Translated, edited and introduced by
ROBIN KIRKPATRICK
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The translation of Inferno first published in Penguin Classics 2006
The translation of Purgatorio first published in Penguin Classics 2007
The translation of Paradiso first published in Penguin Classics 2007
This combined edition, with a revised introduction, first published 2012
Translation and editorial material © Robin Kirkpatrick, 2006, 2007, 2012
Cover: Angels of the Mandorla Christi from The Last Judgement by Giotto di Bondone and workshop, c. 1303 – 06, west wall, Arena chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni), Padua, Italy (Photograph © akg- images/Cameraphoto)
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The moral right of the translator and author of the editorial material has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-14-197064-6
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Manuscript Tradition
Map of Italy, c. 1300
Plan of Hell
Plan of Purgatory
Plan of Paradise
THE DIVINE
COMEDY
Inferno
Purgatorio
Paradiso
Notes
PENGUIN 
CLASSICS
DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in Florence in 1265 into a family from the lower ranks of the nobility. He may have studied at the university of Bologna. When he was about twenty, he married Gemma Donati, by whom he had four children. He first met Bice Portinari, whom he called Beatrice, in 1274, and when she died in 1290 he sought consolation by writing the Vita nuova and by studying philosophy and theology. During this time he also became involved in the conflict between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions in Florence; he became a prominent White Guelf, and when the Black Guelfs came to power in 1302, Dante was, while absent from the city, condemned to exile. He took refuge initially in Verona but eventually, having wandered from place to place, he settled in Ravenna. While there he completed the Commedia, which he began in about 1307. Dante died in Ravenna in 1321.
ROBIN KIRKPATRICK graduated from Merton College, Oxford. He has taught courses on Dante’s Commedia in Hong Kong, Dublin and – for more than thirty years – at the university of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Robinson College and Emeritus Professor of Italian and English Literatures. His books include Dante’s Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism (1978), Dante’s Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry (1987) and, in the Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature series, Dante: The Divine Comedy (2004). His own published poetry includes Prologue and Palinodes (1997), and currently he is working on several volumes in which notions of performance are pursued in conjunction with a range of theological considerations.
1224 Saint Francis receives the stigmata
1250 Death of Emperor Frederick II
1260 Defeat of the Guelfs at the battle of Montaperti, leading to seven years of Ghibelline domination in Florence
1265 Dante born, probably 25 May
1266 Defeat of imperial army by the Guelfs and the French under Charles of Anjou at the battle of Benevento
1267 Birth of Giotto; restoration of Guelf rule in Florence under the protection of Charles of Anjou
1274 Deaths of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure
1282 The influence of the guilds starts to grow in Florence
1283 Dante begins his association with the poet Guido Cavalcanti
1289 Dante fights at the battle of Campaldino; Florence, having defeated Arezzo and Ghibelline factions at Campaldino, begins to extend its supremacy over Tuscany
1290 Death of Bice (Beatrice) Portinari
1292 Dante compiles the Vita nuova
1293 Ordinamenti di Giustizia promulgated in Florence
1294 Election and abdication of Pope Celestine V; election of Pope Boniface VIII
1295 Dante enrols in a guild
1296 For five years, Dante is actively involved in the political life of the Florence commune; Rime Petrose probably composed
1300 Dante elected to the office of prior; fictional date of the Commedia
1301 Crisis and coup d’état in Florence; Charles de Valois enters the city; return of Corso Donati; defeat of the White Guelfs by the Black Guelfs
1302 In his absence, Dante formally exiled and sentenced to death by the Black Guelfs
1303 Dante seeks refuge for the first time in Verona; death of Pope Boniface VIII
1304 Dante probably engaged until 1307 on the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia; birth of Petrarch
1305 Pope Clement V detained in Avignon
1307 Possible date for when Dante started the Commedia; accession of Edward II to English throne
1308 Henry VII of Luxembourg elected Holy Roman Emperor in Rome
1310 Dante writes his epistle to Henry: ‘Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile’; Henry enters Italy
1312 Possible (though much debated) date for when Dante started De Monarchia; Henry crowned Holy Roman Emperor
1313 Emperor Henry VII dies; Boccaccio born
1314 Dante begins living for six years in Verona, under the protection of Can Grande della Scala
1318 Dante in Ravenna: in close contact with Guido Novello da Polenta
1320 Dante in Latin verse correspondence with the humanist Giovanni del Virgilio; lectures at university of Verona: Questio de Aqua et Terra
1321 Dante dies in Ravenna, 13 September
In January 1302, at the age of thirty-six, Dante Alighieri was exiled from his native Florence. In the five or six years before that date, he had played an increasingly important role in the political life of the Florentine commune and in 1300 was elected to the governing authority of the city, the Council of Priors. It is this period of Dante’s life that is celebrated in a fresco painted by a contemporary, Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), which depicts the poet among the most prominent citizens of his day. His look is keen, gaunt and defiant. Yet he also seems capable (almost) of smiling; and it is easy to see in Giotto’s portrait something not only of the political activist but also of the delicate young poet who in the 1290s had already dedicated his poetry to ‘Beatrice’ – the Florentine neighbour, Bice Portinari, who married a banker and died an early death in 1290.
