Dante Alighieri Was Roman Catholic Poet and Italian Nobleman and Philosopher, he created the Divine Comedy Trilogy. 1. Inferno (Hell). 2. Purgatorio (Purgatory). 3. Paradiso (Heaven/Paradise).
Dante’s Divine Comedy, a landmark in Italian literature and among the greatest works of all medieval European literature, is a profound Christian vision of humankind’s temporal and eternal destiny. On its most personal level, it draws on Dante’s own experience of exile from his native city of Florence. On its most comprehensive level, it may be read as an allegory, taking the form of a journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. The poem amazes by its array of learning, its penetrating and comprehensive analysis of contemporary problems, and its inventiveness of language and imagery. By choosing to write his poem in the Italian vernacular rather than in Latin, Dante decisively influenced the course of literary development. (He primarily used the Tuscan dialect, which would become standard literary Italian, but his vivid vocabulary ranged widely over many dialects and languages.) Not only did he lend a voice to the emerging lay culture of his own country, but Italian became the literary language in western Europe for several centuries.
In addition to poetry Dante wrote important theoretical works ranging from discussions of rhetoric to moral philosophy and political thought. He was fully conversant with the classical tradition, drawing for his own purposes on such writers as Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius. But, most unusual for a layman, he also had an impressive command of the most recent scholastic philosophy and of theology. His learning and his personal involvement in the heated political controversies of his age led him to the composition of De monarchia, one of the major tracts of medieval political philosophy.
Early life[]
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in 1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in the Vita nuova, and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown. Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco, and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country. About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento, expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany. Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher, this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti, Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that man is a social (political) being. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for man were he not a member of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for instructing Dante in the means by which man makes himself immortal, and in his farewell words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in the Convivio, written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular. His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness, his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course, conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death (that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality. Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
Exile From The Catholic Church[]
Information about Dante’s early years in exile is scanty; nevertheless, enough is known to provide a broad picture. It seems that Dante at first was active among the exiled White Guelfs in their attempts to seek a military return. These efforts proved fruitless. Evidently Dante grew disillusioned with the other Florentine outcasts, the Ghibellines, and was determined to prove his worthiness by means of his writings and thus secure his return. These are the circumstances that led him to compose Il convivio
The Divine Comedy[]
Dante’s years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations from one place to another—as he himself repeatedly says, most effectively in Paradiso [XVII], in Cacciaguida’s moving lamentation that “bitter is the taste of another man’s bread and…heavy the way up and down another man’s stair.” Throughout his exile Dante nevertheless was sustained by work on his great poem. The Divine Comedy was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain. In addition, in his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north of Italy, most notably by Guido Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca, in Ravenna. There at his death Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.
The plot of The Divine Comedy is simple: a man, generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake an ultramundane journey, which leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him through the Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice, who introduces him to Paradiso. Through these fictional encounters taking place from Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already occurred at the time of the writing). This device allowed Dante not only to create a story out of his pending exile but also to explain the means by which he came to cope with his personal calamity and to offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s troubles as well. Thus, the exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the fall of humankind. Dante’s story is thus historically specific as well as paradigmatic.
The basic structural component of The Divine Comedy is the canto. The poem consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into three sections, or canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Technically there are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto, contained in the Inferno, which serves as an introduction to the entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151 lines. The poem’s rhyme scheme is the terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.). Thus, the divine number of three is present in every part of the work.
Dante’s Inferno differs from its great classical predecessors in both position and purpose. In Homer’s Odyssey (Book XII) and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book VI) the visit to the land of the dead occurs in the middle of the poem because in these centrally placed books the essential values of life are revealed. Dante, while adopting the convention, transforms the practice by beginning his journey with the visit to the land of the dead. He does this because his poem’s spiritual pattern is not classical but Christian: Dante’s journey to Hell represents the spiritual act of dying to the world, and hence it coincides with the season of Christ’s own death. (In this way, Dante’s method is similar to that of Milton in Paradise Lost, where the flamboyant but defective Lucifer and his fallen angels are presented first.) The Inferno represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world. Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante’s meetings with the roster of the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, the simoniacal popes, Ulysses, and Ugolino della Gherardesca impose themselves upon the reader’s imagination with tremendous force.
