Study Guide to The Divine Comedy by Dante

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Studienhilfen
• Subtopic: Studienführer

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Dante’s The Divine Comedy, a defining work of religious literature for the Renaissance time period. In Pilgrim’s exploration through the Inferno, Purgatory, and Heaven, Dante takes readers on a religious journey of the soul as defined by the Renaissance era. In doing so, his work also displayed the dominant views of the culture and organized religion for that time period. Moreover, The Divine Comedy demonstrates for students the numerous new ideas which originated during the Renaissance, as well as how the time period influenced Catholicism. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Dante’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO DANTE

THE DIVINE COMEDY

This is an epic poem depicting an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. It is presented in the form of a vision experienced by the author in the year 1300, when, as he puts it, he was at the mid-point of his journey through life. Yet, although the poem stages an imaginary voyage through the realms of the afterlife, it deals with human experience. For one thing, the hero, Dante himself, encounters on his way the souls of people who were once alive and whose experiences as human beings are revealed and evaluated. Furthermore, the poem displays an intense interest in the social and political events of the times. On both counts, then, human events are an important part of Dante’s poem. And lastly, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise were as real to Dante and his contemporaries as the physical world they lived in. Dante’s epic is, therefore, not a flight into fantasy; it is an imaginative work which, coming to grips with the problems of life, seeks to interpret the meaning of human existence.

THE REALITY OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

The world of Spirit - the realms of eternity through which Dante Travels - is not a vague abstraction for Dante, but a concrete reality. And it is one of the glories of his achievement as a poet that he is able to translate his sense of that world’s real existence into images which enable us to visualize it. But even such visualization is not an end in itself. The moral, philosophical, and theological truths which Dante uncovers on his imaginary journey apply to human life everywhere and for all time, and his vision is accompanied by the specific mission of bringing the truths he has learned to the awareness of mankind. These truths are to shed light on the meaning of man’s life and serve as guides for the conduct of private and public life in this world.

DANTE’S VISION AS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

The Divine Comedy is therefore more than an ingenious formulation, through images, of philosophic and theological doctrine. Like all great epics, it is a presentation and interpretation of the nature of human existence. But if the poet is to communicate his meaning successfully - if the vision is to come alive for us, he must not only make us see and understand the truth he perceives, he must also make us feel it. In other words, he must make us live through the experience with him. This direct communication of the feel of experience is accomplished by means of the hero, with whom we identify: through our identification, we not only observe the hero’s experience, but share in it as well. Dante makes himself the hero of his epic. Speaking in the first person, he can interpret his experience for us by commenting on it. And insofar as he is an actor in his drama - insofar as what happens, happens to him - we can put ourselves in his place and experience in some measure what he experiences. Dante’s poem is a Christian epic which takes as its subject the soul’s pilgrimage from sin to salvation. Specifically, it is the progress of Dante’s soul toward salvation that is at issue. It is in this way that the poem becomes a meaningful experience for its readers. For Dante’s unshakable faith in God’s concern with his personal salvation assures us that God is equally interested in each and every human being’s salvation. In short, by focusing on his personal experience, Dante gives his poem universal meaning.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVE

The underlying theme of the Divine Comedy is that love is the force which holds the universe together and links it to God, its Creator. Like a magnet, it draws men’s souls to their Maker. It is love, therefore, which is the motivating force behind Dante’s spiritual journey. But love is not just an abstract principle to be defined philosophically; it is an intense psychic experience in which a man’s desire is focused on a specific object. In Dante’s case, it is his passion for Beatrice which starts him on the road to salvation. It is she who forces him to raise his sights ever higher until he is brought face to face with God. At the end of the poem he feels at one with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” and, on one level, Dante’s progress consists in nothing more than the gradual deepening of his understanding of what was at first a purely emotional experience. Here again, the movement of the poem is from the personal to the universal level, but the personal experience is never lost sight of, and it is this feature of Dante’s poem which makes it possible for us to follow him and make his experience our own.

DANTE’S LOVE FOR BEATRICE

The ups and downs of his passion for the incomparable Beatrice had been recorded by Dante in an earlier work, the Vita Nuova (“New” or “Young Life”), and we must consider that relationship briefly if we want to understand her function in the scheme of his salvation. It was the sight of Beatrice’s unutterable beauty which first set in motion the long and difficult process of spiritual rebirth and personal salvation which finally culminates in the closing cantos of Paradiso (the third and last section of the Divine Comedy). For in loving Beatrice, Dante unwittingly loved the beauty of God reflected in her, and although he did not know that she was, in effect, God’s personal representative on earth, sent to bring about his spiritual salvation, his love for her remained pure, untouched by physical desire. All he knew was the passion and awe which her presence evoked in him. To see her, to receive her salutation constituted the highest measure of happiness he hoped for. Her death, therefore, came as a shattering blow which all but destroyed his whole world, and although he knew that so perfect a lady as she could have gone only to heaven, he felt inconsolable grief at her loss. He sought relief from his suffering in the affections of a kindly lady who took pity on him, but in so doing he lost sight of the heavenly light which had been embodied in Beatrice. And thus it happened that, as he puts it in the opening of Inferno (“Hell,” the first part of the Divine Comedy), having lost his way in the middle of his journey through life, he found himself lost in a dark forest. It is at this point that his spiritual pilgrimage begins.

