the poem but also the story itself. I’m always curious about heaven or afterlife, so I read stories that manifests their own perception about what will we see when we die. Yes, no one can surely convince us for we are humans; we want to see before we believe. But I am not saying to you not to believe in God but it is just a weird thing not to know right? I think, Dante may possibly be right about his view of afterlife. That’s all.

Moral Lesson

I just want to say one thing. Everything you do corresponds to an appropriate result. I you do a good thing, good things will happen to you. And if you do bad things, especially to another person, of course, unpleasant things will come after you, and sometimes even worse.

Facts

The Divine Comedy is composed of over 14,000 lines that are divided into three canticas (Ital. pl. cantiche) — Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) — each consisting of 33 cantos (Ital. pl. canti). An initial canto serves as an introduction to the poem and is generally not considered to be part of the first cantica, bringing the total number of cantos to 100. The number 3 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, ….

In Northern Italy’s political struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante was part of the Guelphs, who in general favored the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence’s Guelphs split into factions around 1300: the White Guelphs, who opposed secular rule by Pope Boniface VIII and who wished to preserve Florence’s independence, and the Black Guelphs, who favored the Pope’s control of Florence. Dante was among the White Guelphs who were exiled in 1302 by the Lord-Mayor Cante de’ Gabrielli di Gubbio, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city, at the request of Boniface and in alliance with the Blacks. The Pope said if he had returned he would be burned at the stake. This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante’s life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy, from prophecies of Dante’s exile to Dante’s views of politics to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents.

In Hell and Purgatory, Dante shares in the sin and the penitence respectively. The last word in each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy is “stars.”