Dante Alighieri
is beyond doubt the greatest of Italian poets, and, many readers think, one of
the greatest poets that Western civilization has produced. W. B. Yeats called
him "the chief imagination of Christendom." T. S. Eliot said:
"Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. There is no
third."
He was born in
Florence, Italy, in 1265. Italy in those days was not a united country, but a
collection of mostly small city-states. Feuds and power struggles between noble
families were a constant source of wars between states and of turmoil and civil
war within them. Dante, heir of a poor but noble family, was one of the seven
elected officials in charge of the government of Florence, when an accidental
collision in the street during the May Festival in 1300 led to a brawl that
escalated into a civil war that ultimately got Dante's party overthrown and its
leaders (including Dante) exiled from Florence. He spent the rest of his life
in exile, pining for his native city.
In 1293 he
published a book called the Vita Nuova ("The New
Life"), in which he relates how he fell in love with a young girl
(Beatrice), and found his chief happiness in thinking of her, and looking at
her from afar. In 1304 or shortly thereafter he published De Vulgari
Eloquentia, an argument for writing poems and other works in the language
that people speak (in his case, Italian) rather than in Latin. At the same time
he wrote Il Convivio ("The Banquet"), in which he
discusses grammar, and styles of poetry, and complains that his own poems, and
in particular some of the things he said in theVito Nuova, have been
much misunderstood. In 1313 he published De Monarchia ("On
Monarchy" or "A Treatise on Government"), in which he argued
that the authority of a secular prince is not derived from the authority of the
church, and is not given him by the pope, but comes directly from God (although
in his exercise of it he ought, like every other Christian, to be guided by the
moral instruction of the spiritual authority).
When he began
writing his masterpiece, the Commedia, we do not know. (A
"comedy," as traditionally defined, is a story that "begins in
sorrow and ends in joy". Dante called his work simply "The
Comedy." Later Italian writers speaking of the work called it "The
Divine Comedy," by which name it is usually known today.) It appears that
he had finished the first of its three parts by 1314, and the last only shortly
before his death on 14 September 1321. (Because that is the Feast of the Holy
Cross, he is remembered on the following day.)
The plot of the
Comedy is straightforward. It begins with Dante lost and walking in a Dark
Wood, unable to remember how he got there or how long he has been walking. He
sees a mountain and tries to get out of the wood by climbing it, but is driven back
by three beasts that bar his path. He runs in panic, sees a man approaching,
and asks for help. The man replies: I am the poet Virgil. You cannot get out of
the wood by climbing the mountain. You must follow me, and I will take you the
long way round. Your Lady Beatrice has sent me to guide you, through the depths
of Hell and up the slopes of Purgatory, to meet her in the country of the
Blessed." Dante then follows Virgil, who conducts him through Hell, a vast
funnel-shaped region under the surface of the earth, with a series of terraces
that form ever-narrowing circles on which various kinds of evil deeds are
punished, down to the center. They reach the tip of the funnel, located at the
center of the earth, "the point toward which all things down-weigh",
where the directions "up" and "down" are reversed, and find
a small tunnel or pathway cut through the rock that leads them finally out on
the other side of the earth, directly opposite Jerusalem, at the foot of Mount
Purgatory, which is surrounded by cornices on which the seven basic kinds of
inclination to sin are purged and corrected. They climb the mount and at its
summit they find the earthly Paradise, the Eden from which our first parents
were expelled when they turned aside from a relation of loving obedience to God
and of loving trust in Him. There Beatrice meets Dante, and conducts him upward
through the planetary spheres. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the
stars, and beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given
a vision of the glory of God Himself. And here the poem ends.
Dante on The State of Souls After Death
In Part One of
the Comedy, Inferno (Hell), we see those who have chosen evil,
and have rejected the rescuing grace of God, enduring the consequences of their
choice.
