Dante Alighieri: the Paradiso

At noon on Easter Wednesday Dante mounts with Beatrice straight up into the world of light. The planets and stars he passes through spell out in images and language a vision as lost to us as the classical myths once read so popularly in the constellations. Not lost entirely, perhaps, for Dante teaches the reader how to sift the seeds of light from the chaff of mere superstition. Although the earth-centered Ptolemaic universe has vanished, as C. S. Lewis observes in The Discarded Image, each of us can still place ourselves in the midst of the galaxies by gazing up into the starlit night sky and wonder at our consciousness of such myriad lights. We may not be the physical center any longer, but in a profound spiritual sense our knowledge of the cosmos has never been more exciting, honest, and searching.

Through the nine spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Fixed Stars, Primum Mobile, and beyond them to the Empyrean, Dante the pilgrim moves up into the rose of paradise to the vision of the triune God. Resuming the imagery of the sea-voyage in Purgatory, the poet cautions those readers following him in little skiffs to turn back to port. The sea he ventures upon has never been crossed before and those who sail in his wake will be more amazed than were the first seafaring Argonauts by the exploits of Jason. Only the wayfarers who look for manna from heaven will take this journey:

You other few who stretched your necks on high

In time to taste the bread of angels which

People here feed on, but never have their fill,

You well may put your boat out on the deep

By staying in the furrow of my wake

Before the water flows back smooth again.                                                 (Paradise II, 10-15)

Greater than the power to see visions is the gift of interpreting them, Saint Augustine claims. Pharaoh has dreams but Joseph gives them meaning; Belshazzar sees the hand-writing but Daniel tells him its significance. Dante’s vision of Holy and Easter Weeks in 1300 raised him to mystic heights, but how was one to re-visit such an apex of human consciousness and make it real to others? In the opening of Paradise the poet sounds a note that he will ring often again in the lines that follow:

I have been to that heaven where his light

Beams brightest and seen things that none, returning,

Has the knowledge or the power to repeat,

 

Because as it draws near to its desire,

Our intellect sinks down to such a depth

That memory cannot trace its way back there.

                               (Paradise I, 4-9)

So overwhelming was the experience that the mind cannot retain the profound dimensions felt at the time.

The poet must now seek the aid not of the Muses but of Apollo, god of sunlight and poetic inspiration. He asks the god to "come into my breast and breathe in me," as if the deity were another Holy Spirit. The gift of verbal music is not just for himself but for the poets with greater talents who shall follow Dante:

A little spark is followed by huge fires:

Perhaps, after me, prayers will be so raised

With stronger voices that Cyrrha may respond.

                               (Paradise I, 34-36)

The peak of Parnassus called Cyrrha was dear to Apollo — already the interpretation of the vision begins with these references to the pagan god who is himself being metamorphosed by the poet.

Dante’s task is to put the transcendent into speech until God grant others the similar grace of rising, here and now, above the human condition:

This passing-beyond-the-human cannot be

Expressed in words; let the example then

Serve him for whom grace reserves the experience.

                               (Paradise I, 70-72)

Dante employs the verb "trasumanar" to express the action of "transhumanizing" or moving above the earthly state into the heavenly realm. Like Saint Paul, the wayfarer does not know how he ascends, "whether in the body or out of the body" (2 Corinthians 12:2).

Even as he speaks and without being aware of it, the pilgrim soars with Beatrice at incalculable speed to the first sphere. The pair enters the moon, and Dante first sees faces like reflections in water, as faint as a pearl on a white forehead. He turns to look at the faces he thinks mirrored in front of him, but he finds nothing there. The reflections are real! Among souls he meets Piccarda, sister of his friend Forese Donati and cousin of his wife Gemma. These spirits have been inconstant like the moon. Dante wonders whether or not they aspire to a higher place in heaven, and Piccarda responds with one of the central themes of Paradise:

"So, how we dwell from threshold up to threshold

Throughout this kingdom gladdens the whole kingdom

And the King, too, who wills in us what He wills.

 

"For in His will is our peace. It is the sea

To which all things existing flow, both those

His will creates and those that nature makes."

                               (Paradise III, 82-87)

The poet here transforms the ocean imagery into a sea of light. The individual souls literally bathe in the single radiance of God which pours down through the nine spheres like luminous rain.

In the wheeling spirals of the sparkling souls that dazzle his gaze amid the planets and constellations, Dante is delighted to discover patterns within patterns of light. One of his most elaborate and complex configurations occupies the first eight stanzas of Canto XIII. In the previous two cantos the poet has described two twirling rings of twelve dancers that move around him as they sing their praises. Dante asks the reader three times to "imagine" the scene by taking any fifteen stars of the first magnitude, the seven stars of the Big Dipper, and the two stars from the mouth of the Little Dipper and then grouping them in two concentric circles, each like the Corona Borealis which, in Greek mythology, was made from the bridal wreath of Ariadne when she was brought to heaven to be the wife of Dionysus. With these twenty-four stars spinning in two circles, we may try to picture the two rings of twelve dancers rotating one within the other’s circle and in opposite directions, but such a splendid design would be only a pale shadow of what the poet witnessed, as far from the experience as the swift motion of the Primum Mobile is from the sluggish flow of the Chiana river in Tuscany. In one multi-layered epic simile, Dante fuses heaven and earth, sky and legend, vision and interpretation, into one coherently brilliant image.

In the pure white light of the planet Jupiter, the pilgrim watches as souls fly up like birds to form themselves into sparkling letters; their sky-writing spells out a message in Latin for rulers, the last character M becoming in turn a unit composed of many spirits:

And I saw other lights descend to where

The top of the M rose, and come to rest

There, singing, I believe, the Good that draws them.

                               (Paradise XVIII, 97-99)

In the next canto, the letter becomes an eagle that speaks with a single voice — the most unusual of all Dante’s conversationalists — and with clarity and vigorous warnings defends God’s justice.

Dante’s most inspired pattern is the white rose with its yellow center which the souls form in the highest heaven, the Empyrean. The rose is like a massive Colosseum with souls of both Dispensations seated in tiers that rise up higher and higher. It is divided vertically and equally between the Old and New Testaments with the upper rows on one half lined with souls who believed in Christ to come and on the other half those who believed in Christ when he came. Along the one dividing line sits Mary and downward under her the holy Hebrew women; opposite them sits John the Baptist and along the dividing line under him are Christian male saints.

Did Dante draw the pattern for his rose from the great rose windows of the French Gothic cathedrals? His first two biographers, Villani and Boccaccio, state that in the early years of his exile Dante visited Paris and attended the University. In Canto X the poet mentions the rue du Fouarre which begins on the left bank of the Seine across from the church of Notre-Dame. The rose of the poem combines the North and South windows in Notre-Dame’s transept, one depicting Mary with the Child Jesus surrounded by witnesses of the Old Dispensation and the other showing Christ ringed with the faithful from the New Covenant. About Mary are enthroned in the North rose first the sixteen prophets; in the second circle sit the thirty-two kings, royal ancestors of her Child; and in the outermost circle are thirty-two patriarchs and high-priests. The South rose (completely restored in the nineteenth century) pictures Christ surrounded by similar ranks of martyrs, confessors, and saints.

Not only does Dante join the ranking groups into one image but he also reverses our perspective. Instead of being a bystander gazing up at the flower from the outside, the pilgrim moves up through the tiers from within. As a result, Dante turns the rose inside out so that it is seen entirely in reflection, all mirrored in the one radiance that shines down from above:

The whole expanse is fashioned by the ray

Reflected from the top of the first-moved

Sphere from which it takes its might and motion.

 

And as a hillside is mirrored in a lake

Below, as if to look on its own beauty

When it is lush with flowers and fresh grass,

 

Just so, above the light and round and round,

Reflected from more than a thousand tiers,

I saw all those of us who have returned there.

