A Research On The Divine Comedy By Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321) was an Italian poet born in Florence in the Republic of Florence, present day Italy. His mother Bella, died when he was a child and his father Alighiero remarried and had two children from his second wife. Alighiero and his family belonged to the Guelphs which was one of the prominent groups of the then Florence and the other one was the Ghibellines. Both groups were in constant rivalry. The Guelphs supported the Pope while Ghibellines supported the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante was married to Gemma di Manneto Donati, who was from a wealthy and powerful Florentine family. Even though he was married to her, Dante was in love with Beatrice Portinari also known as Bice. He fell in love with Beatrice when he was nine years old. Dante has written many sonnets for Beatrice. It is said that the love for Beatrice could be the reason why he wrote poems and lived with political passions. This could be seen in his work La Vita Nuova (The New Life), 1294. In many of Dante’s poems, Beatrice is represented as semi-divine, who constantly watches him and provides spiritual assistance. His other works are Convivo (the Banquet) - collection of his longest poems and De Monarchia which is a treatise on political philosophy.
The Divine Comedy is a long Italian narrative poem. Dante started writing this poem in the year 1308 and finished it in the year 1320 just before his death. The poem is about Dante’s imagination of the afterlife. The poem is divided into three parts- the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. It is about how one’s soul travels after death through the three realms: hell, purgatory and paradise or heaven. The poem represents the medieval viewpoint developed and the spread by the Western Church. It is an allegorical poem that represents the journey of the soul towards God. In this poem, Dante has included the Christian philosophies and theology. As mentioned before, the two political groups of the then Florentine were in constant rivalry, during the birth of Dante the Guelphs emerged victorious. But slowly the Guelphs dissented into two groups- the Black and the White groups to which Dante belonged. Dante’s prominence as a White Guelph made him the primary target among the Black Guelphs. After the White Guelphs invited Charles of Valois, to stand as a neutral third party and take the role of impartial peacemaker, he disarmed the Whites and banished the Blacks. This experience of crushing and alienating most of the victims and Dante’s share of bitterness could be seen in the poem. Through this poem Dante is trying to understand the problem of evil and he tries to solve this. The allegorical interpretation does not detract from the poem but it rather adds some significance to its meaning. In the poem, Dante represents mankind- ‘the Noble Soul’. In the first part of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno Dante is guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil and he is represented as the ‘Human Reason’. This work is classically referred as the epitome because the medieval attitudes can be found in it like the reasoning, the learning, the mysticism which belonged of Dante’s time. It glorifies the ways of God but it is also a sharp protest against the ways in which men have derailed the divine plan. The first part of the Divine Comedy- Inferno is considered to be the most important one. The word ‘Inferno’ is an Italian word for Hell. So, in the Inferno, Dante talks about the nine circles of Hell and how sinners are punished according to the sins that they have committed. The poem begins with the line “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood”. Dante is the protagonist; he was in the midway of his life. According to the Bible man lives up to seventy years or if he is healthy, he may even live up to eighty years. But all through his life he has to endure all the hardships and sorrows because the mildness has overwhelmed him and he should be corrected. So, it is assumed that Dante was thirty-five years old when he started writing this poem. It was Maundy Thursday, the day when Jesus Christ had his last supper with his disciples, the day on which he foretells that one of his apostles would betray him and Peter will thrice deny knowing him. On this day Dante travels through the woods and in the middle of his journey he realises that he has strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error (worldliness). As soon as Dante realises that he has lost his way, he lifts his eyes and sees the first light of sunrise (sun the symbol of Divine illumination), coming from the mountains. The symbols of joy and divinity fill Dante with hope and when he walks towards the mountain, he is stopped by the three beasts- a leopard that represents malice and fraud, a lion that represents violence and ambition and a she-wolf representing the incontinence. The three beasts especially the she-wolf tries to drive him back to the darkness of error, but Virgil who represents the ‘Human Reason’ saves Dante from the beasts. Virgil tells Dante that there is no direct ascent past the beasts, the man must go through a longer and much harder way. First, he has to descend through Hell (the recognition of sin), and ascend through Purgatory (the renunciation of sin) only through them he could reach the pinnacle of joy and come to the light of God. Virgil offers to guide Dante, as far as human reason can go. Virgil tells Dante that it was Beatrice the symbol of Divine Love, who has sent Virgil to lead Dante from error. Beatrice was sent with the blessings and prayers of the Virgin Mary (compassion) and Saint Lucia (divine light).
