Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, of a petit bourgeois family. He was ambitious to excel both in politics and in poetry. His first book, La Vita Nuova (The New Life; 1293), an allegorical amalgam of prose and verse, ensured his literary reputation. He was not so fortunate in politics. The year 1301 was his undoing. He was elected in that year to an important post, but while he was on a diplomatic mission outside the city enemies managed to have him condemned for various crimes. He was exiled from Florence and never set foot in his city again. He died in 1321, in Ravenna. Of course by this time he was famous and Florence, which had banished him, petitioned for the return of his body. Ravenna refused, as it does to this day. There are many memorials of Dante in his native city, but his remains are not there.
For the remaining twenty years of his life Dante wandered from city to city throughout Italy, surviving on the undependable generosity of a succession of wealthy men. He learned how salty is the taste, as he wrote, of another’s bread, and how steep are another’s stairs.
La Divina Commedia is in one hundred verse chapters, or cantos, which are assembled into three canzone, or parts. (The first canto is an introduction to the entire poem; each of the three parts then contains thirty-three cantos, for a total of one hundred. Dante is always careful about this sort of detail.) The first part, called Inferno (Hell), relates Dante’s meeting with the Roman poet Virgil, who is to guide him through the Underworld, and their subsequent journey together through Hell. According to Dante, Hell is shaped like an enormous cone of concentric circles, going from greater to less as you descend (as the souls of the sinners punished there grow smaller and meaner). These great circles of Hell correspond more or less to the Seven Deadly Sins. All of these sins are deadly; that is, they all entail remorseless damnation and punishment without relief throughout eternity, but they vary in seriousness and intensity, from Lust, the least serious, through Greed, Avarice, Spiritual Sloth, Anger, and Envy, to Pride, the worst of all.
As Dante and Virgil move down through the circles of Hell they meet real people, many of them historical personages, others personal enemies and even some friends of Dante. In the years at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Dante was writing his poem, most readers recognized these people encountered in Hell, and they appreciated the satirical revenges wrought by Dante upon enemies who had harmed him in his real life. Today, we have to read the notes that accompany any good edition of The Divine Comedy. These notes are often a bore but they have to be read. They are the price that has to be paid to read Dante.
Not only does Hell become smaller the farther Dante descends with Virgil at his side, but it also becomes colder. In the last circle the souls of traitors are frozen in ice, signifying the coldness of their hearts when they were still alive on earth. At the very bottom of Hell, which is also the dead center of the earth, stands the dread figure of Satan, the proudest of all sinners, frozen in the ice up to his waist and grinding in his teeth the arch traitor Judas, who betrayed his friend and master. Having endured all the levels of Hell, Dante is able to pass through its center and emerge on the other side, at the base of the Mountain of Purgatory.
Dante’s and Virgil’s journey through Hell is one of the most famous events in literature. It has been the source of innumerable drawings and paintings and the subject of endless commentaries and critical appreciations. It is true that Dante’s major poetic strengths are much in evidence in Inferno: his skill at characterization, his ability to describe a concrete scene in just a few lines or even a few words so that it suddenly is realized before our very eyes, the power, grace, and flexibility of his verse. It is also true that Inferno contains wonderful and memorable scenes: Paolo and Francesca, guilty lovers doomed forever to enjoy only one another and not God; the Gluttons, gnawed eternally by the teeth of their hunger; the Fallen Angels and the Furies, and the Heavenly Messenger who rescues Dante from them; the great heretic, Farinata degli Uberti, who “entertained great scorn of Hell”; Dante’s old teacher, Brunetto Latini, doomed to run forever in payment for his sexual tastes; the Simonist Popes, already in Hell though not yet dead; Ulysses and his moving account of his own death; the Giants, looming terrible in the half-darkness of deep Hell; Ugolino, with his chilling story of his death and that of his children, immured in the Tower of Pisa.
It is not surprising, then, that so many readers enjoy Inferno and think, when they have finished it, that they have read enough of The Divine Comedy. Alas, they have not! To stop reading there is to miss another side of Dante that is even more wonderful than the tough, graphic realism of Inferno. Some of the most beautiful scenes in poetry are purposely placed by Dante in Purgatorio to balance the horrors of Hell, and the flights of thought and imagination that mark the third part of The Divine Comedy—Paradiso—possess a grandeur and luminosity seen in no other poem.
Purgatorio and Paradiso are no more difficult to read than Inferno, although some readers seem to believe they are. (None of The Divine Comedy is easy to read.) Perhaps this is because evil has come to seem more real than goodness, or it may be that scenes of pain and suffering have a fascination not possessed by scenes of bliss. There is plenty of pain and torment in Purgatorio, too, the difference being that here the suffering is not endless. It is a cleansing not a punishing fire that burns these souls. They will eventually reach Paradise—in a shorter or, perhaps, a longer time, but what matter how long the wait considering the good that is to be found there?
I myself am no longer able to read Inferno. Even though I am the first to concede its incomparable power, emotionally I can hardly stand it. In its place Purgatorio has become my favorite part of The Divine Comedy. I have reached the age when my own death no longer seems impossible, as was the case when I was young. I wonder, these days, about what is likely to happen afterwards. I cannot hope for bliss, certainly not immediate bliss; but I do hope that something like Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory is there to climb. I would be content to spend the necessary time and effort in the climbing in order finally to attain what can be found at the summit.
Virgil, the pagan poet and the symbol, in Dante’s scheme, of enlightened reason without the gift of Grace, is able to guide Dante only to the border of the Earthly Paradise, which surmounts Purgatory. There, Virgil must depart. He can go no farther, for he was not a Christian. The moment when Dante turns to exclaim with pleasure at what he sees, as he has done many times before—and finds Virgil gone—is one of the most affecting in literature.