Had Dante stopped writing poetry with his lyric production and never composed The Divine Comedy, he would be remembered only by medievalists as the author of a moderately interesting Latin treatise on political theory, De Monarchia (On Monarchy), completed during the last decade of his life, and an unfinished Latin treatise on vernacular language and its use in poetry, De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular Tongue), probably written between 1302 and 1305. Without The Divine Comedy, there would have been little reason for Dante to have composed his unfinished Italian Il Convivio (The Banquet), a philosophical consideration of poetry that is also inspired by religion. In fact, rather than being admired for the often abstract and ethereal love lyrics typical of the “sweet new style” (another historical label that would not have existed without The Divine Comedy, since the term itself comes from a line in his epic poem), Dante would be recognized primarily for La Vita Nuova and four explicitly sensual lyrics called the rime petrose (literally the “rocky rhymes”) that reveal his interest in metrical experimentation and a highly sophisticated understanding that the courtly love celebrated by the Provençal poets—often Dante’s models—was firmly based on requited lust rather than unrequited love. Such a poetic reputation would not have attracted much critical attention during the past six centuries from anyone but highly specialized scholars.
Dante’s love poetry, however, led to the stroke of genius that ultimately saved him from so unremarkable a future. Dante had the immensely clever idea of taking thirty-one of the lyric poems he had composed treating an unrequited love for a girl named Beatrice and of setting them within a prose frame. Although not widely read and immediately eclipsed by the appearance of his great epic, La Vita Nuova (probably completed around 1293) represents a fundamental step forward in Dante’s poetic and intellectual development. The Italian prose framework of the work allowed Dante to comment on his own work. The idea of a poet who presents a series of poems on love and then includes his own readings of the works was a unique invention that flirts with a postmodern conception of literature as an ironic revisitation of what has been written in the past. La Vita Nuova represents a precocious first step toward Dante’s decision to become the protagonist hero of an epic poem filled with self-critical images of its author. This little work already contains the key distinction in The Divine Comedy between protagonist and narrator, who are the same person but are viewed from different perspectives. But even more important was the revolutionary role of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova. By the addition of the prose commentary, Dante projects Beatrice as one whose name, life, and effects upon the narrator are associated with blessing and salvation and especially with the number nine (the square of three, the number of the Trinity). Her death nearly destroys the narrator of La Vita Nuova, but in the process of mourning, Dante envisions a Beatrice who has become a figuration of Christ and a guide to his salvation even before her dramatic appearance in The Divine Comedy.
Did Beatrice really exist? We know that there was a real person named Beatrice Portinari who died around the time Dante says his Beatrice did. Did she really have such an influence upon the young Dante, or does Dante simply invent this conceit in order to embark on a revolutionary treatment of a woman’s role in a poet’s life? It is impossible to prove or disprove this influence, for we only have Dante’s word. Whether or not the young Dante was so struck by Beatrice at the age of eight that she led him to poetic glory, Dante states that this early innamoramento transformed his life and mind. In the process, Dante raised the poetry of praise, the most traditional role of medieval love poetry, to the highest possible level, surpassing the traditional claims of courtly poetry that a woman’s love (sexual or chaste) refined a man. Dante affirmed that a woman’s love could lead a man or a poet to God, and this bordered on blasphemy. It was, at the same time, a step back from the avowed sensuality of troubadour lyrics and the creation of a literary relationship between the lover and his beloved that would later come to be labeled “platonic.”
For approximately a decade between the time La Vita Nuova was completed and his exile from Florence in 1302, Dante divided his activities between writing and active participation in the communal government. In 1289 Dante took part as a cavalryman in the battle of Campaldino, in which the Florentine Guelphs were victorious against the Ghibellines of the nearby Tuscan city of Arezzo. Guelph and Ghibelline traditionally refer to Italian political factions allied, respectively, to the papacy and to the Holy Roman Empire. But the intense and bitter rivalries within the city-state governments of Italy made things more complicated than that. If your enemy was a Guelph, you became a Ghibelline, and vice versa. Conflicts between families and clans were often more important than the more weighty issues of empire versus papacy. Florence was traditionally Guelph, as were most of the city-state republics intent upon removing themselves from the restrictions of either church or state, but even the Guelphs divided into warring factions. The Black Guelphs were most extreme and had the closest ties to the papacy. The White Guelphs (Dante’s party) were generally more moderate in their politics.
