Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages, and one of the greatest poems in any language: the Commedia — later called the Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy — a journey through the three realms of the afterlife, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, in a hundred cantos of interlocking verse. In it he gathered the theology, philosophy, science, politics and personal passions of his age into a single vision, filled it with hundreds of real people — popes, kings, poets, lovers, murderers, his own friends and enemies — and wrote it not in Latin but in the Tuscan vernacular, creating the literary Italian language in the process. T. S. Eliot said: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.”

Life

Florence and Beatrice

Dante was born in Florence in 1265 into a family of minor nobility of the Guelf party. His mother died when he was a child; his father, a moneylender, when he was about eighteen. At nine, at a May Day party, he saw Beatrice Portinari, also nine — “from that time forward Love quite governed my soul”. He saw her again nine years later, when she greeted him in the street. That is almost all that happened between them. Both married others — Dante was betrothed as a boy to Gemma Donati and had several children; Beatrice married a banker. She died in 1290, aged twenty-four. Dante’s grief produced the Vita Nuova (New Life, c. 1294), a sequence of love poems with prose commentary, which ends with his resolve “to say of her what was never said of any woman”.

Politics and exile

Dante studied philosophy — he says that after Beatrice’s death he consoled himself with Boethius and Cicero, and attended the schools of the friars — and fought as a cavalryman at the battle of Campaldino (1289). He entered Florentine politics, which were viciously factional: the Guelfs (supporters of the Pope) had split into White and Black factions. In 1300 Dante served as one of the six priors governing the city. In 1301, while he was on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII in Rome, the Blacks seized power with the Pope’s backing. Dante was condemned in absentia, fined, and banned; when he did not pay, he was sentenced to be burned alive if he ever returned.

He never did. For nearly twenty years he wandered northern Italy, a guest at the courts of lords — the Scaligeri at Verona, the Malaspina, finally Guido Novello da Polenta at Ravenna — learning, as his ancestor prophesies to him in Paradiso, “how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another man’s stairs”. He hoped the Emperor Henry VII would restore order to Italy; Henry died in 1313. Dante died in Ravenna on 14 September 1321, of malaria caught on a diplomatic mission to Venice, shortly after completing Paradiso. He is buried in Ravenna; Florence has an empty tomb for him in Santa Croce.

Works

• Vita Nuova (c. 1294) — love poems for Beatrice, with prose.
• Convivio (The Banquet, c. 1304–07, unfinished) — philosophical commentary on his poems, in Italian, to bring philosophy to non-Latin readers.
• De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) — a Latin treatise defending the vernacular as a literary language.
• Monarchia (c. 1312–18) — a Latin treatise arguing that humanity needs a universal Emperor, independent of the Pope, to secure peace; burned as heretical in 1329.
• Commedia (c. 1308–1321) — see The Divine Comedy.

Thought

Philosophy and theology

Dante was steeped in the scholastic synthesis of his time: Aristotle (“the master of those who know”), Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Arab philosophers (Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) appear in Limbo). The moral structure of Hell follows Aristotle’s Ethics — sins of incontinence, violence, and fraud — and Purgatory follows the Christian seven deadly sins, explained as forms of misdirected love.

Love

The key to Dante’s universe is love. God is love, and creation is ordered by love; every creature moves toward its good. In Purgatorio 17, Virgil explains: “Neither Creator nor creature was ever without love.” Sin is love gone wrong — directed to evil (pride, envy, wrath), too weak toward the highest good (sloth), or excessive toward lesser goods (avarice, gluttony, lust). The poem’s last line names God as “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”.

Church and empire

Dante believed God had ordained two powers: the Pope for spiritual guidance, the Emperor for temporal peace. The corruption of the Church through wealth and its usurpation of political power were, he thought, the root of Italy’s chaos. He put popes in Hell for simony (selling Church offices), including — prophetically — Boniface VIII, still alive in 1300.

Legacy

Boccaccio wrote the first biography and gave the first public lectures on the Comedy in Florence (1373). Dante shaped Petrarch, Chaucer (who translated passages), Milton, the Romantics (Blake illustrated him; Shelley and Byron revered him), T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land), Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett (whose Belacqua comes from Purgatorio), Primo Levi (who recited the Ulysses canto in Auschwitz in If This Is a Man), and Jorge Luis Borges. Painters from Botticelli to Delacroix, Doré and Dalí illustrated him; Liszt and Tchaikovsky set him to music; Rodin’s Gates of Hell (with The Thinker — originally Dante — on top) came from the Inferno.

Using Dante in conversation

• On beginnings in crisis: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”
• On despair: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”
• On punishment fitting the crime: contrapasso.
• On curiosity and its dangers: Ulysses’ last voyage “to follow virtue and knowledge”.