mr. mxylplyx

Charles Eliot Norton once wrote of Dante's Divine poem:
"There are few other works of man, perhaps there is no other, which afford such uninterrupted consistency of purpose, of sustained vigor of imagination, and steady force of character controlling alike the vagaries of the poetic temperament, the wavering of human purpose, the fluctuation of human powers, the untowardness of circumstance. From beginning to end of this work of many years, there is no flagging of energy, no indication of weakness. The shoulders, burdened by a task almost tto great for mortal strength, never tremble under their load."

Dante's masterpiece "La Divina Commedia" is without doubt my favorite piece of poetical writing ever, for a host of reasons. Stylistically, it is a work of incomparable genius. Dante acomplishes something, by keeping up the difficult rhyme scheme of the terza rima style in perpetuity for 100 Cantos, that seems nearly superhuman. His was in all respects, a truly divine inspiration. Readers that know the difficulty of composing poetry in this fashion recognize the utter complexity of what Dante has accomplished with this style. In terza rima, the last two syllables of the last word of the first and third line of every tercet must always rhyme, while the last two syllables of the end word of the second line in the tercet must rhyme with the last two syllables of the first and third line of the proceeding tercet. Accomplishing a poem that is able to sustain this for hundreds of pages on end is no small feat in itself, but to do it in a way that not only does not appear trite and contrived, but is actually melifluous, and at the same time packed with layers of complex meaning, is something that defies the bounds of human ability.
Meaning in Dante's poem is in fact densely packed in every single image, as his poem, like the biblical stories that inspire Dante, is meant to be read not only on the literal, but the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical, all at the same time. An explanation of the poem's complexity is given by the poet himself in his now famous "Epistle to Can Grande della Scala," in which he states:
"For me be able to present what I am going to say, you must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: "When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion" (Douay-Rheims, Ps. 113.1-2). If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which in Latin means other or different.

Now that we have seen this, it is obvious that the subject around which the two senses turn must be twofold. And therefore it is to be determined about the subject of this work when it is taken literally, then about the subject when it is understood allegorically. The subject of the whole work, taken only from a literal standpoint, is simply the status of the soul after death, taken simply. The movement of the whole work turns from it and around it. If the work is taken allegorically, however, the subject is man, either gaining or losing merit through his freedom of will, subject to the justice of being rewarded or punished.

Its form is twofold, the form of the treatise and the form of the treatment. The form of the treatise is three-fold, according to the three-fold division. The first division is that by which the entire work is divided into three canticles. The second that by which each canticle is divided into cantos. The third that by which each canto is divided into rhyming units. The form or the mode of treatment is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive; and along with this definitive, divisive, probative, improbative, and setting examples."

Take for example the image of Satan from the end of the Inferno. The final canto of Dante’s Inferno is, to me, the most vividly striking, meaningfully symbolic, and masterfully done of all the cantos in this epic portion of La Comedia. And when one considers how each single canto of this incredibly inspired poem itself embodies every one of these supreme qualities of excellence, one can see just how great a deal my saying that truly is. From the incontinent lovers who are buffeted about by winds from which they can find no respite, to the pilfering bishops who are buried stake-like in the ground with the soles of their protruding feet set ablaze over their bags of ill-gotten loot, to the disseminators of scandal and schism who are rent in twain from chin to genitals in the Ninth Bolgia of Dante’s hell, the Inferno is overflowing with powerfully grotesque and symbolic imagery. The unique tortures ascribed for each individual type of sinner are thoughtfully crafted so as to parallel the crimes for which they are punishment, and each are presented in such a striking fashion so as to make it impossible to miss the allegorical meaning behind them. The last canto is the greatest of them all, where all of Dante’s and the readers journeying through the myriad horrors of the underworld finally culminate in the terrible and awesome sight of the Enemy himself, enormous and three-headed, and encased up to his midsection in a frozen river of his own tears. Along with himself are imprisoned the worst sinners in hell, the betrayers, who, because they are in their sins so like Satan, are buried up to their necks in the devil’s own river of icy tears so that they may be forever tortured by the ice encircling their hearts. The symbolism of this image is magnificent, and the cold they must endure for their sin, which is so bitter that it freezes their tears to their face as they flow forth, callusing their eyes, mirrors their cold, betraying nature, the lack of warmth that their pride and ambition engendered in their living souls. Like Satan, these pitiful souls discover in hell that the harshest punishment there is not truly the application of a torture from without, but the absence of warmth, which is symbolic of the absence of the warmth and light of God’s love, and the lack of hope of seeing the face of that which they have betrayed.

