Q.E.D.

Dante Alighieri

The Creator of the Divine Comedy

The year 1265 must be regarded as one of the most significant dates in the history of European culture, for in that year, in the city of Florence, one of Europe's greatest poets, Dante Alighieri, was born. The city had already become a large and prosperous place deriving its increasing wealth from banking and textiles and its growing fame from its art, architecture and learning. But it was also, like so many of the city-states in late medieval Italy, a place riven with the violent internecine strife of ambitious family groupings struggling for power. We know little certain knowledge of the early life of the boy, Dante, except that he grew up in an old Florentine family and probably received his education at the hands of both the Franciscan and Dominican friars: the relatively newly-founded, but dominant teaching orders. He himself was to become deeply immersed in the politics of the city, but long before he entered public life, and long before he wrote any of his poetry, an event occurred which was to be the focal point of his entire existence. The year 1274 is a date almost equally important as the birth date of Dante, for it was in this year that, at the age of nine, he met, and fell in love with, a girl only a little younger than himself whom we know as Beatrice. They met only two - or perhaps three - times after this early encounter, and no-one knows what the girl Beatrice Portinari, thought of the ardent young man, Dante Alighieri. Beatrice herself had, before her twenty-fifth birthday, already been married and had died; yet she became the source of the inspiration of his greatest poetry: the Divina Commedia, a work that has come to be universally recognised as one of the masterpieces of literature. It is not only a work to which later generations of writers refer with an admiration amounting to awe, but one that has helped to shape the thinking and imagination of the whole of Western European civilisation.

As a young man Dante became a member of a group of poets who were beginning to break away from the style and vocabulary of traditional forms of religious and love poetry to forge what became known as the dolce stil nuovo, the 'sweet new style'; and in 1292, four years after the death of Beatrice, Dante wrote the book which was to signal to the world the arrival of a major new talent, the Vita Nuova; a work which springs out his love for Beatrice and tells the story of that original encounter and the subsequent loss of his beloved. It still has echoes of style of the poetry of courtly love but it carries the connection between the passionate love of the beloved and the glory of divine love to remarkable, even scanda lous, lengths. It consists of thirty-one poems interspersed with prose commentaries and has, to modern ears, a formal, elaborate and extravagant method of presentation. In other words it is not the kind of love poetry that we have become accustomed to; nonetheless, it gives a vivid picture of the coming into being of a great poetic gift joined to a profound and penetrating mind. And it is revolutionary: Many of the love poets of the era address their beloved in terms of exaggerated praise, speaking of them as ones sent from heaven; Dante goes much further: Beatrice is seen as conveying in her person something of the glory of God appearing in the streets of Florence and, in the end, draws Dante up to heaven. Beatrice dies and is lost to Dante; but though lost to the poet in the streets of Florence, she will return to him later in his visionary imagination as he begins the Divine Comedy ten years later and encounters her again as he approaches Paradise.

But before he began work on the poem that would establish his immortality as an artist, Dante was involved, between the years 1292 and 1302, in the fractious politics of his native city. By the end of the century he had become one of the six priors, high ranking officials who, with the podesta, governed the city. But as the thirteenth century turned into the fourteenth century, Florence was, once again, torn apart by civil conflict; conflict that arose, this time, out of the rivalry between the two factions of the Guelph party - Dante was on the losing side. While he was out of Florence on an ambassadorial mission to the Pope in 1301 his enemies came to power and in the following year pronounced a sentence of exile on him. He never saw his beloved city again, and it was in exile that he produced the great works by which he is known. Again, little is known in detail of the early years of his exile but he was given shelter for a large part of that time at the court of the ruler of the city of Verona, Can Grande della Scala. It was there that he was joined by his sons. But in 1318 we find him in the court of Guido Novella da Polenta, ruler of the city of Ravenna. It was in Ravenna that he died in 1321 and in that city that he was buried. In these years of bitter exile the works flowed from his pen - many of them unfinished, either because the manuscripts have been lost or because he himself abandoned them before completion. In 1303 he began his work De Eloquentia, a treatise in Latin which is both a disquisition on the nature of language and a defence of the use of the vernacular. In 1304 a substantial work of philosophy, Il Convivio, was begun. Written in Italian, it is essentially a commentary on three philosophical poems he had written earlier in his life which has the purpose of making accessible to the general reader some of the disputes that had occupied the minds of the professional philosophers in the great schools. In this work themes appear which are taken up in the Comedy. The outlines of Dante's Catholic philosophy and theology are already in evidence. Much attention is given to the relation between faith and reason and it is noticeable that Dante places a high value on the power of reason to realise, at the level of nature, the potentialities of the human being. For Dante, as for Thomas Aquinas, reason and intelligence prepare the ground for faith and revelation. This, in itself, is not remarkable; what, however, will seem remarkable to the modern reader is the place accorded to love. This love, as we shall see from the Comedy, is not mere emotion, but operates as the fundamental law of the universe; indeed, the universe is governed by love. It is here too that Dante adumbrates the cosmology, his theory of the disposition and movements of the stars and planets in the universe, that will inform and provide the context for the narrative of the Comedy. In 1312 - 1313 his work on political philosophy, De Monarchia, (in Latin) appeared. Here Dante is again revolutionary, for he proposes a radical separation of temporal and spiritual power. The authority of the State exists so that every person may reach his or her own 'liberty and power' at the level of natural existence and prepare the way for the grace of spiritual life. The authority of the Church exists to bring every human being to the enjoyment of the beatific vision. The State is under the governance of the Emperor: the Church under the governance of the Pope. Neither is to trespass upon the sphere of the other. And all the time, from 1302 to his death in 1321, he was writing what was to become, like the plays of William Shakespeare or Faust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, one of the undisputed masterpieces of Western European literature, the Divina Commedia.