The visit to Hell is, as Virgil and later Beatrice explain, an extreme measure, a painful but necessary act before real recovery can begin. This explains why the Inferno is both aesthetically and theologically incomplete. For instance, readers frequently express disappointment at the lack of dramatic or emotional power in the final encounter with Satan in canto XXXIV. But because the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development, it must end with a distinct anticlimax. In a way this is inevitable because the final revelation of Satan can have nothing new to offer: the sad effects of his presence in human history have already become apparent throughout the Inferno.
In the Purgatorio the protagonist’s painful process of spiritual rehabilitation commences; in fact, this part of the journey may be considered the poem’s true moral starting point. Here the pilgrim Dante subdues his own personality in order that he may ascend. In fact, in contrast to the Inferno, where Dante is confronted with a system of models that needs to be discarded, in the Purgatorio few characters present themselves as models; all of the penitents are pilgrims along the road of life. Dante, rather than being an awed if alienated observer, is an active participant. If the Inferno is a canticle of enforced and involuntary alienation, in which Dante learns how harmful were his former allegiances, in the Purgatorio he comes to accept as most fitting the essential Christian image of life as a pilgrimage. As Beatrice in her magisterial return in the earthly paradise reminds Dante, he must learn to reject the deceptive promises of the temporal world.
Despite its harsh regime, the Purgatorio is the realm of spiritual dawn, where larger visions are entertained. Whereas in only one canto of the Inferno (VII), in which Fortuna is discussed, is there any suggestion of philosophy, in the Purgatorio, historical, political, and moral vistas are opened up. It is, moreover, the great canticle of poetry and the arts. Dante meant it literally when he proclaimed, after the dreary dimensions of Hell: “But here let poetry rise again from the dead.” There is only one poet in Hell proper and not more than two in the Paradiso, but in the Purgatorio the reader encounters the musicians Casella and Belacqua and the poet Sordello and hears of the fortunes of the two Guidos, Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, the painters Cimabue and Giotto, and the miniaturists. In the upper reaches of Purgatory, the reader observes Dante reconstructing his classical tradition and then comes even closer to Dante’s own great native tradition (placed higher than the classical tradition) when he meets Forese Donati, hears explained—in an encounter with Bonagiunta da Lucca—the true resources of the dolce stil nuovo, and meets with Guido Guinizelli and hears how he surpassed in skill and poetic mastery the reigning regional poet, Guittone d’Arezzo. These cantos resume the line of thought presented in the Inferno (IV), where among the virtuous pagans Dante announces his own program for an epic and takes his place, “sixth among that number,” alongside the classical writers. In the Purgatorio he extends that tradition to include Statius (whose Thebaid did in fact provide the matter for the more grisly features of the lower inferno), but he also shows his more modern tradition originating in Guinizelli. Shortly after his encounter with Guinizelli comes the long-awaited reunion with Beatrice in the earthly paradise. Thus, from the classics Dante seems to have derived his moral and political understanding as well as his conception of the epic poem—that is, a framing story large enough to encompass the most important issues of his day, but it was from his native tradition that he acquired the philosophy of love that forms the Christian matter of his poem.
This means of course that Virgil, Dante’s guide, must give way to other leaders, and in a canticle generally devoid of drama the rejection of Virgil becomes the single dramatic event. Dante’s use of Virgil is one of the richest cultural appropriations in literature. To begin, in Dante’s poem he is an exponent of classical reason. He is also a historical figure and is presented as such in the Inferno (I): “…once I was a man, and my parents were Lombards, both Mantuan by birth. I was born sub Julio, though late in his time, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of the false and lying gods.” Virgil, moreover, is associated with Dante’s homeland (his references are to contemporary Italian places), and his background is entirely imperial. (Born under Julius Caesar, he extolled Augustus Caesar.) He is presented as a poet, the theme of whose great epic sounds remarkably similar to that of Dante’s poem: “I was a poet and sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned.” So, too, Dante sings of the just son of a city, Florence, who was unjustly expelled, and forced to search, as Aeneas had done, for a better city, in his case the heavenly city.
