Dante Alighieri

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Dante Alighieri

Politics and Poetry.

While The Romance of the Rose, the most influential poem written in French in the thirteenth century, had combined elements of courtly love, allegory, and philosophy, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri chose an even more daring strategy to write, in Italian, the first truly epic poem since Vergil's Aeneid. Born in the city-state of Florence in 1265, Dante brought to his poetry the near photographic recall of an intensely political life and the love of his native language, while also having a vision of heaven, earth, and hell that surpassed all previous efforts at encompassing the vast range of human experience. A member of the Guelph party, which supported the power of the papacy against the Ghibbelines, who took the side of the Holy Roman Emperor, Dante attempted a career in politics, which was aborted when his own party split into two groups and the power fell into the hands of the opposing faction, who sentenced him to death. He lived in exile from his beloved Florence for the rest of his life, a circumstance that intensified his sense of the contrast between happiness and deprivation, and allowed him to make literary use of the characters and events of recent history from which he was forcibly distanced. As a man who so intensely defined himself as a Florentine, in an age distinguished by a new sense of civic identity and participation, Dante is significant for employing the vernacular, rather than Latin (the official language of learning), in his most important writings. In fact, he produced a manifesto advocating the use of vernacular dialects or the "vulgar" tongue to produce serious literature. This treatise, De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular), is itself expressed in Latin, not Italian. Dante distinguished between natural language, locutio prima, that children learn at their mother's breast, and a second artificial language, locutio grammatica, that they learn at school. Latin should be used only in technical works, such as the De Vulgari, while the first nobler, more natural language should be used to create art.

A Poetic Autobiography.

Dante was a disciple of the poet Brunetto Latini, and with Latini, Guido Cavalcanti, and other poets early in his career he practiced the dolce stil nuovo ("sweet new style"), the expression of courtly love poetry (influenced by the troubadours) in various Italian dialects. Culminating Dante's early attempts to be a lyric poet was his creation of the Vita Nuova (New Life; 1292–1295), a 42-chapter collection of these early love poems, which are linked with a prose framework written in Italian, commenting on the poems themselves as well as generally about how to write and interpret poetry. This poetic autobiography, which attests Dante's fidelity to the ideals of the dolce stil nuovo, especially to the acceptance of the power of Love as an external force, also chronicles Dante's love for a young Florentine woman, which produced in him a spiritual renewal (hence the title). Although Dante was married to Gemma di Manetto Donati, with whom he had several children, the woman in the poem is Bice di Folco Portinari, whom he refers to in his poetry as Beatrice or Bea-Trice, a symbolic name meaning "triple blessed." Beatrice served as an artistic muse and spiritual inspiration to him throughout his writing career. Beginning with Dante's initial encounter with nine-year-old Beatrice and their second encounter nine years later, when she becomes a subject of his love poetry, Dante recounts his prophetic visions about her early death and her ascent to heaven. Upon her actual death in 1290, Dante abandoned writing secular love poetry, for in his perception Beatrice had now gone beyond incarnating earthly love and had become a vehicle of God's larger plan. In The Divine Comedy, Beatrice is nearly apotheosized. She not only guides Dante through Paradise towards the Godhead, but also takes her place near the Virgin Mary as a "petal" in the highly allegorical "Celestial Rose," Dante's metaphor for the most sublime reaches of Heaven.

Dante 's Divine Numbers.

Written over the span of 1314 to 1321, The Divine Comedy is a tripartite visionary pilgrimage to hell, purgatory, and heaven, a medieval masterpiece that is considered one of the greatest literary achievements of all time. The poem is a highly structured work revealing Dante's reliance on number symbolism, a favorite device of many medieval authors, including the poet who wrote the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the dream vision Pearl, who made repeated use of the numbers three, five, and twelve. The entire Comedy is comprised of three major parts: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Heaven). Each of the three parts, reflecting the sacred number associated with the Christian Trinity, is in turn divided into 33 cantos with one introductory canto in Inferno adding up to the sacred and mathematically perfect number of 100 cantos (songs) in all. At the beginning of the poem, after realizing he is lost in a dark allegorical wood of error, Dante envisions (significantly) three symbolic beasts—a leopard (lust), a lion (pride), and a she-wolf (greed/avarice)—that paralyze him with fear and prevent him from making further progress toward the hill of salvation, until another figure appears to prod the pilgrim into action. Even the verse form Dante invented for the Comedy, terza rima ("triple rhyme"), reflects his employment of the Trinitarian pattern to organize and unify the vast literary work in which his muse, triple-blessed Beatrice, leads him to the Beatific Vision at the end of the third part.

The Spiritual Journey of the Self.

