Study guide
The Divine Comedy
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Overview
- Author
- Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Florentine poet, philosopher and politician, exiled from Florence in 1302
- Composition
- c. 1308–1321, in exile; Inferno and Purgatorio were circulating by about 1315, and Paradiso was finished shortly before Dante's death at Ravenna in September 1321
- Title
- Dante called it his Comedìa ('Comedy'); the epithet 'Divine' was first used by Boccaccio and first appears on a title page in the Venice edition of 1555
- Form
- Terza rima (ABA BCB CDC ...), interlocking tercets of Italian hendecasyllables (eleven-syllable lines), each canto closing on a single line
- Length
- 14,233 lines in 100 cantos: an introductory canto plus 33 in the Inferno, 33 in the Purgatorio and 33 in the Paradiso
- Language
- The Florentine vernacular, with Latin, Provençal and invented speech; the poem did more than any other work to make Tuscan the literary language of Italy
- Fictional date
- Easter 1300: the journey begins on the night before Good Friday and ends about a week later; Dante is thirty-five, 'midway' through the biblical span of seventy years
- Guides
- Virgil through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice from the Earthly Paradise through the heavens; St Bernard of Clairvaux for the final vision
- Cosmos
- Hell a funnel down to the earth's centre; Purgatory a mountain in the southern hemisphere, with the Earthly Paradise on its summit; Paradise the nine moving heavens and the Empyrean beyond them
- Translation quoted
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1867), a line-for-line blank-verse version, so line numbers match the Italian
Context
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 into a family of minor nobility. The city was then one of the richest in Europe, a republic of bankers, cloth merchants and guilds, and it was divided by factional strife. The great quarrel of thirteenth-century Italy was between the Guelfs, who generally supported the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor. The Guelfs won control of Florence after the battle of Benevento in 1266, and Dante fought on the Guelf side at Campaldino in 1289. By the 1290s the Florentine Guelfs had split into two parties, the Whites and the Blacks, and Dante, who belonged to the Whites, entered the city's government; in 1300, the year in which the Comedy is set, he served as one of the six priors (Took 2020) (Jacoff 2007).
In 1301 Pope Boniface VIII, who wished to extend papal control over Tuscany, sent Charles of Valois into Florence, and the Blacks seized power. Dante was away on an embassy to Rome. In January 1302 he was sentenced in his absence on charges of barratry (corruption in office), and in March he was condemned to be burned if he returned. He never saw Florence again. He lived in exile at Verona, in the Lunigiana, perhaps in Paris, and finally at Ravenna, where he died in 1321. The coming of the Emperor Henry VII to Italy in 1310 raised Dante's hopes of a just imperial order, and his political treatise Monarchia argued that the emperor's authority came directly from God, not through the pope; Henry's death in 1313 ended those hopes. The prophecies of exile and the attacks on corrupt popes and on Florence that run through the Comedy grow from this experience (Ferrante 1984) (Dante Alighieri 1996).
Dante's first book, the Vita Nuova (c. 1293–1295), tells in prose and verse the story of his love for Beatrice, usually identified with Beatrice Portinari, who married Simone de' Bardi and died in 1290. It ends with a vision that leads Dante to resolve to write of her 'what has never been written of any woman'. The Comedy fulfils that promise by making Beatrice his guide to God. Dante's lyric poetry belonged to the movement that the poem itself calls the dolce stil novo, with Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti, in which love for a lady becomes a path to nobility of mind (Singleton 1958) (Barolini 1984).
In exile Dante wrote two unfinished treatises, the Convivio, a work of popular philosophy in Italian, and De vulgari eloquentia, a Latin defence of the vernacular as a language for serious poetry. The Comedy carries out that programme: a vast poem of theology, philosophy and history written in the Florentine of everyday speech and in every register, from the obscene to the sublime. Its debt to classical poetry is open. Virgil is its guide, and the Aeneid, with Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Pharsalia and Statius' Thebaid, is its model and rival; Dante also drew on the Bible, the liturgy and the medieval tradition of visions of the other world (Barolini 1984) (Hollander 1969).
The poem's universe is that of medieval science and theology. The earth lies motionless at the centre of nine concentric heavens, the spheres of the seven planets, the fixed stars and the Primum Mobile, beyond which is the Empyrean, the dwelling of God. Dante's moral and physical ideas come from Aristotle, whom he calls 'the master of those who know', and from his Christian interpreters, especially Thomas Aquinas, together with Augustine, Boethius, Bonaventure and the mystics. Scholars such as Patrick Boyde have shown how closely the poem follows the natural philosophy of its time, and how it turns that philosophy into poetry (Boyde 1981) (Took 2020).
Plot overview
In the spring of 1300 Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood. Prevented from climbing a sunlit hill by three beasts, he is rescued by the shade of the poet Virgil, who has been sent by Beatrice. Virgil leads him through the gate of Hell and down through nine circles, arranged on the scheme of Aristotle's Ethics: first the sins of incontinence (lust, gluttony, avarice and prodigality, wrath), then, inside the walled city of Dis, heresy, violence and fraud. Dante speaks with the damned, among them Francesca da Rimini, the Ghibelline Farinata, his teacher Brunetto Latini, Ulysses and Count Ugolino, and sees each sin punished by a fitting penalty, the contrapasso.
At the centre of the earth, frozen in the ice of Cocytus, Lucifer chews the traitors Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Virgil carries Dante down Lucifer's body and through the centre of the earth, and they climb to the surface in the southern hemisphere on Easter morning. There, guarded by Cato, the mountain of Purgatory rises out of the sea. After the ante-purgatory, where the excommunicated and the late repentant wait, Dante passes through the gate and climbs seven terraces on which souls purge the seven capital sins: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust. On the way the poets are joined by the Roman poet Statius, released after his long penance.
At the summit, the Earthly Paradise, Virgil leaves him. Beatrice appears in a great allegorical procession, reproaches Dante and receives his confession; he is washed in the rivers Lethe and Eunoe and is ready to rise to the stars. In the Paradiso Beatrice carries him up through the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, where the souls of the blessed appear to him according to their degrees of glory. He hears the history of the Roman Empire from Justinian, the lives of Francis and Dominic from Aquinas and Bonaventure, and the prophecy of his own exile from his ancestor Cacciaguida.