First, in the
upper circles of Hell we see sins of Incontinence, of lack of self-control,
sins of those who would have said, "I couldn't help it!" There are
those who could not Say No to others, dramatically represented by unlawful
lovers (though a mother who ruins her child's teeth and his health because she
cannot refuse him all the sweets he cries for would be an equally appropriate
example). Next, there are those who cannot Say No to themselves, dramatically
represented by the gluttonous. And thus are shown other kinds of choices to
turn away from God in pursuit of a false good. Each chooser is living forever
with what he has chosen. The lovers, if asked what they wanted, would have
said, "To be with each other forever." In Dante's vision, they are
forever joined, and circle forever like a flock of birds, born on the howling
wind of their own passions. The sullen lie forever buried in a muddy marsh,
their bubbles rising to the surface as if to say, "While we lived, we took
no joy in the pleasant things around us, preferring to cling to our resentments
and nurse our grudges, and now we nurse them still throughout eternity."
Passing the
circles of Incontinence, we come to those of Violence, of those who have
injured or sought to injure others, or self, or God (or Nature, the child of
God, or Art (human productivity), the child of Nature).
Here we see
those who made their careers through flattery and the debasement of language
wallowing forever in a ditch full of bullshit.
Here we see
hypocrites, plodding forever around in their circle:
And now we saw
a people decked with paint, Who trod their circling way with tear and groan And
slow, slow steps, seeming subdued and faint
They all wore
cloaks, with deep hoods forward thrown Over their eyes, and shaped in fashion
quite Like the great cowls the monks wear at Cologne;
Outwardly they
were gilded dazzling bright, But all within was lead, and weighed thereby, King
Frederick's copes would have seemed feather-light.
O weary mantle
for eternity! Once more we turned to the left, and by their side Paced on,
intent upon their mournful cry.
Here we find
the moat of thieves. Because they refused to distinguish "mine" and
"thine", they remain forever in a society in which not even their
bodies are their own, but may be snatched from them at any time by a fellow
thief, at which they are left to steal a body from someone else, and so on. Dante
describes several such exchanges. One takes place when a thief in the body of a
reptile bites (on the navel) a thief in a human body, whereupon they exchange
shapes. The passage is too long to quote in full, but it begins:
And just as a
lizard, with a quick, slick slither, Flicks across the highway from hedge to
hedge, Fleeter than a flash, in the battering dog-day weather, A fiery little
monster, livid, in a rage, Black as any peppercorn, came and made a dart At the
guts of the others, and leaping to engage
One of the
pair, it pierced him at the part Through which we first draw food; then loosed
its grip And fell before him, outstretched and apart.
Passing the
circles of Fraud Simple, we come to those of Fraud Complex, the place of those
who betrayed, not just fellow humans, but those to whom they had a special
obligation to be faithful: traitors to kindred, traitors to country, traitors
to their invited guests, traitors to those to whom they have sworn allegiance.
And so past Satan at the very bottom of the universe, and up the long path down
which trickles the stream of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness), up toward
remembrance, to emerge at last on the other side of the earth, free of the salt
and heat and noise and sweat and stink of Hell, free to look once more upon the
stars.
Many freshman
survey courses in The World's Great Literature are planned by those who think
that the student ought to read some Dante, but are unwilling or unable to
budget course time to study the whole Comedy, and so assign only Part I,
the Inferno (Hell). The result is that many students read only
Part I, and are left with the impression that this is the really worth-while
part of the poem, and that the rest, if they read it, would be a letdown. This
is a major mistake. The poem get steadily better as it proceeds. (The only real
awkwardnesses that I have noticed are in the first three of the 100 cantos that
make up the poem.)
Dante and
Virgil emerge from Hell at the foot of Mount Purgatory.
As they climb
the mountain, they find seven cornices on which penitent and redeemed sinners
are cleansed by the grace of God from the seven sinful tendencies which hinder
them from full harmony with the will of God. The treatment may sometimes be
painful, but they eagerly embrace it (As an aerobics instructor might put it:
"Go for the burn!"), knowing that through it God is bringing their
wills into complete conformity with His own. On the first cornice, that of
Pride, the proud circle the mountain, crawling low in a position of humility,
bearing heavy burdens on their backs, and praying the Lord's Prayer (with
interpolations appropriate to those who are learning the Virtue of Humility).
