Great Books #9: Dante

The Divine Comedy is the greatest literary masterpiece in human history. When Dante wrote it in about 1300, he called it La Commedia. The reason why is that at this time in history, epic poetry was considered "high," or tragic, and it was usually written in Latin. But Dante believed that epic poetry should be democratic; it should be accessible to the people. That's why he called it La Commedia—"low," or a comedy. He wrote it in Tuscan, which is the language of Florence where he lived.

Latin was the language of the elite in Europe. He wanted to write in Tuscan so that ordinary people around him could access it. As a result, Dante is a great believer in democracy. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare were, in their own respective languages, the greatest poets because first and foremost, they believed that poetry should be accessed by the people. They believed in a democratic spirit to poetry, and that made them distinct from the people of their time.

A Response to Virgil and the Church

La Commedia is a response to the Aeneid by Virgil. For the past 1,000 years, the Aeneid was the dominant literature in Europe and the foundation for the Catholic Church. Remember, the end of the Aeneid is fundamentally about duty and piety, and it stood in contrast to love. This became the dominant idea in the Catholic Church, where you are not allowed to access God directly. You are not allowed to believe in love; you must obey the church because only the church can guarantee you redemption and salvation.

This, of course, led to massive corruption in the Catholic Church. It also led to wars throughout Europe because so much power was concentrated in the Church, and as a result, many kings fought for power within it. This led to many wars and a splintering of the Catholic Church, and Dante found himself embroiled in a lot of these conflicts.

He wrote La Commedia in order for people to access God. Through the comedy, you can access God and bypass the Catholic Church. In fact, if you read La Commedia, you'll find many direct criticisms of the Catholic Church. La Commedia was also written in response to the Aeneid. And like Homer, what Dante wants to do is position love first and foremost. In La Commedia, love is God itself. These are the basic themes that we'll be looking at throughout this book.

The Architecture of the Afterlife: Structure and Paradox

Let me talk about the structure of La Commedia. There are three distinct parts: first is Inferno, second is Purgatory, and the last is Paradise.

What makes La Commedia so powerful is that Dante uses two major literary devices to construct his universe. The first is what we call structure. The second is paradox.

Imagine La Commedia not just as epic poetry but as a very complex mathematical puzzle that you must unravel through time.

• The structure of Inferno is an inverted triangle. Dante and Virgil are going to travel through Inferno, through hell, almost as if they're traveling underground.
• Purgatory becomes a pyramid or a mountain. Dante and Virgil are going to travel up a mountain so that they can meet Beatrice at the very top. Beatrice will then take Dante to heaven, where he will meet God. That is the very ending of the Divine Comedy.
• Paradise is structured as a solar system. There is something called the Empyrean where God is, and Dante will travel with Beatrice into the Empyrean.

As you can see, the structure is very mathematical and rigorous. There's a symmetry to La Commedia that doesn't really exist anywhere else in poetry.

But what makes the Divine Comedy so distinct and so powerful is the idea of paradox, or perhaps cognitive dissonance. All poetry is designed to be memorized and read aloud, and there is subtlety and nuance in all poetry. Think of poetry as almost like a virus: it's trying to infiltrate you, subvert you, and remake you. That's what the Divine Comedy does. You read it, and it all sounds very simple and nice, but the more you memorize it and interact with it, the more it enters you and creates cognitive dissonance, meaning that it is disrupting the normal way you see the world. It creates paradox, and your mind is going to, by itself, subconsciously try to unravel these paradoxes over time.

The more you read the Divine Comedy over decades, the more it will reveal itself to you. It is a universe that comes into you and then remakes you. That is the power and beauty of the Divine Comedy. The trick is to unravel the paradoxes which will implant themselves throughout the poem.

Another thing about the structure is that in order to reach Paradise, Dante must first enter Inferno. There are different ways you can interpret the meaning of this. The simplest way is that in order to truly discover God, you must experience hell yourself. Good and evil are intertwined. You can never have good unless you first experience evil. Good is not the absence of evil; good is a confrontation and the defeat of evil.

Another way to interpret it is that Inferno represents Virgil, which represents the Aeneid. For Dante to begin the process of entering into heaven, he must first recognize the impact of Virgil and the Aeneid on his psyche and his culture. Then, by recognizing this, he can defeat the Aeneid in order to fully embrace the power of God and of love. That's the interpretation that I want to present to you as we go along.