In the heaven of the fixed stars Dante sees the triumph of Christ and is examined by the apostles Peter, James and John on faith, hope and love. In the Primum Mobile he sees God as a point of light surrounded by the angels, and in the Empyrean the souls of the blessed in the form of a white rose. Beatrice returns to her place, and St Bernard prays to the Virgin for Dante's final vision. He sees the Trinity as three circles and the Incarnation as a human image within them, and his will and desire are moved by 'the Love which moves the sun and the other stars'.
Part by part
Part 1: Inferno 1–2: The dark wood and Virgil
Inferno, Cantos 1–2
Summary
The poem opens in the middle of a life. Dante, thirty-five years old in the spring of 1300, finds that he has lost the straight way and wandered into a dark wood. At dawn he sees a hill lit by the sun and tries to climb it, but three beasts drive him back: a quick, spotted leopard (Longfellow's 'panther'), a lion and, worst of all, a lean she-wolf. As he slips back towards the dark a figure appears who has grown faint from long silence. It is Virgil, the poet of the Aeneid, who tells him that he must take another road: through the eternal places of the damned and of those who are purged, after which a worthier soul will guide him to the blessed. Virgil also prophesies a hound, the veltro, who will one day drive the she-wolf back to Hell.
In Canto 2 Dante's nerve fails. He is not Aeneas, he says, and not Paul, the two living men who were allowed to visit the other world. Virgil answers by telling the story of his summons. In Limbo he was called by Beatrice, Dante's dead beloved, who had been sent by Lucia at the request of the Virgin Mary. Three ladies in heaven are concerned for him. Comforted, Dante declares Virgil his leader, lord and master, and they set out as night falls.
Analysis
The first two cantos are a double prologue, one to the whole poem and one to the Inferno. Their opening line places the private crisis inside a common one, 'our life', and the allegory is offered openly: the wood, the hill, the beasts and the sun belong to the language of sermons and moral treatises, and readers have debated since the fourteenth century whether the beasts stand for incontinence, violence and fraud, for particular sins such as lust, pride and avarice, or for political powers. John Freccero showed how the scene rewrites a pattern of conversion found in Augustine's Confessions, in which the soul's own effort to climb fails and a journey of humility must replace it (Freccero 1986).
The choice of Virgil is the poem's first great decision. Dante greets him as the author from whom he took 'the beautiful style', and the whole Comedy is written in conversation with the Aeneid. Yet Virgil is sent by Beatrice, and his authority is borrowed: his description of the chain of heavenly ladies anticipates the order of grace that the pagan poet himself will never enter (Barolini 1984) (Hollander 1969).
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita: the journey belongs to 'our' life, so Dante's crisis stands for everyone's.
Part 2: Inferno 3–4: The gate of Hell; Limbo
Inferno, Cantos 3–4
Summary
The gate of Hell bears an inscription in which the gate itself speaks: it was made by divine Power, Wisdom and Love, it will last for ever, and it tells those who enter to abandon all hope. Inside, in a vestibule, Dante hears the cries of those who lived without praise or blame, together with the angels who took no side in Lucifer's rebellion. They run endlessly behind a banner, stung by wasps and hornets. Among them Dante recognises the shade of one 'who made through cowardice the great refusal', usually taken to be Pope Celestine V, whose abdication in 1294 opened the way for Boniface VIII. At the river Acheron the ferryman Charon refuses to carry a living man; an earthquake and a flash of light make Dante faint.
He wakes across the river in Limbo, the first circle, where unbaptised children and virtuous pagans live without torment but without hope, in a longing that is their only pain. Virgil belongs here. Four great poets come to meet him, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, and they make Dante a sixth in their company. In a noble castle on green meadows he sees the heroes and philosophers of antiquity, including Aristotle, 'the Master ... of those who know', together with three Muslims, Avicenna, Averroës and Saladin.
Analysis
The inscription is one of the most famous passages in European poetry, and its theology is hard: Hell is the work not only of Power but of Love, because justice belongs to love. The neutrals, rejected by Heaven and by Hell, show at the outset that the poem values commitment, and Dante's contempt for them is part of his own moral and political character.
Limbo is the canto in which Dante's love for the classical world meets his theology. The pagans suffer no punishment except desire without hope, and Virgil's paleness as he enters is pity for his own circle. Dante's acceptance into the 'fair school' of poets is a bold claim to a place in the classical tradition, and it raises at once the question that the poem will return to in the cases of Cato, Statius, Trajan and Ripheus: why should these noble souls be lost? Kenelm Foster saw in this tension between the humanist and the theologian 'two Dantes' who are never fully reconciled (Foster 1977) (Barolini 1984).
Through me the way is to the city dolent; Through me the way is to eternal dole; Through me the way among the people lost.
The gate speaks in its own voice, repeating 'Per me si va'; the inscription ends a few lines later with 'Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate'.
Part 3: Inferno 5: Francesca da Rimini
Inferno, Canto 5
Summary
At the entrance to the second circle sits Minos, who judges each soul by wrapping his tail around himself as many times as the number of the circle to which it must go. Here the lustful are blown about for ever by a dark wind, as they let passion carry away reason in life. Virgil points out the great lovers of history and legend, Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Akhilleus, Paris and Tristan, and Dante is overcome with pity.
He asks to speak with two souls who move together, and the wind brings them to him. The woman, Francesca da Rimini, tells how love, which seizes the gentle heart quickly and lets no one who is loved escape from loving, joined her to her husband's brother Paolo, and how love led them to one death; their murderer is awaited in Caina, the place of traitors to kin. Asked how they first knew their love, she tells of reading together the romance of Lancelot, and how when they read of the hero's kiss, Paolo kissed her trembling; 'that day no farther did we read therein'. Paolo weeps as she speaks, and Dante faints from pity.
Analysis
Francesca is the first fully developed sinner in the poem, and her eloquence has made her one of its most loved and argued-over figures. Romantic readers saw her as a victim of love and of a cruel God; modern critics point out that her speech is built from the doctrines of the love poetry that Dante himself had written, and that she blames Love, and the book, and never herself. The famous line about Gallehault, the go-between in the Lancelot romance, makes the book the pander (Barolini 2000).