Under the impetus given by poets and intellectuals such as Dante himself, a highly sophisticated culture was developing in thirteenth-century Florence. But the city was also wracked by internal dissension and susceptible to pressures from the world beyond its civic boundaries. In 1301, Dante’s party was ousted from power by a coup d’état, and the poet, ‘midway on [his] path in life’ (Inferno 1: 1), subsequently condemned to exile. He never returned to Florence. Accused – falsely, one presumes – of the corrupt exercise of his public office, Dante refused to admit to the charges or accept any ignominious offer of amnesty, preferring, until his death in 1321, to remain as a voice in the wilderness, travelling from place to place in the northern part of the Italian peninsula. He was accompanied for some of this time by two of his three sons – these two being among the first people to write commentaries on their father’s work – and by his daughter, who became a nun and took ‘Beatrice’ as her name in religion. Dante’s wife appears to have remained in Florence.
Little more than this is known about Dante’s life, save for what Dante himself relates – often obliquely – in the Commedia. It is possible that he travelled as far as Paris and visited the great schools of philosophy at the Sorbonne. He must certainly at some time, possibly before his exile, have reached Bologna, about sixty miles from Florence, and been able to develop at its civic university the interests in philosophy that he had pursued as an amateur in Florence. Subsequently, his reputation as a politician, philosopher and poet seems to have secured him a livelihood at some of the great courts of north-east Italy, notably those of Can Grande della Scala (1291–1329), ruler of Verona, and Guido Novello da Polenta (fl. mid-thirteenth century), in Ravenna. Indeed, within fifty years of Dante’s death, Florence itself came to recognize the merits of the erstwhile outlaw – whose writings by now existed in a great many copies, though no autograph script has ever been found. By 1373 Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) had organized a series of public lectures in Florence on the Commedia. But Dante died in exile on 13 September 1321, having perhaps contracted malaria while on a diplomatic mission to Venice. He was buried in Ravenna with great honour at the church of San Pier Maggiore.
One of the most notable features of Dante’s Commedia is the unfailing attention that its author pays to the history and politics of his day. Even in the Paradiso, where the reader might have expected a certain detachment from worldly concerns, Dante can speak movingly (at 17: 58–60) of how bitter it is for him as an exile to climb another man’s stair each night and trace the causes of his personal tragedy to the factionalism that, by 1300, had been brewing in Florence for more than a century. Equally (at 27: 25–7), he can launch a violent attack on the late medieval papacy not only for its corruption – which has turned the sacred territory of Rome into a sewer spilling with ‘blood and pus’ – but also because of its involvement in the political disruptions of which he himself had become the victim.
At no stage, however, are such passages merely the product of embittered nostalgia. Surveying the history of Europe from the vantage point of 1300, Dante accurately identifies some of the major forces which, at that point, were to determine the shape and character of the modern world. There is much here that he resists, in particular the rampant advance of capitalism and nationalism. But always he seeks solutions of his own. In the Commedia he develops a voice which, while often dramatically aggressive, is also quick to celebrate the possibilities and achievements that continue to flare in the contemporary wasteland.
Throughout the thirteenth century, the political and economic life of the Italian peninsula was driven by the interaction of three forces. Two of these – the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church – laid claim to universal jurisdiction. The third force, generated by the emerging economies of the mercantile Italian city states, did not initially make any such claim – though, in effect, the hegemony of the global marketplace that has developed over the last 700 years owes much to its origins in late medieval Italy. From the time of Charlemagne (742–814), crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, Europe had at least a notional principle of unity in feudal allegiance to the imperial throne. There was, of course, little hard reality to support this principle; and by Dante’s time dynastic aspirations began to display themselves in the territories of present-day France, Spain and Italy, which, over the coming centuries, came progressively to displace imperial authority in favour of the ambitions of the several nation states. To Italian eyes – and particularly to Dante’s – there were a few decades at the beginning of the thirteenth century when imperial power seemed to have gained ascendancy in the peninsula. With Frederick II (1194–1250) as emperor, a flourishing imperial culture developed, in which notions of the emperor as the embodiment of universal justice were consciously cultivated. At the same time, the first stirrings of Italian vernacular poetry were discernible at his court and there was even some development of science. (See Inferno 13.) By 1265, however, the claims of Frederick’s dynasty to political control in Italy had been extinguished by a lack of legitimate descendants and through the armed opposition of Church and city state. Nevertheless, as late as 1313 Dante maintained the passionate, if ill-founded, hope that the Empire would return to Italy in the person of Henry VII of Luxembourg (c. 1269–1313) and restore the unity and peace once enjoyed under the rule of ancient Rome.
Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Empire was in conflict, on both ideological and territorial grounds, with a Church that displayed increasing efficiency and appetite as a political institution. The advance of the Papal Curia as an extremely well-regulated civil service encouraged the development of bureaucratic technologies that strengthened central control and allowed the Church to respond rapidly and rapaciously to the decline of imperial power in Italy. A manifestation of what this might produce is the papacy of Boniface VIII, in office from 1294 to 1303. An aristocrat and a lawyer experienced in the wheelings and dealings of the Curia, Boniface claimed the right as pope to intervene directly (if not always successfully) in the local politics of Italy, and was an important protagonist in the coup that led to Dante’s exile. Dante himself speaks of Boniface with often brilliant sarcasm. (See especially Inferno 19 and Purgatorio 20.) Nor was he alone in the odium he expressed: a posthumous trial of the pope accused him of heresy, witchcraft, embezzlement, nepotism and sodomy.
The third feature of the Italian scene was the emergence in the course of the thirteenth century of a considerable number of city states. As they gathered momentum, these urban centres increasingly asserted their independence and were inclined to forge self-interested alliances. These were established in league, sometimes, with the Empire against neighbouring city states. But cities also formed alliances with the Church against the Empire, which – though in decline – could still claim suzerainty over lands that were now increasingly subject to the influence of mercantile and banking interests. The huge energies of the city state were to find expression not only in trade but also in intellectual ambition and artistic achievement. It was in this complex and highly charged arena that Dante most directly encountered the intersecting currents that impelled and wracked the social order into which he was born. By the end of the twelfth century, Florence was expanding rapidly as a workshop for luxury goods and, increasingly, as a centre of financial expertise. Migrant workers from the surrounding countryside flooded in – bringing the population of the city from approximately 30,000 in 1200 to something like 100,000 in 1300, and leading to a corresponding expansion of the city limits. (See Inferno 15 and Paradiso 15–17.) The feudal nobility also began to set up working establishments in the city, which allowed them to share in its economic success. Energies and tensions ran high. Rivalries – often between aristocratic factions or between noblemen and nouveaux riches – were rife. Clan opposed clan. And, where marriage alliances failed, murder was likely to prove the alternative. In the course of the thirteenth century, two partisan groupings, along with lesser and more shifting factions, developed aggressively visible identities: the Ghibelline party, proclaiming allegiance to the increasingly beleaguered Empire, and the Guelfs, who, even though they themselves were often nobles of feudal origin, tended to look pragmatically to the future, associating with the new power of the papacy while also supporting the claims of northern dynasties such as the Angevin. Despite these turf wars – which saw ascendancy switch from Ghibelline to Guelf and back again – civic and ecclesiastical planning prospered during the period, and Florence became remarkable for the vigour and beauty of its building programme.
The 1260s, the decade in which Dante was born, saw a number of crucial developments. In 1260, the Ghibellines, riding on a final surge of imperial influence, won a military victory over the Guelfs, which was apparently so decisive that they could easily have chosen to raze the city of Florence to the ground. (See Inferno 10.) Yet by 1266, the influence of the Empire in Italy had been extinguished and the Guelf cause came to prevail, producing a period of stability which was to endure for at least thirty-five years. Dante’s own family was a minor scion of an aristocratic Guelf clan. But political involvement had, by mid-century, come to depend upon membership of the great trade guilds that oversaw the interests of the commercial commune. Dante’s father, Alighiero Alighieri (d. c. 1283), who died in or before the poet’s eighteenth year (his mother had died much earlier), seems to have worked on the shadier margins of the banking industry, possibly as a money-lender. He did not qualify to belong to any guild. Alighiero Alighieri, though known to contemporary texts, is never mentioned by Dante himself. But Dante (unlike his father) became a nominal member of the Guild of Physicians and Pharmacists. Thus, while he came to detest many aspects of Guelf polity, he was formally qualified to take an active part in the political life of the city.
By the late 1290s, the Guelf party itself had divided into two factions, the Blacks and the Whites. The Blacks (who by 1301 were temporarily in exile) were led by Corso Donati (d. 1308), described by Dante (Purgatorio 24: 82–7) as the one ‘most to blame dragged at a horse’s tail towards the ditch [Hell]’. It is an indication of how finely drawn were the lines of internal division (and also perhaps of Dante’s open-mindedness and delicacy in discrimination) that Corso’s brother, Forese Donati (d. 1296), was one of Dante’s closest friends – and appears as a redeemed sinner in Purgatorio 23 – while Corso’s sister, Piccarda Donati (c. 1270–c. 1298/9?), is found among the blessed in Paradiso 3 delivering one of the most important accounts of love and order in the whole Commedia.
Corso, however, had a clearer eye for political advantage than Dante. He formed alliances with both the Church and Angevin armies, who were marching close to Florence. The city, under a supposedly non-partisan government, sought to rally the guilds, who failed, however, to muster any unified defiance to the military threat. In early November 1301, while Dante was out of the city on a last-ditch diplomatic mission to Rome, the French armies under Charles de Valois (1270–1325) came within striking distance of Florence and installed the Blacks in power. Along with members of the White Guelf faction, Dante was banished from the city.