In 1300 Florence boasted a population of around 100,000; it may have risen to 120,000 before the Black Plague of 1348 devastated the city as it did most of Western Europe. This Italian city-state was a crucial player in the politics of the period because of its central location, its vibrant republican government, and particularly its enormous wealth. Its flourishing textile industry (specializing in luxury goods of wool and silk but also more humble fabrics made from cotton and linen) and its international banking business dominated world trade and commerce—even rivaling that of Venice, a commercial city and seafaring republic. Florentine politics reflected not only the struggle between Ghibellines and the two factions of Guelphs but also class conflict between the impoverished mass of humble workers, on the one hand, and the two groups of economically well-off people who governed and who were themselves often in conflict: the elite, upper-class patricians who represented a small number of powerful families and were not really noble in the medieval or feudal sense and the more numerous but less prestigious middle-class merchants, artisans, notaries, lawyers, manufacturers, and shopkeepers who were members of the various guilds and corporations in the city-state. The politics of the city remained turbulent because of friction between various groups. Although members of the groups were often connected to each other by ties of family, religion, and friendship, conflicts often turned into violence, riot, and warfare, with financial ruin and exile being the favorite punishment for those who lost the struggle. Constant internal conflict led quite naturally to a search for outside allies, further complicating the situation within Florence.
In the fourteenth century, the Florentine florin served as the standard currency for the entire European economy. Its value was carefully maintained: 24 carats of purely refined gold accepted almost everywhere in the known world as legal tender. Rapid commercial communications operated by the Florentine banks, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, and shrewd dealings abroad made Florence the capital of the major service industry of the Middle Ages. When Tuscan banks began to collect papal revenues all over Europe, the profits were enormous. Based upon high banking charges and incredible profits from the luxury goods produced by the textile industry, the Florentine economy supported a huge building program between 1250 and 1320. The popular monuments now visited by busloads of foreign tourists each year—the Bargello, the churches of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, the duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Palazzo Vecchio, numerous family palaces—were all begun during Dante’s lifetime. Florentines were so omnipresent in the economic life of Western Europe that they were called the “fifth element” by a pope—the other four elements, of course, were earth, fire, air, and water. Florentine bankers collected taxes for various foreign monarchs and loaned money to both sides in European wars, gaining the reputation as usurers for their trouble. Florentines ran at least one European navy, and like their counterparts in Venice, they journeyed as far as China an
d India in search of profit. In the process, they began to patronize architects, painters, and sculptors in such an enthusiastic and sophisticated manner that the city soon became the artistic capital of the known world. By the time Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio died, they had virtually created Italian literature and fixed the Italian language in the form that we know it today. Unlike Old French or Old English, Old Italian is just Italian thanks to the example of Dante and his two brilliant successors, together known as the “three crowns of Florence.”
Religious life in Florence was vibrant, and the cloister and pulpit concerned Florentine citizens as much as the bank and the factory did. In fact, a significant part of the city’s remarkable artistic production was directly linked to religious patronage. Religious organizations also contributed a great deal to the daily life of the city. The life of a medieval Florentine was marked from the cradle to the grave by religious ritual; time was told by canonical hours, and the passing of the seasons was marked by religious holidays, saints’ days, and church processions. Moreover, the city’s clerics provided much of the education and religious confraternities supplied much of the social assistance before the advent of a welfare state. One of Tuscany’s wealthiest citizens in the next century, Francesco Datini, began his ledger book with the telling phrase: “In the name of God and profit.” The relationship between economic wealth and moral corruption, the latter caused by a society that avidly pursued profit and tried to retain its religious devotion, would provide Dante with one of the key themes in the Inferno—the moral and ethical corruption of both Church and society brought about by the wealth produced by the “new people” that Dante’s essentially conservative social views could not abide. Florence also boasted some of the greatest reformist, fire-and-brimstone preachers of the time, figures who reflected the great popular piety of both the masses and members of the ruling classes and the intelligentsia. Echoing the concerns of these preachers, Dante sometimes seems like an outraged Jeremiah, but his moral indignation over corruption and evildoing was shared by many of his fellow citizens. In spite of Dante’s reservations about the “new people” who were busily making Florence into the most exciting place in the Western world, Florence soon became a cultural and commercial center that would rival Athens and Rome in its brilliance during the period between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries.
Once the merchant class determined that internal conflict was bad for business, the city government found a novel way to limit the strife. In 1293 a fundamental constitutional change, the Ordinamenti di Giustizia (Ordinances of Justice), took place in Florence, supported by the Guelph faction. Essentially, it limited political participation in the republican government of the city to members of the major guilds or corporations—basically merchants, bankers, magistrates, notaries, and the moneyed classes. It is important to remember that medieval guilds were not modern labor unions: Membership usually excluded common workers and included only people with property or money. In 1295 Dante joined the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries)—the same guild to which most artists in Renaissance Florence subsequently belonged, because apothecaries provided the materials for paintings. He was elected to serve a two-month term as one of the seven city priors, but fulfilling his civic duty proved to be disastrous for Dante. The elevation to this office identified him as an important White Guelph and made him a target when the more radical Black Guelphs seized power from the White Guelphs. While serving as one of three Florentine ambassadors to Pope Boniface VIII in Rome in 1302, Dante was sentenced first to exile and then to death if he should ever again set foot in his beloved native city of Florence.
