Dante The Divine Comedy

• Born in Florence in 1265; died in Ravenna in 1321

• Met Beatrice circa 1274
• Married Gemma Donati in 1289
• Elected Prior (highest magistrate, a 2 month post) in
1300
• Exiled from Florence in 1302

Dante's Life
 De Vulgari Eloquentia, on the origin and
development of language
 De Monarchia, on political theory
 Convivio, unfinished, a compendium of knowledge
 Vita Nuova, lyric poems and commentary
 Commedia , dubbed The Divine Comedy in the 16th
century, written from 1307-21. Relates a symbolic
pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, & Heaven
undertaken by the fictitious pilgrim Dante beginning
the evening before Good Friday, 1300.

Literary Works
DANTE AND The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri (1265-
1321)
La Divina Commedia
(The Divine Comedy)
Trilogy: Inferno,
Purgatorio, Paradiso
Written in the late
Middle Ages, c. 1307 -
1321
Dante’s home in Florence
Dante wrote The Divine Comedy while in exile due to his
involvement with a political party that criticized the
corruption of the pope. Dante believed that an emperor
should govern affairs of the state while the pope’s power
should be confined to religious affairs.

Background
Literary Influences

• Old & New Testament

• Homer’s Odyssey, and

especially Virgil's
Aeneid

• St. Augustine's
Confessions
 The Divine Comedy is an account of Dante's own journey
through the afterlife (hell, purgatory, and paradise)
 He is guided by the Roman poet Virgil (1st c. BC) and
later by Beatrice
 The journey inspired by and directed toward Beatrice, the
earthly love of Dante's youth
 A journey toward salvation

Contents
• Three Guides:
1. Virgil, symbol of human reason & poetry, through Inferno &
Purgatorio
2. Beatrice, his “pure” human love, through most of Paradiso
3. St. Bernard de Clairvaux, a 12th century contemplative
monk
• Written in vernacular Italian in terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.)
• 33 cantos in each canticle (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso),
plus one in the beginning as an introduction = 100.
• Nine circles of Hell + anteroom = 10; seven levels of purgatory
plus three ante-terraces = 10; nine heavenly spheres +
empyrean = 10.
• Three beasts block his path: Leopard, Lion, and She-Wolf.

Structure in Multiple Layers of Three to

Symbolize the Trinity:
Characters

"Peopled" by hundreds of
historical,
contemporaneous, and
mythical figures who
had died by the year
1300, but who may have
lived centuries before.
Virgil
The action of the poem begins on Good Friday of the year 1300,
at which time Dante, who was born in 1265, had reached the
middle of the Scriptural threescore years and ten. It ends on the
first Sunday after Easter, making in all ten days.

Time
civil and international warfare
political struggles
corrupt popes seeking power and wealth
sale of ecclesiastical offices (simony) and of
salvation (indulgences)
world of intolerance and persecution (Inquisition
founded 1231)
religion is abused, and manipulated; greed, pride and
violence disguised as holiness
prevalence of ignorance, superstition, and fear

Dante's historical world as hell

 exposure of the evils of his world

 challenging of Church dogmas, exposing superstitions

 creation of a new Humanist philosophy radically re-interpreting

Christianity

 giving Christianity a human and earthly meaning centered

around the idea of love

 demanding the substance of true Christianity in Christian life:

love, peace, humility, forgiveness, giving, caring about others,
healing the sick, feeding the hungry

DANTE'S CRITICISM OF HIS WORLD

 Concept of contrapasso (sin = punishment), sinning is
hell
 Hell is the state of sin; harming others creates a world
that is literally hellish for the sinner himself and for
others
 We are responsible not only for our own actions, but for
the effects they have on others; we are responsible not
only for our own salvation, but for the good of society.