Our Father,
dwelling in the Heavens, nowise As circumscribed, but as the things above, Thy
first effects, are dearer in Thine eyes,
Hallowed Thy
name be and the Power thereof, By every creature, as right meet it is We praise
the tender effluence of Thy love.
Let come to us,
let come Thy kingdom's peace; If it come not, we've no power of our own To come
to it, for all our subtleties.
Like as with
glad Hosannas at Thy throne Thine angels offer up their wills alway, So let men
offer theirs, that Thine be done.
Our daily manna
give to us this day, Without which he that through this desert wild Toils most
to speed goes backward on his way.
As we, with all
our debtors reconciled, Forgive, do thou forgive us, nor regard Our merits, but
upon our sins look mild.
Put not our
strength, too easily ensnared And overcome, to proof with the old foe; But save
us from him, for he tries it hard.
This last
prayer is not made for us--we know Dear Lord, that it is needless--but for
those Who still remain behind us we pray so.
Thus God
schools these Christians, these penitent and redeemed sinners, in the virtue of
humility, and so delivers them, not only from the consequences of their sins
(justification) but from the sins themselves (sanctification). And so, on the
six subsequent cornices, they are purged of the vices of envy, anger, sloth,
avarice, gluttony, and lust, and the opposing virtues are instilled in them,
all by God's grace at work in them.
At last Dante,
still led by Virgil, reaches the top of the mountain, and there he is met by
his Lady, Beatrice, whom Virgil has mentioned to him repeatedly throughout the
journey when he particularly needed to be encouraged and strengthened. Here at
last he sees her in person, and she prepares him for his journey through
Heaven.
Now, at last,
in the third part of the Comedy, we have the homecoming. With
Beatrice at his side, Dante mounts up instantly from the peak of Mount
Purgatory to the first of the heavens. In medieval astronomy, following a
tradition going back to the ancient Greeks and earlier, the earth is considered
to be surrounded by a set of whirling transparent spheres, each carrying with
it one of the planets. A "planet" here means a heavenly body which is
not one of the fixed stars, but moves (as seen from the earth) around the belt
of constellations known as the Zodiac. Counting from the earth outward, these
are Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Outside these spheres is
that of the fixed stars, then that of the Primum Mobile (the first moved thing,
the sphere whose motion imparts motion to all the other spheres), and finally
the Empyrean, the unimaginable boundless space that "has no 'where' but in
the mind of God." (For a discussion of the medieval cosmology, see The
Discarded Image, by C S Lewis.) As Dante moves upward through the spheres,
he sees in each sphere some of the redeemed, perfected, and glorified
Christians whose lives and callings to serve God are in some way represented by
the characteristics of that planet. In the sphere of Mars, for example, he
meets martyrs and others who have shed their blood for the faith of Jesus. In
the sphere of Jupiter, he meets righteous kings and judges, and those who have
served justice. In the sphere of the Sun, he meets theologians and others who
have enlightened their fellow Christians and promoted clear thinking about God
and His works. Finally, he soars beyond the planets, beyond the stars, and
beholds the whole company of Heaven assembled together, and is given a vision
of the glory of God Himself. And here the poem ends.
Dante and Multiple Meanings
One answer,
then, to the question, "What is the Comedy about?"
is that it deals with the afterlife, with the eternal destinies of those who
have accepted the love of God and those who have rejected it. Not that Dante believed
that those who have betrayed their countries or families or friends will spend
eternity frozen in ice. But he did believe that to cut oneself off from every
bond of loyalty and affection is to undergo a hardness of heart, a loss of
human feeling, that is appropriately pictured by the image of perpetual
frozenness. He believed that God is the center of reality, and that the nature
of a thing is only to be understood by considering it as a created thing, by
viewing it in its relation to God its Creator. He therefore further believed
that a man who insists on regarding himself as the center of the universe is
denying his fundamental nature, denying the deepest reality about himself, and
is thus living a lie twenty-four hours a day. Accordingly, he speaks of the
souls in Hell as "those who have lost the good of intellect." And the
poem is, on one level, an imaginative account of the consequences in eternity
of being in a right or a wrong relation with God.