Dante reaches the Vestibule of Hell where it is written: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. In the vestibule of Hell those men are punished who took no side. Those souls who were neither for good nor evil but only for themselves. They were opportunists and were only concerned with themselves. Those angels who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels were also mixed with these souls. They took no sides; therefore, they are given no place. They are neither in hell nor out of it. As their guilty conscience hunt them, so they are hunted by swarms and hornets. The pus and blood which comes out of their body are consumed by worms and maggots on which the sinned souls eternally run. Dante and Virgil move towards Acheron, the river of woes and the ferry is piloted by Charon. They then proceed to the nine circles of Hell. The circles are concentric circles that symbolise the increasing wickedness of the punishment given to the sinners. The circles culminate at the centre of the earth where Satan is held in captivity. Each punishment given at Hell is a ‘contrapasso’ which means “suffer the opposite”. So, the punishment given will be the opposite of the sin they have committed. There are two divisions of Hell, the upper Hell and the lower Hell. The upper Hell consists of sinners of incontinence for example; lust, gluttony, hoarders etc. and the lower Hell consists of sinners, punished for fraud and violence. The ‘Limbo’ is the first circle of Hell. The people who are unbaptised and virtuous pagans are the inhabitants of the first circle. The Limbo is an impaired Heaven. Virgil himself was an inhabitant of the Limbo along with Homer, Horace, Lucan, Ovid etc. Lust is the second circle of Hell. The carnal desires of human beings would eventually lead his soul to this circle. The punishment they have to endure is that they would carry to and forth by the terrible winds of a violent storm without any rest. Dante considered it as the simplest punishment compared to the others. Gluttony is the third circle of Hell. People who had a voracious appetite, who couldn’t control themselves from eating were punished here. Foul and icy rain poured down in Gluttony. There is an unpleasant slush of mud in which the souls grovel symbolising the selfish, cold and empty sensuality of their lives. The fourth circle of Hell is Greed. Punished those souls who deviated from the reason to material possession. They had to push weapons of great weight their chests. Wrath is the fifth circle. Those who fought with each other were punished in this circle. The souls were held in the swampy, stinking water of river Styx. The water was slimy and sullen which expresses the savage of self-frustration. Heresy the sixth circle of Hell, punished souls like Epicurus and his followers who said that the soul of a person dies with his body. Their souls lie in the flaming tombs. The seventh circle of Hell is Violence. The circle is divided into three: violence against neighbours, violence against oneself and violence against God, Art and Nature. They are punished according to the sins they have committed. Fraud, the eighth circle is a large funnel shaped like an amphitheatre. The tunnel runs into a series of ten trenches called ‘bolge’. Panderers, flatterers, sorcerers, barraters, hypocrites, thieves, etc are punished here. Treachery is the final circle of Hell. It is located at lake Cocytus. The sinners are trapped in the icy lake. The lake of ice is divided into four circles. First round is called the Caiina, named after Cain who killed his brother. They have their necks and heads out of the ice allowing them to bow to protect themselves from the freezing wind. The second round is called Antenora, named after Antenor who betrayed the city of Troy and his people for the Greeks. They have their heads above their eyes out of the ice. Third round Ptolemea named after Ptolemy, who killed his father-in law and sons in a banquet. They lie in the ice and their tears get frozen in their eye sockets. Round four named Judecca named after Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ. They lay completely in the ice distorted and twisted.
The Divine Comedy is composed of 14,233 lines. The three parts of the Divine Comedy consists of 33 cantos each. Number three is prominent in this work, it alludes to the Trinity- the Father, the Son and the Holy spirit. This is represented by the number of cantiche or parts and their lengths, the lines are composed in tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded. Each cantica presents a different but related model to the then society. The third cantiche Paradise is an ideal society where all elements in the society works perfectly with harmony and balance. The second cantiche Purgatorio represents a transitional society, where society is shifting from self-centredness to concern for all and committed to others. Yet the society is not organised when compared to Paradise. Hell represents the real picture of what a society is, people are only concerned with themselves and works against common good. Through this work Dante is trying to some moral values in the then society. He put forth the point that we are not only responsible for our actions but we are also responsible for its result. He emphasises on the point that individual morality cannot be disassociated from social responsibility because an individual is a citizen and only a good individual can be a good citizen. He tries to focus on social responsibility of each citizen. Other than religious allegory, the poem can be considered as a witty and fierce commentary on Italian politics. A soldier and statesman of Florence, Dante was very faithful to God. He was often critical of the Roman Catholic Church particularly nepotism and simony, where ecclesiastical privileges were brought or sold. Many of them protested against these corrupt practices but a few supported these practices as the Black Guelphs. He believed in the political freedom of Florence from the Pope’s power and frequently spoke out in public against the Pope’s influence. To silence Dante the Black Guelphs exiled him from Florence. Through the work The Divine Comedy, he wrote about his grievances about the Church and the Italian society. He wrote the work in Italian rather than the traditional Latin of the educated elite; he ensured the widest possible audience for his commentary on the politics of Florence. In the circle of Wrath of Hell, he witnesses sinners tear Filippo Argenti, a Black Guelph limb from limb. In the circle of Fraud to converses with a mysterious sinner burning in the hottest flames, which he later identifies as Pope Nicholas III. Sin and punishment are the main theme of Inferno. In Hell all the sinners who failed to repent are punished. Love is another theme in the poem. Beatrice’s love or Dante’s love for Beatrice could is presented here. Beatrice descended from the Heaven to Hell to help Dante escape from the error through Virgil. The most important love that Dante throws light on is the love for God.
Dante’s Inferno is a candid walkthrough the depths of Hell and summons much imagery, contemplation and emotion. It constructs a sensory portrayal of Hell and the souls he meets along the journey. It not only throws light on the moral construction of the society but also on the political history of the then Florence. Dante’s imagination about the events that took place in Hell is very well portrayed in the poem. He mixes the pagan mythology with Christian theology and philosophies and he also included Greek and Roman myth and history. The most important character after Dante is the pagan Greek poet Virgil. In this work Dante doesn’t use allegory as a trick but it is considered as the truest language in terms of bringing out the meaning of a composition. From this work we notice that allegory is used for expression which is direct and natural within a multiple reality. According to Ezra Pound the theology of the poem is of less importance instead for him it is an example of how poetry can engage with the living world of history, making the readers think about their own moral flaws. For Pound the work is a poetic and moral measure of the modern world. For T. S Eliot, Dante represents the “universal poets” ever written. He found Dante’s poems comprehensible on multiple levels. It even comprehended the all of European culture until his time. The Divine Comedy was rediscovered by William Blake who illustrated several images of the poem. Later on, T. S Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett were inspired by Dante’s work.