The dark wood of Inferno 1 may be thought in large part to represent Dante’s own entanglement in the world of Florentine politics, a place of sterile barbarity, remote from all true civilization. But even in the midst of desolation, Dante is seeking to construct a solution: ‘my theme will be the good I found there’ (Inferno 1: 8). And the first good that he finds is an authoritative guide, encountered dramatically at lines 62–6, who will lead him forward in purposeful discovery. This is Virgil (b. 70 BC, near Mantua), author of the Aeneid.
To identify Virgil as the immediate source of his salvation is an astonishing decision on Dante’s part. Not only is Virgil a poet and a pagan rather than some accredited Christian authority, he is also himself an inhabitant of Hell. (See Inferno 4.) As will be seen, the implications of these extraordinary facts resonate throughout the whole Commedia. Yet considering Dante’s predicament, as both a politician and as a poet, there are at least two ways in which Virgil may be seen to answer directly to Dante’s needs.
In the first place, as author of the Aeneid, Virgil points to certain political considerations that Dante will continue to explore in philosophical writings such as De Monarchia. The Aeneid tells of how, at the fall of Troy, Aeneas led his refugee band away from the ruins of the city and eventually brought them to Italy where, in founding Rome, he also lays the foundations for the Roman Empire. Dante, in De Monarchia, proceeds to meditate philosophically on the significance of the Roman Empire. On his understanding, it is an institution authorized by God Himself and intended to bring justice and peace to the whole human race. (See also Paradiso 6.) In particular, Roman justice alone can be seen as the answer to the partisan strife which the avarice and greed of mercantile cities such as Florence have fomented. Facing the bitter consequences of that strife in exile – in the dark wood – it is natural that Dante should turn to Virgil who first celebrated the principles, embodied in the hero Aeneas, that underlay the establishment of the Empire.
In the Commedia, however, matters of philosophy can never be seen in isolation from those of poetic form. And in choosing Virgil as his guide, Dante also signalled a radical change of direction in his poetic career. Until he began the Commedia, he had written almost exclusively within the lyrical love tradition of his day. Vernacular poetry, which had been developing in Italy before he began to write, had cultivated the idiom of a refined meditation on the meaning of love, deriving in some measure from the love poets of Provence. In its most sophisticated form such poetry had been intended for private circulation among an elite circle of like-minded individuals – such as those in Florence whom Dante designates the stil novisti, poets of the ‘sweet new style’. (See Purgatorio 24: 57 and 26: 97–9.) But now with the example of Virgil’s Aeneid Dante sets himself to write a public poem, a narrative work which aims to explore the political and ethical principles on which a successful society must always depend. Thus at Inferno 1: 85–7 Dante can proclaim that it is Virgil who has taught him his fine new style. This may be seen as an exaggeration, since there is little evidence, before the Commedia itself, that Virgil had influenced Dante’s way of writing. These lines do, however, reflect, as a matter of pride, Dante’s new intention to distinguish himself from his contemporaries by close attention in terms of style and moral purpose to the example of Virgil’s Latin poem. Under the influence of Virgil, Dante now comes to see his exile, not as an occasion for despair, but rather as the stimulus to an epic endeavour comparable to that which Aeneas undertook to re-establish a homeland, at least an intellectual one, for himself and all true Florentines.
Central as Virgil proves to be in the narrative of the Commedia, it would be a mistake to suppose that Dante slavishly followed Virgil’s example, or to suggest that he ever ceased to develop the conception of love and the lyrical modes of expression that he had first discovered in his devotion to Beatrice. It is crucial in reading the Commedia to take seriously the declaration, recorded in Paradiso 31, which speaks of Beatrice as the ultimate source of his personal salvation and the true inspiration of his poetry. Indeed, while Beatrice does not appear in the poem until the final cantos of the Purgatorio, she is already identified in Inferno 2 as the voice, speaking on behalf of Heaven, who commissions Virgil to assume his role as Dante’s guide. Beyond the harmony that imperial justice might bring about, there is an ultimate harmony with the divine powers that first brought into being and now sustain the created order of the universe. The final line of the Commedia will speak of the ‘love that moves the sun and other stars’. And on Dante’s account he originally began to understand how he himself might be moved by and participate in the universal activity of love by his particular experience of Beatrice’s presence. At no point in the Commedia is justice shown to be at odds with love. But the final fruit of justice will be a condition in which one is free to contemplate, unimpeded by faction, friction and political strife, the goodness of all creation.