                               (Paradise XXX, 106-115)

The pilgrim wonders: if the lowest ranks where the innocent children are ranged looks so vast, how wide must be the circumference of the "farthest-reaching petals"!

One of the problematic patterns that confounds the wayfarer and the reader involves reconciling the concentric model of the universe and its ever-widening orbits around the fixed earth with the center of the heavens in the Point of God on which all depends. In the first model the Primum Mobile occupies the outermost circle and in the second version the Primum Mobile forms the innermost ring. How can the universe possess two opposite centers? In Canto XXVIII Beatrice distinguishes between the material earth-centered cosmos and the Light-pivoting heavens. Employing the paradox of mysticism, she explains that the contradiction is only apparent since the principles of both patterns is the same and the spheres accelerate in speed as they draw nearer to God: the Primum Mobile whirls fastest in both worlds. To each physical sphere an angelic Intelligence is assigned with a wonderful correspondence between them. God as the center of the hierarchy of angels and as the circumference of the material cosmos manifests his omnipotence and omnipresence as both the immanent and transcendent One. And the earth? It recedes into insignificance.

The poet has turned the pilgrimage upside down and inside out, from a universe that takes the earth as its starting-point to a universe that offers an Archimedean point outside space and time, a total change in gravitation from the Satanic pull of the Inferno to the divine attraction of Paradise. This otherworldly reorientation takes place in human consciousness — Dante’s mystical vision intends to transform his readers in the here and now, in the course of moving through the Comedy. Kierkegaard remarked in a journal entry for 1848: "The Archimedean point outside the world is an oratory where a man really prays in all sincerity — and he shall move the earth." Dante has moved the earth with the fulcrum of his vision: first it moved him as an actual turning around of his life in 1300 and then it moved him again to write the poem.

Twice the pilgrim looks back from paradise to peer downward at the physical world so far below him:

I traveled back in gazing down through all

The seven spheres, and then I saw this globe

So paltry that I smiled at its appearance.

 

And that opinion I approve as best

Which holds the earth as least, and he whose thought

Is elsewhere may be named as truly upright.

                               (Paradise XXII, 133-138)

In his second farewell glance in Canto XXVII, Dante sees the madcap course followed by Ulysses, recalling the Greek’s speech in Inferno XXVI and the island of Mount Purgatory. Like the Omega Point of Teilhard de Chardin, the Point that attracts the pilgrim and all the blessed is a lodestone of Love, of dynamic energy and light, and of converging forces that receive their motion and charge from its attraction.

Like the previous canticles, Paradise proceeds to its climax through a series of personal encounters between the pilgrim and the spirits of the dead. Dante’s drive to go onward first comes from his contact with Beatrice as she grows more luminous and gracious in his eyes. But Dante also learns from others along the way. In Canto VI, the Emperor Justinian provides Dante with a summary of heroic deeds accomplished under the ensign of the Roman eagle. Dante’s great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in Canto XVI offers a detailed account of the past achievements of noble families in Florence. Both histories follow a pattern of rise and fall, the ancient prowess yielding to gradual decline and breakdown into factions. The Holy Roman Empire on the national and local levels has fallen on evil days. As Charles Martel of Anjou predicts in Canto VIII, darker days of warfare lie ahead.

The panoramic view of Roman history provided by Justinian and the story of the Florentine families and of Dante’s own lineage recounted by Cacciaguida present the public and personal narratives that the poet balances in turn with the past and future summaries of events. The public prophecy of Martel is counterpointed by the private revelations of Cacciaguida regarding Dante’s own exile and suffering:

"You shall leave everything most dearly loved:

This is the first one of the arrows which

The bow of exile is prepared to shoot.

 

"You shall discover how salty is the savor

Of someone else’s bread, and how hard the way

To come down and climb up another’s stairs."

                               (Paradise XVII, 58-63)

This rising and falling pattern also marks two of the most perfectly symmetrical speeches in the Comedy: the eulogy of Saint Francis by Saint Thomas Aquinas in Canto XI and the eulogy of Saint Dominic by Saint Bonaventure in Canto XII. In each case the speaker follows his words of praise for the founder of the other religious order with a denunciation of the present state of his own: Thomas laments the degeneracy of the Dominicans while Bonaventure grieves for the loss of the original Franciscan fervor. The same rhythm that sends the exile up and down the stairs of strangers marks the cadences of the lives of popes, princes, and ordinary people.

From the fall of man, however, all are called to rise through the cross and resurrection of Jesus to the summit of new love. The poet’s path traces the footsteps of the scriptural authors and their interpreters who mapped out the road before him. To Saint Bonaventure, Dante possibly owed not only the Christological bent of his mysticism but also the framework for his triadic poem. Like Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum (The Soul’s Journey Into God), Dante’s Comedy derives its inspiration from a mystical experience, takes the form of an ascent toward the Being of God in Christ, and employs the number three and its combinations as the key to order the passage into the eternal. The threefold way according to Bonaventure begins with the physical world, then enters into the soul itself, and finally goes beyond it to attain the vision of the Trinity. These three ways conform to the triadic existence of things: matter, creative intelligence, and eternal art; to the three parts of the day: evening, morning, and noon; and to the triple substance of Christ, who is the ladder to God: the corporeal, spiritual, and divine. Lastly, the threefold way embodies the very nature of the person: body, spirit, and mind so that the whole being mounts up to God, loving him with all one’s mind, with all one’s heart, and with all one’s soul (Mark 12:30). Dante’s journey begins on Good Friday evening in the material world of Inferno, climbs on Easter morning up the spiritual mountain of Purgatory, and rises on Wednesday at noon to the mind of God in Paradise.

Three visions of Christ occur in the journey through paradise: the cross seen in Mars in Canto XIV, the triumph of the risen Lord in Canto XXIII, and the vision of the human Jesus in the center of the circle of Godhead in the final canto. These experiences complete the initial sight of the divine and human natures of Christ shining in the eyes of Beatrice as she gazes on the half-eagle, half-lion griffin at the climax of Purgatory XXXI. Seen against the ruby-red glow of Mars, the white light of the cross within the circle, traced by the radiant spirits glittering as they proceed through the sky, surely forms one of Dante’s most brilliant configurations:

Here now my memory outruns my talent,

For Christ flamed from that cross with such a flash

That I can find no pattern fit for it.

                               (Paradise XIV, 103-105)

As he looks on the moving lights, Dante hears hymns of praise being sung within the cross, and he grows "enraptured" and "moved with loving." Heaven, Saint Augustine says, is "one Christ loving himself."

In the sphere of the Fixed Stars, the pilgrim is directed by Beatrice to turn his eyes to the shining followers of Christ in triumph, all illumined by his light:

I saw, above a million burning lamps,

A Sun that kindled every one of them

As our sun lights the stars we glimpse on high;

 

And through its living light the shining Substance

Glowed out so brightly down upon my gaze

That my eyes dazzled and could not endure it.

                               (Paradise XXIII, 28-33)

Dante is overwhelmed by the vision but, encouraged by Beatrice, he recovers to find that his mind, now enlarged, breaks free from itself, although his mind cannot "recall what it became" at the moment. The vision prepares him for a new, profound insight into the smiling face of Beatrice; she tells him:

"Open your eyes and look at what I am,

For you have seen such things that you are able

Now to withstand the vision of my smile!"

                               (Paradise XXIII, 46-48)

Just as Lucia prepared Dante for the ascent of Mount Purgatory by raising him to the threshold during his first night of sleep on the mountain, so Beatrice introduces the poet to the Queen of Heaven who with them made up the trinity of women, in Canto II of the Inferno, responsible for Dante’s salvation.

Three moments of vision make up the movement of the final canto, climaxing in the last face to face meeting with the Incarnate Son. In the first moment, Dante views the world as composed of numerous pages bound together in a single volume within the eternal light:

Within its depths I saw gathered together,

Bound by love into a single volume,

Leaves that lie scattered through the universe.