The canto is therefore also about reading. Two readers are destroyed by a book; a third reader, Dante the poet of love, faints. Teodolinda Barolini has shown how the canto sets the courtly language of love against a historical case of adultery and murder in the families who ruled Ravenna and Rimini, and asks the reader to measure the poem's sympathy against its judgement (Barolini 2000) (Kirkpatrick 1987).
Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving, Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly, That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me;
The 'Amor' tercets: 'Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona'. Francesca speaks in the idiom of the love lyric, which the canto puts on trial.
Part 4: Inferno 6–8: The gluttons, the avaricious and the wrathful
Inferno, Cantos 6–8
Summary
In the third circle the gluttons lie in mud under a cold, filthy rain, guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, whom Virgil silences with fistfuls of earth. A Florentine called Ciacco ('Hog') recognises Dante and gives the poem's first political prophecy: Florence is full of envy, the factions will come to blood, and one party will drive out the other. In the fourth circle Plutus guards the avaricious and the prodigal, who roll great weights against one another and clash, shouting 'Why keep?' and 'Why squander?'; many of them are clerics, popes and cardinals. Virgil explains that Fortune is a heavenly intelligence who moves the goods of the world from people to people.
In the marsh of the Styx the wrathful strike and bite each other, and the sullen lie beneath the water gurgling their confession. The boatman Phlegyas carries the poets across; a Florentine, Filippo Argenti, rises from the mud, and Dante curses him, while Virgil embraces Dante and blesses the mother who bore him. At the walls of the city of Dis, fallen angels slam the gates in Virgil's face.
Analysis
These circles show the first form of Dante's moral system: the sins of incontinence, where appetite overcomes reason, are punished in the upper Hell, and their punishments are fitting images of the sins. The gluttons live in the mud they made of their bodies; the misers and spendthrifts are reduced to blind weights; the sullen choke on the words they would not say. The discourse on Fortune, by contrast, turns a pagan goddess into an angel and asks the reader to see the shifts of wealth and power within providence (Boyde 1981).
The meeting with Argenti is harder. Dante's fury and Virgil's praise of it have troubled readers who expect the pilgrim to show pity. The poem distinguishes between the pity that is owed to suffering and the righteous indignation that is owed to sin, and Dante is still learning which is which. The closed gates of Dis mark the limit of what Virgil's reason can do without help from heaven (Kirkpatrick 1987).
And he to me: “Thy city, which is full Of envy so that now the sack runs over, Held me within it in the life serene.
Ciacco's first words introduce the theme of Florence and the envy that ruined it.
Part 5: Inferno 9–11: The city of Dis; Farinata; the plan of Hell
Inferno, Cantos 9–11
Summary
Before the walls of Dis the three Furies appear on a tower and call for Medusa, whose gaze would turn Dante to stone; Virgil covers Dante's eyes with his own hands. The poet tells his readers to look for the doctrine hidden beneath the veil of these strange verses. Then a messenger from heaven crosses the Styx dry-shod and opens the gate with a wand. Inside lies a plain of burning tombs, where heretics are punished.
In Canto 10 the Epicureans, who said the soul dies with the body, lie in open tombs. Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline leader who defeated the Guelfs at Montaperti in 1260 but then refused to let Florence be destroyed, rises up 'as if Hell he had in great despite' and talks politics with Dante. Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, father of Dante's friend the poet Guido, interrupts to ask why his son is not with Dante, and sinks back believing him dead. Farinata explains that the damned see the future but not the present. In Canto 11 Virgil sets out the plan of Hell, following Aristotle's Ethics: incontinence above, then violence, then fraud, the worst sin because it is proper to human reason.
Analysis
The Medusa episode and the address to the reader are central texts for the debate on allegory: the poem itself asks for a second level of reading, and readers have taken Medusa as despair, heresy or the hardness of heart that makes conversion impossible. Freccero argued that the scene makes the reading of the poem itself a test of conversion (Freccero 1986).
Farinata and Cavalcante are the subject of Erich Auerbach's essay in Mimesis, where he showed how Dante's figures keep their historical character, their passions and their political memory in the timeless state of eternity, so that the afterlife becomes the fulfilment and not the cancellation of earthly life (Auerbach 1953). Farinata's pride and Cavalcante's anxious love are presented with equal force, and they never notice each other. Canto 11's schematic lecture, sometimes found dull, gives the reader the map that makes the rest of Hell intelligible (Singleton 1954).
I had already fixed mine eyes on his, And he uprose erect with breast and front E’en as if Hell he had in great despite.
Farinata rises from his tomb 'com' avesse l'inferno a gran dispitto', the classic instance of a soul who keeps his earthly character in eternity.
Part 6: Inferno 12–14: The violent; the wood of the suicides
Inferno, Cantos 12–14
Summary
The seventh circle, of the violent, has three rings. The way down passes a landslide made, Virgil explains, by the earthquake at Christ's death, and the Minotaur guards it. In the first ring tyrants and murderers are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, at depths that match their crimes, and centaurs shoot at any who rise too high. The centaur Nessus carries Dante across.
The second ring is a wood of twisted, thorny trees in which the souls of suicides are imprisoned; the Harpies feed on their leaves. When Dante breaks a twig the tree bleeds and speaks: it is Pier della Vigna, minister of the Emperor Frederick II, who killed himself after he fell from favour, and who swears that he was never unfaithful to his lord. Two spendthrifts run through the wood pursued by black dogs. In Canto 14 the third ring is a plain of burning sand on which fire falls like snow; the blasphemer Capaneus, one of the Seven against Thebes, lies defiant. Virgil explains that the rivers of Hell spring from the tears of a great statue, the Old Man of Crete, which stands in Mount Ida.
Analysis
Canto 13 is one of the poem's most self-conscious episodes. The bleeding tree imitates the episode of Polydorus in Aeneid 3, and Virgil confesses that he made Dante break the branch because his own poem had not been believed. Pier speaks in an elaborate courtly rhetoric, full of paradoxes and repetitions, and the style of the canto mirrors the self-division of the suicide, who in rejecting his body has lost the right to it even at the Last Judgement (Kirkpatrick 1987).
Capaneus and the Old Man of Crete set classical myth inside a Christian world history: the giant who defied Jove is a type of all rebellion against God, and the statue, with its head of gold and feet of clay, combines Daniel's vision with Ovid's ages of the world. Dante's syncretism is not decoration; it claims that the poets of antiquity half-saw the truths of the Christian order (Barolini 1984).