If, then, Dante learns from Virgil how to be an epic poet, he also remains, as he always was, a love poet. And the goal of his epic endeavour is to reaffirm the Christian truth that our home, whether in time or eternity, is not a geographical location to be secured by territorial ambition but a revelation of the fundamental relationships that should and can be expressed in love of our neighbours and the whole of the created order. In arriving at this understanding, Dante will greatly magnify and minutely define his original conception of love. (See especially Purgatorio 16–18.) And in doing so, his journey will at times take on the character both of an educational syllabus and of a pilgrimage of faith, in which his understanding of Christian love will be systematically supported by reference to the most sophisticated thinkers of the late Middle Ages, including Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). The heroes of his poem will prove to be not warriors such as Aeneas, but saints such as Saint Francis and Saint Dominic (Paradiso 11–12), along with the innumerable men and women of his own time whom Dante celebrates, in the Purgatorio and Paradiso, for the richness of their earthly lives. But in all these figures – and also in himself – he will always be seeking evidence of that joy in existence which Beatrice inspired in him. That joy, as he argues in Purgatorio 16, is the very condition of the lives that God, who is for Dante not a judge but a ‘joyous Maker’ (line 89), always intended us to pursue.
To many of its readers, the Commedia is remarkable above all as a great intellectual synthesis, a summa sustained by the confidence that all things in the universe can be fully understood and all things explained. On this reading, Dante’s poem has frequently been compared to a great Gothic cathedral. And those who favour such an analogy are likely to argue that the work is a characteristic product of the late Middle Ages, of a period in which Christian faith joined hands with Christian reason and confidently developed (as did the writings of Aquinas) a comprehensive account of our relationship to God and of the cosmos that He had created.
Scholars may now question whether the late Middle Ages offered as unified a picture of the world as it has sometimes been thought to do. And it is certainly doubtful whether Dante, faced with the controversies that animated the intellectual, as well as the political life, of the period, would have remained a passive inheritor of that system. (See his overview in Paradiso 10–14.) His thought is too individualistic and idiosyncratic for that. None the less, the overall plan that he devised for his poem – including the landscape through which he imagines himself to be travelling – reflects a mind that was devoted to the concept of order in a philosophical perspective while, at the same time, proving capable of great leaps of imagination and narrative invention.
The Inferno, despite the manifold horrors that Dante envisages there, differs from those depictions of Hell, common in his own time, which indulged an understanding of sin and evil as sheer ugliness and chaotic violence. Against unbridled disorder, Dante pictures a graded descent, leading from the surface of the earth (Dante knew it was round) to its dead centre, where Satan, displaying the utmost deformation of dignity and person, stands imprisoned in ice. Each successive circle of Hell reflects Dante’s progressive analysis of the ways in which sin destroys the goodness that he believes to be the essential attribute of all created beings. In pursuing this analysis, he draws as much upon classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero as he does upon Christian thinkers. (See notes to Inferno 11.) And the results of his diagnosis are often surprising, even to the modern reader. Why, for instance, are the sins of flattery and seduction deemed to be so much more heinous than those of lust and greed? Why is it that, for Dante, the worst sin of all is treachery, whether to friends, guests, nations or benefactors? In asking such questions as these, the reader is drawn to engage with Dante’s own developing conception of how order, in the intellectual and ethical sphere, is finally to be understood.
Even more original than Dante’s depiction of Hell is his picture of Purgatory. The doctrine of Purgatory had only recently been formulated, and such descriptions as were available generally represented it as a subterranean region in which penitents suffered punishments identical to those suffered by the eternally damned, save that their sufferings were only temporary in duration, endured as a remedial preparation for the pleasures of Heaven. Dante, for his own purposes, takes a very different view, drawing upon a talent for invention more associated today with a writer of science fiction. On this understanding, when Satan fell from Heaven, the impetus of his fall drove him to the centre of the terrestrial globe. But what, Dante seems to have asked himself, was the logical result of this? Where did the mass of earthly matter that Satan had displaced disappear to? His answer is that, since Satan struck the earth at the point which was later to be named Jerusalem, the core of matter that he gouged out was extruded into the southern hemisphere, at the antipodes of Jerusalem, to form a mountain-island – on the summit of which is the Garden of Eden. This mountain is now Mount Purgatory, where penitents will spend centuries on its slopes, recovering by their own willing efforts the happiness that was lost to humanity by the fall of Adam and Eve. Free as this flight of rigorous fancy undoubtedly is, it serves to embody some of Dante’s most characteristic emphases, in the philosophical as well as the poetic sphere. Hence, for instance, Satan’s fall, so far from precipitating disaster in God’s universe, serves to create a realm in which sin can always be redeemed. Adam and Eve are created in Satan’s stead. And even when they sin, their sins can be redeemed through penitential assimilation to the sufferings of Christ. Nor is redemption simply a matter of transcending one’s human nature in pursuit of some transcendently angelic ideal. On the contrary, Dante’s Purgatory as a natural environment – subject to the passage of time, the play of the senses in the diurnal alternation of day and night – invites its inhabitants to recover the human selfhood that they were always intended to enjoy through the full exercise of their intellectual and sensuous natures.
