The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso

"One of the things which four out of the five books I’ve chosen all have in common is a belief that the kind of truth which Christianity embodies was available before the coming into the world of Christ. What Dante does is take all the classical mythologies of monsters and harpies and make them into a part of the underworld in Hell, which is fascinating. And it is also very odd that he’s being taken along by Virgil. Although this is, in a way, little more than a technicality, Virgil does have to admit, at certain points, that he’s never going to get to Heaven because he was a non-believer. In fact, Dante takes over Virgil’s world view completely — not just the classical mythology but also the view that Rome is central to the whole European story, and the Virgilian political myth of Aeneas coming to start the Latin dynasty. Part of the Dantean myth is that the redemption of the world wouldn’t have been possible without the Roman Empire because there had to be a trial. There had to be a trial in which the victim was guilty. Because otherwise he couldn’t have redeemed the world. You then get the rather nasty aftertaste of that – that, although he was, technically speaking, guilty in Roman law, the ones who are really to blame are the Jews. He doesn’t labour that point in the Commedia but it is there. In that arch in the forum in Rome, you see Titus taking away all the treasures from the temple and wrecking the temple — which is very creepy, given what has happened ever since. But Dante certainly believed that the punishment had to be lethal otherwise it wouldn’t have worked. He is incredibly Roman in his Christianity, not just Roman Catholic, but pre-Catholic Roman. He hates popes by the end of the poem. They certainly would have the knowledge. They wouldn’t have had the beliefs. One of the things about Dante which doesn’t come into the poem is that he wasn’t a Christian as a young man. Cavalcanti, who comes into the earlier bit of the poem in the Inferno, was specifically non-Christian. They didn’t believe that the soul was immortal. They thought that, when you die, that was it. In the Inferno , Dante and Virgil approach these people who are claustrophobically locked into stone tombs and they’re trying to get out. One of them is Cavalcanti’s father, who has been what Dante called an ‘ Epicurean .’ The only Epicurean thing about him—for the purposes of the poem and for modern readers—is that Epicurus didn’t believe in the immortality of the soul. I think they’d have been thrilled by it. They knew all this stuff and he’d put it all together. He manages to synthesize all the modern thought, and the clash between the schoolmen and the Epicureans. It’s an extraordinary synthesis. It is a total mistake to think the Middle Ages are an age of blind superstition where everybody followed the Pope; quite the reverse is the case. There was a possibility of being a Muslim, being an atheist, being a materialist, just as there is nowadays. Dante opted for all this stuff. One of the things which makes him original is that romantic love, in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, was an alternative to Christian faith. He makes romantic love the pathway to Christian faith. That’s unusual, absolutely. Charles Williams—who was a friend of C.S. Lewis and a publisher at Oxford University Press—wrote a book about Dante. He said that the Church still hasn’t really managed to absorb what Dante was saying, and I think that’s absolutely true. When you look at what the Church says about sex —whether it is gay sex, or sex before marriage—they still are in the situation, most of them, of the Manichees that St Augustine is attacking. They think there’s flesh on the one side and spirit on the other, and we should always be spiritual. What Dante was saying was that romantic love and full-blown love between men and women is a path to God. Although he hadn’t had full-blown sex with Beatrice. She was a figure on a pedestal. No, no, no. She died when she was a very young woman. She was married to someone else and, although he did have affairs—as he tells us in his letters—he didn’t have one with her. It is unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably skilful. Somebody said WH Auden could have rewritten Paradise Lost in limericks. Dante had that knack. The first book he ever wrote was a rewrite of an incredibly boring medieval poem called The Romance of the Rose . He rewrote it in another verse form completely. He’d then invented this thing called ‘terza rima’ — a three line rhyme. Some people try and do it in English and you can’t, it doesn’t work — but it is extraordinary. Beautiful sounding and it is clever. As well as being an extraordinary, imaginative creation, it is a synthesis of modern thought, modern science, technology. He puts in his similes all sorts of things which had hardly been mentioned in literature before; partly because they only just began to exist: for example, the clock. There’s a whole simile of a clock, so he must have seen a clock. There weren’t many clocks in Europe. He invented the Italian language. Some of his work is in Latin and some of it is in Italian, and he decided to write it in Italian. About a third of the words in the modern Italian dictionary are coined, for the first time, by Dante. He was very sophisticated by modern standards. He wrote a whole book about linguistics , called De Vulgari Eloquentia , about how languages develop and about the differences between Latin and Italian and about different dialects in Italy, some of which he’d encountered on his wanderings as an exile. His writing is in very pure Tuscan. Some people think the reason he was writing in Italian was because he wanted to appeal to the courtly, aristocratic people who weren’t necessarily readers of Latin. But everybody would have had a bit of Latin. Until the 16th century, people like grocers kept all their notes in Latin all over Europe, and nearly all trade agreements. There was an awful lot of travel going on between merchants. Not that they had anything as close as the European Union, but there were trade agreements. One of the things Dante is the first person to think about is whether spoken and written languages are different languages or just funny versions of the same one. He loses Virgil and Beatrice leads him on, and he has all these conversations. He meets his ancestor who appears rather grand. And he is then led even further up and even Beatrice has to abandon him and swan back into the background. Then he is led by St Bernard into the presence and he sees God. It is extraordinary. I don’t think there’s anything in world literature to compare with the last few cantos of the Paradiso as a Christian statement."