Dante the Man: Politics, Exile, and Love

Dante is considered the greatest poet in the Italian language. At this time in history, around the year 1300, Italy was divided into city-states. Dante was in Florence, but there were also other major city-states like Venice and Genoa, all competing against each other. They were also competing against Rome and the Catholic Church, which wanted to exert authority over these city-states. At the same time, you had the different empires of Europe—for example, France and the Holy Roman Empire (which we would today call Germany)—also trying to exert authority.

Simultaneously, there were different factions within these city-states, different families that fought against each other. During Dante's time, he experienced constant conflict, violence, and hatred. For him, the major question was: how can we as a people, as humans, escape this constant cycle of vengeance, hatred, and war? That's why he wrote the Divine Comedy.

Two major biographical details you need to understand about him are that he is of noble birth and therefore a participant in this conflict. The northern Italian city-states, which include Florence, Milan, Genoa, and Venice, had two major political factions: the Guelphs, who supported the Papacy, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Empire. Dante's family belonged to the Guelphs, so he was born into this political rivalry. Over time, the Guelphs would win, but then they would divide into the Black and White factions—different families fighting for power again. For Dante, all his life, he experienced nothing but political rivalry and hatred. Ultimately, he would get sick of this constant fighting and exile himself to focus on his poetry.

The other thing to know about him is that he falls in love with Beatrice at a very early age. He meets her when he is nine and she is eight. The problem is that Beatrice's family is of more noble, aristocratic birth than Dante's. At this time in history, all marriages were arranged. Dante married someone of his class, and Beatrice married someone of her class, but they never really abandoned each other. They remained friends, and Dante in his heart still had this longing for Beatrice. Beatrice would die pretty young, maybe in her mid-20s, giving birth, but Dante never forgot about her. He spent his entire life remembering his love for Beatrice, and this becomes the basis of the Divine Comedy.

When Dante is exiled from Florence, he never returns. He spends all his life in exile, patronized by some very powerful aristocrats throughout Italy, and he spends a lot of his time reflecting on his experience in these political factions. In the Divine Comedy, there will be a lot of references to this conflict between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, his exile from Florence, and his hatred of the Catholic Church. There will also be a lot of references to his love for Beatrice, which will redeem him from this earthly conflict.

Entering the Inferno: A Journey of Deception

Let's look at certain passages to truly understand the Divine Comedy. I choose the Allen Mandelbaum translation because he's just the easiest to read. I'm not interested in the language as much as the ideas.

This is the very beginning of the Divine Comedy. He is in middle age and in a shadowed forest. He's simply confused as to why the world is what it is. This hatred for the world is causing him to hate himself as well. Because of this confusion about why there's so much hatred, he has lost his connection with God and doesn't know how to proceed. He's in a deep depression, lost in this forest, and feels hopeless. Then, a man emerges named Virgil.

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter—death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I’ll also tell the other things I saw.

Virgil is the poet that Dante respects the most because, at this point in history, Virgil is the most influential poet. Virgil promises to guide Dante out of this shadowed forest and into the light, and Dante puts his faith in him. At this point, Dante sees Virgil not just as a savior but as a father and a teacher. This is important because for Dante to truly defeat Virgil—which is the point of La Commedia, to destroy the influence and power of the Aeneid—he first must put Virgil onto a pedestal. This is in order for us to recognize the limitations of Virgil so that we ourselves can defeat Virgil in our hearts.

The Paradox of Reciprocity

A lot of La Commedia is dialogue. There's a speaker and there's a listener. This is an important formulation because what Dante wants us to recognize is that when a speaker speaks, he or she is speaking from a certain worldview, a certain prejudice. We must always be on guard and ask ourselves why this person is saying what he or she is saying.

Something we discuss a lot is the idea of God. God is the perfect manifestation of love, generosity, and forgiveness. One thing that God does not do is reciprocity. The Catholic Church teaches you that if you obey God, then God will allow you access to heaven. What Dante wants us to understand is that this cannot be true. If God is perfection, love, and beauty, God would never require anything of you. God will always give you free will, and free will and reciprocity are a contradiction. If I make you do something in order to access heaven, that means I don't give you free will. But God gives you free will.

Here, we can see a contradiction. Dante is talking to Virgil and asking, "How did you get here? Why are you taking me to heaven?" Virgil's response is that he was in Limbo when an angel, Beatrice, came to him and said she needed his help to aid a friend. Dante then asks why Beatrice would want to help him. Virgil explains it was because she saw his pain from heaven and recognized how much he loved her.

