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Gregory Elder is a professor emeritus of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. (Courtesy Photo)

In this year of grace 2021, we have reached the 700th anniversary of the death of one of the world’s truly great poets, Dante Alighieri, who died in 1321 in the city of Ravenna, Italy. Dante’s influence on Western literature is vast and cannot be understated.

Dante was born in the city state of Florence in 1265 to a prosperous family in the lower aristocracy. After a good education, he entered politics, which was expected of young men in the ruling classes. In 1285 he married Gemma Donati, whose family had better political connections than his own. The couple would have four children. It is not known how much Dante loved Gemma, for reasons to be discussed.

Although he had married Gemma, the love of Dante’s life was a young woman known as Bice Portinari, but whom Dante always called Beatrice. Dante first met Beatrice when she was only 9, and rarely talked to her. But she became in his mind the perfect woman, endowed with wisdom and grace. Beatrice married someone else, and died only two years later in 1290 at the age of 24, leaving the young poet devastated.

Things got worse for Dante. As a young politician, Dante was employed by the city fathers as a diplomat in the violent Italian politics of the day. Dante had allied himself to a political faction in the city known as the White Guelphs, an alliance which resisted the power of the papacy. When their rivals, the Black Guelphs staged a revolution in 1301, Dante and the other White Guelphs were banished perpetually from the city under pain of death. Now, he had lost the love of his life, his career, his city and his family.

Yet it was this experience of abandonment and loss which inspired the poet to look inward, and his reflections on the spiritual life would lead to his writing the poem in Italian for which he is known, the “Commedia,” known in English as the “Divine Comedy.” He began writing this in 1308 and finished it just before his death in 1321.

The “Divine Comedy” is a guided tour of the afterlife, as it was understood by the medieval Catholic Church. At the same time, it is an examination of the human heart, spirituality, and the experiences of sin and redemption. The poem is divided into three sections, “Hell,” “Purgatory” and “Heaven,” but sadly most people who read Dante stick only to the first part which is lurid in its descriptions of the damned. From the poet’s perspective, however, his pilgrimage through these three levels of eternal existence represent the stark examination of the destructive power of sin, the struggle of repentance and purification from sin, followed by the reward of the purified saints.

According to the poem, midway through life Dante found himself lost in a dark wood which he could find no way out of. It is the darkness of error, and unaided men are unable to extricate themselves from. Fortunately, in paradise, Beatrice has seen his problem and arranged for the pagan Poet Virgil to lead Dante along the path of enlightenment. Classicists know that Virgil’s epic poem the “Aeneid” likewise has a visitation to the afterlife, so presumably Virgil knew the way, having been there once before. Virgil will guide Dante through hell and purgatory as the voice of right reason, but the trip to paradise must be left to Beatrice. Virgil is a pagan and does not know Christ, but Beatrice is a Christian and therefore has access to heaven.

The poem as a whole is called a comedy, not because it is in any way funny but because classical literature defines any play or poem ending with a marriage a comedy. Since the comedy ends with a kind of spiritual marriage between heaven and earth, it therefore is classified as such. But the horror of what hell looks like is made clear when Dante reads the inscription above the doorway to the inferno. Before entering hell, new arrivals must read:

“Through me one goes into the town of woe,

through me one goes into eternal pain,

through me among the people that are lost.

Justice inspired my high exalted Maker;

I was created by the Might divine,

the highest Wisdom and eternal love

Before me there was naught created, save

eternal things, and I eternal last;

all hope abandon, ye that enter here!”

Dante’s vision of hell consists of three sections, each of which is a concentric circle, growing smaller as they go deeper. The outermost circles are reserved for those guilty of the sins of indulgence, such as lust and gluttony. The second level down are the cantos for the sins of violence, fraud and treachery. The lowest level is for the malicious, those guilty of treason and betrayal. It is common for people to say that the punishments which Dante describes are those that fit the crime. For example, fornicators who did not control their passions on Earth are eternally buffeted in terrible winds. Schismatics who divided the Church on Earth, trudge an endless circle where they are perpetually sliced up just as they divided the Church, the body of Christ. Violent men are boiled in blood because of their hot-blooded crimes. At the lowest level are the traitors, frozen forever in a lake of ice for their ice cold hearts. But it would be more accurate to say not that the punishment fits the crime, but that the punishment is the crime, but in hell is seen in its full reality.

Dante’s cast of characters in hell were well known men and women of his era and before — popes and bishops, lawyers and thieves, politicians and corrupt tycoons. Yet he also places a few of his own teachers there, including one who committed sexual crimes and was condemned to run forever in burning sand because of his actions. At the lowest level is, of course Satan, a huge but powerless figure in the ice, who perpetually chews Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Caesar.

Dante’s book was an immediate success and it has never been out of print. He died almost immediately after its publication and his grave is often visited in Ravenna. In Florence his image is painted on the walls of the Duomo, the great cathedral. But in life, he was never permitted to return to his home. The problem with hell, of course, is that in this life one cannot escape and return home, and the homeless poet reflecting on that is in his exile.


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