A political meaning in this canto is also present. In the three eternally devouring maws of Satan are the three betrayers that Dante sees to be the worst of them all, save Satan himself, which are Cassius and Brutus -- the betrayers of Julius, the first Caesar of Rome -- who are being chewed head and torso-out in the devil’s left and right heads, and the betrayer of Jesus Christ himself -- Judas Iscariot -- who is devoured feet-out, head-in, in Satan’s center head. The three colors (not shown in the above picture) – black, vermilion, and a sort of bilious yellow-- corresponding to each of the devil’s three heads are symbolic in themselves, and can be seen to represent either three weapons and vices of the devil: Ignorance, Hatred, and Impotence, or they can be interpreted as signifying the three parts of the then known world: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Likewise, Dante’s choice of these three figures to represent the ultimate betrayers can be themselves taken in two fashions, either as literal or representative, and allegorically, it is the theory of many that these three taken together can be seen as symbolic representation of Pope Boniface III, who Dante took to be a seller of Christ and a traitor to the Roman Caesar.

Part of the genius of Dante's poem is how he is at the same time able to borrow generously from pre-existing traditions in creating his structure, and yet add a measure of dimension and scope to his subject that both invigorates and goes beyond his original source material. In Dante’s Christian conception of the realms of the dead, there are numerous borrowings form the ancient Greco-Roman concepts pertaining to the characteristics of the underworld, particularly, of course, in the Inferno. True, the level of intricacy and poetic detail with regards to the descriptions of Hell’s divers punishments and the structuring of its characteristics in this book of The Comedy is unique to Dante, but of course it is no secret or accident that Dante throughout the first two books of the Divine Comedy describes himself both literally and metaphorically as following in the footsteps of the great ancient Roman poet Virgil, who is of course Dante’s guide through both the Inferno and the Purgatorio. Both Dante’s descriptions of the architecture of Hell – its various levels, rivers, monsters, and judges – and his ideas of the torment that awaits the unjust and corrupted souls of dead men is largely taken directly from Virgil’s conception of Dis (a name Dante himself uses as a pseudonym for Hell) in the Aenid, which itself borrows much from the Greek conceptions of Hades in Homer’s Odyssey, which was in Socrates’ time the culturaly accepted version of what fate awaited man in the realm of the afterlife, though the Greek version of the underworld varied significantly from the Roman and Christian, in that until Virgil’s time there had been no conception of rewards or punishments in the afterlife for the souls of men, making the Greek conception of Hades unlike either Dante’s or Virgil’s Hell. In Socrates’ time there was no officially recognized version of either the Heaven of the Christians or the Elysian fields of Virgil’s Rome, for the way Hades is described by Homer in both the Iliad and the Odyssey is as a realm of formless shades, shadows of men’s former selves -- souls incapable of ever feeling again any kind of physical sensation or ascending up into a realm of light.

Like Dante’s Christian theology, and unlike the beliefs of most of his contemporaries, for Socrates, death only held the possibly of mental torment to the unrighteous souls who cared too much for the benefits of earthly pleasures. For him, a good man could neither be harmed in life nor death, and the pains and wants of mortal life were but fleeting and unimportant sensations. In the underworld, he believed that one was bodiless, and therefore deathless for the rest of eternity. Only mental anguish, consequently, could ever harm him then, but because he was a man who lived only for virtue, Socrates felt he would in death have freedom from all desires and cares, because for him, there was nothing that he had ever wanted more than what he would have in the spirit world, in death, for all eternity – the opportunity to contemplate philosophy unhampered by the limitations of the body, and be at one with the spirit of virtue, without end. This, then, is the fundamentally similarity between both Dante and Socrates, for both believe that the ultimate reward of a life spent in virtue and goodness is an afterlife spent in eternal bliss, free from the torments of the unjust, whose unrighteous thoughts and actions and preoccupation with earthly cares and the grotesqueries of their own nature, in effect, cause them to damn themselves. This helps to answer the question of why sinners in dante's Inferno are condemned to an eternity without hope or salvation, of suffering and torture. For although there is a world of difference from the tortures and heavenly pleasures described in Dante’s Comedy and Socrates’ vision of Hades, if torture is for the wicked the eternal mental anguish caused by unfulfilled desire for unattainable pleasure or freedom from pain, and bliss is the for the righteous an eternal intimacy with the source of all virtue and goodness, then these two great men’s visions of the afterlife have much more in common than they do not.

