Dante Alighieri is beyond doubt the greatest of Italian poets, and, many readers think, one of the greatest poets that Western civilization has produced. W B Yeats called him "the chief imagination of Christendom." T S Eliot said: "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no third."
He was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. Italy in those days was not a united country, but a collection of mostly small city-states. Feuds and power struggles between noble families were a constant source of wars between states and of turmoil and civil war within them. Dante, heir of a poor but noble family, was one of the seven elected officials in charge of the government of Florence, when an accidental collision in the street during the May Festival in 1300 led to a brawl that escalated into a civil war that ultimately got Dante's party overthrown and its leaders (including Dante) exiled from Florence. He spent the rest of his life in exile, pining for his native city.
In 1293 he published a book called the Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), in which he relates how he fell in love with a young girl (Beatrice), and found his chief happiness in thinking of her, and looking at her from afar. In 1304 or shortly thereafter he published De Vulgari Eloquentia, an argument for writing poems and other works in the language that people speak (in his case, Italian) rather than in Latin. At the same time he wrote IL Convivio ("The Banquet"), in which he discusses grammar, and styles of poetry, and complains that his own poems, and in particular some of the things he said in the Vito Nuova, have been much misunderstood. In 1313 he published De Monarchia ("On Monarchy" or "A Treatise on Government"), in which he argued that the authority of a secular prince is not derived from the authority of the church, and is not given him by the pope, but comes directly from God (although in his exercise of it he ought, like every other Christian, to be guided by the moral instruction of the spiritual authority).
When he began writing his masterpiece, the Commedia, we do not know. (A "comedy," as traditionally defined, is a story that "begins in sorrow and ends in joy". Dante called his work simply "The Comedy." Later Italian writers speaking of the work called it "The Divine Comedy," by which name it is usually known today.) It appears that he had finished the first of its three parts by 1314, and the last only shortly before his death on 14 September 1321. (Because that is the Feast of the Holy Cross, he is remembered on the following day.)
The plot of the Comedy is straightforward. It begins with Dante lost and walking in a Dark Wood, unable to remember how he got there or how long he has been walking. He sees a mountain and tries to get out of the wood by climbing it, but is driven back by three beasts that bar his path. He runs in panic, sees a man approaching, and asks for help. The man replies: I am the poet Virgil. You cannot get out of the wood by climbing the mountain. You must follow me, and I will take you the long way round. Your Lady Beatrice has sent me to guide you, through the depths of Hell and up the slopes of Purgatory, to meet her in the country of the Blessed." Dante then follows Virgil, who conducts him through Hell, a vast funnel-shaped region under the surface of the earth, with a series of terraces that form ever-narrowing circles on which various kinds of evil deeds are punished, down to the center. They reach the tip of the funnel, located at the center of the earth, "the point toward which all things down-weigh", where the directions "up" and "down" are reversed, and find a small tunnel or pathway cut through the rock that leads them finally out on the other side of the earth, directly opposite Jerusalem, at the foot of Mount Purgatory, which is surrounded by cornices on which the seven basic kinds of inclination to sin are purged and corrected. They climb the mount and at its summit they find the earthly Paradise, the Eden from which our first parents were expelled when they turned aside from a relation of loving obedience to God and of loving trust in Him. There Beatrice meets Dante, and conducts him upward through the planetary spheres. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the stars, and beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given a vision of the glory of God Himself. And here the poem ends.
Dante On the State of Souls After Death
In Part One of the Comedy, Inferno (Hell), we see those who have chosen evil, and have rejected the rescuing grace of God, enduring the consequences of their choice.
First, in the upper circles of Hell we see sins of Incontinence, of lack of self-control, sins of those who would have said, "I couldn't help it!" There are those who could not Say No to others, dramatically represented by unlawful lovers (though a mother who ruins her child's teeth and his health because she cannot refuse him all the sweets he cries for would be an equally appropriate example). Next, there are those who cannot Say No to themselves, dramatically represented by the gluttonous. And thus are shown other kinds of choices to turn away from God in pursuit of a false good. Each chooser is living forever with what he has chosen. The lovers, if asked what they wanted, would have said, "To be with each other forever." In Dante's vision, they are forever joined, and circle forever like a flock of birds, born on the howling wind of their own passions. The sullen lie forever buried in a muddy marsh, their bubbles rising to the surface as if to say, "While we lived, we took no joy in the pleasant things around us, preferring to cling to our resentments and nurse our grudges, and now we nurse them still throughout eternity."