                               (Paradise XXXIII, 85-87)

The image is all important because, the poet states, he believes he saw in it "the universal pattern of this knot" that makes the whole cohere in one. The famous metaphor, in fact, contains a meaning too often missed. The volume here is a sacred text: in the book of nature we are to read the Word of God, the Lord revealed in the book of the Gospels.

A codex of the Gospels commonly began with a depiction of Christ in glory, Alpha-Omega, seated on the throne of majesty and circled by an oval mandorla around which stood the four figures of the Apocalypse, here representing the four evangelists. In his hand Jesus holds the book of the Gospels which is himself. The cover is studded with precious jewels. Each individual page inside shares in the beauty and unity declared from without, but each makes up only part of the whole. Thus the meaning of what is revealed cannot be grasped in one passage or in one human life; it is gathered up in one volume, the person of Jesus. Like the cover, nature too glitters in earth and sky with the variegated light of its maker. The book then is not a static symbol for Dante but alive with color, speech, and motion; it is a portal into the real and a container of the treasury of heaven.

The second moment of vision comes in the form of the three circles of Light; they are of "one dimension and three different colors":

One seemed to be reflected by the other,

Rainbow by rainbow, while the third seemed fire

Breathed equally from one and from the other.

                               (Paradise XXXIII, 118-120)

The poet confesses that his words fail to match his conception of the Trinity. All he can manage is to exclaim in the form of a prayer:

O everlasting Light, you dwell alone

In yourself, know yourself alone, and known

And knowing, love and smile upon yourself!

                               (Paradise XXXIII, 124-126)

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit gaze, meditate, and smile upon its Self — the Three in One — circle within circle within circle as the Knower, Known, and Knowing and the Lover, Loved, and Loving.

The moment of the third vision arrives, the epitome and apex of the poem:

That middle circle which appeared in you

To be conceived as a reflected light,

After my eyes had studied it a while,

 

Within itself and in its coloring

Seemed to be painted with our human likeness

So that my eyes were wholly focused on it.

                               (Paradise XXXIII. 127-132)

Fascinated and drawn to this likeness of our features (nostra effige), Dante longs to know how in "this new vision" our image fuses into "the circle and finds its place in it." His own capacities fail, but then he is "struck by lightning" and grasps the God-man in the center as embodying divine Light that shines from within the features through the eyes. Gaze meets gaze, and the seer becomes one with the "Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Dante prepares us for this vision by already seeing Christ reflected in the eyes of Beatrice when they meet in Purgatory and by the previous instances in Paradise when he has looked into her face. In fact, at the conclusion of the Vita Nuova, Dante sees the pilgrims who go to gaze on the Holy Shroud, which bears the imprint of the Crucified’s face, at the time he is imagining the blessed face of Beatrice in paradise. So all features join in the true image (vera icona) of Christ’s countenance, just as the pilgrim from far away Croatia comes to Saint Peter’s in Rome to look on the Veronica and cannot "see enough":

But in his thought says, while it is exposed,

"My Lord Jesus Christ, true God and Savior,

Was this your face then as you once appeared?"

                               (Paradise XXXI, 106-108)

The face the poet sees at the end of the poem is the true image of God, the "OMO" glimpsed in Canto XXIII of Purgatory.

In icons of Christ "made without hands" (archeiropoietos), as the image on the Holy Shroud, the head is modeled on the Omega form with the halo, the hair, and the face itself making three circles within each other. The pattern is intended to reflect the inner reality of the Triune God. The whole appears illuminated by a divine effulgence suffusing the countenance and by a harmonious inner light radiating from within the God-man. Around him the halo is inscribed with the revealed Name: "The Being." Dante’s last face to face meeting sums up the eternal art made human by the Artist Himself.

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Dante Alighieri: the "PURGATORIO"

In the opening canto of Purgatory, Dante the poet pictures Dante the pilgrim coming out of the pit of hell blackened by soot and weary with climbing. To Cato, the guardian of the threshold to the mountain, Dante looks like a typical sinner. So he is. His behavior in hell, his weak pity, quick anger, lassitude, and pride still wait for transformation into virtues of compassion, patience, zeal, and humility. Otherwise, why climb the mountain?
In the Inferno sins are punished, in Purgatory sins are purged. For the pilgrim and the reader, the journey literally leads to a higher level of interior commitment in order to acquire virtue and to change one’s life by deepening the inner experience of personal worth and public goodness. By probing the depths of his own humanity and ascending the heights of the human spirit, Dante makes the journey alone and for all. A happy ambiguity exists in the Italian word alta: it can mean both "high" and "deep." In the Divine Comedy, the higher we travel, the more profound the journey inward and the more demanding the search into the mind and heart.
When, in Canto II, Dante meets the souls detained in Antepurgatory, he joins them in listening to Casella sing one of Dante’s own songs which Casella set to music. His behavior — and Virgil’s — is ripe for reproach. The serious business of total spiritual change has yet to begin, as Cato vigorously reminds the sluggards:

"What negligence and what delay is this?

Race to the mountain and strip off the slough

Which won’t let God be manifest in you!"

                        (Purgatory II, 121-123)

The reprimand affects Virgil more pointedly than it does Dante who appears more interested in his guide’s feelings than in his own failure to move ahead. Only when the wayfarer stands before Beatrice — after Virgil, who has declared him free, has left — and listens to her in the earthly paradise as she reproaches him, only then will he fully realize the personal impact of his long journey, that the path has been followed for his sake to lead him to the "new life" which Beatrice has prepared for him.
Previously, Dante has portrayed his encounters with the damned in hell as a shocking reminder of the evil pervading the world and contaminating even the pilgrim passing through the landscape of pain on his way to the final vision of God. Before writing a line of verse, the poet already had experienced that vision, and from that point of view every step along the way reveals its true purpose and perspective. The transformation that awaits the wayfarer has taken place in the writer’s deepest consciousness. Now he must retrace the winding road by which the mystical height was reached, up the hillside of corrected vices and acquired virtues.
On each of the seven terraces of purgatory the pilgrim’s imagination undergoes a different training in assimilating images of vice and virtue so that his mind will finally be ready for the vision of God. In hell he remained basically an observer, but in purgatory he is a participant in the unfolding drama. Dante staggers as he approaches the cornice of sloth, he cannot see in the place of blind anger, and he burns as he passes through the fiery wall of the terrace of lust. He is the sinner in need of reform and he is the purified soul who will drink the waters of Eunoè to be made whole again beyond confusion.
The spirituality of Purgatory is decidedly modern in its emphasis on the individual as the focus of God’s salvation plan. Humanity, not in the abstract but in the person of Dante, must change if history is to cease its threshing tumult of upheaval and selfish pursuit. Dante must first set his own house in order before leading his readers to straighten out their lives. He has already done so, and the poem now universalizes the experience of one man so that all may come to the same transformation of life, making the crooked straight and turning the reader around in conversion.
Through overt and hermetic teaching, Dante wants the reader to discover his or her own humanity in the poem. In his letter to Can Grande della Scala, the author states that the subject of his work is "man as he is subject to the reward or punishment of Justice in the exercise of his free will with its merits and demerits." In Canto XII, the proud, crouched beneath the heavy stones they carry on their backs, gaze down on the reliefs carved into the pavement. The examples, ranging from the fall of Lucifer to the destruction of Troy, are set out in twelve tercets that begin respectively with U U U U, O O O O, and M M M M; then the thirteenth tercet starts each line with each of the three acrostic letters. The pattern spells out the Italian word for "man" who, the poet implies, is synonymous with pride. The reader discovers the code that spells out the message secretly for his or her own perception of the truth. Similarly, in Canto XXIII the poet sees the word OMO shaped in the features of the starved gluttons:

The sockets of their eyes seemed gemless rings:

Those who read OMO in the face of man

Would plainly there have recognized the M.