“In Heaven there’s a gentle lady—one
who weeps for the distress toward which I send you,
so that stern judgment up above is shattered.
And it was she who called upon Lucia,
requesting of her: ‘Now your faithful one
is in need of you, and I commend him to you.’
Lucia, enemy of every cruelty,
arose and made her way to where I was,
sitting beside the venerable Rachel.
She said: ‘You, Beatrice, true praise of God,
why have you not helped him who loves you so
that for your sake he left the vulgar crowd?
Do you not hear the anguish in his cry?
Do you not see the death he wars against
upon that river ruthless as the sea?’
No one within this world has ever been
so quick to seek his good or flee his harm
as I, when she had finished speaking thus,
to come below, down from my blessed station;
I trusted in your honest utterance,
which honors you and those who have listened to you.”
When she had finished with her words to me,
she turned aside her gleaming, tearful eyes,
which only made me hurry all the more.

It's almost like a reciprocity: because Dante loves Beatrice so much, Beatrice has to come help him now. But this goes against the very idea of God. Two possibilities are happening here. The first is that Virgil is misinterpreting what's going on. God will always come to you if you truly want God to come because God is all-generous. Dante's heart is calling out for God, and God sends Beatrice without any conditions because God understands that Beatrice is the person who can most help Dante. There's no reciprocity here. But when Beatrice tells Virgil this, Virgil misinterprets it to mean that reciprocity is going on. This shows you the limitations of Virgil's worldview, where in the Aeneid it's all about contract and duty.

Another possibility is that Beatrice understands the limitations of Virgil and so just tells Virgil what he wants to hear or structures this in a way that Virgil can understand. If Beatrice says to Virgil, "I came to help Dante because Dante needs help," Virgil might be like, "Okay, he needs help, but why help him?" So she just says it's because of his love for her that she was able to go to heaven.

Already, in the beginning, we have to question the authority of Virgil. Virgil is an unreliable guide. For us to truly enter Paradise and discover God, we need to recognize he is unreliable ourselves. Dante will never tell us, but he'll give us clues to suggest that Virgil is unreliable, and we must reject him if we are to fully embrace God.

The Paradox of Charon

Virgil is taking Dante into hell, and he emphasizes that this is a path they must take if they are to go into Paradise. You must first confront evil and understand sin to truly understand goodness. When they get there, a river blocks their path into hell, and there is a ferryman named Charon from Greek mythology who will take them across. The problem is that Dante is still living. Charon sees that and says he can't take him across.

And here, advancing toward us in a boat,
an aged man—his hair was white with years—
was shouting: “Woe to you, corrupted souls!
Forget your hope of ever seeing heaven:
I come to lead you to the other shore,
to the eternal dark, to fire and frost.
And you approaching there, you living soul,
keep well away from these—they are the dead.”
But when he saw I made no move to go,
he said: “Another way, in other harbors—
not here—will bring you passage to your shore;
a lighter craft will have to carry you.”
My guide then: “Charon, don’t torment yourself:
our passage has been willed above, where One
can do what He has willed; and ask no more.”
Now silence fell upon the woolly cheeks
of Charon, pilot of the livid marsh,
whose eyes were ringed about with wheels of flame.

When Virgil says to him, "Let us pass," Charon obeys. This is a paradox. They are in hell because they've rejected God. We know they rejected God from the line, "Woe to you, corrupted souls! Forget your hope of ever seeing heaven." You can interpret this as Charon saying this is all hopeless. But another way of interpreting this is Charon saying to all these souls, "You are here because you believe God has abandoned you. You believe there is no God, no heaven. You believe you deserve to be here. That's why you're here."

He sees Dante and knows that Dante doesn't believe this; he is actually going to heaven. So Dante is a corruption, and Charon doesn't want to take him across. But then Virgil says, "God has ordered Dante to be crossed," and Charon obeys. The paradox is this: Charon himself doesn't believe in God. That's why he's in hell. He rejects the authority of God, yet he obeys God. This makes absolutely no sense.

It's a paradox unless you remember that what matters is the speaker. Virgil is the one who is speaking. In other words, Charon is not obeying the authority of God; he's obeying the authority of the speaker, who is Virgil. This suggests to us that Virgil is the master of hell. The question then is, why is he the master of hell? The answer is because he created hell through the Aeneid. The Aeneid is poetry that emphasizes piety, obedience, and how love is a disease. It emphasizes the importance of hatred and empire. In other words, Virgil, through the Aeneid, created emotions in human beings that allow for the creation of hell itself. You can also argue that with the Aeneid, Virgil created the foundation for the Catholic Church, which is based not on the Bible but on the Aeneid.

