Can a single literary work combine metaphysical contemplation, political critique, and a theological vision claiming to light our path to salvation, while also being a biography, a journey, an epic, and a magnificent love poem? Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy" did. Although it would take him ten years to finish when he began writing it at 35, his journey would only last seven and a half days.
In fact, the word "divine" was added to the title by Giovanni Boccaccio, a poet and writer who did not know Dante and died many years after him but was nonetheless among the first to ever study the text.
"Comedy" is divided into three parts ("cantiches") and three volumes: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio. The protagonist and narrator of the journey is Dante himself, a "lost traveler in a dark forest" - an allusion to the sins that have seized Italy and an imaginative metaphor for the soul's journey to God. We follow Dante as he delves deeper and deeper into the abysses of Hell, witnessing various forms of obscenely severe punishment in its nine circles: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and finally, the ninth and most horrifying circle, Betrayal.
However, "Comedy" is also a meditation on our earthly world. A Florentine soldier and politician, Dante, who was a devout believer - even seeing himself as another Christ - was also highly critical of the Church. He particularly resented its nepotism, its purchase of positions, and its selling of indulgences. At a time when the "Blacks" faction that supported the papacy was defending those practices, Dante was part of the "Whites," who advocated for greater freedoms from the Papacy for Florence. He was most outspoken in his criticism of the Pope. In 1302, the "Blacks" managed to banish him from his city, and he would never return. However, it was during his time in exile that Dante wrote his magnum opus.
In his epic The Divine Comedy, Dante takes "revenge" against some of these "Blacks." In Inferno, he sees sinners like Filippo Argenti - a Florentine politician and aristocrat who was one of the leaders of the Blacks - being torn limb from limb. Dante even speaks with a sinner as he burned, and he turns out to be Pope Nicholas III. The latter tells him that his two successors would end up in the same position. With a cruelty that knows no restraint, Dante believed that some sinners deserved even harsher punishments, seemingly questioning God's verdict regarding the severity of their punishments.
This was not typical in the medieval world, especially not among poets, but it was an early iteration of the ideas of the Renaissance, which was itself born in Florence. Although he shows us this world and elaborates his view of the universe, its conflicts, and failings, he also introduces a new hero: the "Renaissance man." An audacious, broad-minded figure who embodied the spirit of the Renaissance, as Leonardo and Michelangelo did after him, Dante showed us that art could shape the world.
The Divine Comedy was written in Italian at a time when Latin was still the written language of the educated elite. This ensured its broad reach and readership. Broadly seen as a linguistic (and consequently national) event, his achievement is considered foundational to modern Italian literary writing.
Dante famously once began writing a study, in Latin, on local languages and their importance, but never completed it.
Despite its bleak and violent images of Hell, "Comedy" is also a love story. Dante, who had an arranged marriage with the daughter of a Florentine noble, was in love with another woman, Beatrice Portinari. Although it is widely believed that he only met her twice, once when she was a child, he considered her "the daughter of God" because of her beauty. Their second encounter would come nine years later when she was already married, but Beatrice would nevertheless continue to be his muse throughout his life.
Beatrice is a celestial being who launches his journey to the depths of Hell and then to the terraces of Mount Purgatory, accompanying him throughout this long voyage that leads him to a face-to-face encounter with God. Although Beatrice died suddenly at the age of twenty-four, Dante immortalized her as the spirit guiding him. In "Comedy," she is the divine ideal that has been elevated to the highest level of Paradiso."
Alongside Beatrice, Virgil helped guide Dante. This Roman poet, born seventy years before Christ, was "rationality personified." His character was a symbol of rising new perspectives on Roman antiquity, as the Renaissance period rediscovered the ancient world and made Virgil part of the European classical canon. Dante's third guide, after Beatrice and Virgil, was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a Christian thinker of the 12th Century. He was a reformer of the Benedictine Catholic Order whose mystical views fascinated Dante. With Bernard, the epic journey concludes.
Dante claimed that his poetry was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Some have even argued that he is the greatest poet in world history, as he almost convinced his readers that he truly saw what he wrote about seeing and actually met the people he wrote about meeting, that the final hundred lines about his meeting with God actually were true. Centuries after The Divine Comedy was published, artists and writers, from Rodin to Dali and Ezra Pound, embraced its themes of love, sin, and salvation.
Among his critics, some argued that the great Italian poet was influenced by Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri's "The Epistle of Forgiveness" and by Ibn Arabi in "The Translator of Desires." It is not difficult to find evidence to support this claim, as The Divine Comedy was written at a time when worlds heavily influenced one another.