If we look at the Divine Comedy on a philosophical level, we see folded within it, like the convolutions of a rose, even deeper levels of meaning. Take the significance of the afterlife. At first glance, it may appear to some that the afterlife of the soul envisioned by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy has very little in common with the afterlife of the soul that someone like Socrates supposes may exist when we die, but there is, in actuality, a central idea to both of their respective visions which they share in common. That central idea, or more properly, common belief, is a belief in the immortality of the spirit and the fate that await the soul of the human being, the eternal remnant of his essence, in the realm of the afterlife. Dante’s vision of the afterlife is obviously much more complexly structured than Socrates’, and in fact his vivid and intensely descriptive visions of the three Medieval Christian spheres of the spirit world (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) were more complex and exacting in their descriptions than probably anyone else’s which had ever existed, including those the Catholic Church had described in official Christian doctrine. In Dante's worlds there are exact heavenly rewards and hellish punishments that were poetically designed to be mirror images of the state of one's soul in the earthly life, so that heaven and hell are seen relative the human soul as an extension of its own essence, made palpable by the divine justice. The worlds, though ostensibly created by and imposed by the divine will, are actually manifestations of the state of the disembodied souls. Disembodied, in fact, is perhaps not a proper term of description, for in Dante’s Hell, as well as his Purgatory (though not in Paradise, where they have been purged of corporeality and ascended to pure spiritual essence), spirits do have bodies of flesh and blood, which are immortally regenerative and are fully capable of feeling the pangs of physical anguish, and thus are perpetually tormented in agony for their crimes. Or at least in Hell the agony is forever. Those in Purgatory, however, have the hope of one day completing the term of their purification from earthly sin, slavery to appetite, earthly desire and fear, and ascending to heaven, and thus, though some in Purgatory are doomed for a punishment that will endure for thousands of human years, they are content in their suffering (or burning, in Dante's more apt metaphor), because unlike those unfortunate and wretched souls in Hell, who have no hope of ever escaping their torments, or even lessening them by the slightest degree, those in Purgatory are not so far immersed in the shadows of the temporal, dualistic world of mortal, terminal pleasures and pains that they will be one day able to transcend the limitations of the timebound, sin-bound, relative earthly nature to an apprehension and appreciation, a oneness, with the eternal.

This inability of the souls in the Inferno then, to look upon the face of God, that is, to go beyond the limitations of the body to a connection with the eternal, the divinity behind the mortal, and the sinner, is in actuality the true torment of Dante’s Hell -- the inability to renounce sin and seek salvation in life is the metaphor of the soul's inability to transcend to the eternal essence that informs the crude matter of the physical, dualistic universe, a universe where torment is eternal because dualistic distinctions of good and evil exist. There is thus no escape from evil and suffering in this world without God, and the mental torment of it is complete and utter hopelessness. It is this hopelessness of spirit that mirrors the hopelessness of the truly disembodied spirits of the Hades of Socrates’ conception, who have no participation in the immortal wisdom of the forms, which are the eternal Goods, or more properly, that which surpass subjective distinctions as to good and evil because they emanate from the life source that is beyond the world of suffering and dualism. This is the nature of the God and the Heaven which the great Tuscan poet concieved of, a heaven of concentric, inward facing rings of harmony and unity with eternity, non-subjective and all-encompassing--from the point of view of this world, the unfathomable. His soul's ability to to somehow touch what cannot be touched, to connect with and convey through metaphor and feeling that which cannot be intellectually described, a mystic experience of truth, is nothing short of miraculous. His palpable, tactile, and impressive immortal vision of the innefible realms is something that, to me, truly expresses the height and the power of the creative faculty in human beings. It is what makes poetry, myth, and metaphor...Divine.