Dante, The Divine Comedy

When James Joyce wrote Ulysses, he had no doubts about the greatness of the work he had produced. In one of his characteristically self-aware quotes, he claimed that he had overstuffed the novel with so many puzzles and allusions that academics would spend years deciphering them, thus ensuring his lasting fame. This may seem a big middle finger to readers who enjoy books for, you know, pleasure, but he did it with a purpose. Joyce saw himself as part of a line of artists regarded as the greatest not only of their generation but of their entire epoch. He believed that he was the artistic successor of Shakespeare, who in turn had succeeded the subject of today’s post, Dante.

But what made Dante so great, and why did Joyce believe that it took nearly 300 years for someone to eclipse him? Joyce, the canonical Modernist, was a destroyer, an undoer, one who took established structures and tore them down; in doing so, he heralded a new era of literature, in which one was free to create and experiment in a way previously impossible. Dante, Joyce’s antipode, was, rather, as Eugenio Montale writes in his introduction, “summing up... bringing his era to a close.” In its myriad references to Christian theology and Greek and Roman mythology, Dante’s Commedia gathered together all that came before it, closing out the Classical world and the Middle Ages.

But just as Joyce destroyed in order to open the floodgates, Dante did not just close an era: he created a new one. By writing in Italian, a relatively unsophisticated language compared to Latin, he asserted the power of other languages and their place in literature, allowing writers like Boccaccio and Petrarch to flourish later on.

His Commedia bears more than just this resemblance to Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as Leopold Bloom, the analogue of the powerful Odysseus, had not the deeds to live up to his namesake, Dante––as protagonist of the Commedia––is no epic hero, and the poem itself no Aeneid, despite the presence of its creator, Virgil, guiding Dante through the afterlife. The Commedia, though certainly qualifying as an epic poem by its length, leaves much to be desired in terms of action and heroism. Throughout its hundred cantos, our hero does not prove his worth through battles against demons, no matter how many video games think he did. Dante uses his journey to purify and prepare himself for heaven. He is not the hero that we root for, but a lost traveler, one who is found in the midst of his own sin and despair. A silent protector, a dark knight, a… shit, wrong post.

Limbo

I don't actually want to talk about limbo in Dante; rather I just have a comment that I didn't know where else to place.

For my library, I chose the Allen Mandelbaum translation of Dante, from Everyman Library. I've heard that every translator wants to try his hand at Dante, but I never heard why that is. It makes sense, though, because there are tons of translations out there, at least half a dozen of which would be fantastic to read. Of the ones I was choosing from, there were ones by Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate; Burton Raffel, noted scholar and translator of Don Quixote; Mark Musa, who's translated other prominent Italian works, including Bocaccio and Petrarch; Robert and Jane Hollander; even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Point being, any one of these translators probably would've done a fantastic job, but I chose Mandelbaum, who translated my version of Ovid's Metamorphoses as well and which I thought was done very well.

As with other comments about translations, I should say again that I don't know any Italian. My choice of translation is based on a few things: the prominence of the translator (because I'm a fame-whore), the publisher, and any excerpts I could find. Based on all those criteria, and the fact that I wanted to read the entire Commedia, I chose Mandelbaum.

Inferno

“In the middle of my days, I shall go to the gates of Hell…” – Isaiah

Dante begins his journey in the year 1300, the year he turns 35, which is “midway through life’s journey,” according to the biblical conception of 70 as the perfect age. He is confronted in a dark wood by vicious animals representing the cardinal sins that plague him, and he is saved by Virgil, who informs him that it is his job to lead Dante through the afterlife so that he can see what awaits him and hopefully turn back to the "path that does not stray." He does so at the behest of Beatrice, the object of Dante’s unrequited love, who has recently died.

As Dante is led first to the gates of hell by Virgil, he notices the inscription upon them, which ends with the famous line, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” This is a grim inscription, no doubt: those who lie in hell have no hope, presumably of ever again being happy or even just not being painfully tortured. Yet Dante has a very specific notion of what constitutes hope, a notion that is only fully revealed by reading the entire Commedia. In Paradiso, he defines it: “Hope is the certain expectation of future glory.”

It is important to read the levels of the afterlife through Dante’s idea of hope. When he encounters the souls in purgatory, they are much less miserable than the ones in hell, not because their tortures are less painful (they might be, but they are tortures nonetheless) but because they have hope. The hope they have is distinct from the way we might conceive of hope as something that may or may not come to be: Dante’s hope, the hope of the souls in purgatory is the certain knowledge of the existence of God and the certain expectation that they will be exalted. The shades in hell have this knowledge, but without the accompanying expectation. Their future is the same as their present, and so it will always be. As Virgil says, “Those who are here can place no hope in death, / and their blind life is so abject that they / are envious of every other fate.”

