Where Dante’s Divine Comedy guides us
However, Hell is full of bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clergy, for example—including the Pope—are crammed upside down into holes in the rocky ground, their legs flying and their feet licked with fire. (There are a notable number of churchmen in Hell, as well as Florentines.) Other times, he takes pity on the souls he meets and Virgil rebukes them for it. To feel compassion is to question God’s judgment. Because Satan has no power here. He himself suffers in the lowest level of Hell, bound by ice. It was God who condemned the unrepentant sinners in this place and designed ingenious torments to repeat their crimes. Thus the adulterous lovers are buffeted by the strong winds that surround them in each other’s arms, imitating the turbulent passion they could not control. Seers – who claim to know what only God knows – have their heads tilted back, so they can only see what is behind them. And Ulysses, the silver-tongued masked man, is covered in a tongue of flame. Yet, however just the condemnation of these transgressors, they attract not only Dante’s sympathy but ours as well, drawing us into the precarious position of doubting divine justice.
Transcending boundaries, daring everything for the sake of knowledge, Dante’s Ulysses has much in common with the false prototype of humanity, Adam, whom Dante impatiently interrogates in heaven. (Question: How long did you live in the garden before you bit into the apple? Answer: About seven hours.) It also has much in common with Dante himself, in the poet’s extreme audacity in undertaking this work: entering forbidden lands, exploring the worst and best of man, and attempting to penetrate the mind of God. Although he can’t get rid of nagging concerns or dangerous questions, he gives readers who buy into his silver tongue a fair warning. “Turn back if you want to see your shores again,” Dante warns us. “The seas I sail have never been sailed before.”
Homer was not a single person, as is now generally agreed, but a slowly accumulating oral tradition given a name. Virgil’s Aeneid is interrupted suddenly, apparently incomplete, and the poet is said to have requested, upon his death, that the manuscript be burned. (Tsar Augustus intervened). Dante Alighieri, the successor of these literary forces that defined civilization, was born to a family of moderate means in an Italian city torn by political violence and in an era when the birth of classical education had barely begun. He was a contemporary and perhaps an acquaintance of the great Florentine painter Giotto, whom he mentions in the comedy because he attracted attention from Cimabue – Giotto’s former teacher, who produced pictures with icon-like impassivity – much as Dante himself would outsmart writers in his youth. Here, in two different genres, is the moment when the cruelty of the Middle Ages gives way to physical and psychological differences, when human figures stretch their limbs and catch their breath. Within a generation, Boccaccio wrote, Dante had opened the way for the long-absent Muse to return to Italy.
He was ambitious from the beginning. In her new book Dante: The Essential Comedy (Liveright), Prue Shaw emphasizes the extraordinary importance and nobility that Dante attached to the task of the poet, and how from an early period he believed his powers to be equal to those of the great poets of classical antiquity. His early writings reflected the popular style of the French troubadours, refined poets and musicians who sang of their longing for a beautiful lady. In his case, the lover was the unobtainable Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a wealthy banker whom Dante claimed to have loved from their first meeting, when they were children—a kind of charming self-mythologization—and to have remained so until her premature death, at twenty-four. It did not seem to matter that he rarely saw her or that they both married others for financial and political reasons. The Divine Comedy has nothing to say about Dante’s wife or their four children. Beatrice was the love that fueled his poems, which became more spiritual after her death, when her name – suggesting beatification – became for him a form of prayer.
If poetry made Dante’s life, politics changed it. In 1300, when he was in his mid-thirties, he served on the Florentine commission that exiled many of the leaders of two clashing political factions, in an attempt to achieve peace. The following year, while Dante was on a diplomatic mission to Rome, his faction back home was expelled, and he was falsely accused of corruption. He found himself exiled in absentia from Florence, and in 1302, was condemned to be burned at the stake if he returned. Throughout the rest of his life—nearly twenty years—he sought refuge in various Italian cities, with their unfamiliar local dialects and cultures, nursing the bitterness and longing he felt in the epic work he undertook. He probably began writing it around 1307, but he deliberately set the poem before his exile – at Easter 1300. He called it simply a ‘comedy’, that is, a work that begins in the dark but, unlike tragedy, ends in the light. The adjective “divine” was added by the printing press more than two hundred years later, reflecting the subject and status of the work.