                            (Purgatory XXIII, 31-33)

The commonplace observation that OMO ("man") is written with the eyes, brows, nose, and cheekbones of the face as a pictogram of the essential nature of the person as the OMO DEI ("man is of God") here becomes the icon of all the faces encountered in the poem. The human face is one face. The images mirror one image of man in the image of God.
The maker has stamped his reflection and put his signature there in secret for the people to learn how to read the original name. In Canto XXV Dante carefully traces the development of the human body-soul from before its conception, through its vegetative-sensitive growth in the foetus to the moment when, before its birth, the reflective power of the soul is infused directly by the creator. The physiology may be outdated, but the lesson remains changeless: in order to know God, we must first know ourselves. Or, again, we only know God in our own image because he has placed his image in ourselves. So, love of God, of self, and of one another is really one love. Christ, the God-man, is the recapitulation of the image, so that, as Saint Irenaeus observes, "the glory of God is a living man."
Three definitions of man may be seen operating in the Divine Comedy: the Aristotelian view of man as a rational animal, which explains how those in hell have allowed the beast in them to prevail; the Platonic approach to man as embodied spirit, which explains how those in purgatory struggle to let their souls direct their lives; and the psalmist claim that man is a little less than the angels, which prepares us for the place the blessed assume beside the angelic choirs. Of the three definitions, the middle one contains the most appealing balance between extremes, for it emphasizes the transcendental aspirations which Purgatory describes with such rich variety and striking originality. The gluttons, for example, whose emaciated features make OMO easily recognizable, now hunger for justice in just measure:

And I heard uttered: "Blessed are they whom grace

Enlightens so, the love of taste enkindles

No overindulgent longings in their breasts,

 

"Hungering always only after justice!"

                   (Purgatory XXIV, 151-154)

Christian gnosis or knowledge, according to Clement of Alexandria, involves "a perfecting of man as man." This gnosis of divine things conforms to human nature and to the word of God inspiring the mind and heart. It comes through the senses or directly from above through intuitive inspiration:

O imagination, which sometimes steals us

So far from outward things we pay no heed

Although a thousand trumpets blast about us,

 

Who moves you if the senses yield you nothing?

Light formed in heaven moves you by itself

Or by the will of Him who guides it downward.

                              (Purgatory XVII, 13-18)

An inner guiding light gives gnosis its spiritual character and destination so that what is learned outwardly through examples and experience forms an interior image which can take the form of a dream. The pilgrim learns his way by both outer and inner imaging. The Purgatory is a mystical school of instruction, scholastic in its structure, practical and psychological in its application. Divine and human art are brought together, for the human being is God’s greatest work in nature and man’s artistry is an imitation of the divine.
Dante’s gnostic plan is to instruct his readers by the means of his own presence in the poem, by learning through his seeing, by hearing, and by opening mentally and emotionally to the outer and inner imagery of the seven levels circling up the mountain. His book of instruction prepares us for the vision of God through grounding the senses, imagination, and intellect in the best possible models from the past. At each cornice one of the deadly sins is corrected first by a whip that offers examples of the opposing virtue and then by a rein which checks the vice with examples of the sin being punished. Everything is done in an orderly and straightforward fashion without cruelty or fuss: the system works because it perfectly suits the needs of the participants who are there willingly and gladly in hopes of moving upward. Each whip always begins with a lesson from the life of the Virgin Mary who "shone with every virtue," Saint Bonaventure observed, "and was most free from the Seven Capital Sins." The next instance of virtue is taken from the Bible, classical literature, mythology, and literature, or from a life of a saint. Usually three examples suffice, although in their haste the slothful only have time for shouting out two, while the gluttons must listen to five "fruits" cried out from the inverted tree of knowledge in Canto XXII. The reins show an even greater range of number and content, from two for sloth and lust to fourteen for pride. These divisions provide the framework for the intellectual program of reform, and in each it is Dante himself who is the one who undergoes that reformation in our place.
The pilgrim spends three nights on Mount Purgatory, which is on an island in the vast waters of the southern hemisphere. The island itself is in three parts, the lower slope where the excommunicated and the negligent late-repenters wait, the cliffs of purgatory proper, and the Garden of Eden at the summit. Dante finds himself at the threshold of each division by the end of each day and falls asleep. Lucia, one of the trinity of ladies (with Beatrice and the Virgin) who initiated his journey originally, as described in Canto II of the Inferno, comes to lift the pilgrim higher and leave him at the gateway of purgatory after his first night on the hillside. Virgil tells Dante what took place in his sleep:

"At dawn before the day, a while ago,

When your soul slept on deep within yourself,

Upon the flowers that deck the glen below,

 

"A lady came; she said, ‘I am Lucia.

Allow me to take this man, still asleep,

So I may speed him on his way above.’ "

                       (Purgatory IX, 52-57)

After waking, the wayfarer climbs three steps of the entrance and starts scaling the cliff up to each level cornice where he encounters each of the seven sins.
Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust simplify and reverse the order of sins in hell, where lust is first and proud Lucifer last in the pit. As the pilgrim climbs he grows lighter and his path easier, for he is drawing away from the pull of gravity of the Satanic center of the earth. All seven sins spring from the failure to recognize the freeing nature of love. Since love is mind-directed, Virgil argues in Canto XVII, it can be turned to wrong ends. This central canto of Purgatory — and of the whole Comedy — explains the threefold division of the seven sins: evil love (pride, envy, wrath), too little love (sloth), and too much love (avarice, gluttony, lust). The middle sin is sloth — better designated as acedia, the mental laziness that refuses to think things through and to heed one’s inspirations. It is this sin of distraction that Beatrice accuses Dante of failing to avoid after her death, wandering in pursuit of other women and neglecting the vision of love she has bequeathed to him.
The goal of his climb is the reunion with Beatrice. Meeting her again sums up all the past events of the poet’s life and transforms him for the turning upward toward God that completes the journey. Setting out on the slope below on Easter morning, he arrives three days later at the earthly paradise:

Longing now to search in and around

The heavenly woods — dense and green with life —

Which softened the new sunlight for my eyes,

 

Not waiting any longer, I left the cliff,

Making my slow, slow way on level ground,

Over the soil which everywhere spread fragrance.

                              (Purgatory XXVIII, 1-6)

The key word now is "new" which the poet will sound again and again until the final lines of this canticle:

From out those holiest waves I now returned,

Refashioned, just as new trees are renewed

With their new foliage, for I came back

 

Pure and prepared to leap up to the stars.

                       (Purgatory XXXIII, 142-145)

Dante deliberately echoes the title of his work the Vita Nuova or New Life which he wrote in the late 1290's as a prose commentary on poems previously written in praise of Beatrice. She herself recalls the book when she describes his failures to live up to her ideal:

"This man was so potentially endowed

In his new life, that every fine ambition

Would have been wonderfully fulfilled in him."

                        (Purgatory XXX, 115-117)

Numerous parallels exist between the New Life and Purgatory, especially in the use of the number nine as the essence of Beatrice and the sum of the Trinity. The three main divisions of Purgatory occur when the pilgrim sleeps before crossing to the next area, in Cantos IX, XVIII, and XXVII. The pattern of nine unifies the poet’s own life as he moves from childhood through adolescence and into manhood. In the New Life Dante describes three critical passages in his experience, at the ages of nine, eighteen, and twenty-seven. Each instance involves an encounter with Beatrice who reflects like a mirror an ideal image of what he the poet might become and each meeting provokes a dream which leads to a vision of his beloved. In their first meeting, Beatrice’s innocent beauty sums up a dream of childhood and his falling in love prepares him for emotional maturity. In their second encounter, Beatrice speaks to Dante, inspiring him to use his gifts of poetry and intellectual powers for the good of others. At the age of twenty-four, Beatrice dies, and two years later the poet has a vision of her in paradise: he resolves to dedicate all his gifts to her praise.
Eight years later, in 1300, Dante journeys back to Beatrice who first summoned Virgil to be his guide and then, at the top of Mount Purgatory, herself becomes his teacher and guide into paradise. In chapter XXX of the New Life, the author describes Beatrice as "a nine, that is a miracle." The Italian word nove means both "nine" and "a new thing," so that she embodies anew the nines of Purgatory and the nine spheres of Paradise. She is the human being who sums up and renews his encounters with all others. When she lifts the veil from her face, the ten years since her death flash before him with all their lack of focused purpose and false starts. Only the longing to be here has sustained him:

My eyes were so intent and fixed on her

To satisfy the thirst of those ten years

That every other sense was quenched in me.