Passing the circles of Incontinence, we come to those of Violence, of those who have injured or sought to injure others, or self, or God (or Nature, the child of God, or Art (human productivity), the child of Nature).
Beneath these lie the circles of Fraud, the place of those who not only injured others but betrayed their confidence to do so.
Here we see those who made their careers through flattery and the debasement of language wallowing forever in a ditch full of bullshit.
Here we see hypocrites, plodding forever around in their circle:
And now we saw a people decked with paint,
Who trod their circling way with tear and groan
And slow, slow steps, seeming subdued and faint
They all wore cloaks, with deep hoods forward thrown
Over their eyes, and shaped in fashion quite
Like the great cowls the monks wear at Cologne;
Outwardly they were gilded dazzling bright,
But all within was lead, and weighed thereby,
King Frederick's copes would have seemed feather-light.
O weary mantle for eternity!
Once more we turned to the left, and by their side
Paced on, intent upon their mournful cry.
Here we find the moat of thieves. Because they refused to distinguish "mine" and "thine", they remain forever in a society in which not even their bodies are their own, but may be snatched from them at any time by a fellow thief, at which they are left to steal a body from someone else, and so on. Dante describes several such exchanges. One takes place when a thief in the body of a reptile bites (on the navel) a thief in a human body, whereupon they exchange shapes. The passage is too long to quote in full, but it begins:
And just as a lizard, with a quick, slick slither,
Flicks across the highway from hedge to hedge,
Fleeter than a flash, in the battering dog-day weather,
A fiery little monster, livid, in a rage,
Black as any peppercorn, came and made a dart
At the guts of the others, and leaping to engage
One of the pair, it pierced him at the part
Through which we first draw food; then loosed its grip
And fell before him, outstretched and apart.
Passing the circles of Fraud Simple, we come to those of Fraud Complex, the place of those who betrayed, not just fellow humans, but those to whom they had a special obligation to be faithful: traitors to kindred, traitors to country, traitors to their invited guests, traitors to those to whom they have sworn allegiance. And so past Satan at the very bottom of the universe, and up the long path down which trickles the stream of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness), up toward remembrance, to emerge at last on the other side of the earth, free of the salt and heat and noise and sweat and stink of Hell, free to look once more upon the stars.
Many freshman survey courses in The World's Great Literature are planned by those who think that the student ought to read some Dante, but are unwilling or unable to budget course time to study the whole Comedy, and so assign only Part I, the Inferno (Hell). The result is that many students read only Part I, and are left with the impression that this is the really worth-while part of the poem, and that the rest, if they read it, would be a letdown. This is a major mistake. The poem get steadily better as it proceeds. (The only real awkwardnesses that I have noticed are in the first three of the 100 cantos that make up the poem.)
Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell at the foot of Mount Purgatory.
As they climb the mountain, they find seven cornices on which penitent and redeemed sinners are cleansed by the grace of God from the seven sinful tendencies which hinder them from full harmony with the will of God. The treatment may sometimes be painful, but they eagerly embrace it (As an aerobics instructor might put it: "Go for the burn!"), knowing that through it God is bringing their wills into complete conformity with His own. On the first cornice, that of Pride, the proud circle the mountain, crawling low in a position of humility, bearing heavy burdens on their backs, and praying the Lord's Prayer (with interpolations appropriate to those who are learning the Virtue of Humility).
Our Father, dwelling in the Heavens, nowise
As circumscribed, but as the things above,
Thy first effects, are dearer in Thine eyes,
Hallowed Thy name be and the Power thereof,
By every creature, as right meet it is
We praise the tender effluence of Thy love.
Let come to us, let come Thy kingdom's peace;
If it come not, we've no power of our own
To come to it, for all our subtleties.
Like as with glad Hosannas at Thy throne
Thine angels offer up their wills alway,
So let men offer theirs, that Thine be done.
Our daily manna give to us this day,
Without which he that through this desert wild
Toils most to speed goes backward on his way.
As we, with all our debtors reconciled,
Forgive, do thou forgive us, nor regard
Our merits, but upon our sins look mild.