Dante’s powers of architectonics and invention do not desert him in the Paradiso. The Heaven that he depicts is no vaguely suggestive symphony of pleasing melodies and delightful illumination. Order again is his concern; and the originality of his conception resides in a triumphant realization that the rational mind is born to enjoy the rationally appreciable ordering of the cosmic system. The journey here, until its very last phase, ascends through the planetary spheres as studied by Dante in the pages of the best astronomical science that was available to him. The planetary heavens from the moon to Saturn mark the stages of his journey, and Paradise, on the view that emerges from his poem, becomes a realization of the variety and refreshment that the created cosmos was intended to offer to the searching mind.
For all that, too strong an emphasis upon the coherence and architectural characteristics of Dante’s poem can sometimes prove misleading and distort the character of his thinking and achievement. Doubt, for Dante, is a productive state of mind. This is true even in the Paradiso, where, if one were to suppose that Christian faith was simply a matter of comforting certitude, one might imagine that Dante would have been content to offer, faithfully, a simple reaffirmation of established doctrine. Yet at 4: 124–32, the poet declares that doubt springs like a growing shoot from the base of truth and drives the mind onwards to ever greater understanding.
In literary terms, too, the narrative of the Commedia displays a dynamic interest in effects of dislocation, hesitation, surprise and sudden illumination. As most readers will testify, the poet demonstrates exceptional skill in the handling of episode, in cinematic cliffhangers, fades-to-black, unexpected changes of tempo. But these effects are never merely incidental. They encourage attention to critical moments in Dante’s visions where his thinking itself needs to begin anew or pursue some new direction, as, for instance, in Inferno 8 and 9 where Virgil – having a mere seven cantos previously been chosen as Dante’s trusted guide – proves inadequate to the task. (Compare Inferno 5–6, 16–17, Purgatorio 20–21 and Paradiso 6–7, 19–20 and 21–2.) But these same moments also indicate how unremittingly, as the Commedia advances, Dante develops and refashions language, image and motif. This is particularly evident in his handling of the sources on which he draws, whether these be classical, Scriptural or vernacular. In assimilating earlier texts Dante, at all points, is prepared to experiment, interpreting or combining these texts to serve his own artistic ends.
Consider, for instance, how subtly his treatment of Virgil – and of the Aeneid – gradually develops. As we have seen, Dante departs decisively from contemporary practice in claiming that Virgil has taught him ‘the fine-tuned style that has, already, brought [him] so much honour’ (Inferno 1: 86–7); and he reinforces this claim in Inferno 4, where he pictures himself as a new member of the ancient school of poets that includes not only Virgil but also Homer, Ovid, Horace and Lucan. Yet from the outset the very form of narrative that Dante chooses to adopt differs radically from that in the Aeneid, where the narrative unit – also employed by subsequent writers of epic such as John Milton – is book length, extending always to some 600 lines or more, thereby allowing for sustained and coherent development of action and atmosphere. By contrast, Dante’s cantos are never more than 160 lines long, so that author (and the reader, too) is at every point challenged to re-forge connections or establish some new angle of perception. Furthermore, while the Aeneid is prominent in Dante’s mind, especially in the early Inferno, he increasingly draws upon the example of Virgil’s pastoral poetry – the Eclogues and the Georgics. (See, in particular, the opening of Inferno 24.) Indeed, by Purgatorio 22: 57, Virgil is referred to as ‘the singer of the farming songs’. The fourth of Virgil’s Eclogues – which speaks of the coming of a golden world of justice – was regularly taken in Dante’s time to be a prophecy of Christ’s nativity. Then finally, in depicting Virgil as a character in his fictional journey, Dante perpetrates a great many liberties upon the Roman patriarch. So, for example, at one point in Inferno 24, Virgil is shown to accelerate Dante’s escape from a band of pursuing demons by hoisting his pupil on to his stomach and sliding down a precipitous cliff-face, with all the instinctual energy of a mother saving her child from a burning house. Through a series of such moments, the relationship between Dante and Virgil emerges less as a heroic companionship such as the Aeneid had depicted than as a matter of intimate nuance and, at times, comedy, deserving to be compared with the relationship, say, between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
A similar inventiveness marks Dante’s treatment of other authors in the classical pantheon. For instance, Statius (d. c. AD 96) wrote his epic poem Thebaid to depict, in spectacular fashion, the corruption and divisions that arose in Thebes after the death of Oedipus. The Inferno, being itself the depiction of a degenerate city, draws prolifically on references to the Thebaid. (See Inferno 12, 32 and 33.) Yet when Statius himself appears in Dante’s poem, it is in Purgatorio 21, where he joins Virgil as Dante’s guide on the last stage of the penitential journey. Moreover, entirely without historical justification, Dante represents the Latin poet as a secret convert to Christianity (at the time of imperial persecution) and, indeed, the only Christian who, in a great coup de théâtre, is released from penance in the course of Dante’s three days on the Mountain. The implications of this exuberant invention (see notes to this canto) are only complicated and deepened when Statius in the course of the episode claims to have been not only taught how to write epic poetry through observing Virgil’s example but also taught how to be a Christian by reading Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. (See Purgatorio 22: 73.)