                              (Purgatory XXXII, 1-3)

The face of Beatrice is the face of OMO DEI, the image of God he has searched for in vain up until now — or rather, he has seen the face before but never recognized it. The mystical vision of 1300 has been made possible by the grace of Beatrice who, eight years before as recorded in the New Life, granted him a vision of herself in heaven. That vision, like this one, culminates not in Beatrice herself but in the vera icona of Christ. Just after the earlier vision, Dante, while watching pilgrims set out for Rome to see the Holy Shroud on which the face of the Lord has been traced in blood and tears, reflects that Beatrice looks on that face now in glory.
At the climax of Purgatory, Dante achieves his initiation into the vision of God in Christ that will finally seize him at the end of the entire pilgrimage. The wayfarer has been baptized by Matilda, the symbol of the moral life, in the waters of Lethe, wiping out all memory of past sins as the angels have already erased the seven P’s of sin (peccatum) from the pilgrim’s forehead. The reprimands and testing by Beatrice have served as a confirmation sacrament, just as his confession and sorrow supplied the function of the sacrament of penance, Now Dante is to partake in communion with Christ who is symbolized in the earthly paradise by the griffin, a mythological animal that has the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion — the eagle representing the divine nature and the lion the human nature of the God-man. As the pilgrim gazes into the eyes of Beatrice — she is not looking at him but at the griffin — he sees the dual nature of the animal reflected there, shifting constantly although the griffin does not move: the divine and human are focused in the one place:

A thousand yearnings seething more than flames

Held my eyes fastened to the radiant eyes

That remained ever rooted on the griffin.

 

Exactly like the sunlight in a mirror,

The twofold animal gleamed in her eyes,

Now beaming with one nature, now the other.

 

Reader, reflect if I was struck with wonder

When I observed the object in itself

Stand still while its reflecting image shifted.

                         (Purgatory XXXI, 118-126)

The next lines make explicit the Eucharistic nature of this experience: "my soul, full of gladness and amazement, / Was tasting that food which, while satisfying / Of itself, still causes one to crave it."
Notice that the pilgrim does not see the two natures as one; that vision must wait until the mystic heights of paradise have been reached and Dante sees within the three circles of the trinity the human effige of Jesus. In his vision of the griffin, however, he achieves gnostic perfection, the knowledge of Christ as true man and God in one person. Note, too, that this is the first of the visions of Christ and that three more remain for the wayfarer in Paradise, including the one that closes the poem,
The procession that greets the reader in the Garden of Eden surely strikes the modern consciousness as strangely exotic and too heavily symbolic. We must set all realism aside — any illustration, especially by a Doré, destroys the whole medieval effect. The pageant is pure imagination, a triumph staged for Beatrice as an introduction to her part in the drama that began in the darkened forest. Now we have reached an utterly different woods, "dense and green with life," with tall trees like those in India, singing birds, lush flowers, and dark streams. The colors of the procession first catch the eye, from the burning lights of the seven candelabra that lead the pageant, to the white-crowned twenty-four elders of the Old Testament, the green-laureled four creatures of the Gospels, and the red-garlanded figures of the rest of the New Testament. The colors, symbolic of faith, hope, and love, all are repeated in the women who represent the three theological virtues:

Three women in a circle next came dancing

At the right wheel; the first one was so red

She scarcely would be noticed in a flame;

 

The second seemed as if her flesh and bone

Had been cut out of emerald; and the third

Appeared to be of freshly fallen snow.

 

And now the white one seemed to lead them round

And now the red, and from their leader’s song

The others took the measure fast and slow.

                              (Purgatory XXIX, 121-129)

The full impact of the tricolors does not appear, however, until after the chariot, which is the Church, drawn by the griffin passes before the witnessing and wonder-struck poets. Since this is a procession of history from Genesis to Revelation, from the beginning to the end of time, the center to which all eyes are drawn becomes the focal point of space and time:

I have seen sometimes at the break of day

The eastern sky all rose-tinged, while the rest

Of heaven is adorned with bright clear blue,

 

And the face of the sun rise misted-over

By so soft-tempering a veil of vapors

The eye could keep on staring a long time:

 

So, in a cloud of flowers which flew up

From the angelic hands and fell again

Inside and all around the chariot,

 

A crown of olive over her white veil,

A woman appeared to me; beneath her green

Mantle she wore a robe of flaming red.

                           (Purgatory XXX, 22-33)

The moment and place are specific: the long road has led up to this spot for this encounter with Beatrice, and the procession of history has become Dante’s own story as in this new hour he recalls his old life:

And my soul, which for a long time now

Had not felt overcome as when I’d stood

Trembling with trepidation in her presence,

 

Without apprehending further through my eyes,

But by the hidden power she projected,

Felt the tremendous force of the old love.

                           (Purgatory XXX, 34-39)

No meeting in literature so rings true with its mystical sense of anticipation and promised fulfillment. Dante has met Beatrice beyond the grave and his life is forever touched by her resurrected presence. In her the colors of faith, hope, and love come alive.
With its imagery of skies, cliffs, and forests, Purgatory offers us a landscape that, like a Rouault painting, breathes a Biblical sense of post-crucifixion sunsets and Easter-morning vistas. One of the most appealing images is that of the voyage. From its opening lines, this canticle sets us out to sea to transport us to a safe haven on the top of this mountain island. The poet is our pilot, leading us first to the celestial steersman who will lead us, like the Israelites, across the sea to the Promised Land. The famous simile that opens Canto VIII catches the twofold imagery perfectly:

Now was the hour when voyagers at sea

Pine to turn home and their hearts soften,

This first day out, for friends they bid good-by;

 

The hour when outsetting pilgrims ache

With love to hear the far-off tolling bell

That seems to mourn the dying day with tears...

                                      (Purgatory VIII, 1-6)

Dante’s voyage carries out the one that Ulysses undertook in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, but where the pagan’s route sprang from hubris and self-deception (and deception of others), the Christian pilgrim’s way wells up from humility and trust in the call received from God. When Dante meets Beatrice, he compares her to an admiral inspecting her fleet of ships. When he wakes to find himself floating in the Lethe, held up by Matilda, he can be likened to a boat. The poet is our vessel to the far shore. "From out those holiest waves" he has returned, to show us the waters, to plunge us into them, and to have us drink:

If, reader, I had room to write more lines,

I would sing still, in part, of the sweet drink

That kept me thirsting always after more,

 

But since all of the pages planned beforehand

For this, the second canticle, are filled,

The curb of art lets me run on no further.

                   (Purgatory XXXIII, 139-141)

"The curb of art" reminds us of the reins that created a kaleidoscope of images along the terraces of the mountain. Art too has its limits, and the poet melts into the silence of his own creation.