Dante’s exile lasted until his death, in 1321, from malaria at Ravenna, where he enjoyed the protection and patronage of Guido Novello of Polenta, after receiving the same type of hospitality from Cangrande della Scala in Verona. He wrote The Divine Comedy during his long years in exile, and his body was laid to rest in Ravenna, not in Florence, where it remains to this day. In spite of Dante’s life in exile and the composition of the poem outside his native city, The Divine Comedy has a distinctive Florentine and Tuscan character. The poem often reflects the partisan struggles that swept over Italy during Dante’s day, and in so doing allowed the poet ample opportunity to pay back his political foes. Many of the most memorable figures in the Inferno are essentially minor historical characters who played a role in the internecine factional struggles of fourteenth-century Florence and who had a personal effect on Dante’s life. Many minor historical figures—although condemned to a Hell of Dante’s invention, their depictions inspired by Dante’s rancor and righteous indignation or, occasionally, by his admiration—have been transformed by Dante’s poetry into major literary characters.
An Overview of The Divine Comedy
Several times in the poem, Dante refers simply to his creation as The Comedy. A subsequent sixteenth-century edition of a manuscript published in Venice during the Renaissance added the adjective “divine” to the title, where it has remained ever since. The poem is an epic, owing a good deal of its structure and content to the epic tradition that began in Western literature with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—works Dante could not have read, since he knew no Greek. Few readers of Virgil’s Aeneid, however, would ever know the Latin epic better than Dante, who absorbed many of the lessons he might have learned from a direct reading of Homer through an indirect encounter with Homer in Virgil’s poem. In celebrating the birth of the city of Rome, destined to rule the classical world by Virgil’s lifetime, the Latin poet could not have predicted that his imperial capital would eventually become the capital of Christianity, or that the Latin race would be fully Christianized. The link of Rome to both the Roman Republic and Empire, on the one hand, and to the rise of Christianity, on the other, was never far from Dante’s mind when he considered what Rome meant to his own times. Virgil’s Latin epic became the single most important work in the formation of the ideas that would eventually produce The Divine Comedy. Dante also read carefully other Latin epics that are less popular today. One such book was Lucan’s Pharsalia, a Latin work that described the Roman civil wars and was also full of horrible monsters and marvelous sights. He admired two Latin epics by Statius: the unfinished Achilleid, a treatment of Achilles in the Trojan War, and the more important Thebeid, a poem treating the fratricidal struggles of the sons of Oedipus in the city of Thebes. Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided Dante with the most influential repository of poetry about classical mythology.
However, there is really no classical precedent for the overall structure of The Divine Comedy, in which the author is also the epic protagonist, an Everyman who is not a warrior or a city founder. Homer or Virgil would never have dreamed of making themselves the heroes of their epic works. Dante the Pilgrim in Dante the Poet’s epic takes a journey that the poet believes must be taken by every human being. No matter how many trappings of the classical epic The Divine Comedy may contain—invocations to the muses, masterful epic similes, divine messengers sent from the deities, lofty verse, and monsters and other figures cited from the literature or mythology of ancient Greece and Rome—the underpinning of the entire poem is fundamentally religious. It is a Christian epic and, more specifically, a Catholic epic. For the first time in Western literature, the values and ideals of an epic poem derive from the fundamental tenets of Christianity as they were understood during the Middle Ages. This means Catholicism as mediated by the dominant theology of the time—the Scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas—as well as the writings, teachings, and examples of such figures as Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Saint Benedict, Saint Dominic, Saint Bernard, and Saint Bonaventure. Ancient philosophy, in particular the works of Cicero, Boethius, and Aristotle, filtered through these Christian lenses, as did the traditional Ptolemaic picture of the universe as Earth-centered and the classical rhetoric and erudition often based on either Scholastic commentaries in Latin or Latin translations of Arabic commentaries on Greek texts.
The most imp
ortant philosopher of the Middle Ages in Italy as in Europe was Aristotle, the sage Dante calls the Master of “those who know” (Inferno IV: 131). By the time Dante was born, more than fifty of Aristotle’s works had been translated into Latin, although these works were often read alongside Scholastic or Arabic commentaries. Plato was virtually unknown during Dante’s time, except for an incomplete Latin translation of the Timaeus. The emergence of Plato as a rival for Aristotle would not occur until the Medici family of fifteenth-century Florence sponsored the publication of Latin translations of the entire body of Plato’s works.
In addition to his profound knowledge of Christian philosophy and theology, Dante had a familiarity with the Bible that was extensive for his time, an era when most Catholics may have only heard scripture cited in sermons, or read to them out loud during the celebration of the Mass, or even depicted in narrative fresco painting and tempera altar pieces in the churches. In the centuries before the Reformation declared that every man could be his own priest, few laymen actually read the Bible. Dante was certainly an exception to this general practice, and the Bible he would have read would have been some version of Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. In The Divine Comedy, Dante draws almost 600 references or citations from the Bible, compared to almost 400 from Aristotle and almost 200 from Virgil. Interestingly enough, the number of classical and biblical citations is almost identical, an eloquent testimony to Dante’s conscious desire to synthesize the classical and Christian traditions in his poem.
The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3