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"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri

A Reading Experience (Pt.6)

By Annie KapurPublished 4 years ago 6 min read
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It has been a very, very long time since my first attempt at the Divine Comedy. I was thirteen when I first read it and I probably still have the notebook where I kept all my notes on what was happening in the text somewhere as well. This is a book which changed almost everything about me and made me really believe in the unlimited possibilities of literature. The book changed the very essence of my personality, it came to change my belief in poetry and its possibilities, it came to change the way I saw the Renaissance and finally, it changed my loves and likes, my interests and my intentions in reading, film and even my interests when it came to my own future. It is possibly the book that has had the greatest effect on my existence since I read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” at eleven years’ old.

My favourite character in The Divine Comedy is obviously the main character himself - Dante. Dante is a three dimensional character which I think is only really half-based on the actual person he was. I think the fictional Dante has far more confessions of sin than the real one and so, when within the Inferno, the descriptions are very much to the vast extreme. Frightening and dark as they are, there is a certain amount of sympathy for those who are trapped down there. What makes the fictional Dante so impressive is his ability to endure all of these images and still proceed positively upon Paradise, or ‘Heaven’. Even when his own guide, Virgil, must abandon him - he still has this positive outlook and only when we enter Paradise, do we know why. When we enter the Paradise section of the Divine Comedy, we see one key character to which I believe that the Divine Comedy was written for. We see the dead Beatrice. The dead Beatrice represents something strange, not only is this a link to when Aeneas sees Dido in the Underworld, but it is also a key moment of grief for Dante. The fact that there is no sadness in Paradise seems not to apply here. I would say that the fictional Dante’s only real fault is his sadness over the fact that Beatrice is pretty much ignoring him in Paradise. He does not understand that she has crossed over to the other realm whilst he is still mortal. He does not seem to comprehend that his love was unrequited in life and yet, in death apparently it should be requited as he has made a long journey. It is the sin of expecting reward for doing something difficult or strenuous. Dante does not receive it but is led out of this fantasy and into the end of the book. The fictional Dante represents the state of mind of the religious man of the early Renaissance. The fictional Dante seems to know all of Hell and knows that there are certain sins for which we get no forgiveness for - yet, he still sympathises with those that go to Hell. Not sympathising with the characters directly, but sympathising with the fact that they are doomed to eternal damnation. Like Augustine, Dante confesses to himself that he is on the journey in order to see one person in particular and for this journey, he expects to be replied to - but it does not happen. His confession is that he is overly in love with Beatrice and so, like Augustine - he must fix his transgressions before it is too late. He must accept the fact that Beatrice is dead. He can ironically only do that by seeing that she is at ease in Paradise.

A key theme in this book is morality. The fictional Dante knows about his own transgressions and accepts them by confessing that he will change them. The fictional Dante is also aware of the fact that the only crime Virgil has committed is that he is not a Christian and thus cannot be allowed into Paradise. It seems to me confusing that there is little comment by the fictional Dante on this but instead only a line or so from Virgil in which he explains himself. There is an absolute certainty about the doctrine that determines whether someone is good or bad in the text. The morality question is very simple to figure out in the different circles in the Inferno since they each have a label on them which state what the particular sin is. The only problem I have had with this labelling of sins is that it doesn’t mean very much at all without a good amount of context in which that sin was either committed or coaxed into being committed. The fictional Dante does not seem to question this fact and, like a Medieval man, he ingests doctrine like holy water and moves on to the next layer in which he will learn a new thing about his religion and the morality question. When the fictional Dante enters Paradise, he sees Emperor Justinian - an innovative ruler of the Byzantine empire. The riches and art that were involved in the reign of Justinian seem to shed light on a new era dawning before Dante. The morality question changes from what morality is to how morality will change if innovation where to change. Here we have the difference between the Medieval era and the Renaissance.

This book means so much to me in so many different ways pretty much because it came to change everything I had ever once understood about literature. In my latter reading experiences, I have always looked back to the Divine Comedy, especially in my readings of Renaissance Literature and my constant re-reads of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton. When I have revisited the Divine Comedy, I have always become rather enamoured by its use of language concerning darkness. Especially in the Inferno. When I was doing my undergraduate dissertation, I used the Divine Comedy as one of my key texts in order to compare the language of darkness - it was pretty awesome and I actually have a notebook of every single word in the book that either connotes, expresses, defines, depicts or implies a sense of darkness. And the best thing about this book is the way it depicts this darkness in ways that I had never even read about before.

I think more people should give Dante’s Divine Comedy a chance because you will come to realise that it was at this time that the Medieval World was changing into the Renaissance and people understood this. People like Dante Alighieri understood this and he wrote it into a strange thematic code into his work. It is a key moment in artistic history that is explained with vibrance, glory and the change in values of religion, beliefs and philosophy. This book is still read by people today because it is purely one of the best works of literature ever written. There is absolutely no book like it in the world, except for probably part of the Aeneid, but that was the entire point. On my next re-read of the Divine Comedy, I would like to explore the characters of Justinian and Beatrice in more detail and how they symbolise certain aspects of the realm of Heaven. It seems to me that they are more than just static characters Dante just happened to remember.

"The darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who their maintain neutrality in times of moral crisis."

"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri

literature
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About the Creator

Annie Kapur

190K+ Reads on Vocal.

English Lecturer

🎓Literature & Writing (B.A)

🎓Film & Writing (M.A)

🎓Secondary English Education (PgDipEd)

📍Birmingham, UK

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