"Yes absolutely. There’s no other monograph out there. Though there is a long tradition of talking about not talking about cowardice. The Inferno is the classic moment of people not wanting to talk about cowardice. Dante hesitates while Virgil is leading him along even though he has a guaranteed safe passage through hell and knows that at the end of his journey paradise awaits him. Even before he goes in through the gates he’s hesitant and Virgil says ‘don’t be a coward,’ he doesn’t say ‘be a hero,’ he doesn’t say ‘be courageous,’ he says ‘don’t be a coward, don’t hesitate, you’re equivocating: just do it.’ And then when they get in, just inside the gate, in the Anteroom he hears this terrible weeping and slapping and sees uncountable millions of souls crying and being stung by wasps and flies, and Dante asks Virgil ‘Hey, what’s the deal with these people?’ Virgil tells him that these are the cowardly neutrals, but he is very brief with him and concludes by saying ‘Let us not speak of them’. Both Dante and Miller do say some really interesting things about cowardice, though it doesn’t get that much attention. Yes, and Dante gives us one reason why — or Dante’s Virgil does. He tells Dante the pilgrim that these shades he sees are the neutrals, the wretches who lived with neither disgrace nor praise; they never committed to anything in life and so have no hope in death, he says. They’re not has-beens but never-weres. So of course nothing’s ever written about them. The world doesn’t want to hear about them. I’m still trying to find a famous coward."

"Well, it’s mainly through Inferno that what you might call the ‘shock and awe’ of Dante’s impact is felt. Inferno is, of course, where almost all readers start and where many of them indeed stop, which is a pity because Purgatorio is, in many senses, the ‘of this world’ part of the Commedia . It’s largely because of Inferno’s greater accessibility and vividness and indeed the violence. That’s what has always been the attraction. Plus, of course, it is the way into the Commedia , you can’t reach the higher places until you’ve travelled the lower regions. The OUP edition is not the most easily accessible, nor the most attractive in style. Indeed Durling acknowledged that the style of translation is ‘literal’ and ‘craggy’. Yet it is a close and reliable translation, it gives you the original text on the facing page and it also has excellent notes. It’s very difficult to decide with the profusion of Dante translations that there are at the moment (including a number of good verse translations) what to recommend. This edition is the one that students frequently use before they go on to the Italian editions. The notes are thorough and very accessible. Which edition to recommend for the new reader also raises several other questions about how to render Dante’s verse into English, and how much explanation is needed – both in the translation itself and in the form of commentary. If one wanted to go for a complete translation, though – because it is such a pity for people to stop after the Inferno – I’d suggest the Everyman edition by Allen Mandelbaum , an American poet and professor who has given us one of the more readable verse translations of the Commedia . It’s not as scholarly as the Durling and Martinez, although there are plenty of notes by a Dante scholar. It’s the translation I use most in teaching Dante at university. A complete translation should encourage readers to go beyond the Inferno , through to Purgatorio – especially because, as I said, Purgatorio is the most ‘of this world’ part of the Commedia . It’s a point emphasised once again in the recent OUP Very Short Introduction to Dante , edited by Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, which argues that the Purgatorio is the most humane part of the Commedia – the part most concerned with everyday lives, and the idea of Purgatorio was, of course, that it was a state which could bring the souls of the dead into contact with the souls of the living. Dante’s Purgatorio has that sense of souls reconstructing a society – it’s even been regarded as a kind of reformed church where groups of people are working together while also looking back to the world of the living, so it has that kind of humanity to it. And the humanity ties in with another prevalent theme: art and poetry. Dante is constantly encountering the souls of those who have to do with art or poetry – at the beginning, for example, he meets the soul of a musician who sets one of his poems to music – and he is always negotiating the place of his own work in relation to those who have gone before him. He pays tribute to his predecessors, while also questioning the validity of the fame given to artists. Crucially, he emphasises the value of human art, even in the afterlife, as a means to understanding the relationship between humanity and the deity."

"I think Dante is of importance to Leonardo in two respects. One is a fairly obvious one in that he really set in train – not wholly individually but he gave a great impetus to – the standard Florentine poetic genre of the beloved lady. In his work, Beatrice is never really somebody he knows that well but she is idealised and sublimated into this extraordinary object of rarefied desire. He set in motion a tradition that goes through Petrarch and beyond, and one that was still thriving in the Leonardo courts. As we know, poets wrote about Leonardo’s portraits using this language. So, that Dantesque figure of the beloved lady goes into a Leonardo portrait and then is extracted – as it were – by the poets who were writing about Leonardo. It’s not been noticed very much before but it is obvious to the close observer. The other aspect to it is that Dante is the supreme poet-natural philosopher. We know about Dante’s imagination, we know his great storytelling abilities, but we tend to take into account rather less that in The Divine Comedy and in all his works – the Convivio (the Banquet) not least – there is an enormous amount of learning about objects, about physics, about the behaviour of things in the natural world and about light, above all. The Paradiso is about light. And also about the act of seeing. So, I think, for Leonardo, it was not just that Dante was the most potent poet he could read but that he set in train a sense of the science of art; the poetic imagination – ‘ fantasia’ as Dante and Leonardo called it – is compatible with ‘ intelletto’ – with the intellect – and that these are two strings to the poet’s bow. So, it’s the ability to understand how the natural world operates and the ability then to transmute that into an imaginative realm."