Men once we were, and now are changed to trees; Indeed, thy hand should be more pitiful, Even if the souls of serpents we had been.
'Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi': Pier della Vigna's reproach, spoken by a broken branch.
Part 7: Inferno 15–17: Brunetto Latini; Geryon
Inferno, Cantos 15–17
Summary
On the burning sand Dante meets a group of men who committed violence against nature, the sodomites. One of them tugs at his hem: it is Brunetto Latini, the Florentine statesman and scholar, author of the encyclopedic Trésor, whom Dante honours as a father. Brunetto predicts that Dante will be persecuted by the ungrateful Florentines and urges him to follow his star. Dante remembers how Brunetto taught him 'how a man becomes eternal' through fame and learning. Brunetto runs off like a winner in a race.
In Canto 16 three distinguished Florentines ask about their city, and Dante answers in a bitter apostrophe on its new wealth and its upstart citizens. Virgil throws the cord that Dante wears around his waist into the abyss, and from the depths rises Geryon, 'the image of fraud', with an honest face, a serpent's body and a scorpion's sting. While Virgil negotiates, Dante visits the usurers who sit at the edge of the sand with purses round their necks, marked with the arms of noble families. The two poets then ride down on Geryon's back, circling slowly in the dark.
Analysis
The Brunetto canto is one of the most moving in the poem and one of its greatest problems. Dante speaks to his old teacher with reverence and gratitude, using the formal 'voi', and yet he has placed him among the sodomites. Some scholars have argued that Brunetto's sin is a different one, such as a misuse of language or of the vernacular; most accept the literal charge, and see the canto as a judgement on a humanism of earthly fame that Dante both honours and leaves behind (Kirkpatrick 1987) (Barolini 1984).
Geryon is the most fantastic creature in Hell, and Dante swears by 'the notes of this Comedy' that he truly saw it. The oath on the poem's name, at the point where the poem describes fraud, is one of the passages that Barolini used to show how the Comedy builds its claim to truth through its very fictions (Barolini 1992).
You taught me how a man becomes eternal;
'Come l'uom s'etterna': Dante's gratitude to his teacher, set against the place where he finds him.
Part 8: Inferno 18–20: Malebolge; the simonists; the soothsayers
Inferno, Cantos 18–20
Summary
The eighth circle, Malebolge ('evil pouches'), is a funnel of ten concentric ditches joined by bridges of rock, where the simply fraudulent are punished. In the first ditch panders and seducers march in two files, whipped by horned demons; Dante sees a Bolognese pimp and Jason, who seduced and abandoned Hypsipyle and Medea. In the second, flatterers wallow in excrement.
In the third ditch the simonists, who sold sacred things, are thrust head downwards into holes in the rock, with flames on the soles of their feet. One of them, Pope Nicholas III, mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII, who was then still alive, and is surprised that he has come so early; he predicts that Clement V will follow. Dante replies with a fierce invective against the papacy's love of money and laments the Donation of Constantine. In the fourth ditch the soothsayers walk with their heads turned backwards, weeping down their backs. Dante weeps, and Virgil rebukes him; Virgil then tells the story of Mantua's foundation by the prophetess Manto, correcting his own account in the Aeneid.
Analysis
Here the poem's contrapasso, the fit between sin and punishment, becomes almost grotesque: the simonists parody baptism in the holes like fonts and the Pentecostal flames that should descend on the heads of the apostles, and the soothsayers who tried to see forward can only look behind. Canto 19 is also the first of the poem's great attacks on the corrupt Church; Dante, a layman, condemns a pope in Hell and predicts the damnation of two more (Ferrante 1984).
Virgil's sharp rebuke in Canto 20, 'Here pity lives when it is wholly dead', is one of the key texts for the debate about pity in the Inferno. The play on pietà (pity and piety) asks the pilgrim to accept God's justice. Virgil's revision of the Aeneid in the same canto shows, as Barolini and Hollander have argued, that Dante was willing to correct his master and to make the Comedy the true version of the classical story (Barolini 1984) (Hollander 1969).
Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?
'Qui vive la pietà quando è ben morta': the pun on pity and piety in Virgil's rebuke.
Part 9: Inferno 21–23: The barrators and the demons; the hypocrites
Inferno, Cantos 21–23
Summary
In the fifth ditch corrupt public officials, the barrators, are plunged in boiling pitch, and a band of demons, the Malebranche ('evil claws'), push them under with hooks. The demons' leader, Malacoda, tells Virgil that the next bridge is broken and offers an escort, assuring him that another bridge further on is intact; the escort sets off, and its captain gives the signal with an obscene noise. In Canto 22 a sinner from Navarre tricks the demons and escapes back into the pitch, and two demons fight and fall in.
In Canto 23 the poets fear the angry demons, and Virgil takes Dante in his arms and slides down the bank into the sixth ditch. Here the hypocrites walk slowly in cloaks gilded outside and lead within. Two Bolognese friars explain that Malacoda lied, since every bridge over this ditch fell at the time of the Crucifixion. Caiaphas, the high priest who advised that one man should die for the people, lies crucified on the ground, and everyone walks over him.
Analysis
These cantos are the comic centre of the Inferno, with their low language, slapstick and the farce of the demons; they show most clearly why Dante called the poem a comedy and how wide its range of style is. They also contain Dante's own history, since he was himself convicted of barratry by the Florentines in 1302; his account of the corrupt officials of Lucca can be read as an answer to that charge (Took 2020).
The episode tests Virgil's authority: he is deceived by a demon's lie and has to be told the truth by hypocrites. Robert Hollander and others read the deception as a sign of the limits of reason when it has not been taught by grace; the old bridges fell at the death of Christ, an event Virgil did not understand (Hollander 1969) (Kirkpatrick 1987).
A painted people there below we found, Who went about with footsteps very slow, Weeping and in their semblance tired and vanquished.
The hypocrites with their gilded leaden cloaks, one of Hell's clearest images of a punishment that is the sin itself.
