Where Dante Guides Us

Hell is nevertheless filled with bloody and horrific torments. In Dante’s eyes, some sinners fully deserve what they get: corrupt clerics, for example—including a Pope—are jammed upside down into holes in the rocky earth, legs flailing and feet licked by fire. (There are a notable number of churchmen in Hell; also Florentines.) At other times, he pities the souls he meets and is chastised by Virgil for it. To feel pity is to question the judgment of God. For Satan has no power here; he himself suffers at Hell’s lowest level, bound in ice. It is God who has sentenced unrepentant sinners to this place and designed ingenious torments to echo their crimes. So adulterous lovers are battered by fierce winds that whirl them around in each other’s arms, mimicking the turbulent passion they did not control. Fortune-tellers—those who claimed to know what only God can know—have their heads twisted backward, so they can see nothing but what is behind them. And Ulysses, silver-tongued persuader of men, is encased in a tongue of flame. Yet, however justly these transgressors are condemned, they draw not only Dante’s sympathy but ours, too, luring us into the uneasy position of doubting divine justice.

Going beyond boundaries, daring everything for knowledge, Dante’s Ulysses has much in common with mankind’s faulty prototype, Adam, whom Dante eagerly interrogates in Paradise. (Question: How long did you live in the Garden before biting the apple? Answer: About seven hours.) He also has much in common with Dante himself, in the poet’s sheer gall in taking on this work: entering forbidden territories, exploring the worst and the best of man, trying to penetrate the mind of God. And, although he can’t let go of nagging qualms or dangerous questions, he gives the readers who are persuaded by his silver tongue fair warning. “Turn back if you would see your shores again,” Dante cautions us. “The seas I sail were never sailed before.”

Homer was not one person, it is now generally agreed, but a slowly accumulating oral tradition given a name. Virgil’s Aeneid breaks off suddenly, apparently unfinished, and at his death the poet is said to have asked that the manuscript be burned. (Caesar Augustus intervened.) Dante Alighieri, the successor to these civilization-defining literary forces, was born to a family of moderate means in an Italian city torn by political violence and in an era when the rebirth of classical learning had barely begun. He was a contemporary and possibly an acquaintance of the great Florentine painter Giotto, whom he mentions in the Comedy for having seized attention from Cimabue—Giotto’s former master, who produced images of icon-like rigidity—much as Dante himself will overtake the writers of his youth. Here, in two different arts, is the moment when medieval severity gives way to physical and psychological nuance, when human figures stretch their limbs and take breath. Within a generation, Boccaccio would write that Dante had opened the way for the long-absent Muses to return to Italy.

He was ambitious from the start. Prue Shaw, in her new book, “Dante: The Essential Commedia” (Liveright), emphasizes the exceptional importance and nobility that Dante accords the vocation of the poet, and how, from early on, he believed his powers to be equal to those of the great poets of classical antiquity. His early writing reflected the popular style of the French troubadours, courtly poet-musicians who sang of their longing for a beautiful lady. In his case, the beloved was the unobtainable Beatrice Portinari, a wealthy banker’s daughter whom Dante claimed to have loved from their first meeting, when both were children—a bit of charming self-mythology—and steadily on until her untimely death, at twenty-four. It didn’t seem to matter that he saw her rarely or that both were married off to others for financial and political reasons. The Divine Comedy has nothing to say about Dante’s wife, or their four children. Beatrice was the love that fuelled his poems, which only became more spiritual after her death, when her very name—which suggests beatitude—becomes for him a form of prayer.

If poetry made Dante’s life, politics overturned it. In 1300, in his mid-thirties, he served on a Florentine governing committee that exiled several leaders of two clashing political factions, in a bid for peace. The following year, while Dante was on a diplomatic mission to Rome, his own faction back home was ousted, and he was falsely accused of corruption. He found himself exiled from Florence in absentia and, in 1302, he was sentenced to burn at the stake should he ever return. For the rest of his life—nearly twenty years—he sought refuge in various Italian cities, with their unfamiliar dialects and local cultures, nursing both a bitterness and a longing that are felt in the epic work he undertook. He probably started writing it in about 1307, but he set the poem, very deliberately, before his exile—at Easter, 1300. He called it simply the Comedy, meaning a work that begins in darkness but, unlike a tragedy, ends in light. The adjective “Divine” was added by a printer more than two hundred years later, reflecting both the work’s subject matter and its status.