Virgil is a poet whom Dante had studied carefully and from whom he had acquired his poetic style, the beauty of which has brought him much honour. But Dante had lost touch with Virgil in the intervening years, and when the spirit of Virgil returns it is one that seems weak from long silence. But the Virgil that returns is more than a stylist; he is the poet of the Roman Empire, a subject of great importance to Dante, and he is a poet who has become a saggio, a sage, or moral teacher.
Though an exponent of reason, Virgil has become an emissary of divine grace, and his return is part of the revival of those simpler faiths associated with Dante’s earlier trust in Beatrice. And yet, of course, Virgil by himself is insufficient. It cannot be said that Dante rejects Virgil; rather, he sadly found that nowhere in Virgil’s work—that is, in his consciousness—was there any sense of personal liberation from the enthrallment of history and its processes. Virgil had provided Dante with moral instruction in survival as an exile, which is the theme of his own poem as well as Dante’s, but he clung to his faith in the processes of history, which, given their culmination in the Roman Empire, were deeply consoling. Dante, on the other hand, was determined to go beyond history because it had become for him a nightmare.
In the Paradiso true heroic fulfillment is achieved. Dante’s poem gives expression to those figures from the past who seem to defy death. Their historical impact continues and the totality of their commitment inspires in their followers a feeling of exaltation and a desire for identification. In his encounters with such characters as his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida and Saints Francis, Dominic, and Bernard, Dante is carried beyond himself. The Paradiso is consequently a poem of fulfillment and of completion. It is the fulfillment of what is prefigured in the earlier canticles. Aesthetically it completes the poem’s elaborate system of anticipation and retrospection.
Legacy and influence of Dante[]
The recognition and the honour that were the due of Dante’s Divine Comedy did not have to await the long passage of time: by the year 1400 no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the first public lectures on The Divine Comedy (which means that Dante was the first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course). Dante became known as the divino poeta, and in a splendid edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective was applied to the poem’s title; thus, the simple Commedia became La divina commedia, or The Divine Comedy.
Even when the epic lost its appeal and was replaced by other art forms (the novel, primarily, and the drama) Dante’s own fame continued. In fact, his great poem enjoys the kind of power peculiar to a classic: successive epochs have been able to find reflected in it their own intellectual concerns. In the post-Napoleonic 19th century, readers identified with the powerful, sympathetic, and doomed personalities of the Inferno. In the early 20th century they found the poem to possess an aesthetic power of verbal realization independent of and at times in contradiction to its structure and argument. Later readers have been eager to show the poem to be a polyphonic masterpiece, as integrated as a mighty work of architecture, whose different sections reflect and, in a way, respond to one another. Dante created a remarkable repertoire of types in a work of vivid mimetic presentations, as well as a poem of great stylistic artistry in its prefigurations and correspondences. Moreover, he incorporated in all of this important political, philosophical, and theological themes and did so in a way that shows moral wisdom and lofty ethical vision.
Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poem that has flourished for more than 650 years. In the simple power of its striking imaginative conceptions it has continued to astonish generations of readers; for more than a hundred years it has been a staple in all higher educational programs in the Western world; and it has continued to provide guidance and nourishment to the major poets of our own times. William Butler Yeats called Dante “the chief imagination of Christendom,” and T.S. Eliot elevated Dante to a preeminence shared by only one other poet in the modern world, William Shakespeare: “[They] divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” In fact, they rival one another in their creation of types that have entered into the world of reference and association of modern thought. Like Shakespeare, Dante created universal types from historical figures, and in so doing he considerably enhanced the treasury of modern myth.
Videos[]
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- Divine Comedy Audiobook
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