Dante’s Journey Begins in Hell

Hell is a place on earth
Most notable: the popes in hell (Nicholas III,
Boniface VIII, Clement V); the keys of Saint
Peter opening the gates of understanding of the
new symbolism created by Dante
Representation of hell in earthly, sensory,
familiar terms, populated by oneself and those
one knows
The presence of the living human being in hell

THE INFERNO
1. Limbo
2. The Lustful
3. The Gluttonous
4. The Avaricious and the Prodigal
5. The Wrathful and the Sullen
6. Heretics
7. The Violent
8. The Fraudulent
9. The Treacherous

The Nine Circles of Hell

Map of the Inferno
Inferno
Circle 1
The Virtuous Pagans
Circle 2
The Lascivious/Lustful
Circle 3
The Gluttonous
Circle 4
The Miserly and the Wasteful against
kindred, country
Circle 5
The Wathful guests, lords, etc.
Circle 6
The Heretics
Circle 7
The Violent
Circle 8
The Fraudulent
Circle 9
The Lake of the Treacherous
Images of Dante’s Hell
Boticelli’s Image of Dante’s Hell
Bartolomeo’s Vision of Dante’s Hell
 Canto I
Dante enters hell while alive: Canto I.1
"in the middle of the road of our life“

Dante enters hell driven by his own sins

(symbolized by the lion, the wolf, and
the leopard)

A lion: Pride or ambition.

A she-wolf: Avarice

A leopard: Fraudulence

Here he confronts the lion.

Illustration by Gustave Doré
The dark forest of human life, with its passions,
vices, and perplexities of all kinds; politically the
state of Florence with its fractions Guelf and
Ghibelline.
Dante as pro-Ghibelline and Imperialist is in
opposition to the Guelfs, Papal Party: Boniface
VIII., and the King of France, Philip the Fair, and
is banished from Florence, out of the sunshine,
and into the dark.

Canto 1
 Canto 4: The Unbaptized

 Dante is borne across the river

Acheron in his sleep, and awakes on the
brink of the sad valley of the abyss.

 He now enters the First Circle of

the Inferno; the Limbo of the Unbaptized
and those born before Christianity.

 Here he finds the Philosophers

(Aristotle, Plato), classical writers and
Avicenna and Averroes.

Illustration by Gustave Doré

 Canto 5: The Lustful
Paolo and Francesca

Francesca, daughter of Guido da

Polenta, Lord of Ravenna, and wife
of Gianciotto Malatesta, son of the
Lord of Rimini. The lover, Paul
Malatesta, was the brother of the
husband, who, discovering their love,
put them both to death with his own
hand. They are condemned to be
whirled around in a violent wind.

Illustration by Gustave Doré

Paolo and Francesca

By J.A. Ingres By Amos Cassioli

 Canto 10: Farinata
Farinata degli Uberti was the
valiant and renowned leader of
the Ghibellines in Florence. He
believed like Epicurus, that the
soul dies with the body, and that
human happiness consisted in
temporal pleasures; and for this
sin he is damned as a Heretic as
is Cavalcante, a Guelph.

Farinata addresses Dante

llustration by Gustave Doré
 Farinata led the Ghibellines at the famous battle of Monte
Aperto in 1260, where the Guelfs were routed, and driven
out of Florence. He died in 1264.

Guelphs- Papal Party

Ghibellines- Imperial Party

Farinata (con’t)
 Symbolic of the ultimate cold-heartedness, lack of feeling
for others
 Dante feels half-dead as he experiences the cold blast of
Lucifer's beating wings
 then Dante kicks heads, pulls hair, and abuses the souls
embedded in the ice
 Dante promises Fra Alberigo to clear the ice from his
eyes if he reveals his identity, then goes back on his
promise

The Ninth Circle

• Dante ensnared in his own sins and
contradictions
• at this point Dante is effectively entrapped in
hell, his heart frozen, his actions identical with
those of the treacherous at the bottom of hell
• the only way for him to get out: recognizing the
sin in himself, seeing the absurdity of his self-
righteousness, forgiving and accepting what he
hates the most
• only way out: to look into the spiritual mirror, to
embrace the body of Satan

Gravest danger as he becomes

treacherous in circle of treachery
The Ninth Circle of Hell: the frozen, circular lake of ice at the bottom of
hell and the home of Satan