Consider, likewise, Dante’s treatment of Ovid. In terms purely of narrative technique, Ovid may well be regarded as a greater influence on the Commedia than Virgil is. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are deliberately anti-Virgilian in their spectacular and often amoral portrayal of a shifting and unstable world of physical transformations. The appeal of Ovid’s narrative lies in its cultivation of sensuous effect, shock, horror and fictional extravagance. And Dante in Inferno 25: 97 – where he depicts the phantasmagoric transformation of sinners into snakes and snakes into sinners – can explicitly claim to outdo anything Ovid might have achieved. Yet Ovid’s work remains an influence even in the Paradiso. When, in Paradiso 1, Dante imagines his own unimaginable transformation on entering a world of pure intelligence, the text he draws upon is Ovid’s account of how Glaucus became a sea god. (See Paradiso 1: 67–72.) In the same canto, at lines 19–21, when the poet invokes Apollo, in addition to the Muses, he also recalls the Ovidian story of Marsyas, the satyr who challenged Apollo to a flute-playing contest and, on losing, was flayed alive. This violent act is now seen as a metaphor for inspiration, by virtue of which Dante seeks to be wholly possessed by the example and presence of Apollo, who can be understood to be Christ himself.
The two principles underlying Dante’s treatment of classical literature are those of assimilation and experiment. And these principles extend also to his handling of Scriptural reference and the allusions he makes to the vernacular literature of his own day. He has constant recourse to the narratives of the Judaic and Christian traditions, in citation, particularly of the Psalms, the prophetic books, the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. Although these citations are usually less explicit than his quotations from classical texts, they are far greater in number. Commonly, Scriptural reference is combined with classical (see, for instance, Purgatorio 30: 10–21), and, in this regard, Dante shows himself to be syncretist, claiming to reconcile all forms of literary text – whether classical, Scriptural or Christian – in a manifestation of how divine truth is progressively revealed through history.
In his dealings with the contemporary literature in the vernacular tradition, Dante, while claiming superiority by virtue of his interest in classical literature, engages at all points with the works of poets who have immediately preceded him. At times his treatment is polemical, as in Inferno 28, where the troubadour poet Bertran de Born (for whom Dante had once expressed admiration) appears as a decapitated corpse in one of the most violent cantos of the cantica. At other points, Dante acknowledges the influence of poets of the Occitan literature of southern France (which inspired the rise of vernacular literature throughout Europe), as when Arnaut Daniel is placed at the summit of Purgatory, speaking indeed in a Dantean version of his own mother tongue (Purgatorio 26: 142–7). Dante, in his celebration of Beatrice, will certainly claim to have taken this tradition to a higher level. But from first to last, he can only do so, on his own account, because he has appropriated and refined the lyric poetry that preceded him. The same may be said of his references to the narrative traditions in the vernacular, whose main examples of narrative had been the prose romances in French concerning the Arthurian legends of errant and love-lorn knights. The essential form of these narratives is that of the quest. And Dante may have been conscious of having enriched this tradition and also to have seen its shortcomings. His own narrative is not only an epic poem on the model of the Aeneid but also a romance, a quest for lost love, an ordeal displaying the virtues and prowess of the lover in the eyes of the lady. Indeed, in Inferno 1, Virgil’s enigmatic appearance carries with it something of the aura of a fable and far-off legend, as – refusing to name himself – he lays before Dante a series of cryptic hints as to who he is and what Dante’s destiny must be.
Among the most distinctive features of Dante’s narrative in the Commedia is its interest in the psychology, actions and fate of the human individual. It is this concern that has led readers to place the Commedia alongside the plays of the Elizabethan period and the great novels of the nineteenth century. Shakespeare is unlikely to have read Dante’s work, but he shares with him an interest in representing people at points of crisis. Honoré de Balzac in his Comédie humaine (1842–53) consciously attempts to emulate the detail and variety that Dante brings to his observation of human beings. Dante is undoubtedly sensitive to the appeal exerted by the voices of particular and recognizable (usually historical) people. Supremely skilful at creating such voices, he is clearly conscious of the deep pathos that arises in contemplating the loss or destruction of these individuals. The most familiar example occurs in Inferno 5, where Dante represents the delicate figure of the adulterous Francesca trapped in the filigree of her own fine sentiments in a way that could be taken to anticipate Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. There are almost as many comparable characters in the Commedia as there are cantos. And many readers of the poem – especially if they are influenced by nineteenth-century styles of interpretation – are, not unreasonably, content to focus their attentions on such dominant personalities as the Florentine patriot Farinata (Inferno 10), the intellectual adventurer Ulysses (Inferno 26) or Count Ugolino, the agonized but cannibalistic father of Inferno 33.