Although the Comedy is in many ways a very personal poem, its framework ensures that Beatrice and Dante's other guide, whom he calls Virgil (spelled in Italian as "Virgilio" rather than as the Latin "Vergil"), does not lead only Dante to his goal. While on one level Dante's mind-boggling experience constitutes his own spiritual autobiography, he is careful to include the reader as a participant on the journey he takes to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In the famous opening lines of the poem, Dante admits, "When I had journeyed half of our life's way, I found myself inside a dark wood, for I had lost the path that does not stray." With his significant use of the plural possessive pronoun "our," Dante ensures that his experience will have universal applications. Similar to the trip to the Underworld taken by Vergil's Aeneas or St. Paul's ascent to Heaven in the New Testament (he later compares himself to both figures), Dante's allegorical journey begun in Inferno's first canto builds on a literary tradition of journeys that will later appear in the works of other great poets of the period, including Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Dante's choice of Vergil, author of the Aeneid, as his guide in the first part of the poem is hardly random. Significantly, Vergil was the greatest Latin authority for medieval arts and letters, and his epic was also a narrative about the arduous journey of its protagonist Aeneas, the eventual founder of the Roman Empire.

Sin and Retribution.

The funnel-shaped landscape of Hell through which the character Virgil leads Dante is organized by various sins—not the traditional Seven Deadly Sins, but Dante's own personal ranking of sins that adversely affect mankind not only in the personal sphere of life, but in the public realm of the economic and political operation of the polis ("city"). Dante has the various sins and subdivisions of them represented by an assortment of figures that include historical personages, literary characters, mythological figures, and his own local Italian contemporaries, many of whom are now obscure to the modern reader. Dante observes how these sinners are punished for eternity. The principle behind the assignment of the specific punishments is known as contrapasso ("opposition"), in which the punishment suits the sin by being its ironic opposite. For example, the gluttons, who ate excessively in life, are punished by being pelted by hurricanes of excrement, the byproduct of their own overeating, raining down upon them for eternity.

The Circle of the Lustful.

In each circle Dante observes the sinners from afar, and then, in the most moving encounters, he actually converses with those being punished. For example, in Inferno's Canto 5, devoted to the circle of the lustful, Dante is powerfully affected by the punishment of a pair of near contemporaries, Paolo and Francesca, who, for succumbing to the "storms" of passion that drove them to commit adultery and cuckold her husband (who was also Paolo's brother), are forever within each other's sight, but swept from each other's touch by gale-force winds that fling them airborne. Francesca explains to Dante that what first sexually attracted them, impelling them to commit adultery, was their shared reading of a romance about the adultery of the Arthurian characters Lancelot and Guinevere. The reading led to kissing and beyond, and her husband, catching them, killed both. Dante has a violent reaction to Francesca's characterization of an Arthurian romance as their "go-between" or pimp; he falls into a swoon. Whether Dante's swoon was provoked by his pity for their fate or stemmed from his own stricken culpability as a writer who produced erotic poetry in his earlier career is a matter of interpretation.

Treachery, the Bottom of Hell.

Dante and Virgil continue through the circles of Hell, encountering representatives of the sins of gluttony, avarice, wrath, heresy, violence against others (tyrants and murderers), against the self (suicides), and against God (blasphemers, homosexuals, usurers), and fraud in many permutations. The worst sin, and the one punished in the deepest pocket of Hell, is treachery, whose various degrees culminate finally in a monstrous three-headed Lucifer, who betrayed God his creator. Lucifer is seen grinding an anti-Trinity of other traitors in his triple jaws: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, who respectively betrayed Christ and Julius Caesar, representing Church and Empire. Closing Inferno with more "threes," Dante here underscores his significant use of number symbolism in the Comedy. Climbing out of Hell, he and Virgil spiral their way up Mount Purgatory, now encountering another varied group of sinners expiating the traditional Seven Deadly Sins (pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust) with punishments again assigned on the principle of contrapasso.

Reunion with Beatrice.

Virgil, technically a pagan, is capable only of guiding Dante through the bolgias ("pockets") of Hell and up the circular mountain of Purgatory to its pinnacle, the Earthly Paradise. Here he must yield his charge to an even higher authority, Dante's long-lost Beatrice, who leads the pilgrim through the spheres of the planets, to the fixed stars, through the Empyrean to the heights of Paradise, where he has a vision of Beatrice joining the Virgin Mary and other saints in the Celestial Rose, a symbol that had been exploited in a secular way by the authors of the Romance of the Rose. In the last moments of Paradiso, Dante experiences the light and love of God. In trying to convey his utter incapacity to render his vision into language commensurate with its significance, the great wordsmith compares himself to an infant babbling while suckling at his mother's breast. The poem, which started on a faltering note of moral paralysis, thus ends triumphantly with Dante restored to the primal innocence of a baby. In this way Dante's poem is justifiably called the Comedy, a title that, for his medieval audience, indicated its genre. As explained in the Letter to Can Grande, duke of Verona, traditionally believed to have been written by Dante himself, a "comedy" is a work with a fortuitous ending and is the opposite of a "tragedy," a story that ends badly for the protagonist. In those terms, Dante's poem is the greatest of all comedies because the plot concludes ultimately with the protagonist experiencing a vision of God in Heaven.