Part 10: Inferno 24–27: The thieves; Ulysses; Guido da Montefeltro
Inferno, Cantos 24–27
Summary
After a steep climb Dante reaches the seventh ditch, where the thieves are attacked by serpents and turned to ash and back again, or are fused with snakes in hideous transformations. Vanni Fucci of Pistoia, a thief of church treasure, prophesies the defeat of Dante's party, and in Canto 25 makes an obscene gesture at God. Dante describes the metamorphoses of five Florentine thieves and boasts that Lucan and Ovid should be silent before them.
In the eighth ditch fraudulent counsellors move inside tongues of flame. A double flame holds Ulysses and Diomedes, punished for the stratagem of the wooden horse and other frauds. Virgil questions Ulysses, who tells how he left home after his adventures to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, urging his old crew not to live like brutes but to pursue virtue and knowledge, and how after five months they saw a high dark mountain before a whirlwind sank the ship. In Canto 27 Guido da Montefeltro, a Ghibelline commander who became a friar, tells how Boniface VIII persuaded him to give fraudulent advice by absolving him in advance; at his death a devil took him from St Francis by logic.
Analysis
Ulysses' speech is one of the most famous passages in the poem and one of its hardest. The Ulysses of Dante is not Homer's, whom Dante could not read, but a figure built from Latin sources, and his last voyage is Dante's invention. Readers have seen in him a hero of the human desire for knowledge, an image of Dante's own daring, or a warning against the 'mad flight' of an intellect that sails without grace towards the mountain of Purgatory. Freccero and Boitani have traced how the poem keeps returning to his voyage as a counter-image to Dante's own (Freccero 1986) (Boitani 1994).
Guido's story is a deliberate pair to Ulysses: a man of fraud who tried to repent, but trusted a corrupt pope's absolution instead of true contrition. It shows that the poem judges intention, not institutions, and it prepares for the story of his son Buonconte in Purgatorio 5, saved by a single tear (Ferrante 1984).
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.
'Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza': Ulysses' 'little speech' to his crew.
Part 11: Inferno 28–31: The sowers of discord; the falsifiers; the giants
Inferno, Cantos 28–31
Summary
In the ninth ditch those who sowed religious and political discord are split open by a demon's sword: Muhammad (whom medieval Christians took for a schismatic), Pier da Medicina, the Roman Curio, the Florentine Mosca, whose advice began the city's feud, and the troubadour Bertran de Born, who set a son against his father and carries his own severed head like a lantern. Bertran states the principle of the punishments: 'Thus is observed in me the counterpoise', the contrapasso.
In the tenth ditch the falsifiers suffer diseases: the alchemists itch with scabs, the impersonators run mad, the counterfeiter Master Adam is swollen with dropsy and longs for the streams of the Casentino, and the liars burn with fever. Master Adam and the Greek Sinon trade insults, and Virgil rebukes Dante for enjoying the quarrel. In Canto 31 the poets reach the central pit, where giants stand like towers: Nimrod speaks a meaningless language, Ephialtes is chained, and Antaeus lowers them to the bottom.
Analysis
Bertran's line gives a name to the principle that governs the whole Inferno and much of Purgatorio. The word contrapasso comes from the medieval Latin translation of Aristotle's Ethics, where it renders the idea of reciprocal justice; Dante makes the punishment an image of what the sin already was, so that in Hell the sinner gets what he has chosen (Boyde 1981) (Durling 2011).
These cantos are among the most violent and grotesque in the poem, and their language becomes deliberately harsh and low. Virgil's rebuke at the end of Canto 30, that the wish to hear such quarrels is a base wish, is a warning to the reader as well as to the pilgrim. Nimrod's babble, the speech of the builder of the Tower of Babel, introduces the theme of language that will return in Adam's speech in Paradiso 26 (Kirkpatrick 1987).
Thus is observed in me the counterpoise.
'Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso': the only use of the word in the poem, which critics have taken as the name of its whole system of justice.
Part 12: Inferno 32–34: Cocytus; Ugolino; Lucifer
Inferno, Cantos 32–34
Summary
The ninth circle is Cocytus, a lake of ice in which traitors are frozen. It has four regions: Caina for traitors to kin, Antenora for traitors to country or party, Ptolomea for traitors to guests, and Judecca for traitors to their lords. Dante kicks the head of Bocca degli Abati, the traitor of Montaperti, and pulls out his hair. He then finds two souls frozen in one hole, one gnawing the other's skull.
In Canto 33 Count Ugolino della Gherardesca of Pisa tells how Archbishop Ruggieri imprisoned him with his sons and grandsons in a tower and nailed up the door; the children offered him their own flesh, died one by one, and 'then hunger did what sorrow could not do'. Dante curses Pisa. In Ptolomea Fra Alberigo explains that some traitors' souls fall here while their bodies still live on earth, possessed by demons. In Canto 34 Lucifer stands frozen at the centre of the earth, with three faces, red, yellow and black, chewing Judas, Brutus and Cassius, and beating six wings that make the wind that freezes the lake. Virgil climbs down his body, turns at the centre of gravity, and the two poets climb a hidden passage until they see the stars.
Analysis
Ugolino's story is the climax of the Inferno's pathos and its most disputed line. Readers since the early commentators have asked whether 'hunger did what sorrow could not' means that he died of hunger or that he ate his children; Dante leaves the horror unspoken. The story, like Francesca's, is told by the sinner in his own terms, and it moves the reader to pity even while Ugolino gnaws for ever on his enemy (Kirkpatrick 1987) (Freccero 1986).
The end of Hell is cold, silent and absurd. Lucifer, once the most beautiful of angels, is a weeping machine without speech, a parody of the Trinity with his three faces, and his body becomes the ladder by which the pilgrim escapes. The last word of the canto, stelle, is also the last word of the other two cantiche (Singleton 1954).
Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.
'E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle': the final word, stelle, ends all three cantiche.
Part 13: Purgatorio 1–3: The shore; Cato; Casella; Manfred
Purgatorio, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The poet calls on the Muses, and on Calliope above all, to raise his song from the dead poetry of Hell. It is the dawn of Easter Sunday on the shore of an island in the southern hemisphere, where the mountain of Purgatory rises opposite Jerusalem. Dante sees four stars never seen since the first people, and an old man with a white beard, the Roman Cato of Utica, who killed himself rather than live under Caesar and is now the guardian of the mountain. Virgil explains that Dante seeks liberty, and Cato allows them to go on; Virgil washes the grime of Hell from Dante's face with dew and girds him with a reed, the plant of humility.