Yet for all Dante’s evident interest in the details of human behaviour, he also sets himself to explore fully the ethical relationships that could or should exist, in the social sphere, between one individual and another. Equally, under the impulse of his theological vision, his poem is intended to reveal the most fundamental relationship of all, that between all human beings and the source of their being ‘in the hand of God’. (See especially Purgatorio 16.) This exploration begins, in the Inferno, with a realization of how disastrously human individuals can be divided from their own true selves, from their fellow creatures and from their Creator. Then, progressively in the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, the poet recuperates an understanding of what our lives were always at their best intended to be. But in the course of this long investigation, he develops a view (sometimes, it seems, to his own amazement) that directly challenges some of the preconceptions that the reader, especially the modern reader, is likely to bring to the text. The points at issue are both philosophical and theological. The first concerns the structure of the human being, in particular the connection between mind and body. The second concerns the ways in which we think about good and evil.
In philosophical terms, Dante may, in a certain sense, be regarded as a great rationalist. Virgil, as his guide in both Hell and Purgatory, is frequently taken as an allegorical representation of our rational faculties. It is also evident that Dante, as a philosopher, was deeply indebted (as was Saint Thomas Aquinas) to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whom he describes (at Inferno 4: 132) as ‘the master of all those who think and know’. Indeed, initially sin is diagnosed from a rational point of view, unaided or unimpeded by specifically Christian categories of thought. One might even say that sin in the Inferno is seen less as an offence against God than as a crime against humanity, in which the clarity of rational perception is fatally clouded or perverted. It follows from this that the worst of sins, according to the plan of Hell, is not lust or greed or even avarice but rather treachery, which is punished at the very centre of Hell. Traitors – whether to family, friends or nation – undermine the best institutions that human beings have rationally established. They are now imprisoned in ice; and this punishment is an exact indication of how, in Dante’s view, treachery wholly extinguishes the fruitful capacity for love that exists in all individuals.
In speaking, however, of Dante’s rationalism, one needs also to emphasize that his view of reason is by no means identical to that which has become familiar since the European Enlightenment (and still dominates the popular view). We may now suppose, taking science as our model, that hypothesis, experiment and the dispassionate assessment of evidence are the essential characteristics of rational procedure. Dante would not wholly dissent. To this understanding, however, with its emphasis upon neutrality of view and clarity of neutral analysis, he would add the realization that reason is the central factor in our ethical lives and is deeply engaged in our pursuit of happiness. On the account offered in the central cantos of the Purgatorio (16 and 17), the core of human personality is freedom of the will. And, for Dante, it is the will that impels us constantly to pursue those objects and purposes that bring us, individually, to fruition but also lead us to collaborate with those whose lives are lived alongside our own. As the Inferno demonstrates, Hell is the condition of those who refused in the course of their lives to free themselves from destructively self-imprisoning appetites. The Purgatorio and Paradiso proceed to investigate how wide the field of human possibilities might be if people set their minds upon the pursuit of rational freedom. Dantean reason, therefore, is concerned less with the production of logically valid assertions than with the search for what is truly good. It is also the common bond between all human beings engaged upon this search. In this respect the possession of reason carries with it a commitment to discourse: to argument, but also to conversation and persuasion; to logic, but also to rhetoric. Correspondingly, the characters whom Dante condemns or applauds represent the many historical figures from whom he sought to disassociate himself or towards whom, as members of the intellectual community, he owed some particular debt of gratitude.
Where the mind is expected to engage in the pursuit of rational good, what part does the body have to play in such a journey? There is scarcely an episode in the Commedia that does not in some way focus upon the human body, its gestures and its dynamics. Sodomites dance like greased gymnasts under a rain of fire (Inferno 16); blind penitents tilt back their heads – as the visually impaired observably do (Purgatorio 13); saints yearn towards God like babies seeking milk at their mother’s breast (Paradiso 23). Behind such details lies a philosophical perspective, infused by Christian belief, that marks Dante off from any school of thought that disparages or recoils from the physicality of the human condition. Nothing would seem more natural than to insist upon a division between body and spirit, and to locate the core of human identity in its spiritual characteristics. But Dante is no dualist. His very conception of a human soul denies that he could be. For Dante – as for Aristotle – the soul, or (in Italian) anima, is neither more nor less than the animating form of the body. All forms of life that are capable even of minimal self-motivation are endowed with a soul, whether vegetable, animal or rational, which impels them to seek what is good for their existence, be it food, procreation or pleasure. Human beings differ from other life forms only in having more complex forms of good to pursue if they are to survive and flourish: reading, music, friendship and social cohesion are just some of these. But none of these are attainable without physical effort and thus they include and subsume animal motivations. Reading requires a healthy and attentive eye, for instance; friendship requires a handclasp. We are rational beings, but we live our lives in and through the specific stories that our physical existence in space and time demands that we should enter. This is what being human means and, for Dante, it is good that this should be so.
Inferno 6