Beatrice, in the Divine Comedy, has been variously interpreted as representing Theology, Revelation, or Divine Wisdom. She may indeed stand for any or all of these things, but what is most important is that Dante never strips her of her identity as a person. She remains first and foremost the woman whose beauty awakened in him the promptings of a most intense spiritual love. We must never lose sight of the fact that his redemption comes as a result of a deeply felt experience and not only from the intellectual recognition of a theological truth. The recognition comes later, but even it comes as a personal experience. This order of events is as it should be, for, psychologically speaking, anything that touches us closely is bound to be felt as personal. Thus Dante’s spiritual progress may illustrate a universal truth - Dante takes this much for granted - but its meaningfulness can be communicated to others only in terms of his experience of it. Consequently, it is not just any picture of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that we come across in the Divine Comedy, but the picture seen, felt, and understood by Dante. In other words, what we follow in our mind’s eye is not a newsreel-like travelogue through the underworld, but Dante’s progress through that world. As has been noted above, it is our sense of his personal involvement with what he encounters which makes it possible for us to identify with him and, through that identification, share his experience.

DANTE’S UNIVERSE

Whatever else it may be, the Divine Comedy is the record of a personal experience, and is so presented. Specifically, it is the experience of a deeply committed Christian. Now it may be belaboring the obvious to say that the Christian of the Middle Ages lived in a Christian universe, but, in the twentieth century, we need to remind ourselves of this fact if we are to understand Dante’s poem. Medieval man took it for granted that the universe was a finite system created by God. It had definite physical limits, and within those limits, a specific form or structure. Viewed in its physical aspect, the universe consisted of nine concentric spheres or “heavens” having the earth as their center and surrounded by a tenth heaven called the Empyrean. Neither the earth nor the Empyrean had motion; but whereas the earth was at the center of the created universe, the Empyrean was actually outside of time and space, being the eternal, infinite realm where God, the angels, and the saved dwelt. The nine heavens, on the other hand, were constantly revolving about their center in accordance to the motion imparted to them by the outermost sphere, the Primum Mobile or Prime Mover, so designated because of its function.

Dante’s cosmology follows the Ptolemaic system devised by the Ancients as interpreted in the light of Christian doctrine. The nine heavens thus correspond to the five known planets of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - with the addition of the sun and the moon (both believed to be planets), the starry sky (the eighth heaven, realm of the fixed stars), and the Primum Mobile. The sun, the moon, and the fixed stars had to be assigned moving heavens since they were all observed to move across the sky in relation to the earth - the moon by virtue of its actual revolution around the earth, the sun and the stars by virtue of the earth’s revolution around the sun and rotation on its own axis. The Primum Mobile, on the other hand, was deduced or “invented” in order to account for the motion of all heavenly bodies.

So much for the physical structure of the cosmos as it was understood in the Middle Ages. But to the medieval mind the universe was not only a physical reality. According to medieval thought current in Dante’s day, all physical objects had been formed out of a kind of undifferentiated primeval substance called prima materia, or prime matter. What gave form to this prime matter, giving rise to the physical universe, was, ultimately, God, in whose mind all forms were said to pre-exist. Form, then, was a spiritual principle - an “idea” or concept, if we will - which infused itself into prime matter to shape or create the physical world as we know it. Consequently, the sharp separation between mind and matter which we so readily take for granted did not exist for the men of the Middle Ages. Instead, they took it as axiomatic truth that the entire universe was as much a spiritual entity as a physical structure. In other words, the cosmos was suffused with the spirit of God. At first glance this notion might seem to smack of the hazy pantheism of the nineteenth-century romantic poets who merely felt the presence of God in Nature, but that is not the case. For the world of spirit, as conceived by the medieval mind, entailed intellectual order and discipline. It was a logical world, the logic of which was reflected in the orderly structure or hierarchy of the created world. In other words, God did not slobber over and wallow in the universe He had created; He created it in an orderly fashion, and His Spirit acted on it through clearly defined channels established by Him. Thus to each of the nine heavens corresponds one of the nine orders of angels. These angels not only regulate the motion of their heaven, but also transmit God’s influence downwards to the earth. (Similarly, the constellations in the starry sky also transmit heavenly “light” earthwards.) And since each of these heavens has a specific spiritual attribute, the souls of the saved are manifested to Dante in those heavens in accordance with the quality which was dominant in their lives on earth.