Dante Alighieri: the "Inferno"

The journey Dante offers us in his Divine Comedy stretches before us from the dark wood of its beginning, down through the chasm of hell, up the terraces of purgatory, and into the spheres of heaven, as a record of a living experience. Opening in bitterness, mounting through hope, and ending in vision, the poet insists that the person he is now, fashioning the poem, is the person who then walked into and out of that other world. His work is more than fiction — the poet insists on this acceptance — it is a literal recapitulation of what happened to him in mind, heart, and spirit.
What happened to him, in turn, is meant to happen to the reader — otherwise, why write the poem? The 14,233 lines are the poet's free gift to the reader: what Dante has already experienced awaits each one who sits down with this journey in words before him or her. He challenges each one to be the wayfarer here and now that he was then and there. First he had to meet the challenge himself, of course, by going back to the experience and putting it all into a poem.
For Dante, there are no apathetic wayfarers: they lie outside hell, purgatory, and heaven; they travel no farther than the third canto. The reader who circles into the inner unknown world of this poet's making finds that one is never alone, however. For Dante speaks, time and again, directly to his reader:

May God so grant you, reader, to find fruit

In your reading: now ponder for yourself

How I could keep the eyes in my head dry ...

                                     (Inferno XX. 19-21)

The invitation to do more than read, to live the journey, motivates every line of the Comedy.
On Good Friday of 1300, Dante began a week of religious experience that transformed his whole life. From near-despair at his own sinfulness — especially his own pride and apathy — he found a hope for change of heart and mind. More than he expected awaited him, for more than reform occurred: he was swept up in vision so that his entire being — before and after — came into focus and he truly converted, turned around, and became another man. Saint Paul, he recalled, had spoken of something similar happening to him: "I knew a man in Christ more than fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows;) such a one caught up to the third heaven" (2 Corinthians 12:2). Later Saint Ignatius of Loyola would cast this opportunity for conversion and contemplation in the form of a spiritual retreat. The world had been created in the same span of time and with it man and woman. The creation of the new man and woman should take no longer than that.
Where did this conversion take place? As specific as he is about the time, Dante remains deliberately vague about the location. In his native Florence? In Rome, where Pope Boniface VIII had declared 1300 to be a Jubilee year of special grace? Or in some rural and remote area of Italy that the poet describes so vividly at moments in his journey? The place does matter because for the poet it is a real spot, a crossroad of crisis and decision, but he has sublimated it into anywhere for the reader's sake, since the experience of the journey was — and is — inward, downward, upward, and beyond to a center that is everywhere and a circumference nowhere as in Saint Bonaventure's definition of God.
Dante's Holy and Easter Week vision changed his view of the world which, up to this time, he had worked to reform as a citizen, a soldier, a politician, and a poet. Its failure to live up to Christ's call for love of God and neighbor shocked him, especially in the practices of an official religion that had fallen, politically, militarily, and financially, into the same bad ways of the people whom Christ had sent it to redeem. For Dante, there could be no middle ground, no halfway measures between commitment and compromise. The worst sins loomed as the systematic evils of everyday life, the taking of bribes, selling of church goods and offices, the deceit, scandal, and treachery on which the century thrived. Italy lay in shambles because of the crass pettiness of important leaders in Church and state.
Total honesty, candor, openness, these virtues Dante now saw to be the fruits of the searing and uplifting call that he had heard and heeded. Ironically, he was soon to become the victim of all the vices opposed to these virtues. He would be exiled from his beloved Florence, sentenced to death in his absence, allowed only later to return if he would confess to a list of the offenses he lived to despise. He refused. How would he lie about his own person? Like Saint Thomas More he knew that his own conscience would act as his final judge. That conscience few men have honed to such a sharp edge of sureness, steadiness, and pointed truth.
Such is the confidence of saints and seers. Dante's vision in that way was like Paul's — although in canto two he demands that we not compare him to that Chosen Vessel — since the event left him another man, a self within his still weak and fallible ego. Having known profoundly the purifying of consciousness beyond all thought and emotion, the flight of the mystics, Dante for the next dozen years lived with the memory of emptiness, searching, and filling with light. Perhaps other glimpses and moments came back to him -- still that week remained as the turning point in his life when, at thirty-five, halfway through the traditional lifespan of seventy years, he woke to find himself deep in a darkened forest and ended moving with the sun and the other stars in utter harmony with Love: "But to describe the good discovered there / I here will tell the other things I saw."
Dante did not rush to begin writing down what he had seen. The experience, he reminds us, was beyond his own or anyone's expression. How could words describe or picture what it had been like for the self to harrow the depths of human existence, to rid itself of egotism, and to be filled with joy in the presence of the unseen Trinity of Love, Loving, and Loved? No one before had dreamed of putting his own inner autobiography in prose or poetry. Saint Augustine had offered the events in a chronology of outward events leading to an interior ascent to God and he addressed his book to his Maker; but Dante's experience was entirely different: he was a man of another age, temperament, and vision.
Initially, the poet turned not into himself, but to the experience of the learned minds of the past. He began writing the Convivio or The Banquet, an invitation to his Tuscan readers to feast at the table of knowledge: political, ethical, and above all philosophical wisdom which might give direction to the present. Written in his native Italian rather than in Latin, the work was to cover fourteen parts, but Dante only completed the introduction and the first three sections. What had he in mind in attempting this compendium of the learning of the ancient pagan and Christian traditions? The Banquet reveals a great deal about Dante: it is the work of a Christian gnostic, as Clement of Alexandria portrayed him, "the perfecting of man as man, by acquaintance with divine character, life, and word, conforming to itself and to the divine Word" (Stromata VII, 10). The gnostic or knower reaches out to embrace the whole, not as a specialist or theorist, but to live knowledge and to share its fruit with others. The gnostic is not a mystic, but yearns to be one with divine things. Of course, the mystic may be a gnostic, for both are swept up with the longing to make the hidden known, the invisible seen, the unimaginable imaged-forth, and the inexpressible worded. The mystic fulfills what the gnostic seeks to impart; the one possesses in a moment what the other searches in a lifetime.
Gnosticism and mysticism have a common goal: the secret knowledge of God. From the early Middle Ages up to the sixteenth century, as David Knowles observes, this meaning of mysticism as the sight of things unseen drew its currency from the title of Dionysius the Areopagite's Theologia Mystica, translated by an English mystic as Denis Hid Divinity. The difference, then, between Christian Gnosticism and Mysticism is one of degree: faith gives way to a totally new kind of knowing, given and received at the deepest levels of the personality. Through the gate one passes on to travel out of one's own orbit and into an entirely other dimension. Again, one is not alone: another guides:

And with that, putting his own hand in mine,

With smiling face, just to encourage me,

He led me to things hidden from the world.

                                   (Inferno III, 19-21)