Put not our strength, too easily ensnared
And overcome, to proof with the old foe;
But save us from him, for he tries it hard.
This last prayer is not made for us--we know
Dear Lord, that it is needless--but for those
Who still remain behind us we pray so.
Thus God schools these Christians, these penitent and redeemed sinners, in the virtue of humility, and so delivers them, not only from the consequences of their sins (justification) but from the sins themselves (sanctification). And so, on the six subsequent cornices, they are purged of the vices of envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust, and the opposing virtues are instilled in them, all by God's grace at work in them.
At last Dante, still led by Virgil, reaches the top of the mountain, and there he is met by his Lady, Beatrice, whom Virgil has mentioned to him repeatedly throughout the journey when he particularly needed to be encouraged and strengthened. Here at last he sees her in person, and she prepares him for his journey through Heaven.
Now, at last, in the third part of the Comedy, we have the homecoming. With Beatrice at his side, Dante mounts up instantly from the peak of Mount Purgatory to the first of the heavens. In medieval astronomy, following a tradition going back to the ancient Greeks and earlier, the earth is considered to be surrounded by a set of whirling transparent spheres, each carrying with it one of the planets. A "planet" here means a heavenly body which is not one of the fixed stars, but moves (as seen from the earth) around the belt of constellations known as the Zodiac. Counting from the earth outward, these are Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Outside these spheres is that of the fixed stars, then that of the Primum Mobile (the first moved thing, the sphere whose motion imparts motion to all the other spheres), and finally the Empyrean, the unimaginable boundless space that "has no 'where' but in the mind of God." (For a discussion of the medieval cosmology, see The Discarded Image, by C S Lewis.) As Dante moves upward through the spheres, he sees in each sphere some of the redeemed, perfected, and glorified Christians whose lives and callings to serve God are in some way represented by the characteristics of that planet. In the sphere of Mars, for example, he meets martyrs and others who have shed their blood for the faith of Jesus. In the sphere of Jupiter, he meets righteous kings and judges, and those who have served justice. In the sphere of the Sun, he meets theologians and others who have enlightened their fellow Christians and promoted clear thinking about God and His works. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the stars, and beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given a vision of the glory of God Himself. And here the poem ends.
ايطالي مدريدي
NAD
He was born in Florence, Italy, in 1265. Italy in those days was not a united country, but a collection of mostly small city-states. Feuds and power struggles between noble families were a constant source of wars between states and of turmoil and civil war within them. Dante, heir of a poor but noble family, was one of the seven elected officials in charge of the government of Florence, when an accidental collision in the street during the May Festival in 1300 led to a brawl that escalated into a civil war that ultimately got Dante's party overthrown and its leaders (including Dante) exiled from Florence. He spent the rest of his life in exile, pining for his native city.
In 1293 he published a book called the Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), in which he relates how he fell in love with a young girl (Beatrice), and found his chief happiness in thinking of her, and looking at her from afar. In 1304 or shortly thereafter he published De Vulgari Eloquentia, an argument for writing poems and other works in the language that people speak (in his case, Italian) rather than in Latin. At the same time he wrote IL Convivio ("The Banquet"), in which he discusses grammar, and styles of poetry, and complains that his own poems, and in particular some of the things he said in the Vito Nuova, have been much misunderstood. In 1313 he published De Monarchia ("On Monarchy" or "A Treatise on Government"), in which he argued that the authority of a secular prince is not derived from the authority of the church, and is not given him by the pope, but comes directly from God (although in his exercise of it he ought, like every other Christian, to be guided by the moral instruction of the spiritual authority).
When he began writing his masterpiece, the Commedia, we do not know. (A "comedy," as traditionally defined, is a story that "begins in sorrow and ends in joy". Dante called his work simply "The Comedy." Later Italian writers speaking of the work called it "The Divine Comedy," by which name it is usually known today.) It appears that he had finished the first of its three parts by 1314, and the last only shortly before his death on 14 September 1321. (Because that is the Feast of the Holy Cross, he is remembered on the following day.)
