Ian Thomson - Dante’s Divine Comedy

AN APOLLO BOOK

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Dante has no equal as he sings of other-worldly horror and celestial beatitude alike. Yet for all our distance from medieval theology, the Florentine poets allegorical journey through hell, purgatory and paradise remains one of the essential works of world literature. At least fifty English language versions of the Inferno the first part of Dantes poem appeared in the twentieth century alone.

If Dantes Divine Comedy speaks to our present condition, it is because it tells the story of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation in this world. Dante composed his great poem in the spoken Italian of his time. He wrote about suffering bodies and human weakness, and about divine ecstasy, in words that have resonated with readers and writers for the last seven hundred years.

Ian Thomsons lively book is a wide-ranging exploration of a literary masterwork and its influence on writers, poets, artists and film-makers up to our own time.

To understand Dante it is not, of course,

necessary to believe what he believed,

but it is, I think, necessary to understand

what he believed.

DOROTHY L . SAYERS

Before you know it, youre in the

noisome regions of the night

LOUIS - FERDINAND CLINE ,

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

VERY LATE NEWS

Dante in Ferno Shock

After a turbulent 12 months

of unprecedented upheaval,

the 14th Century poet and creator

of the Divine Comedy, Dante

Alighieri, admitted today that hell

be glad to see the back of this year,

saying Phew, Ive been trapped

in this circle of hell for so long,

I cant wait to get out of it. Its such

a relief to know that the fourth circle

of hell is over!

PRIVATE EYE ,

23 DECEMBER 12 JANUARY 2017

Domenico di Michelinos 1456 La commedia illumina Firenze (The Comedy Illuminates Florence), located on the west wall of the Duomo in Florence.

Getty/DEA/G. Dagli Orti

Except for The Divine Comedy, I use the Italian or Latin titles for Dantes work, though some titles remain disputed. For example, rather than the Italian Vita nuova, Dantes title is now thought to have been the Latin Vita nova, after the line in the opening paragraph: Incipit vita nova . (I have kept to the customary Vita nuova. ) All translations of quotations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday, 1300. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. At the request of a woman called Beatrice, the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell.

Midway in the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wood,

for the right path was lost

Begun in the first decade of the fourteenth century, Dantes poem is, for many, the greatest single work of Western literature. It gathers together an extraordinary range of literary styles: lyric, satiric, biblical and invective. The poems bold intermixture of realities, from the sublime to the vile, is part of what makes it so modern. Much of The Divine Comedy is composed in the Italian vernacular which Dante regarded as the true and richly storied expression of the Italian people. Dante said he owed his life to this vernacular, meaning that it was his parents native tongue. Even when The Divine Comedy aspires to grandiloquence with mannered and evocative Latinisms, the language stays close to everyday usage. Dantes unfinished treatise, De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular), written some time between 1302 and 1305, is an impassioned plea for linguistic unity in a peninsula divided by over thirty dialects. Dante would not have been referred to as Italian in his day because Italy as a nation-state did not exist until unification in 1861. Only then could Dante become Italys Sommo Poeta, Supreme Poet.

The Divine Comedy , with its dramatic chiaroscuro of fuming mists and frozen shallows, is awful in that archaic sense of the word (still valid in the Italian terribile ) meaning to inspire awe. It is divided into three books or canticles of equal length: Inferno , Purgatorio, Paradiso . Each canticle is made up of thirty-three rhymed sections called cantos, with an additional introductory canto for the Inferno . One hundred cantos in all. The poem is called a comedy in the medieval-Aristotelian sense that it leads from misery to a state of happiness. Dantes salvation is comic in that it culminates in joy.

In the course of his poem Dante is seen to fathom the nine concentric circles of hell, before his ascent to the summit of Mount Purgatory takes him to the revelation of God in Paradise. The theme of despair ascending through hope towards salvation is Catholic. In medieval Catholic orthodoxy, Purgatory was an in-between state where imperfect souls were cleansed by fire in preparation for their entry into heaven. Dantes journey from the supernatural dark wood to heaven by way of Purgatory lasts just one week, in a poem that took over twenty years to complete. Having journeyed through a strange tragic land populated by the guilty dead, Dante is re-conducted to a world of light. His intention all along had been to write in pro del mondo che mal vive (for the benefit of the world which lives badly).

Given our distance from medieval theology, the poets three-part journey into the afterlife may at times be hard for us to understand. Attitudes to medieval worship changed in Northern Europe after the Protestant Reformation. The architect of King Henry VIIIs religious reforms in England, the statesman-lawyer Thomas Cromwell, wanted to uproot Catholic belief in hellfire, Purgatory, Marian intercession and other papistical abominations. The Divine Comedy , with its animus against papal and clerical corruptions, was used as Protestant justification for why the pope should no longer remain head of the church in Tudor England. Dante portrayed a pope during his lifetime, Boniface VIII, as a ravaging wolf who gulled congregations into false absolution. This Antichrist pope had turned the Holy See into a cloaca del sangue e de la puzza (a sewer of blood and stench).

During the Reformation, Dantes antipapal status was confirmed by Protestant polemic which vilified Rome as an impious, jewel-eyed harlot. One of the most influential religious books in England at this time, Foxes 1563 Book of Martyrs , applauded Dante as an Italian writer against the pope. Of course The Divine Comedy is not an anti-Catholic work at all. Tommaso Campanella, the Dominican philosopher who was charged with heresy in 1599, admired the poem because it teaches in a popular fashion how to live according to Catholic belief. The Divine Comedy belongs to a pre-Reformation world where any pity shown to the damned was seen as an offence against divine justice. Always, Dante is careful to distinguish between Catholicism and a corrupt papacy.