In Canto 2 an angel steers a boat full of souls to the shore, singing the psalm of the Exodus, In exitu Israel de Aegypto. Dante's friend the musician Casella sings one of Dante's own canzoni, 'Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona', and the souls stand entranced until Cato drives them on. In Canto 3 Virgil reminds the pilgrim that reason cannot grasp the mysteries of God, and they meet the excommunicated, who must wait thirty times the length of their contumacy before climbing. Manfred, the illegitimate son of Frederick II, killed at Benevento in 1266, tells how he repented at the point of death and was saved by the goodness of God, whose arms are so wide.
Analysis
Purgatory is the cantica of time, hope and community. Unlike the damned, these souls move, sing together and are on their way somewhere. The Exodus psalm, which the Letter to Cangrande uses to illustrate the four senses of scripture, gives the cantica its model of liberation, and the Easter dawn sets the soul's rebirth in liturgical time (Singleton 1954) (Hollander 1993).
Cato is one of the poem's great surprises: a pagan, a suicide and an enemy of Caesar, he is made guardian of the mountain and will be saved. Auerbach took him as a perfect example of figura, the historical Cato whose love of political liberty is fulfilled as the Christian liberty of the soul (Auerbach 1959). Casella's song is a gentle test of a different kind: the pilgrim's own early love poetry delays the souls on their way. Manfred's salvation, against the curses of a pope and a bishop, shows again that grace is wider than the Church's judgements (Ferrante 1984).
He seeketh Liberty, which is so dear, As knoweth he who life for her refuses.
'Libertà va cercando, ch'è sì cara': Virgil's account of the pilgrim's journey, spoken to Cato, who died for liberty.
Part 14: Purgatorio 4–6: The late repentant; Pia; Sordello
Purgatorio, Cantos 4–6
Summary
The climb is steep, and Virgil explains that it grows easier the higher one goes. On a ledge Dante finds Belacqua, a Florentine maker of instruments known for his laziness, sitting with his head between his knees: those who delayed repentance until death must wait outside the gate as long as they lived. In Canto 5 those who died by violence and repented in their last moments crowd around, asking to be remembered on earth. Buonconte da Montefeltro, son of Guido of Inferno 27, tells how he died at the battle of Campaldino with Mary's name on his lips, so that an angel took his soul while a frustrated devil raised a storm that carried his body away. A woman, Pia, asks only to be remembered: 'Siena made me, unmade me Maremma'.
In Canto 6 the souls press for prayers, and Virgil explains how the prayers of the living can shorten the time of the dead. The poets meet Sordello, a thirteenth-century troubadour from Mantua, who embraces Virgil when he hears the name of their common city. The embrace provokes Dante's great invective against Italy, a ship without a pilot, against the absent emperor and against Florence, whose laws do not last from October to mid-November.
Analysis
The Buonconte episode answers Inferno 27 in detail: there the father, absolved by a pope, was taken by a devil; here the son, with a single tear, is taken by an angel. The two cantos together show that salvation depends on the turning of the heart, not on rites or reputations (Freccero 1986). The idea of the prayers of the living bound to the souls in Purgatory makes the cantica a work of memory and community, as Manuele Gragnolati has shown in his study of bodily experience in the afterlife (Gragnolati 2005).
The invective on Italy is one of the high points of Dante's political poetry. Sordello's patriotism for his city exposes the factions of contemporary Italy, and Dante blames the emperors for neglecting the 'garden of the empire'. The political vision that Joan Ferrante traced through the whole poem is set out here with special passion (Ferrante 1984).
Ah! servile Italy, grief’s hostelry! A ship without a pilot in great tempest! No Lady thou of Provinces, but brothel!
'Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello': the opening of the invective against Italy.
Part 15: Purgatorio 7–9: The valley of the princes; the gate of Purgatory
Purgatorio, Cantos 7–9
Summary
Sordello explains that the souls cannot climb at night and leads the poets to a flowering valley in which the souls of negligent rulers sit singing the Salve Regina. Many of them were enemies in life: the Emperor Rudolf, Ottokar of Bohemia, Philip III of France, Peter III of Aragon and Charles of Anjou sit side by side. In Canto 8, as evening falls and the souls sing the hymn Te lucis ante terminum, two angels with green wings and blunted swords descend to guard the valley, and a serpent that creeps in is put to flight. Dante speaks with his friend the judge Nino Visconti and with Currado Malaspina, who prophesies that Dante will soon know the hospitality of the Malaspina family.
In Canto 9 Dante falls asleep and dreams that an eagle carries him up to the sphere of fire. He wakes to find that Lucia has carried him to the gate of Purgatory proper. Three steps, of white marble, cracked dark stone and blood-red porphyry, lead to an angel seated on a threshold of diamond. With the point of his sword the angel cuts seven P's (for peccatum, sin) on Dante's forehead and opens the gate with a gold and a silver key.
Analysis
The valley of the princes is a place of liturgy and of political reflection: rulers who neglected their duties now sing together in peace, and their quarrels are reduced to the shadows of a painting. The nightly drama of the serpent and the angels is a symbolic rite, and Dante's address to the reader, to look hard at the truth beneath the thin veil, invites an allegorical reading (Hollander 1969).
The gate scene is one of the clearest pieces of sacramental allegory in the poem. The three steps are commonly read as the stages of penance, contrition, confession and satisfaction, and the keys as the authority and knowledge of the priest. The P's will be erased one by one on the terraces above. The dream of the eagle, with its echo of Ganymede, shows how the cantica uses dreams to mark the stages of the ascent (Singleton 1958).
’Twas now the hour that turneth back desire In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart, The day they’ve said to their sweet friends farewell,
The evening hour 'che volge il disio / ai navicanti': exile, homesickness and the sound of the bell.
Part 16: Purgatorio 10–12: The proud
Purgatorio, Cantos 10–12
Summary
The first terrace punishes pride. Its marble wall is carved with scenes of humility so lifelike that they seem to speak: the Annunciation, David dancing before the Ark, and the Emperor Trajan stopping to do justice to a poor widow. The proud move slowly towards Dante, bent double under heavy stones, and he compares them to the corbels that support roofs, and humanity to worms born to form the angelic butterfly.