However, it
would be a mistake to suppose that the poem deals only with this. The work has
multiple meanings. Dante illustrates his method in a letter to his patron, Can
Grande, by referring to the opening of Psalm 114: "When Israel came out of
Egypt..." He notes that this refers to (1) The historical deliverance of
the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, (2) Our redemption by the action of
Christ, (3) the conversion of the soul from the wretchedness of sin to the
state of grace, and (4) the departure of the redeemed soul from this life to
the liberty of eternal glory. He goes on to say that his work has multiple
allegorical meanings as well as its literal one ("the state of souls after
death").
The fourfold
interpretation is not original with Dante. Jewish scholars use the term
PARDESH, which is a four-letter acronym (P,R,D,Sh) for four levels of
interpretation, corresponding roughly to Dante's literal, moral, analogical,
and mystical. This idea of fourfold interpretation was taken over into
Christian commentary on Holy Scripture by the great third-century scholar
Origen, of ALexandria, Egypt, and through him became the standard approach of
the Alexandrian tradition of Biblical Studies. It shows up in some unexpected
places. For example, in the book, Who Is Ayn Rand? by
Nathaniel Branden (now out of print and hard to find), Branden describes a
lecture at which Ayn Rand said: "I do not believe in writing by instinct
or feeling. I can give reasons for every paragraph I write." A listener
read a five-line paragraph from the novel Atlas Shrugged, and asked
her to analyze it. She replied by distinguishing four levels of meaning and
explaining how the paragraph functioned on each level. The four levels
corresponded very nicely to the four levels of PARDESH, or of Origen, or of
Dante.
Dante and The Way of The Sinner
On one level,
the Comedy can be read as a fictional journey by Dante through
the three Kingdoms of the Dead, and a description of what happens to those who
go there. On another level, it is a journey through the individual human heart.
Dante looks within himself and finds there a capacity for evil. He sees how it
is possible for a man to turn from God, to consent to sin, at first perhaps in
ways so plausible, so innocent-seeming, that the man is not fully aware of what
he is doing ("So heavy was I, and so full of sleep, When first I stumbled
from the narrow way"). Then small deviations from integrity are followed
by larger ones, and what could be called failures in moments of weakness become
definite choices to do what is wrong. And so a man is doing this year without a
qualm things that a year ago he would have been outraged at the suggestion that
he would ever do. The Inferno can be read as an account of how
one sin leads naturally to another, from almost-innocent indulgence to ultimate
treachery. This accounts for some of the scenes in the Inferno where
Dante is rude or worse to some of the sinners he meets there. On the literal
level, this can be explained and defended. But on another level, it is Dante
facing up to the fact of the corruption in his own soul, and recoiling in
horror--not Dante smugly condemning the sins of some stranger, but Dante
accepting and identifying with God's judgement on Dante's own sinfulness. It is
Dante the sinner realizing that he needs help, the necessarily preliminary to
Dante the penitent accepting God's offer to forgive him, cleanse him, reform
and transform and renew him, as shown in the Purgatorio. And this
in turn is a preliminary to the account in the Paradiso of
life in union with Christ, eternal life begun already here on earth. (Christ,
particularly in the Gospel of John, frequently speaks of Eternal Life in the
present tense, as something that the believer has now, rather than something he
will receive after death, or at the Last Judgement.)
Dante and The Way of The City
The Inferno can
also be read, not as a description of an individual sinner falling deeper and
deeper into sin, but as a description of the disintegration of a society.