Again, this is not apparent in the poetry, but once you understand that Dante is conveying his truth through paradox and you try to unravel this paradox, then the truth slowly reveals itself to you.

The Damned's Will and Desire

Two words that you will see a lot in Dante are will and desire, because will and desire together create your soul. You are what you want and what you move towards.

The demon Charon, with his eyes like embers,
by signaling to them, has all embark;
his oar strikes anyone who stretches out.
As in the autumn the leaves detach themselves,
first one and then the other, till the bough
sees all its fallen garments on the ground,
similarly, the evil seed of Adam
descended from the shoreline one by one,
when signaled, as a falcon called will come.
So do they move across the darkened waters;
even before they reach the farther shore,
new ranks already gather on this bank.
“My son,” the gracious master said to me,
“those who have died beneath the wrath of God,
all these assemble here from every country;
and they are eager for the river crossing
because celestial justice spurs them on,
so that their fear is turned into desire.
No good soul ever takes this passage here;
therefore, if Charon has complained of you,
by now you can be sure what his words mean.”

What this is telling us is that people are evil because they obey. This image is where the people line up obediently and do as they're told. They don't question or resist why this is happening. Their will and desire is to move towards hell. They are not in hell because they did bad things—everyone does bad things. They're in hell because they desire to be in hell. As Virgil says, "Their fear is turned into desire." They're entering hell because they want to do so.

This is a really important idea if you are to understand Dante. Free will is a fundamental truth of the universe. You do what you do because you choose to do it. You're in hell not because you did bad things, but because you think that hell is the best place for you. You're happy in hell.

The Unreliable Guide in Limbo

Now they are in hell, and the first place they enter is Limbo. Limbo is a place where good people go, but the problem is they don't believe in Jesus. They never converted to Christianity. These are people like Virgil, Homer, and Plato—very virtuous people. But because they don't believe in God, they are doomed in hell, or that's what Virgil tells Dante. Dante is suspicious and asks Virgil if there was ever a time when people in hell could ascend to heaven. Virgil says there was only one time: when Jesus died and came to hell to save and redeem those most worthy, people from the Bible like King David, Noah, Abraham, and Rachel, who were born before the time of Christ but were worthy of going to heaven.

“The kindly master said: ‘Do you not ask
who are these spirits whom you see before you?
I’d have you know, before you go ahead,
they did not sin; and yet, though they have merits,
that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism,
the portal of the faith that you embrace.
And if they lived before Christianity,
they did not worship God in fitting ways;
and of such spirits I myself am one.
For these defects, and for no other evil,
we now are lost and punished just with this:
we have no hope and yet we live in longing.’
Great sorrow seized my heart on hearing him,
for I had seen some estimable men
among the souls suspended in that limbo.

Virgil is saying there's nothing wrong with him; he was just unlucky. This is incorrect. What you will see as we move on is that Virgil chooses to be here. There are many paths for salvation for him, but he wants to stay in hell.

The Warning of Minos

They go into the first true circle of hell, the circle of Lust, where people whose passion overrode their reason are punished.

So I descended from the first enclosure
down to the second circle, that which girdles
less space but grief more great, that goads to weeping.
There dreadful Minos stands, gnashing his teeth:
examining the sins of those who enter,
he judges and assigns as his tail twines.
I mean that when the spirit born to evil
appears before him, it confesses all;
and he, the connoisseur of sin, can tell
the depth in Hell appropriate to it;
as many times as Minos wraps his tail
around himself, that marks the sinner’s level.
Always there is a crowd that stands before him:
each soul in turn advances to be judged;
they speak and hear and then are cast below.
Arresting his extraordinary task,
Minos, as soon as he had seen me, said:
“O you who reach this house of suffering,
be careful how you enter, whom you trust;
the gate is wide, but do not be deceived.”
To which my guide replied: “But why protest?
Do not attempt to block his fated path:
our passage has been willed above, where One
can do what He has willed; and ask no more.”

This is a very interesting passage that again makes us question things. Minos, who is deciding which level of hell you go to, says to Dante, "Be careful how you enter, whom you trust; the gate is wide, but do not be deceived." This is a very strange thing to say. Minos sees that Dante is with Virgil, and his response is, "Dante, you're a good person. I'm telling you right now, don't trust anyone." What he's really saying is, "Dante, don't trust Virgil." If you think about it logically, it makes no sense for him to say that unless he means don't trust Virgil. If Virgil can be trusted, then all Dante has to do is follow him. But Minos makes a point of saying, "Don't trust anyone here," which is to say, don't trust the person closest to you.