Lucifer, King of Hell

Illustrated by Gustave Doré
Satan
Description of Satan
Satan has three heads—red, black, and yellow—and from his six
eyes streams continuous tears. In each of its mouths, Satan
gnaws on the worst of the traitors: Judas, Brutus, and
Cassius. Virgil abruptly tells Dante that they must
leave. Virgil pulls his pupil onto his back and begins to climb
down Satan’s hairy body. Virgil continues to climb until they
come to a point where Satan’s legs stand upright in a dark
cave. Virgil explains that when they climbed down Satan’s
side, they passed the center of the center of the earth so that
they now stand just below the Southern Hemisphere. Satan
stands where he was planted when he originally fell from
Heaven. Dante quickly scrambles to climb back to Earth and
as he does he sees stars above him for the first time since his
journey began.
• embrace as symbol of forgiveness of sin, need to
sympathize with the suffering (the tears) of the greatest
sinner
• introspection and self-recognition: need to look into the
center of the mirror-like surface of the frozen lake; what
Dante sees there is just himself
• Dante = Satan
• that insight and his capacity to forgive set him free
• implication of the impossibility of escaping hell while his
soul is tainted with anger, hate, vengefulness, and self-
righteousness

Dante-Satan
Purgatory
Purgatorio
Purgatorio

Seven circles for the

seven deadly sins:
pride, envy, anger,
sloth, avarice, gluttony
and incontinence.

Second illustrated ed.

Brescia, 1487
Paradiso
• The Paradiso is a place of
reward.
• It is structured on the Seven
Cardinal Virtues: Faith,
Hope, Love, Prudence,
Justice, Fortitude,
Temperance.
• Each virtue is rewarded in
one of the spheres that were
thought to surround the
earth.
 Canto 33 Paradiso
The Visible Presence

In this new light of

God's grace, the
mystery of the union of
the Divine and human
nature in Christ is
revealed to Dante.
 Canto 33 Paradiso

Dante looks up into the light and receives a glorious vision

of which he feels the emotion of the experience but he
cannot recall the details of the encounter.

 He invokes God to help him recall the scene so that he can

tell the world about it.

Dante reveals that he saw within the Eternal Light: three

circles of different colors reflecting each other.
Dante sees a vision of Christ. The three orbs “of
triple hue” reveals the mystery of the Trinity in
human nature in the Being of God, the Son
mirroring the Father and the Love of the Holy
Spirit between them both.

In the last lines, Dante moves in harmony with

the spheres, with God, and with himself, impelled
by divine love.

Canto 33 Paradiso
Paradiso
Paradiso

Florentine Mss 15th century

Paradiso XVII
Dante’s Exegetical Method: From Dante’s Letter to Can
Grande selection taken from the Geoffrey Chaucer Page
“To elucidate, then, what we have to say, be it known that
the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it
may be called polysemous, that is to say, 'of more senses
than one'; for it is one sense which we get through the
letter, and another which we get through the thing the
letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the
second allegorical or mystic.
And this mode of treatment, for its better manifestation,
may be considered in this verse:
'When lsrael came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob
from a people of strange speech, Judaea became his
sanctification, Israel his power.'
For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the
children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is
presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption
wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion
of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state
of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the
departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this
corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented
to us. Con’t next page..}
…When we understand this we see clearly that the
subject round which the alternative senses play must
be twofold. And we must therefore consider the
subject of this work as literally understood, and then
its subject as allegorically intended. The subject of
the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only,
is 'the state of souls after death,' without qualification,
for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and
about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically
the subject is 'man, as by good or ill desserts, in the
exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes
liable to rewarding or punishing justice.‘”
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/dante/cangrand.html based on From
The Latin Works of Dante, Temple Classics, London, 1904, Epistola X, pp. 346-52.
Summary: a modification and adaptation of the
traditional four-fold method of interpretation of
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274):
• LITERAL -- the everyday meaning
• MORAL -- educational lessons
• ALLEGORICAL -- abstract, intellectual, conceptual
symbols
• ANAGOGICAL -- the deepest mysteries of the afterlife