The Divine Comedy for Seekers

Dear reader — that's the Inferno, and it's only a third of the poem, and the other two thirds are where it actually argues for something. The Comedy (Commedia) is a long poem by Dante Alighieri, written in Italian in the early fourteenth century, about a man who travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. "Divine" was added to the title by later readers and editors. Three parts, called canticles: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Thirty-three cantos each, plus an opening one, to make a hundred. Dante wrote it in exile.

The Guy And Why He Was Exiled

Dante was born in Florence in 1265 and took part in its politics, which were split between factions of the Guelph party. In 1302, while he was away on a mission, his faction lost power, and he was sentenced in absentia and exiled. He never returned. The Comedy is partly what you write when you can't go home, and Florence takes a lot of heat in it, famously as that "ungrateful and malignant people."

Inferno: Lost In A Wood, With A Poet

It opens with the most famous first line in Italian poetry: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost." Dante is lost in a wood and tries to climb a sunlit hill, but three beasts block the way. A figure appears who turns out to be Virgil, the Roman poet of the Aeneid. He was sent to help, and the only way out is through the afterlife. Dante says to him: "Thou art my master, and my author thou, / Thou art alone the one from whom I took / The beautiful style that has done honour to me."

Hell is a funnel-shaped pit under the northern hemisphere, with nine circles that get narrower and colder as they descend. In rough order: Limbo, lust, gluttony, greed and waste, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and betrayal. The gate bears an inscription saying Hell was made by Justice, Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love, and the last line tells those who enter to give up hope. Just inside is a crowd of souls who in life never took a side. Then Limbo: people who did no wrong but weren't baptized, infants and virtuous pagans from before Christ. Not tormented. A green meadow inside a noble castle, but without hope: "That without hope we live on in desire." Virgil lives there.

A few of the meetings:

Francesca. In the circle of lust, souls are blown about by a storm that never stops. Dante speaks to Francesca da Rimini, who's there with her brother-in-law and lover Paolo. They fell in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere together: "One day we reading were for our delight / Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthral. / Alone we were and without any fear." The book played go-between.

Farinata. In the sixth circle the heretics lie in open tombs that burn. Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline leader and an enemy of Dante's family, rises as if he holds all of Hell in contempt. They talk politics, in Hell.

The suicides. In the seventh circle they've been turned into trees, and harpies feed on their leaves. When Dante breaks a twig off one, it bleeds and speaks. It's Pier della Vigna, once a trusted advisor to Emperor Frederick II: "Why dost thou rend me? Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever?"

Ulysses. In the eighth ditch of fraud, false counselors are wrapped in flames. Ulysses burns with Diomedes in a double flame, and tells a story found in no earlier source: after returning home he couldn't stay, and sailed west past the Pillars of Hercules with a few old companions. A storm sank the ship. His speech to his crew is the line everyone quotes: "Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; / Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, / But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge."

Bertran de Born. In the ninth ditch the sowers of discord are slashed open by a demon with a sword, over and over. Bertran, a troubadour who stirred up a prince against his father, walks carrying his severed head by the hair like a lantern: "Because I parted persons so united, / Parted do I now bear my brain, alas!" That's what the guide calls the counterpoise.

Ugolino. At the bottom, in a frozen lake, two heads are frozen in one hole, one gnawing the other's skull. The one gnawing is Count Ugolino of Pisa, and he tells how he and his sons and grandsons were locked in a tower and left to starve by the man whose head he is gnawing, Archbishop Ruggieri. I'll leave that there.

At the exact center of the earth, frozen to the waist in ice, is Satan, enormous, with three faces and six bat-like wings. He weeps and chews on three sinners, one in each mouth: Judas, who betrayed Christ, and Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar. Virgil carries Dante down the hair on Satan's body. At the midpoint they turn upside down as gravity reverses, then climb up a rock tunnel to the opposite side of the earth. They come out at the foot of Purgatory's mountain, just before dawn, and Dante looks up at "the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear."

What runs through Inferno: love pointed the wrong way (Dante's own account, made explicit later, is that all sin comes from love aimed at a bad object, or too weak, or too strong). Pity against justice: Dante the pilgrim reacts with fear, sorrow, and pity, fainting at Francesca, and Virgil rebukes him: "Who is a greater reprobate than he / Who feels compassion at the doom divine?" The poem keeps a gap between what the pilgrim feels and what the poet says is right. I don't think it fully resolves it. And what reason can and can't do: Virgil, the greatest pagan poet, can lead the pilgrim through Hell but can't go further than he's allowed.

Purgatorio: The Mountain

The second canticle, probably written in the 1310s. Dante and Virgil come out onto the shore of an island in the southern hemisphere with a great mountain rising from it: "To run o'er better waters hoists its sail / The little vessel of my genius now, / That leaves behind itself a sea so cruel."

The mountain has three zones. Ante-Purgatory at the base holds souls who delayed repentance and must wait. A gate leads into Purgatory proper, a spiral up seven terraces, one for each of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust. The structure's regular: each terrace has a sin, a punishment that mirrors it, examples of the opposite virtue, a beatitude, and an angel who removes one P from Dante's forehead.

On the shore a guardian appears: Cato of Utica, a Roman statesman who killed himself rather than live under Caesar. Dante never explains why a pagan suicide is in charge here, and readers have argued about it ever since. A boat arrives carrying souls, and Cato scolds the loiterers: "What negligence, what standing still is this? Run to the mountain to strip off the slough."