Sayers devotes an essay ("The City of Dis") to this interpretation in
her book Introductory Papers on Dante. The approach is also
applicable to the other two parts of the Comedy.
Dante and The Way of The Lover
To an observer,
Dante's life, at least until his exile, might seem to focus on his military
career and his political success. To Dante himself, the most important event in
his life took place when he was only nine years old, and met at a friend's
house a girl of his own age, Bica Portinari, whom he calls Beatrice, the blessed
one. Looking at her, Dante found his world undone, his life changed for ever.
He reports that it was like hearing a voice within him say, "Here begins
the new life." From that time, he derived his greatest happiness in
thinking about her, in contriving to catch a glimpse of her from time to time.
He met her on the street, and she smiled and greeted him, and he felt himself
in Heaven. She heard a disparaging rumor about him, and the next time she
passed him she refused her greeting, and he suffered. Her father died, and he
grieved at her loss. Then, in 1290, she died, and it seemed to him that the
whole city of Florence was widowed by her death. He wrote poems in her honor,
and in about 1294 he published a book called the Vita Nuova(The New
Life), in which he speaks of his love for Beatrice, and what she had meant to
him, and inserts the poems he had written about her and his love for her, with
explanations and commentary on each poem. He ends by telling us that after her
death, when he was mourning for her, he saw a lady at a window who smiled
sympathetically at him, and that he was consoled by thoughts of her, which
partly replaced his thoughts about Beatrice, but that he repented of this
wavering, and was rewarded by a vision of Beatrice in heavenly glory, that made
him decide to write no further poems about her until he was able to write of
her worthily. "So that if it please Him by Whom all things live to prolong
my life for a few years, I hope to write of her what never yet was written of
any woman."
Some time
later, around 1305, he wrote a second book, Il Convivio (The
Banquet), a puzzling and incoherent work, in which he said that the Lady in the
Window stands for Philosophy. He further seemed to say that he now thought of
his youthful devotion to Beatrice as adolescent emotionalism, all very well
when one is young, but that he wanted the reader to know that he was now a
mature, sensible fellow, full of the wisdom that comes from philosophical study
and experience, and not one to be swept off his feet by his emotions, or to let
his heart rule his head. He was not retracting what he had said earlier about
Beatrice, but was setting the memory of her aside, with all due respect, while
he got on with the business at hand.
Much of the
literature of the late Middle Ages is dominated by the notion of the knight in
the service of his lady. A knight was expected to find a lady who for him
represented the ideal of what a woman should be. He was to be absolutely
devoted to her and spend his life in her service, his greatest reward to see
her smile. In his dedication to Beatrice, Dante was behaving in a way that was
regarded by his fellow citizens as obviously the proper way for a young man to
behave. And the poem fits the model of poems about a knight travelling through
many dangers on a quest, that leads him at last to his Lady. For a history and
analysis of the idea of Courtly Love, the notion that a man is noblest when
overwhelmed by the splendor of a lady, and ready to make any sacrifice to
please her, see the book The Allegory of Love, by C S Lewis. (Lewis
is well known as a Christian writer, but his official title at the end of his
life was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge
University; and this book was written as an academic and literary study,
certainly begun and perhaps completed before he became a Christian.) See also
the further notes on the topic in Lewis's later book The Four Loves.
Dante actually
goes a bit deeper than this. Beatrice had been for him a source of joy. The
mere sight of her had transformed his life. In the Vita Nuova, he
had poured forth unabashed a testimony to all that she meant to him. Later, he
turned aside from that joy. He accepted the notion that Real Men don't go
overboard about things. He found it embarrassing to recall that he had once
made such a fuss about Beatrice. He wrote the Convivio to
show, among other things, that he had grown up. Later, he realized that what he
bragged of in the Convivio was in fact a fall from grace. To
have set his love for Beatrice aside because it was conflicting with a higher
good would have been laudable. But he was setting it aside because it
conflicted with his desire to be Joe Cool, because he wanted to be in control
of the situation, to live his life untroubled with the agonies and distresses
that come of giving one's heart away. He was in Hell. His sin was hardness of
heart. And then came a renewal of grace. Beatrice could not reach him directly,
but she sent Virgil to speak to him. Through the craft of writing poetry,
through the study of philosophy, through the ordinary civil virtues that the
historical poet Virgil had celebrated in his verse, through all that Virgil
stood for in the medieval imagination, Dante's imagination was re-awakened, and
he remembered what Beatrice had meant to him, and his love for her was
re-kindled, and he forgot about being Joe Cool, and undertook to write a poem
about his joy, sharing it with others.