The plot of the Comedy is straightforward. It begins with Dante lost and walking in a Dark Wood, unable to remember how he got there or how long he has been walking. He sees a mountain and tries to get out of the wood by climbing it, but is driven back by three beasts that bar his path. He runs in panic, sees a man approaching, and asks for help. The man replies: I am the poet Virgil. You cannot get out of the wood by climbing the mountain. You must follow me, and I will take you the long way round. Your Lady Beatrice has sent me to guide you, through the depths of Hell and up the slopes of Purgatory, to meet her in the country of the Blessed." Dante then follows Virgil, who conducts him through Hell, a vast funnel-shaped region under the surface of the earth, with a series of terraces that form ever-narrowing circles on which various kinds of evil deeds are punished, down to the center. They reach the tip of the funnel, located at the center of the earth, "the point toward which all things down-weigh", where the directions "up" and "down" are reversed, and find a small tunnel or pathway cut through the rock that leads them finally out on the other side of the earth, directly opposite Jerusalem, at the foot of Mount Purgatory, which is surrounded by cornices on which the seven basic kinds of inclination to sin are purged and corrected. They climb the mount and at its summit they find the earthly Paradise, the Eden from which our first parents were expelled when they turned aside from a relation of loving obedience to God and of loving trust in Him. There Beatrice meets Dante, and conducts him upward through the planetary spheres. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the stars, and beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given a vision of the glory of God Himself. And here the poem ends.
Dante On the State of Souls After Death
In Part One of the Comedy, Inferno (Hell), we see those who have chosen evil, and have rejected the rescuing grace of God, enduring the consequences of their choice.
First, in the upper circles of Hell we see sins of Incontinence, of lack of self-control, sins of those who would have said, "I couldn't help it!" There are those who could not Say No to others, dramatically represented by unlawful lovers (though a mother who ruins her child's teeth and his health because she cannot refuse him all the sweets he cries for would be an equally appropriate example). Next, there are those who cannot Say No to themselves, dramatically represented by the gluttonous. And thus are shown other kinds of choices to turn away from God in pursuit of a false good. Each chooser is living forever with what he has chosen. The lovers, if asked what they wanted, would have said, "To be with each other forever." In Dante's vision, they are forever joined, and circle forever like a flock of birds, born on the howling wind of their own passions. The sullen lie forever buried in a muddy marsh, their bubbles rising to the surface as if to say, "While we lived, we took no joy in the pleasant things around us, preferring to cling to our resentments and nurse our grudges, and now we nurse them still throughout eternity."
Passing the circles of Incontinence, we come to those of Violence, of those who have injured or sought to injure others, or self, or God (or Nature, the child of God, or Art (human productivity), the child of Nature).
Beneath these lie the circles of Fraud, the place of those who not only injured others but betrayed their confidence to do so.
Here we see those who made their careers through flattery and the debasement of language wallowing forever in a ditch full of bullshit.
Here we see hypocrites, plodding forever around in their circle:
And now we saw a people decked with paint,
Who trod their circling way with tear and groan
And slow, slow steps, seeming subdued and faint
They all wore cloaks, with deep hoods forward thrown
Over their eyes, and shaped in fashion quite
Like the great cowls the monks wear at Cologne;
Outwardly they were gilded dazzling bright,
But all within was lead, and weighed thereby,
King Frederick's copes would have seemed feather-light.
O weary mantle for eternity!
Once more we turned to the left, and by their side
Paced on, intent upon their mournful cry.
Here we find the moat of thieves. Because they refused to distinguish "mine" and "thine", they remain forever in a society in which not even their bodies are their own, but may be snatched from them at any time by a fellow thief, at which they are left to steal a body from someone else, and so on. Dante describes several such exchanges. One takes place when a thief in the body of a reptile bites (on the navel) a thief in a human body, whereupon they exchange shapes. The passage is too long to quote in full, but it begins:
And just as a lizard, with a quick, slick slither,
Flicks across the highway from hedge to hedge,
Fleeter than a flash, in the battering dog-day weather,
A fiery little monster, livid, in a rage,
Black as any peppercorn, came and made a dart
At the guts of the others, and leaping to engage
One of the pair, it pierced him at the part
Through which we first draw food; then loosed its grip
And fell before him, outstretched and apart.
Passing the circles of Fraud Simple, we come to those of Fraud Complex, the place of those who betrayed, not just fellow humans, but those to whom they had a special obligation to be faithful: traitors to kindred, traitors to country, traitors to their invited guests, traitors to those to whom they have sworn allegiance. And so past Satan at the very bottom of the universe, and up the long path down which trickles the stream of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness), up toward remembrance, to emerge at last on the other side of the earth, free of the salt and heat and noise and sweat and stink of Hell, free to look once more upon the stars.