Dante meets Sordello, a Mantuan poet. When he learns Virgil is from Mantua he embraces him on the spot, and the contrast with Italy's civil wars sets off one of Dante's famous outbursts: "Ah! servile Italy, grief's hostelry! / A ship without a pilot in great tempest!" At the gate there are three steps, one polished white marble, one dark cracked stone, one blood-red porphyry. An angel with a sword sits on the threshold, and writes seven P's on Dante's forehead with the point: "Take heed that thou wash these wounds, when thou shalt be within."

The first terrace is pride. The proud walk bent double under enormous stones. Dante meets Oderisi, a manuscript illuminator, who says another artist's work is better than his own and that fame is a breath: "O thou vain glory of the human powers, / How little green upon thy summit lingers." Wrath: souls walk through thick smoke that blinds them, as anger blinded them in life. Marco Lombardo says people blame the stars, but "Light has been given you for good and evil, and free volition."

Near the center of the whole poem Virgil explains the moral structure of the journey. Every creature has love, natural or of the mind. Natural love never errs. Mind-love can go wrong in three ways: aiming at a bad object, or too weak, or too strong. "Love must be the seed within yourselves of every virtue, and every act that merits punishment." A soul named Statius joins them, a Roman poet who just completed his purification, and the mountain shook when he was freed. He tells Virgil it was Virgil's poetry that made him a poet.

On the last terrace the lustful walk through flames, and Dante has to go in too. He freezes at the edge. Virgil tries everything and finally: "Here may indeed be torment, but not death."

At the top, Virgil says he's gone as far as reason can take him: "Free and upright and sound is thy free-will." He crowns and mitres Dante over himself. A procession of figures from scripture comes through the garden, ending in a chariot. Beatrice appears, veiled. Dante turns to tell Virgil and finds he's gone. Dante weeps. Beatrice speaks to him by name, the only time his name appears in the poem: "Dante, because Virgilius has departed, do not weep yet." Virgil, who he'd given himself to for safety, "sweetest of all fathers," left without a goodbye, and the poem treats it as a loss and a stage.

After Beatrice's accusations Dante confesses. He's led into the river Lethe, which takes away the memory of sin, then to the river Eunoe, which restores the memory of every good deed. He comes out "regenerate, in the manner of new trees that are renewed with a new foliage, pure and disposed to mount unto the stars." And the mercy at the gate: Peter told the angel to err on the side of opening.

Paradiso: Up Through The Heavens

The third canticle, thirty-three cantos, written in the last years of Dante's life and probably finished shortly before he died in 1321. It's the hardest and least read part. Guided now by Beatrice, Dante rises through the spheres: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, and the Primum Mobile. Beyond them is the Empyrean, the true heaven and home of God. It opens: "The glory of Him who moveth everything / Doth penetrate the universe, and shine / In one part more and in another less."

In Canto II he warns the reader off. Those who've followed behind his ship in small boats should turn back unless prepared: "The sea I sail has never yet been passed."

He rises and doesn't feel himself rising. Beatrice explains that desire turned toward God naturally carries him up, like a stream running down a mountain. In the lowest sphere he meets Piccarda Donati, a nun forced out of her convent to marry. She's in the lowest heaven, and Dante asks if she wants to be higher. She says no. "And his will is our peace."

In Mars he meets his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, a crusader, who prophesies exile: "Thou shalt abandon everything beloved most tenderly, and this the arrow is which first the bow of banishment shoots forth." Dante worries that if he tells the truth about what he's seen, he'll lose the few places that will take him in. Cacciaguida's answer is the poem's charter for itself: "All falsehood laid aside, make manifest thy vision utterly, and let them scratch wherever is the itch."

In Jupiter the souls of just rulers form the shape of an eagle. One light in its eye is Ripheus, a Trojan mentioned briefly in the Aeneid as the most just man in Troy, a pagan, saved. Dante is amazed: "Who would believe, down in the errant world, that e'er the Trojan Ripheus... could be the fifth one of the holy lights?" In the fixed stars Peter breaks into a furious speech about the pope who sits in his chair, which has become "vacant, before the presence of the Son of God," his burial place turned "a sewer of blood." Dante's heaven has opinions.

In the Empyrean, Beatrice describes it as a pure light: "Light intellectual replete with love, love of true good replete with ecstasy, ecstasy that transcendeth every sweetness." Dante turns to ask Beatrice a question and finds her gone. In her place is an old man, Bernard of Clairvaux, a twelfth-century monk, who tells him Beatrice sent him and points to where she sits. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary to let Dante look at God directly: "Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son."

The last forty lines. Dante looks into the High Light and sees three circles of three colors and one size. The second seems to reflect the first as one rainbow reflects another, and the third seems to be fire breathed equally by both. Then the imagination fails: "Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: / But now was turning my desire and will, / Even as a wheel that equally is moved, / The Love which moves the sun and the other stars." That's the last line of the whole poem. And all along, the speech gets feebler: "O how all speech is feeble and falls short of my conceit."

Reading It

The quotations here are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1867 translation, an early, faithful blank-verse version, free and old-fashioned. Most readers do better with a modern one for a first go. Paradiso suffers most in translation, because so much depends on light, music, and precise theology. Keep track like this: Inferno is a descent through circles with a gallery of sinners; Purgatorio is more regular, same pattern on every terrace; and Paradiso is a series of conversations, each in a new sphere with a new group of souls. Best read as a set of encounters.