DANTE & THE DIVINE COMEDY
The great agent of progress in the world is pain and the unhappy being that wishes to develop themselves and cannot find easy means to do so.
- Renán
Over six hundred years ago, a Florentine man far from his country and at the end of a life filled with bitterness, strife and woes, wrote one of the most extraordinary works of human ingenuity. This man was Dante Alighieri and the work is “The Divine Comedy.”
The Divine Comedy truly shone, shining with such luminosity that it surpassed the boundaries of what was believed to be achievable by human intelligence. Dante, who left us this work before his death, attained extraordinary glorification. Successive generations in these six centuries have increasingly found new reasons to consider him a supernatural being — but this view of him does not match the real Dante. He was, after all, a man — a man who took part in the clashes and struggles of his time. But he loved, suffered, despaired and did everything with the intensity of a gifted being — and it led him to create an almost superhuman work.
Dante was born in 1265 and died in 1321, which is to say he was born at the time when the Middle Ages seemed to bear its maturest fruits and in which the vast spiritual movement that later formed the Renaissance began to appear.
He belonged to a wealthy family, but not of the nobility. He was from Florence, a traditionally cultured city sensitive to the times and changes. When he was very young he lost his parents.
At the age of nine, when attending a party given by a wealthy merchant named Portinaria at his palace in Florence — among flowers, lights and music, Dante only had eyes for admiring the gentle and beautiful figure of a girl: Portinaria’s daughter, Beatrice. Was it a mysterious and sympathetic bond between two hearts and a special influence from heaven? Or was it that amid the harmony of music and the bustle of joy, two young hearts easily become inflamed and found common affection? “What do we care! The truth is that Dante, at such an early age, became submissive to and a slave to love…”
However, Beatrice would never be Dante’s: she married another man and died aged twenty-four. She died — and Dante later confessed that he thought of doing for her what no man had ever done for any woman, to say of her what had never been said of any woman. This is what he does in The Divine Comedy — the most extraordinary glorification of a woman in history.
He married another woman and had children, leading a seemingly normal life and getting involved in the political life of his time and his city. The political struggle of his time was the disappearance of the Roman Empire, which (in successive attempts) German princes had tried to revive — to create political unity in Europe around a crown, governing other kingdoms and principalities as vassals.
In the face of such imperial pretensions arose the papal idea — that the Pope should be both the spiritual and the temporal leader, that kings and emperors should be executors of the will of the Pope. This conflict divided the Middle Ages into two parties — “The party of the Guelphs, who were papists, and that of the Ghibellines, who were supporters of the Emperor.”
According to Dante, both could rule — the Pope over religious matters and the emperors and kings in their respective jurisdictions. This balance, however, was a little difficult and idealistic since both parties wanted absolute power.
Dante belonged to a more liberal faction within the Guelph party, but at the end of the thirteenth century — in Florence — a series of political upheavals gave rise to a democratic type of government in which Dante was to perform some function. He went, as part of an embassy, before a Pope with a very strong personality — Pope Boniface VIII.
Boniface VIII and Dante met face to face. They did not understand each other. The idea of Boniface VIII — of absolute papal dominance — was in contradiction with Dante’s ideas. The Pope managed to have his people prevail in Florence and Dante had no other choice but to flee and go into exile in Ravenna, the city where he died.
Dante’s most important step in conceiving his monumental work was to write in the vernacular, the language spoken by the people — the language despised by the educated people of his time. He conceived his poem as a summary of all human knowledge. He also instilled in it the supernatural and the superhuman, the world of the dead, history, religious views — and — along with this, all the memories and the myths of the classical world.
He goes on a journey that consists of going through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Three canticles written in stanzas of three lines, which is called “Dantean terza rima.”
At the beginning of his poem he says that one day, halfway down the path of his life, he found he had lost his way and become lost in a dark wood where he was symbolically threatened by three figures representing human passions. There he meets Virgil, the great poet of the Latin world, who accompanies him as a guide in the journey through Hell and Purgatory.
There are overlapping circles; the souls in Purgatory are preparing to go to heaven and, at the top, the vision of Paradise features the souls of the blessed, the saints, the powers, the archangels and — as a final coronation — the vision of Divinity.
All of this, superhuman and gigantic, is what Dante narrates in his poem. Virgil is the intelligence that accompanies him through Hell and Purgatory — but — on the border of Purgatory, Beatrice appears to him, almost becoming a messenger of the Divine.
Another important thing in Dante’s work is his concern about fame, renown. This is because Dante had already initiated the Renaissance idea that man must stand for something; the horror of being mediocre was what led him to prefer to stand out, even through evil, than to remain in stable and undistinguished indifference. There is a part in the Divine Comedy where Dante meets the great poets of the ancient world — Homer, Ovid and Lucan. They surround him and receive him as their equal. With this, Dante is saying — “I know I am one of six or seven great spirits that mankind has had, and someday, others will also know this.”
Too bad that the work of many great men is not recognized in life, but only after death! For Dante, death removed him from the only thing that could have caused him happiness for a few moments — seeing the contribution that he had made to humanity with such a wonderful work.
The life of this sensitive man, whose spirit still lives among those who know him, can be summarized in a single, sad word: pain.
His two great loves: Florence and Beatrice, they were two evil things that caused him good, and two good things that caused him evil, and he dedicated his existence to them entirely.