Many freshman survey courses in The World's Great Literature are planned by those who think that the student ought to read some Dante, but are unwilling or unable to budget course time to study the whole Comedy, and so assign only Part I, the Inferno (Hell). The result is that many students read only Part I, and are left with the impression that this is the really worth-while part of the poem, and that the rest, if they read it, would be a letdown. This is a major mistake. The poem get steadily better as it proceeds. (The only real awkwardnesses that I have noticed are in the first three of the 100 cantos that make up the poem.)
Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell at the foot of Mount Purgatory.
As they climb the mountain, they find seven cornices on which penitent and redeemed sinners are cleansed by the grace of God from the seven sinful tendencies which hinder them from full harmony with the will of God. The treatment may sometimes be painful, but they eagerly embrace it (As an aerobics instructor might put it: "Go for the burn!"), knowing that through it God is bringing their wills into complete conformity with His own. On the first cornice, that of Pride, the proud circle the mountain, crawling low in a position of humility, bearing heavy burdens on their backs, and praying the Lord's Prayer (with interpolations appropriate to those who are learning the Virtue of Humility).
Our Father, dwelling in the Heavens, nowise
As circumscribed, but as the things above,
Thy first effects, are dearer in Thine eyes,
Hallowed Thy name be and the Power thereof,
By every creature, as right meet it is
We praise the tender effluence of Thy love.
Let come to us, let come Thy kingdom's peace;
If it come not, we've no power of our own
To come to it, for all our subtleties.
Like as with glad Hosannas at Thy throne
Thine angels offer up their wills alway,
So let men offer theirs, that Thine be done.
Our daily manna give to us this day,
Without which he that through this desert wild
Toils most to speed goes backward on his way.
As we, with all our debtors reconciled,
Forgive, do thou forgive us, nor regard
Our merits, but upon our sins look mild.
Put not our strength, too easily ensnared
And overcome, to proof with the old foe;
But save us from him, for he tries it hard.
This last prayer is not made for us--we know
Dear Lord, that it is needless--but for those
Who still remain behind us we pray so.
Thus God schools these Christians, these penitent and redeemed sinners, in the virtue of humility, and so delivers them, not only from the consequences of their sins (justification) but from the sins themselves (sanctification). And so, on the six subsequent cornices, they are purged of the vices of envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust, and the opposing virtues are instilled in them, all by God's grace at work in them.
At last Dante, still led by Virgil, reaches the top of the mountain, and there he is met by his Lady, Beatrice, whom Virgil has mentioned to him repeatedly throughout the journey when he particularly needed to be encouraged and strengthened. Here at last he sees her in person, and she prepares him for his journey through Heaven.
Now, at last, in the third part of the Comedy, we have the homecoming. With Beatrice at his side, Dante mounts up instantly from the peak of Mount Purgatory to the first of the heavens. In medieval astronomy, following a tradition going back to the ancient Greeks and earlier, the earth is considered to be surrounded by a set of whirling transparent spheres, each carrying with it one of the planets. A "planet" here means a heavenly body which is not one of the fixed stars, but moves (as seen from the earth) around the belt of constellations known as the Zodiac. Counting from the earth outward, these are Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Outside these spheres is that of the fixed stars, then that of the Primum Mobile (the first moved thing, the sphere whose motion imparts motion to all the other spheres), and finally the Empyrean, the unimaginable boundless space that "has no 'where' but in the mind of God." (For a discussion of the medieval cosmology, see The Discarded Image, by C S Lewis.) As Dante moves upward through the spheres, he sees in each sphere some of the redeemed, perfected, and glorified Christians whose lives and callings to serve God are in some way represented by the characteristics of that planet. In the sphere of Mars, for example, he meets martyrs and others who have shed their blood for the faith of Jesus. In the sphere of Jupiter, he meets righteous kings and judges, and those who have served justice. In the sphere of the Sun, he meets theologians and others who have enlightened their fellow Christians and promoted clear thinking about God and His works. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the stars, and beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given a vision of the glory of God Himself. And here the poem ends.
ايطالي مدريدي
NAD