Before discussing any further, I want to point out something else about hell’s gate: it’s wide. It’s wide enough to receive all manner of souls who fell short of God’s glory. In an article I read (from, uh, somewhere long forgotten) about why people choose to read Inferno and Purgatorio over Paradiso, the author agrees with a sentiment I’ve held: goodness is too plain. The gate to heaven, as the Bible says, is “strait and narrow,” in that there are few ways to enter it. Just as Tolstoy notes at the start of Anna Karenina, “Happy families are alike in happiness.” There are few ways to be happy, fewer still to be good; yet there are plenty of ways to be evil, and plenty of ways to suffer.

The next distinction between hell and purgatory is a sensible distinction. Hell is palpable, hell is sensate, hell is as real as the world above. Throughout his journey, Dante talks about his inability to keep his footing on the rocks that make up hell’s floor; he hears the anguished cries of the shades: “Here, for as much as hearing could discover, / there was no outcry louder than the sighs / that caused the everlasting air to tremble.” This is another difference that makes hell that much worse for the damned. Unlike the souls of purgatory, who recognize some difference between their world and the human one (for example, they are not bodies, but souls), the shades of hell can make no such distinction.

And who are the shades? Lots of Italians, for one thing. In fact, as Dante journeys deeper into the underworld, exploring deadlier and deadlier sins, the number of Italians he encounters seems to grow. He certainly had beefs with lots of Italians. Pope John XXII was a huge dick to him, exiling him and sending him away from his beloved Beatrice, whom we meet in Paradiso. I’ll admit that, apart from reading a little on his background with John 22 and the Guelphs, I mostly skipped over the long digressions into Italian politics because, I mean, come on. If there’s one takeaway from this, though, it’s that Dante, like Luther after him, really hates greedy clergymen.

There are more famous people in hell, too, but just as importantly, there are some famous people not in hell: for example, Virgil, Dante’s guide, and Aristotle, the “master of those who know.” They earn a spot in limbo, where they “have no hope, yet [they] must live in longing.” For all his piety, Dante cannot bring himself to believe that God would damn these two great men.  Montale notices this, too: “The apparent injustice of God’s exclusion of good non-Christians from Paradise clearly worried Dante.” Limbo also reflects Dante’s admiration of Thomas Aquinas: those who reside there followed what St. Thomas would call natural law: living as well as pagans can, as closely to divine law as human reason can determine. (Speaking of which, there is a castle in hell: the castle of human reason. Pretty funny, I think.)

Dante’s mission to hell would seem too light if it were only a journey, a kind of “scared straight” (or strait?) program ordained by God. As such, he is not only a casual observer. Rather, he is a participant, to a slightly reduced degree, in the torture and suffering of hell. Throughout the poem, Dante suffers as the souls and shades do: in Purgatory, for example, when he is among the slothful, Dante begins to feel too lazy to climb the mountain further. Dante, everyman that he is, suffers from the whole spectrum of human follies, and it is through his journey (recall that he “lost the path that does not stray”) that he receives an expedited cleansing.

Of course the characteristic feature of hell is the idea of symbolic retribution: the punishment fits the crime, so to speak. And for every obvious copy we’ve seen of Dante (for example, the glutton in the film Seven who is forced to eat until his stomach explodes), Dante himself is usually pretty clever. Take the Epicureans, who, we recall, denied the existence of an afterlife. Rather than simply being punished, they are entombed in coffins for eternity; even having died, they are not finished dying. Like, shit dude. For another example, Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Greek mythology, is guardian of the gluttonous, because he, like they seem to, has three mouths for eating.

We can’t move on to purgatory without encountering the final boss of the inferno: the devil. In Dante, hell has a conical structure: as one progresses further down, the circles become tighter and tighter, as if the architecture were rarefying our expectation, focusing it on some pinpoint of grand evil that is to be revealed in the final canto. Yet, in a brilliant subversion of our expectations, Dante makes the devil the poorest figure in hell. More impotent than the ferryman even, Satan sits half-frozen in ice, far as he is from the warming love of God, and in his mouth, he eternally chews––but cannot consume––those sinners who betrayed their masters: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. He is described later in Paradiso as being “held in constraint by all of the world’s weights” as if he were the ultimate subject of the world, rather than a infiltratory figure.

In the time since Dante, some of the power of this portrait of the devil has been lost, but we need only remember the way the devil is characterized in essentially all other media: a powerful, malevolent being; even in satirical characterizations, like the prince suffering under the abusive rod (pun intended) of Saddam Hussein in South Park, he is still lord of his domain, reigning with an iron fist. In Dante, however, he is the ultimate sinner, the one who suffers more than any other being.