He might have
written, as some modern poets do, in a manner that made it intelligible only to
a small circle of the elite. But he did not. His renewed love had taught him
humility. In addition, he wanted to tell what he had learned to as many readers
as possible. So he wrote his poem, not in Latin, as his contemporaries would
have expected, but in Italian, so that ordinary men and women could read it
with no special training or background. And he simply told a story,
unpretentious, entertaining, an adventure story, a page-turner.
Dante and The Affirmative Way
Throughout the
centuries, many Christians have felt themselves called to pursue a direct
experience of the presence of God through contemplative prayer and meditation.
Some Christians have written books to assist others seeking to know the
presence of God in this manner. Most such books are concerned with what is
known as the Negative Way. (In what follows, I shall chiefly be betraying my
own ignorance. I ask your indulgence, and for a better account I refer the
reader to those better qualified than myself.) The disciple of the Negative Way
is advised to begin by rejecting all images, all concepts, all ideas of God, in
order to make room for God Himself. This is not offered as something that works
overnight. For many persons, it takes years. There are those who report that
this approach has worked for them. In some instances, where I can see that
their lives have been radically transformed for the better, and that the love
of Christ flows forth from them to the world, I am disposed to take their
statements about what has worked for them very seriously. But I do not believe
that I am myself called to the Negative Way.
Another
approach found in Christian circles is called the Affirmative Way. Here,
instead of shoving the universe to one side (an interesting picture!) so as to
see God face to face with no barriers, the contemplative undertakes to see God
in and through the images that bear His likeness. Thus, he may experience
sexual love between husband and wife as an image of the love between Christ and
the Church, or between Christ and an individual human. Or he may look at a
policeman directing traffic--or a conductor directing an orchestra--or a caller
directing a square dance--and see in him the image of God directing and
controlling the universe, that order may prevail and all things may find their
true freedom in conformity to the pattern. Or, like Dante, he (she) may look at
another human being who somehow seems to sum up in her (his) person the meaning
of life and the goal of all desire, to be a window through whom the Glory is
revealed. And contemplating and adoring glory as revealed in that person
becomes the contemplation and adoration of the glory of God Himself. The image
with which one starts need not even be human. We are told that we are to regard
God with awe and fear. To many hearers, this suggests nothing but prudential
efforts to be safe. God is someone who can smite you if you disobey Him, so you
had better obey. Some persons have found the answer in the sight of a towering,
unapproachable mountain crag. It is not dangerous--climbing it is not the
issue, we are just looking at it. But it is majestic. It is awesome. It gives
us (some of us, at any rate) a feeling of awe and wonder, of something like
fear and something like respect, a feeling that we are in the presence of something
not to be trifled with, something mysterious and tremendous, a feeling not easy
to put into words, but one that helps us understand what is meant by the fear
and awe of God.
The following
of the Negative Way is found in several religions. As far as I know, the
following of the Affirmative Way is peculiarly Christian. One might expect
this, since all Christians are called to the contemplation of Christ, the
visible image of the invisible God, the one who said, "He who has seen me
has seen God." And so, the mind and heart and imagination of the Christian
are drawn upward along the Affirmative Way, from the contemplation of the
majestic or the otherwise evocative in nature (the towering crag, the
thundering cataract, the ocean waves, the call of a wild goose, the
peacefulness of a canoe gliding through a bayou with the water lapping gently
against its side), from the contemplation of another human somehow suddenly
seen as glorious, from those in whom we plainly see the love and holiness of
God at work, from saints and angels and archangels, from Mary the historic and
universal God-bearer, to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in Whom the Image
and the Unimageable are One.
