Dante Alighieri
Intro
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and philosopher of the 14th century. He is most famous as the author of The Divine Comedy, a three-part epic poem narrating a pilgrim’s journey through hell, purgatory, and ultimately on to heaven. The first book of the set, the Inferno, is probably the most widely-read work of Medieval literature. With its powerful imagery and incisive moral-political commentary, The Inferno became a cornerstone of Italian culture in the late Medieval and early Renaissance period. Dante’s characterization of sin and its punishment inspired generations of Christian artists and thinkers throughout Europe, and continues to influence our cultural representations of the afterlife today.
Bio
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, modern-day Italy, in 1265. Italy at that time was not a unified country but a collection of small republics and city-states constantly vying for supremacy. Within Florence itself, there was a bitter rivalry between the Guelphs, who supported the Pope, and the Ghibelines, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante’s family belonged to the Guelph party and Dante himself fought in at least one battle against the Ghibelines. Internal conflict, though, soon split the Guelph party in two. Dante spent his life in a world of rivalries within rivalries, a constant struggle for power at every level.
In 1302, Dante was forced into exile when his political party lost power. He would spend the rest of his life in various cities around Italy. Around the same time, he composed The Divine Comedy. The book had a moral and literary aim, but it was intensely political as well. Dante fills his vision of hell with contemporary political figures, including the recently-deceased Pope Nicholas III. At the time, the poem was notable for having been written in vernacular Italian rather than Latin. This style would become more common in the Renaissance, but in Dante’s day it was innovative – by writing a poem of such grand proportions in vernacular language, Dante challenged the cultural primacy of Latin.
Dante’s Ideas
The Nine Layers of Hell
Dante’s Inferno separates hell into nine layers based on the severity of the sin. In each layer, sinners are punished in a way that poetically mirrors the nature of their sin. The lustful, for example, are punished by being thrown into a raging whirlwind. They fly past each other, never able to make lasting contact with anyone else. Just as lust buffets people from partner to partner in life, making stable relationships impossible, so the lustful are doomed to be whirled around for eternity in hell.
The lowest level of Dante’s inferno is the circle of traitors. The ninth circle is a vast frozen lake, exactly the opposite of the popular “lake of fire” image. At the center of the lake is Satan, the fallen angel who betrayed his god at the beginning of time. Satan cries and beats his wings, desperately trying to break free from the ice – but all his flapping just cools the air around him and his tears, dripping down his body, freeze and trap him further. Satan is depicted with three mouths, each chewing on a different legendary traitor: Cassius and Brutus, the assassins of Julius Caesar, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane.
Church & State
Dante was one of the first thinkers to develop a modern concept of church-state separation. He lived in Italy at a time when the Pope was a major political force in Rome, and most people took for granted the idea that religion and politics worked together – after all, kings and popes were similarly appointed by God to rule over their subjects, so why should they be kept separate? Some people supported pope over emperor, and others the opposite, but few people questioned whether political and spiritual power should rest in the same hands.
Dante argued that spiritual and worldly power were completely distinct and had separate goals. The responsibility of the church was to look after the immortal soul; the responsibility of the state was to look after the living body. Human happiness required both, but if they were not pursued separately then church and state would always get in each other’s way.
Dante’s contemporaries vigorously rejected his idea, but it would resurface some 200 years later in the revolutionary writings of Martin Luther, the man who sparked the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Another 250 years after that, the idea would become a foundational principle of the U.S. Constitution, which enshrined it in Article VI and the Bill of Rights. Today, legal and political battles are still fought over the meaning and value of the idea first articulated by Dante more than 700 years ago.
Quotes
The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only is “the state of souls after death” without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is “man as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice.”
Like many Medieval writers and artists, Dante used a lot of allegory – stories in which the events stand in for a deeper, hidden meaning. In the case of his Inferno, Dante points out that it’s fundamentally a story about freedom and its consequences. Because people have free will, they can act however they want – but they will come to deserve punishment if they abuse that freedom. Whether or not hell is literally structured as Dante proposes (indeed whether hell literally exists at all) isn’t really the point. The point is to illustrate a deeper set of moral truths.
It’s an important insight into the way Medieval people understood their world. In the modern era, we take truth and fiction as clear, mutually exclusive opposites. But for Medieval people truth was something more malleable – a statement could be true allegorically without being a literal description of the world around them. Where we see a dichotomy between “truth” and “falsehood,” they would have seen a great variety of different means for approaching different kinds of truths.
In Pop Culture
The structure of Dante’s Inferno seems to lend itself to a video game – it has 9 clear levels and a tough boss at the end. With that in mind, EA released a video game adaptation in 2010 called Dante’s Inferno. The game replaces the politically incisive pilgrim with a musclebound Templar knight, and replaces moral allegory with typical hack-and-slash action.