His presence is even impotent: he appears for but a moment. In the span of a single canto, Dante and Virgil meet him and quickly vault over him like a pile of garbage, and exit hell, ending up back on the surface of the earth, albeit in the barren, unpopulated southern hemisphere. Apparently, the belief back then was that the southern hemisphere was the ancient location of the garden of Eden and that, since the Fall, it has been covered in oceans and thus unfit for human settlement. The only thing that stands out in the landscape is the mountain of purgatory, at the peak of which sits the Garden of Eden, the holiest place on earth. Where they came up with this is unclear to me, since the Bible describes Eden as sitting at the intersection of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is in Iraq.

Purgatorio

At any rate, they arrive at purgatory, where sinners are subjected to cleansing labors which, as we discussed, differ from the punishments of hell mostly in that they have the hope––that certain expectation––that they will soon enter heaven.

Speaking of hope, Virgil tells Dante that, contrary to the church’s teachings, no one is so far gone from the love of God that they can’t be saved: “Despite the Church’s curse, there is no one / so lost that the eternal love cannot / return––as long as hope shows something green.” God’s love is boundless, so much so that anyone can find it. Dante reflects on the mystery of such salvation: “Foolish is he who hopes our intellect / can reach the end of that unending road… / Confine yourselves, o humans, to the quia [Latin for the facts themselves, not the reasons why]; / had you been able to see all, there would / have been no need for Mary to give birth.” Again, this my reflect Dante's belief that a just God could not truly punish men as great his the philosophers and poets he admires.

Before Dante’s time, purgatory was seen as a place of literal fire, where sins were burned off. Dante sees it as an active process rather than a passive punishment. You earned your place in heaven. The people in purgatory also suffer symbolic retribution: the prideful, for example, are forced to carry heavy stones so that their eyes are turned to the ground, humbled: “They were indeed bent down–-some less, some more–- / according to the weights their backs now bore; / and even he whose aspect showed most patience, / in tears, appeared to say: ‘I can no more.’” This agonized cry of futility is even more heartbreaking than the tortures hell. Yet we are not to despair, for as Virgil reminds Dante: “Don’t dwell upon the form of punishment: / consider what comes after that.”

Dante, though, cannot help but be moved to love, and cares about those who suffer here in the afterlife. In doing so, he notices that love is both the cause of all good things and all evils as well. He asks Virgil what love, then, is. Virgil responds that love is the propensity of our soul to “respond to everything that pleases.” “It’s nature / that joins the soul in you, anew, through beauty… / Then, just as flames ascend because the form / of fire was fashioned to fly upward, toward / the stuff of its own sphere, where it lasts longest, / so does the soul, when seized, move into longing, / a motion of the spirit, never resting / till the beloved thing has made it joyous.” Good thing that “there is in you, inborn, / the power that counsels, keeper of the threshold / of your assent: this is the principle / on which your merit may be judged, for it / garners and winnows good and evil longings. / Those reasoners who reached the roots of things / learned of this inborn freedom; the bequest that, thus, they left unto the world is ethics.” Free will, then, is the ability to limit love in all its forms.

As they climb, they finally reach the summit of the mountain of purgatory, where they encounter Beatrice, who, since Virgil is a heathen and cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven, will lead Dante the rest of the way. Dante is understandably thrilled to see her once again: “Within her presence, I had once been used / to feeling–trembling–wonder, dissolution; / but that was long ago. Still, through my soul, / now she was veiled, could not see her directly, / by way of hidden force that she could move, / I felt the mighty power of old love.” And again: “I am left with less / than one drop of my blood that does not tremble: / I recognize the signs of the old flame.”

She, in an interesting turn of events, is less than thrilled to see him. Since her death, he has turned, in her mind, away from the strait and narrow, and for this, she scolds him. She treats him like a mother would a "raving child," emphasizing not only the love of God, but His role as a father, and therefore Beatrice’s analogous role as a mother. Mothers love, but must also instruct.

Paradiso

As I said earlier, Paradiso is usually considered the least interesting part of the Commedia: Inferno is the imaginative one, Purgatorio is the poetic one, and Paradiso is the one where Dante keeps talking about how things are too beautiful to describe. Yet there is much to get from his account of heaven.

Take for instance the structure of heaven. As hell as circles and purgatory has levels, heaven has spheres, yet these spheres are not distinct. If they were, then some souls would be further from God’s love than others, and this is patently false. Rather, just as there are different choirs of angels which, unlike Dogma says, do not resent one another for being at different levels but commune together in God’s glory, so too do people belonging to different spheres feel the same amount of God’s love. It is only due to Dante’s humanity that he cannot comprehend heaven if it appeared in any other form.