FORM OF THE DIVINE COMEDY

According to the thought common in Dante’s time, then, the physical order reflects and expresses the spiritual order which is the ultimate reality. Since the Divine Comedy professes to be an image of the whole cosmos, physical and spiritual, it, too, is structured in terms of that order. The abstract form of that order is expressed by a numerological system based on the number three, the symbol of the Trinity. This is raised to nine (3 x 3, symbol of earthly perfection, as embodied in Christ, for instance), and lifted to the level of ten (symbol of divine perfection and completeness). The poem is thus divided into three sections -Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) - each of which contains thirty-three cantos. This division makes for a total of ninety-nine cantos; that number is raised to 100 (10 x 10) by the addition of an extra canto in Inferno. Each section is likewise divided into three parts, which are subdivided into seven units (symbol of the Christian mystery). These seven are raised to nine by the addition of two other units differing in kind from the first seven, and the whole is raised to ten by the addition of yet another category on an entirely different plane of Being. The structure of the poem thus reflects the nature of the universe as it was understood in Dante’s day: an orderly closed system surrounded, as it were, by God.

DIVISIONS OF PARADISO

The division just described can be readily illustrated. We have seen that Paradiso consists of nine concentric spheres surrounded by the Empyrean. Among the nine spheres one may distinguish between the planetary heavens - Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn - and the other two - Stellar Heaven and Primum Mobile - which differ in kind. These planetary heavens, numbering seven, fall into three groups: those beneath the sun, the sun, and those above the sun. We thus have our three groups, subdivided into seven units. The addition of the Stellar Heaven and the Primum Mobile raises the number to nine, and the further addition of the Empyrean brings the total to ten.

Now this order may seem cumbersome to the modern reader, and altogether meaningless. The scheme takes on meaning, however, once one realizes that to each of the heavens corresponds a moral quality or virtue, and that these moral qualities are arranged in ascending order of excellence. One may thus group the ten heavens of Paradiso into three categories: the earth-tainted “virtues” of Inconstancy, Ambition, and Earthly Love; the cardinal or moral virtues of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance; and the heavenly theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. (It should be noted here that the first three are merely imperfectly realized versions of the last three.) As noted before, then, the physical structure of Paradise is conditioned by a scale of spiritual values.

PURGATORIO

Although not identical with the structure of Paradiso, the scheme of Purgatorio reveals the same principle of organization. There, corresponding to the seven Christian virtues, we find the seven deadly sins arranged in ascending order on levels or platforms circling a cone-shaped mountain, Mount Purgatory; the less severe sins are purged on the higher levels since the higher one rises on the mountain, the closer one gets to heaven. The sins are grouped into three classes, according to their nature: first, we encounter examples of perverted love - Pride, Envy, and Anger; then, examples of defective love - Sloth; and finally, examples of excessive love - Avarice, Gluttony, and Carnality or Lust. These seven circles are preceded, however, by an Antepurgatory in which linger the excommunicated and the late-repentant, and these two categories bring us to a total of nine sections. Finally, atop Mount Purgatory is found the Garden of Eden, the earthly paradise, and the earthly paradise completes the scheme by raising the number of divisions to ten.

INFERNO

An examination of Inferno will reveal the same basic principle or organization. The sins punished in Dante’s Hell are divided into those resulting from incontinence, i.e., lack of control over natural appetite or desire - Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Anger; those resulting from violence, perversion, or brutishness - Violence; and those resulting from fraud or malice, which are subdivided into examples of simple fraud and treacherous fraud. The threefold classification is based on Aristotle and has been subdivided into seven units. But a medieval Christian Hell must also make room for sins unknown to the ancient Greeks; Dante therefore adds the categories of unbelief (the heathen and the unbaptized) and misbelief (the heretics). When, to the nine circles of Hell, we add the ante-chamber where the trimmers, rejected alike by Heaven and Hell, are punished, we have arrived at the tenfold division characteristic of all three sections of the Divine Comedy. There is, however, in Inferno, a further subdivision not found in the other two parts of the poem: the last three circles, seven, eight and nine, are so subdivided as to bring the total number of distinct places of punishment for the damned to a total of twenty-four. But this additional subdivision does not invalidate the basic classification outlined above.

THE SPIRITUAL NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

The main point to remember from this discussion is that the topography of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is laid out in accordance with a scale of moral values and is, in itself, evidence of the Christian nature of the universe, each part of which bears the i...