The Comedy is one of the most carefully wrought and meticulously organised of all great literary works. The number three, the number of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, dominates symbolically. The poem is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. After an introductory canto in Inferno, each part has thirty-three cantos. His verse-form is the terza rima a three-line stanza. Dante calls it a 'comedy' on the simple grounds that it begins in sadness and ends in happiness. It is not written in either the elaborate style of courtly love poetry or in the lofty style of philosophical verse, but in the swiftly-moving style of colloquial, Florentine Italian; and it is the story of the poet's visionary journey from darkness to light; from earth, through hell, to heaven. It is also a great Christian allegory of the journey of the soul as it is drawn from the chaos and confusion of this world to the sight of God. It is profoundly Christian in its sensibility and profoundly Catholic in its theology. But where it is most astonishing is in its portrayal of human love and the place it is given in the mystery of salvation; at the heart of this poem is Dante's love for Beatrice and the redemptive power of that love. This is where Dante transforms the tradition of love poetry he had inherited. As against the old tradition, love is not merely a hopeless passion or an exhilarating madness, it is also a matter of intelligence and obedience. As against the modern Romantic tradition, love is not an end in itself but points away from itself to its divine origin. This is precisely the function Beatrice performs in the theological scheme of the poem. She exists both as herself, the girl with whom Dante fell in love, and also as the sign and vehicle of the love of God.

Throughout the journey Dante is guided: first by the 'shade' of the poet he most admired, Virgil, the poet par excellence, of the Roman Empire; then by Beatrice herself; and finally by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. It is Virgil who comes, at the behest of Beatrice, to lead him into hell and through the darkness and terrors of the circles of the damned to the place of salvation. Virgil, like Beatrice, is both himself, Dante's poetic master of the first century, and also the allegorical figure of Reason. The 'geography' of Inferno, while influenced by Virgil's description of the underworld in his own Aeneid, is, nonetheless, Dante's own creation. Having passed thr ough the limbo of the virtuous pagans, the two travellers enter the infernal regions themselves and move down through the circles of the damned: first through those in which the sins of incontinence are punished, then through the circles of false belief, then of malice, then of violence, and finally of treachery. Dante's characteristic rhetorical device throughout Inferno is the contrapasso: in each place an appropriate punishment is devised for the particular sin that is under discussion. The result is an astonishingly vivid and, often distressing, portrait sin and damnation. As they make their journey Dante speaks to the denizens of these terrible places to learn their history and articulate a theology. It must be stressed that no person is condemned to these regions by the arbitrary will of a vengeful deity; every sinner is there because a free choice has been made to reject the good and choose the evil. Dante's theological vision of the afterlife is based upon a doctrine of radical freewill; the belief that every human being is able to make this choice between good and evil freely. At the bottom of Inferno are the traitors, confined in a sea of ice, a sea in which Satan himself is also imprisoned. This figure of Satan is of particular interest, for the portrayal of him as helplessly beating the air with his wings, emphasises the conviction of Dante that human beings bring about, and are responsible for, their own condemnation: the b lame for wickedness cannot be shifted away from individual human beings, on to the influence of some supernatural malignan t force. Dante and Virgil emerge from this world of horror and damnation into the country of the redeemed: Purgatorio.