Before Dante thought of writing his poem years later, the vision was already wholly his. In the months immediately after Easter Week he turned not to the religious life but to the political turmoil of Florence. On June 15, 1300, he became one of the six Priors appointed to rule the city. While his term lasted only two months, he made some personally hard decisions. To settle the civil war between Dante's own White Guelph party and the hostile Black Guelphs, the priors banished leaders of both factions. Among the White Guelphs forced to leave was Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's close friend and fellow poet. In a few months Guido sickened in exile and, allowed to return to Florence, died shortly afterwards. After his term in office, Dante took on even more serious commitments and, while on a mission of appeal to Pope Boniface VIII for peace, learned in November of 1301 that he had been exiled in his absence. In early 1302 he was accused of bribery, trafficking in offices, and other crimes, punishable not only by banishment but burning at the stake.
Not the road of service to his brother and sister wayfarers lay before him, as he had envisioned it, but another road stretched ahead, physically more painful and exhausting, of literal exile, without his family, his home, friends, or library. Under such hardships, undertaking at least three prose works and completing his Comedy show that the inspiration to reach the minds and hearts of others had not changed: it simply assumed a new shape and purpose. What he could not accomplish by his personal presence and actions, he would achieve through the pen. He would reach the men and women of Italy in their own tongue and on his terms, not on theirs.
Two problems confront us today in reading the Divine Comedy as an account of a real inner experience (Dante's contemporaries did not have these problems): the prejudice that poetry like myth is purely fictitious and the shocked feeling that many scenes of the Inferno are too cruel and even mean-spirited. The first misunderstanding dates back to Plato's dismissal of poets from his ideal Republic because they imitate illusions rather than reality. Plato himself expressed the true possibilities for poetic myth in his Phaedrus — and he was a poet himself — when he shows that myth, rightly inspired, may embody the archetypal Good. His student Aristotle went further in the Poetics by arguing that true imitation is more important, moving, and actual than ordinary experience. For Dante the fruition of his conversion was not to be found in the rationalistic approach of The Banquet but in an inspired Comedy. The creative self in him had to overcome the dynamic and practical, or orient that activity back to the East, the moment of dawn when his life moved out of the dark woods and into the light. The right-side of his brain, the image-making and intuitive force, had to dominate in this most reasonable and methodical of men -- or rather, the two sides had to fuse and answer the higher call, the summons of the Muses, his muses, the three female spirits of his original vision.
In Canto II of the Inferno, Dante reveals the eternal origin of his historic journey. He has his guide Virgil say that Beatrice -- the poet's love of his younger and idealistic years — came to him on the poet's behalf at the request of Saint Lucia, patron saint of light and seeing, who in turn was responding to a plea from the Virgin Mary. Dante quotes Virgil who quotes Beatrice who quotes Mary and Lucia — a quotation within a quotation within a quotation — as circles inside circles take us to the heart of the poem. At the beginning we touch the end: in an instant there becomes here.
The inspiration of the moment is already complete before it comes to the poet's listening; he has been called before he answers. Notice that the links are all conversations, for the poem itself progresses in a series of interviews, face to face, until the final encounter with God in the human person of his Son. Notice, too, that this trinity of feminine requests begins and ends after the poem itself has opened, when panic has already driven the pilgrim back from the barren slope, thwarted by the three beasts that blocked his way: the leopard of greed, the lion of violence, and the she-wolf of intemperance. But heaven acts quickly to save the pilgrim. What starts at the celestial heights spirals down to hell with the speed of light to bring Virgil immediately to Dante's side while he is still breathless and baffled on the hillside.
Although the poet's journey — from the darkened forest to a never-ending vision of God — takes only a week, from Good Friday to Thursday of Easter Week, the actual writing of the Comedy took years, years of painstaking labor, as we have seen, without a settled home or place to study and create. What sustained Dante and made it possible for him to conceive such a task and to carry it out? The poem would be in three parts, corresponding to the three stages of the soul's ascent to God through purgation, illumination, and unity, and to the nature of God himself, the justice of the Father, the redemption through the Son, and the love from the Holy Spirit. Dante fashioned a new poetic form in his rhyming cantos, thirty-three for each canticle and one to introduce the entire work — a total of one hundred. He invented a new rhyme scheme to achieve this unity, the terza rima, an interlocking pattern to keep the flow of lines moving from stanza to stanza until the final end rhyme for each canto, each canticle, the full poem had been reached in the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. The pattern rose up from deep within his consciousness, but, still, what sustained him to attempt such a poem?
The answer lies in the beginning of the poem in the triple summons Dante received on that Good Friday of 1300, a Jubilee year of graces and blessings. Only when the poet rediscovered Beatrice — not as the innocent fascination of his childhood and adolescence, but as the mature, life-in-death wellspring of his own deep inner life — when he found in her the way to symbolize and express the visionary journey, only then could he resolve to write as a poet and to live as a man the power of the original vision. The second canto, then, really does reveal the origin of Dante's quest through the intercession of Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice. At last he was able to answer the invitation and begin to write the poem, the whole work before him already known and possessed, just waiting to be told, flowing from him like a river of words.
The wellspring of Beatrice held the sources of the mystical life. She possessed the beatific vision since she was already in the presence of the light seen here only through a glass darkly. She lived in Dante now — his higher, deeper self. He had known her in life and loved her: now he would know and love her in death, beyond death, in herself as a mirror of divine Light. With this consciousness —crystallized at the deepest level of being — of spiritual realities, of the individuality of God discovered in another human being, and of the three divine persons ever present within his one soul — the trinity of women reflecting the Trinity of God — the mystic becomes sensitive to spiritual beings of all sorts. An awareness of evil grows with an appreciation of the Good. After one has been swept into the third heaven, the earth wears a darker look.
After Dante had the vision that concludes his Comedy — the title simply means his work has a happy ending and not a tragic one — then the process of seeing the world again from within and out into its borders of history began for the poet. Saint Anthony in the desert beset by demons in animal shapes, Saint Ignatius of Loyola later at Manresa ready to hurl himself down into a black hole in his cave, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in modern times enduring years of unrelieved aridity, these hint at the other dark side of the moon of reflected divine light. Jesus' own mission begins in the wilderness of afflicting temptation and ends with the desolation and abandonment of Gethsemane and Golgotha.
The mystic's journey follows the road of Dante's Comedy and, while it does not always begin in the Inferno, it never leaves that vision of human selfishness behind, for the saint rightly protests that he or she is the greatest of sinners. It is an easy matter to dismiss these statements as simple-hearted, saintly hyperbole, but the vision of the mystic reaches to the depths of evil within each heart, often inspiring the visionary to a denunciation and prophetic indignation at least equal to Dante's. As Georges Bernanos observed for us, the problem today has more to do with our cavalier sense toward Satan and sinning than with modem materialism or its drive for progress. We have to discover the communion of sinners if we are to reach the communion of saints. It takes a visionary to see the wealth of wicked transfigurations that permeate any given culture — and some eras, as Dante suggests, are much worse than others.
Along with the disappearance of God, we need to remark on the disappearance of the devil. Students to whom I teach the Divine Comedy inevitably state their preference for the Inferno; the images seem to rise right out of their own rock albums, comic books, television programs, and movies. What we miss seeing is what Anthony, Ignatius, Thérèse, and Dante saw: these demons issue from the black hole of the human heart, from the dense and rugged terrain of lost spiritual purpose, from the center where ice has formed in our love for one another and for God. When Dante finally approaches Satan in the pit of Cocytus, he compares him — it seems innocuous enough — to a windmill. Lucifer's wings stir a freezing breeze; it is the only movement in this treacherous world. In our descent, the journey makes us aware that the pilgrim grows heavier and firmer as he travels on, and the world around him becomes also longer to walk, darker, tighter-bound, and colder. Satan is the absolute essence of hell, the heaviest, largest, coldest, darkest, and fiercest thing that exists. He is completely mechanical, like a windmill, but instead of being a source of purposeful energy, he devours human lives. The worst sin imaginable is betrayal. And Lucifer — as Dante demonstrates — has betrayed us all.
The mystic encounters this satanic force face to face. As Saint John of the Cross tells us in his Dark Night of the Soul: "When there is a naked contact of spirit with spirit, the horror is intolerable which the evil spirit causes in the soul" (11, 2,3). The Inferno offers us a chain of naked contacts with sinners who have become the sin that they chose instead of its opposite virtue: the lustful lost all sense of purity; the gluttons forgot self-restraint; the wasters and miserly refused to moderate their use of possessions; the wrathful never calmed down long enough to enjoy the peace of patience. All these suffering souls occupy the first level of hell for the intemperate or incontinent. The rest of human sinfulness the poet graciously outlines for his readers in Canto XI, and he provides a much better plan than any explication or paraphrase which the critic or scholar or translator has managed to muster up.
Virgil, of course, makes the presentation because he has been down there before — for pagans too can know the harrowing effects of wickedness and long for a virtuous life. Virgil, too, as the voice of reason, offers interpretations that are precise and pointed. The reader, in fact, in search for guidance and a map of some kind — Dante, thank heaven, drew none for he left it to our imagination to recreate his inner world — can find immense help in reading the Inferno by going over Canto XI from time to time as a reminder of the whole pattern that stretches down beneath until it reaches the center.
By now the reader should perceive that not only does Dante's poem have a circular structure: down through the hollow cone of hell, up along the winding terraces of purgatory, and straight up into the whirling spheres of heaven, but that reading the poem must be a circular experience. Since Dante the poet only started to write after Dante the man had looked into the Circle and Center of God, so the reader has no linear work to read in order to get through and finish the poem. The Comedy intends us to find our way through its labyrinth in as many ways as there are readers, by returning to the beginning at the end, by studying one sin or one virtue or one saintly example intently, by comparing one canto with its parallel in another canticle, by turning back as well as forward, by moving around within the poem until we know every stone and leaf of the landscape and every intonation of the human voices that call out to speak to us.
Such is the ideal reader Dante has in mind. In a sense, James Joyce in our century expected the same dedication and response. Amazingly, both authors have received such readership. But Dante does not have the specialist or scholar in mind as, perhaps, Joyce must, given the nature of his temperament and times. No, Dante wanted the Tuscans of his day to see as he had seen the distortions sin causes in our makeup as human beings, the beauty that the practice of virtue fashions in the human spirit, and the joy that peering beyond our small world into the vast rose of the universe brings to the beholder. And if the Tuscans of his day refused to follow him seriously, then the poet hoped that generations ahead would see his vision of Beatrice: the possibility of rising in this life above petty self-indulgence, violence, and greed.
The way to vision is a negative way, as the mystics have shown us, a journey into not-knowing, isolation, error and trial. No one wrote the poem for Dante, and no one will read it in your place. The other side of gnostic insight, guidance, and assurance is the absence of all these as we go:

Silent, solitary, without escort

We walked along, one behind the other

Like minor friars traveling the road.

                       (Inferno XXIII, 1-3)

The same sense of traveling the road alone opens the journey into the underworld, as the wayfarer sets out in Canto II, the beginning of the Inferno after the prologue to the Comedy itself. As evening falls, the pilgrim readies himself for what lies before him, confident of what he knows in his own mind and feels in his heart:

Day was now fading, and the dusky air

Released the creatures dwelling here on earth

From tiring tasks, while I, the only one,

Readied myself to endure the battle

Both of the journey and the pathos,

Which flawless memory shall here record.

                                    (Inferno II, 1-6)

This sense of solitude in life is the hidden secret of the poem. For what immediately awaits the reader is utterly devoid of solitude. The descent first confronts us not with sights but wailing and screaming swirling up out of the pit. In the crowded cramping of hell, no privacy exists. Even the most isolated there, Judas, Cassius, and Brutus, each being chewed in the jaws of Lucifer, have one another and the eternal claustrophobia of hellmouth. They are inside Satan himself, the most intimate and terrible of punishments. Above them, souls are harried, whipped, whirled in the wind, boiled in blood, muck and excrement, beaten, torn, stuffed, turned into serpents or trees, pronged, peeled, burned, and caked in ice.
The drama of these tortures should not distract us from the inner drama of the wayfaring soul. At the bottom of the universe, in Antenora among those who have been treacherous to their homeland, Dante tells us of people locked in ice:

After that I saw a thousand faces so

Purpled by cold that a shivering still

Grips me, and it always will, at frozen ponds.

                              (Inferno XXXII, 70-72)

Dante reminds us that it is the world of our own seasons and living that concerns him and that the memory he has of these events is now to be ours. Out of his own solitude, he speaks to ours, reminding us that the only difference between the people here and there is death.
The damned are never alone and they have been denied the greatest privacy of all — that of their own death: "These people have no hope of again dying." Dante's poem, then, is the mystic's experience beyond death, the glory of vision and the agony of not yet being partaker completely in that beatitude. It is the most Christian of poems because it is grounded in the resurrection, and not simply as life after death but as the presence of the risen life already in lives transformed by grace. There has become here, then is now.
"Halfway in the journey we are living" — each reader sets out on the same road. Dante begins his poem not with "I" but "we". The darkness and light take shape within each self, the voices reach only these ears, and the images form only to these eyes. After writing the Comedy, the poet himself became another reader like the rest of us. We join him in meeting that world he left behind him. And who would not be glad, even in hell, to encounter Farinata, Brunetto Latini, Ulysses, or Count Ugolino? And what a good guide Dante is, urging the reader onward, with Virgil by his side, the author and sustainer of the journey.
We are the company we keep in our reading. Thanks to Dante, each of us is welcomed to that company, as he pictures his own reception among the poets he had read and loved: Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and, of course, Virgil himself. Each reader can say of that time and moment:

This way we walked together toward the light,

Speaking of things as well unmentioned here

As there it was as well to speak of them.

                             (Inferno IV, 103-105)

Dante creates a new conversation with each reader he meets, speaking of things unmentioned in his lines, but part of what reading does is to impart such secrets to each person setting out in solitude along that winding path.
May this translation, reader, help you to read more carefully and clearly the lines — and between the lines — of the Divine Comedy. For helping me prepare it, I want to thank friends and colleagues and a patient family, all who gave me encouragement and assistance, particularly Professor Charles Franco who has unstintingly supported the work for over a decade. My greatest debt is to Frederick Morgan who made many specific suggestions which I have followed. I have relied also on the scholarship and guidance of commentators and critics in attempting to make each line the closest possible imitation of the original. For my failure to do so, I alone am responsible. For my successes, I again acknowledge my gratitude to all the people mentioned here.
For this new edition, I have made numerous changes and corrections in the text and the expanded notes. Again, I am deeply indebted to Professor Charles Franco for his help in preparing this revision and its Web site

DANTE'S LIFE

Dante Alighieri — born in Florence in 1265 under the sign of Gemini, probably some time in the last two weeks of May. In 1274, on May Day, he meets Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a wealthy Florentine family. Nine years later, in 1283, they meet again, and Beatrice speaks to him for the first time. Dante — whose mother had died when he was in infancy — comes of age after his father's death. On June 11, 1289, he takes part in the battle of Campaldino in which the Guelphs of Florence and Lucca defeat the Ghibellines of Arezzo and Pisa. The next year Beatrice dies and a few years later Dante marries Gemma Donati, also of an old and prominent Florentine family. Dante begins his philosophical studies and develops the "sweet new style" of poetry; both aspects of his talent result in his writing the prose-verse book Vita Nuova (The New Life) which examines his relationship to Beatrice. In 1295, after meeting Charles Martel, Dante enters political life in Florence, becoming a member of the People's Council of the Commune. In the Jubilee year of 1300, during Holy and Easter Week, Dante experiences a profound conversion. On June 15 he is elected one of six Priors of the city. To settle civil strife between the White Guelphs, Dante's own party, and Black Guelphs, the priors banish leaders of both sides. In November of 1301, Dante joins an embassy to Rome in an appeal to Boniface VIII to stop Charles of Valois from taking control of Florence. Still on his mission, Dante learns of a sentence of exile against him, dated January 27, 1302. In March, banishment, under pain of death, is made permanent. Between 1304 and 1308, Dante writes portions of the Convivio (The Banquet) and De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Vulgar Tongue), both left unfinished. In 1310, Emperor Henry VII, with the support of Pope Clement V, arrives in Italy, and Dante welcomes him with a letter of enthusiastic approval. By 1312, however, Clement had withdrawn support, and in the next year Henry died. At this time Dante is writing his De Monarchia (On Monarchy), a treatise in behalf of the Ghibelline cause and the central power of the Holy Roman Emperor in temporal matters. Around 1312 he begins writing his Divine Comedy which occupies him until the end of his life. Up to this time he has made numerous efforts to have his sentence repealed, but in 1311 he is excluded from general amnesty offered to the Whites. In 1316 he refuses to return to Florence on the condition that he admit his guilt. Dante spends these years of exile mostly in Romagna, then in Ravenna. He stays at the court of Can Grande della Scala of Verona to whom he dedicates the Paradise and writes him a letter on how to interpret the poem. In September 1321, after becoming ill on a diplomatic mission, Dante dies in Ravenna.