Even still, Dante has trouble comprehending heaven, more than he had trouble comprehending hell and purgatory. So Beatrice begins to guide Dante. As Virgil did, Beatrice points things out to him, but rather than simply explaining the logic behind what’s going on as Virgil did, Beatrice must in a way justify certain decisions of God’s, as His will is often inscrutable to Dante as a human. She explains, for example, the Fall. The Fall was, in a way, inevitable, despite the order with which we are created: 

“Yet it is true that, even as a shape / may, often, not accord with art’s intent, / since matter may be unresponsive, deaf, / so, from this course, the creature strays at times / because he has the power, once impelled, / to swerve elsewhere; as lightning from a cloud / is seen to fall, so does the first impulse, / when man has been diverted by false pleasure, / turn him toward earth. You should–if I am right– / not feel more marvel at your climbing than / you would were you considering a stream / that from a mountain’s height falls to its base. / It would be cause for wonder in you if, / no longer hindered, you remained below, / as if, on a earth, a living flame stood still.”

As they pass through the different spheres, Dante must pass several “tests” to see whether he truly believes and understands God well enough to be in his presence. These tests involve asking him what different aspects of Christianity are. For example, he is asked what faith is, to which he replies: “Faith is the substance of the things we hope for / and is the evidence of things not seen.” As we said before, faith is evidence. Apart from this being an interesting philosophical concept in itself, Dante further believes that the faith of the world is even greater proof of the truth of Christianity. “I said: ‘If without miracles the world / was turned to Christianity, that is / so great a miracle that all the rest / are not its hundredth part: for you were poor / and hungry when you found the field and sowed / the good plant–once a vine and now a thorn.’” In much the same way that Dostoevsky believed that yearning for God was proof of God, Dante believes that the reality of a worldwide belief in Christianity (not completely worldwide, but perhaps it had a greater spread than other religions at the time) was definitive proof of the truth of Christianity.

Again, we notice that we’re not really spending much time on the actual encounter with God. This is partly because Dante spends so much of his time getting ready, as if the entire Commedia were the antechamber to God’s domain, and partly because Dante lacks the words to describe God. “How incomplete is speech,” he laments, “how weak, when set / against my thought!” I’ll close with the final lines of the poem:

“As the geometer intently seeks / to square the circle, but he cannot reach, / through thought on thought, the principle he needs, / so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see / the way in which our human effigy / suited the circle and found place in it–– / and my own wings were far too weak for that. / But then my mind was struck by light that flashed / and, with this light, received what it had asked. / Here force failed my high fantasy; but my / desire and will were moved already––like / a wheel revolving uniformly––by / the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Stray Observations

• Montale in his introduction gives a lot of his own opinions about Dante’s relation to our modern, scientific world. He sees Dante as a “distant precursor” of Romanticism, the movement that is “dissatisfied with its own rationalist, enlightened age” and looks to the Classical world for inspiration. Moreover, he sees our new, scientific age not as the “modern era” but as a “new Middle Ages whose characteristics we cannot yet make out.”
• “And just as he who, with exhausted breath, / having escaped from sea to shore, turns back / to watch the dangerous waters he has quit, / so did my spirit, still a fugitive, / turn back to look intently at the pass / that never has let any man survive.”
• Everyone who is dead, especially those who recently died, beg Dante to tell their stories to the outside world. It’s really strange, although I guess not in the context of the poem. Even the people who were terrible, they all want someone to tell their story, for their name to live on.
• Minos, the “connoisseur of sin”, judges the newly dead and assigns them to a level of hell. Just like the sorting hat!
• Lots of women in the circle of lust…ladies.
• “There is no greater sorrow / than thinking back upon a happy time / in misery…”
• Divination is a sin because it implies that we can figure out God’s plan; ascribing passivity to God is a big no-no.
• Ulysses in Dante sounds a lot like the Ulysses of Tennyson: “Neither my fondness for my son nor pity / for my old father nor the love I owed / Penelope, which would have gladdened her, / was able to defeat in me the longing / I had to gain experience of the world / and of the vices and the worth of men.” More: “Consider well the seed that gave you birth: / you were not made to live your lives as brutes, / but to be followers of worth and knowledge.”
• “Haste denies all acts their dignity.”
• “The man in whom thought thrusts ahead of thought / allows the goal he’s set to move far off-–the force of one thought saps the other’s force.”
• “Enter; but I warn you–-he / who would look back, returns–-again–-outside.” Then: “When I had crossed the threshold of the gate / that–-since the souls’ aberrant love would make / the crooked way seem straight–-is seldom used, / I heard the gate resound and, hearing, knew / that it had shut; and if I’d turned toward it, how could my fault have found a fit excuse?”
• “Why are you driven back by wind so slight?”
• “I felt incomparable joy, / so that I lifted up my daring face / and cried to God: ‘Now I fear you no more!’–- / as did the blackbird after brief fair weather.”
• “And like the rapid change that one can see / in a pale woman’s face when it has freed / itself from bearing bashful modesty…”
• Beatrice is “the lady who imparadises / my mind.” Never seen that word before. Damn.