On Reading Dante
If by any
chance I have stirred in some reader the desire to read Dante's Comedy, let me
recommend the particular translation that I think by far the best I have seen.
Dorothy L Sayers, herself a Christian writer and a serious student of Christian
theology and of the thought of Dante, has produced an English translation available
in three volumes in Penguin Paperbacks. It comes complete with notes and
commentary, carefully arranged to give the reader the information he needs when
he needs it, while putting information not immediately needed for the enjoyment
or understanding of the poem safely tucked away at the back of the book where
the reader can investigate it at his leisure or ignore it if he prefers. There
are those who prefer other poetic renderings to that of Sayers. One cannot
profitably argue about tastes. I do not know any set of notes or comments that
are a candidate for comparison with those of Sayers. (Let me add, before I
forget, that Sayers died leaving the last 13 cantos untranslated, and that the
work was completed by Dr. Barbara Reynolds, who gave final form to the notes in
the third volume, based on extensive notes left by Sayers, and extensive
discussions between the two of them during the previous years.)
My advice,
then, is to read the three volumes in the Penguin edition (ISBN 0-14-044006-2,
0-14-044046-1, and 0-14-044105-0 respectively, with prices currently around $6
or $7 a volume; Warning: Penguin also offers another translation, so check the
ISBN numbers, or make sure that your volumes say "Sayers" or
"Sayers and Reynolds" on the cover). If you are an impoverished
student, ask your librarian, or get a couple of friends to chip in and buy a
set to be passed around. It is possible to read the poem while skipping the
notes and comments altogether, but I have always found it very satisfying to
read the book strictly in order: the Introduction, then the first canto
followed by the notes for that canto, then the next canto, then the notes for
that canto, and so on, just as printed. It works for me. Your mileage may vary.
If you can locate copies, by all means read Sayers' two volumes, Introductory
Papers on Dante and Further Papers on Dante. They are a
delight. (Unfortunately, they are not always in print. My oldest copies are
from Harper Brothers, then from Methuen and from Barnes and Noble. The current
books in print lists only Further Papers on Dante, Greenwood Press,
ISBN 0-313-22005-0 at $35. Try a college library or a good large public
library.) To these volumes, let me add a third, not primarily about Dante, but
nonetheless relevant: The Poetry of Search and The Poetry of Statement.
For a further
exploration of the Affirmative Way, I refer the reader to the writings of
Charles Williams. (That's Charles Walter Stansby Williams of London and Oxford,
who died in 1945.) I suggest beginning with his novel The Greater
Trumps, then perhaps some of his other novels, and then two of his books of
poetry, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of The
Summer Stars, both dealing with the story of King Arthur and the Round
Table. C. S. Lewis has a book of comments on these, called Arthurian
Torso. It includes, besides comments by Lewis, the unfinished fragment of
Williams's proposed book, The Figure of Arthur. And that reminds
me: Williams also wrote a book on Dante called The Figure of Beatrice.
Two well-known
science-fiction writers, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, have written their
own (prose) version of the Inferno, putting it in a
twentieth-century context (Pocket Books, 1976, ISBN 0-671-82058-3). I enjoyed
it, without necessarily agreeing with all their presuppositions. But I do not
recommend reading it before reading Dante's Comedy.
Another book to
be mentioned here is The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis. It is not
an obvious and admitted updating of Dante, in the way that Niven and
Pournelle's Inferno is, (or in the way that Lewis's own Pilgrim's
Regress is of Bunyan), but Lewis's debt to Dante is clear, and someone
who has read Lewis first and then Dante will probably say often: "Oh, now
I see why Lewis handled that scene the way he did -- he was following the
tradition of Dante."