In Canto 11 the proud recite a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer. Omberto Aldobrandesco confesses the pride of his family. The illuminator Oderisi of Gubbio tells Dante that fame passes like a breath of wind: Cimabue thought he held the field in painting, but now Giotto has the cry; one Guido has taken the glory of language from the other, and someone perhaps is born who will drive both from the nest. Oderisi points out Provenzan Salvani, the proud ruler of Siena, who humbled himself to beg in the square for a friend's ransom. In Canto 12 Dante walks over carvings on the pavement of pride brought low, from Lucifer and Nimrod to Niobe, Arachne, Saul and Troy. An angel brushes his forehead with a wing, the first P disappears, and the climb becomes easier.
Analysis
The terrace of pride is a meditation on art. God is the sculptor of the carvings, which surpass both nature and human art, and Dante's description of them is a contest with divine art in which he must know his place. Oderisi's speech about fame, about painters and about the two Guidos, Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti, is usually read as a sly claim of Dante's own coming greatness and, at the same moment, a lesson that such fame is wind. The pilgrim himself admits that he will spend time on this terrace after death (Barolini 1984) (Took 2020).
Barolini has shown how the terrace builds a pattern of examples, a whip and a bridle of contrasting stories, that the following terraces repeat. The structure of Purgatory, with its regular examples, prayers and angels, is a pattern of moral education in which art is the medium of change (Barolini 1992).
In painting Cimabue thought that he Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry, So that the other’s fame is growing dim.
Cimabue and Giotto: the vanity of artistic fame, spoken by an artist on the terrace of pride.
Part 17: Purgatorio 13–15: The envious
Purgatorio, Cantos 13–15
Summary
On the second terrace the envious sit against the rock dressed in haircloth, their eyelids sewn shut with iron wire like those of wild hawks, leaning on each other like blind beggars. Voices fly past calling out examples of generous love. Sapia, a noblewoman of Siena, confesses that she rejoiced at the defeat of her own city's army and was saved only by the prayers of a humble comb-seller.
In Canto 14 Guido del Duca of Romagna describes the course of the Arno, whose inhabitants he compares to hogs, curs, wolves and foxes, and laments the decline of the noble families of Romagna. As the poets move on, voices of envy, Cain's and Aglauros', crack like thunder. In Canto 15 Virgil explains the difference between earthly goods, which are lessened when they are shared, and the love of heaven, which grows the more souls share it. On the third terrace Dante sees ecstatic visions of meekness: Mary finding the boy Jesus in the temple, the gentleness of Pisistratus and the martyrdom of Stephen.
Analysis
Envy, in Dante's scheme, is love of one's own good perverted into the desire that others should lack it. Virgil's discourse in Canto 15 gives the cantica's central economic and moral image: material goods divide those who seek them, while spiritual goods are multiplied by sharing. The idea underlies the poem's whole critique of Florence and of the avarice of the Church (Ferrante 1984).
The physical suffering of the envious, whose eyes misused in looking with spite are now closed, shows how the punishments of Purgatory differ from those of Hell. They are chosen and accepted, and the souls' bodies of air feel them as a means of healing. Gragnolati has argued that Dante's Purgatory makes pain productive, a way in which the self is remade (Gragnolati 2005).
Sapient I was not, although I Sapia Was called, and I was at another’s harm More happy far than at my own good fortune.
'Savia non fui, avvegna che Sapìa / fossi chiamata': a pun on her name that turns into confession.
Part 18: Purgatorio 16–18: Free will and love
Purgatorio, Cantos 16–18
Summary
The wrathful walk through a thick, bitter smoke. Marco Lombardo, a courtier, tells Dante that the world is blind, and answers his question about the cause of evil: it is not the stars, for if the heavens moved everything there would be no free will and no justice in reward or punishment. The fault lies in human beings and in bad government. Rome once had two suns, the emperor and the pope, to show the two roads; now one has put out the other, and the sword is joined to the crook.
In Canto 17 Dante sees visions of wrath and reaches the fourth terrace as night falls. Virgil uses the pause to explain the order of Purgatory: every creature has love, natural or elective, and all sin is love gone wrong, either directed to evil (pride, envy, wrath), too weak towards the good (sloth), or excessive towards lesser goods (avarice, gluttony, lust). In Canto 18 he explains how love is a natural motion that the free will must judge. The slothful rush past, shouting examples of zeal, and Dante falls asleep.
Analysis
The three central cantos of Purgatorio stand at the numerical centre of the whole Comedy, and they contain its theory of love and free will. Singleton argued that the placing is deliberate: the poem's moral system, its theory of the soul and its idea of the journey all depend on the claim that love is the seed of every virtue and of every sin (Singleton 1954) (Singleton 1958).
Marco Lombardo's discourse gives the political application. The disorder of the world is human, not astrological, and it has a remedy: the restoration of two powers, spiritual and temporal, each with its own sphere. This is the doctrine Dante developed in the Monarchia, and it explains why the poem attacks popes who claim temporal power (Dante Alighieri 1996) (Ferrante 1984).
Hence thou mayst comprehend that love must be The seed within yourselves of every virtue, And every act that merits punishment.
Virgil's teaching on love as the seed of every virtue and every sin, at the centre of the poem.
Part 19: Purgatorio 19–21: The avaricious; Statius
Purgatorio, Cantos 19–21
Summary
Before dawn Dante dreams of a stammering, deformed woman who becomes beautiful under his gaze and sings that she is the siren who led Ulysses astray; a holy lady appears, and Virgil tears the siren's dress to reveal the stench of her belly. On the fifth terrace the avaricious and prodigal lie face down on the ground, bound hand and foot. Pope Adrian V tells Dante that he discovered the falseness of the world only when he became pope.
In Canto 20 Hugh Capet, ancestor of the kings of France, denounces his descendants, whose greed culminates in the humiliation of Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303, where Christ was 'captured again in his vicar'. The mountain shakes and the souls sing Gloria in excelsis. In Canto 21 a soul overtakes the poets and explains that the earthquake happens when a soul feels itself pure and rises; he has just been freed after more than five hundred years. He is the Roman poet Statius, author of the Thebaid, who praises the Aeneid as his mother and nurse in poetry and says he would have stayed another year in Purgatory to have lived when Virgil lived. Dante smiles, and Statius learns whom he is speaking to.