What confirms this is Virgil's reply: "But why protest?" Virgil is jumping in and saying, "Hey, shut up." He asserts his authority: "Our passage has been willed above." Again, this is questioning the reliability of the narrator. Dante is planting seeds, giving us clues that in hell, nothing is what it seems. The person that we most trust, Virgil, is the person we should probably least trust. Everything that Virgil says, we have to question.

The Paradox of Dido

Virgil and Dante are in the circle of Lust, and Virgil is pointing out the famous souls there.

“The first of those about whose history
you want to know,” my master then told me,
“once ruled as empress over many nations.
Her vice of lust became so customary
that she made license licit in her laws
to free her from the scandal she had caused.
She is Semiramis, of whom we read
that she was Ninus’ wife and his successor;
she held the land the Sultan now commands.
That other spirit killed herself for love,
and she betrayed the ashes of Sychaeus;
the wanton Cleopatra follows next.
See Helen, for whose sake so many years
of evil had to pass; see great Achilles,
who finally met love in his last battle.
See Paris, Tristan…” and he pointed out
and named to me more than a thousand shades
departed from our life because of love.
No sooner had I heard my teacher name
the ancient ladies and the knights, than pity
seized me, and I was like a man astray.

This is a paradox. Virgil points out a thousand shades, providing the names of people like Semiramis, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, and Tristan. But there's one shade he does not name: "That other spirit who killed herself for love, and she betrayed the ashes of Sychaeus." We know this person is Dido. And who is Dido? Dido is the creation of Virgil.

The grand paradox, the irony, is that of a thousand people, the person that Virgil refuses to acknowledge by name is the one that he understands the best, who he is most intimate with. This creates the question: why does he refuse to name Dido?

If you go back to the Aeneid, Dido is the most realistic character, the one that most people sympathize with because she feels real, but at the same time, she didn't deserve her fate. It is Virgil who cast Dido into hell. This contrasts with Dante, who will elevate Beatrice, his love, to heaven. Virgil condemned Dido to hell; Dante elevated Beatrice to heaven. Dante is longing for Beatrice, while Virgil forgets that Dido even existed. He refuses to name her.

Why? Because Dido is a realistic character, we can assume that she is based on a person that Virgil knew. We can also make the assumption that Virgil pursued this person, fell in love with her, and she rejected him. So Virgil got angry and decided to condemn her to hell in his poem. But in his heart, Virgil knows that this was unfair, that this was pure hatred. He feels a bit guilty and embarrassed about it. That's why he refuses to acknowledge Dido.

But then something interesting happens.

My first words: “Poet, I should willingly
speak with those two who go together there
and seem so lightly carried by the wind.”
And he to me: “You’ll see when they draw closer
to us; and then you may appeal to them
by that love which impels them. They will come.”
No sooner had the wind bent them toward us
than I urged on my voice: “O battered souls,
if One does not forbid it, speak with us.”
Even as doves, when summoned by desire,
borne forward by their will, move through the air
with wings uplifted, still, to their sweet nest,
those spirits left the ranks where Dido suffers,
approaching us through the malignant air,
so powerful had been my loving cry.

Virgil is naming all the shades, and Dante says, "Let me go and talk to them." Virgil says, "Sure." But what I want you to notice is this: "those spirits left the ranks where Dido suffers." The contrast is this: Virgil refuses to name Dido, so Dante names Dido himself.

This is an act of rebellion. Dante acknowledges Virgil as his father, guide, and teacher. Therefore, he should just follow Virgil. If Virgil doesn't want to name Dido, then Dante should be respectful and ignore her. But he's saying, "Nope, I'm going to name Dido because I want us to understand that it was wrong to not acknowledge her. It was wrong, first of all, for Virgil to condemn Dido to hell, and it's wrong to just ignore her." He is saying, "I know who Dido is. I know what Virgil did, and I want to name her in order to resurrect her in our memory."

Again, this is creating cognitive dissonance. It's leaving an idea in our heads that none of what we're seeing in Inferno is what it seems. That's why it's hell—because it's all an illusion, all deception. We have to use our minds and our hearts to truly understand what's going on.

This begins our journey into the Divine Comedy. As you can see, it is extremely complex. You have to see with your heart and your imagination. It's impossible to just read this and know what's going on. You have to believe in your instincts, your intuition. You have to believe that you have a connection with God, and it is God that will reveal to you the truth through your intuition and your imagination. The Divine Comedy is a journey, really, into your own heart and your faith.