Analysis
The siren dream is a parable of desire: the object of excessive love is made beautiful by the gaze of the lover. Its position before the terraces of avarice, gluttony and lust connects the dream to the Ulysses of Inferno 26, and the pilgrim's need of Virgil's help to break the spell (Freccero 1986). Hugh Capet's speech makes the most outspoken attack on the French monarchy in the poem, and its account of Anagni shows that Dante's hatred of Boniface did not stop him from seeing the outrage done to the papal office (Ferrante 1984).
The meeting with Statius is a scene of comedy and tenderness about poetic influence. Dante's Statius is largely his own invention: a secret Christian who learned his faith from Virgil. His homage to the Aeneid stands for Dante's, and his attempt to embrace Virgil's feet echoes the shades who cannot be embraced in classical epic. Barolini has made this scene a cornerstone of her study of the poets in the Comedy (Barolini 1984).
Of the Aeneid speak I, which to me A mother was, and was my nurse in song; Without this weighed I not a drachma’s weight.
Statius on the Aeneid, his 'mamma' and 'nutrice' in poetry: the poem's great tribute to Virgil.
Part 20: Purgatorio 22–24: Statius' conversion; the gluttons
Purgatorio, Cantos 22–24
Summary
Statius explains that his sin was prodigality, not avarice, and that Virgil saved him twice: a line of the Aeneid made him repent his wasteful spending, and the Fourth Eclogue, with its prophecy of a new age and a child from heaven, led him to Christianity. Virgil was like one who walks at night carrying a light behind him, which helps those who follow but not himself. Statius was baptised but hid his faith for fear of persecution, and spent four centuries on the terrace of sloth. On the sixth terrace a tree hung with fruit and watered by a spring tortures the gluttons, who are wasted to skin and bone.
In Canto 23 Dante meets his friend Forese Donati, with whom he once exchanged a series of insulting sonnets. Forese praises his devoted widow Nella and denounces the shameless women of Florence. In Canto 24 Forese points out other gluttons, including Pope Martin IV, and the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca, who asks if Dante is the author of the new rhymes that begin 'Ladies who have understanding of love'. Dante answers that he writes as Love dictates within him, and Bonagiunta names the dolce stil novo, the 'sweet new style'.
Analysis
Statius' line 'Through thee I Poet was, through thee a Christian' is one of the most important statements in the poem about the relation between classical poetry and Christian faith. The image of Virgil as one who lights the way for others while walking in the dark himself captures his tragic place in the Comedy and is central to the debate on the salvation of the pagans (Barolini 1984) (Foster 1977).
Bonagiunta's naming of the 'sweet new style' gave literary history one of its terms, but Dante's own definition, writing as Love dictates, is more a statement of inspiration than the description of a school. Read with Oderisi's speech and the meeting with Guinizzelli to come, these scenes form Dante's own history of Italian poetry, with himself at its end (Barolini 1984) (Took 2020).
And I to him: “One am I, who, whenever Love doth inspire me, note, and in that measure Which he within me dictates, singing go.”
'I' mi son un che, quando / Amor mi spira, noto': Dante defines his poetics, and Bonagiunta names the dolce stil novo.
Part 21: Purgatorio 25–27: The aerial body; the lustful; the wall of fire
Purgatorio, Cantos 25–27
Summary
As the poets climb, Dante asks how souls without need of food can grow thin. Statius answers with a long lecture on the generation of the human body and the creation of the soul by God, and explains how after death the soul shapes the surrounding air into a visible body that can speak, laugh and weep. On the seventh terrace the lustful walk in a great fire, singing a hymn and calling out examples of chastity; two companies meet, kiss briefly and run on, crying out examples of lust.
In Canto 26 Dante meets Guido Guinizzelli of Bologna, whom he calls the father of himself and of his betters in the poetry of love. Guinizzelli points to a better craftsman of the mother tongue, the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, who answers in Provençal and goes back into the fire. In Canto 27 an angel tells the poets that they must pass through the flames. Dante is terrified until Virgil says that only this wall stands between him and Beatrice. After the night, during which Dante dreams of Leah and Rachel, Virgil speaks his last words: his guidance is over, Dante's will is free, upright and whole, and he crowns him lord of himself.
Analysis
Statius' lecture on the aerial body solves a problem that the poem has raised since the shades of Hell first wept and suffered: how can souls be seen and feel pain? Gragnolati has placed it in the medieval debates on body and soul and on the resurrection, and argued that it shows Dante's insistence on bodily identity (Gragnolati 2005).
The meetings with Guinizzelli and Arnaut complete Dante's history of vernacular poetry, and the lines given to Arnaut in Provençal show his care for linguistic difference. Virgil's last words are a turning point. He crowns Dante with the crown and mitre, symbols of temporal and spiritual rule over himself, and with that the human guide has done everything that reason can do. Freccero and Singleton saw here the completion of the moral journey and the beginning of the journey to Beatrice (Singleton 1958) (Freccero 1986).
Thee o’er thyself I therefore crown and mitre!
'Per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio': Virgil's last words to Dante.
Part 22: Purgatorio 28–30: The Earthly Paradise; Beatrice
Purgatorio, Cantos 28–30
Summary
At the summit Dante enters the divine forest of the Earthly Paradise, where Adam and Eve lived before the Fall. Across a small stream he sees a lady, Matelda, singing and gathering flowers, who explains the nature of the place: its breeze comes from the motion of the heavens, and its two rivers, Lethe and Eunoe, take away the memory of sin and restore the memory of good deeds. The ancient poets who sang of the golden age, she suggests, dreamed of this place.
In Canto 29 a procession advances along the stream: seven candlesticks, twenty-four elders crowned with lilies, four living creatures, a chariot drawn by a griffin, half eagle and half lion, and maidens who stand for the theological and cardinal virtues. In Canto 30 a lady veiled in white, under a green mantle and a red gown, appears on the chariot amid a cloud of flowers. Dante feels the old power of love and turns to tell Virgil, 'I know the traces of the ancient flame', but Virgil has gone. As Dante weeps, the lady calls him by name, the only time the poem names him, and reveals herself as Beatrice. She reproaches him before the angels for turning away from her after her death.
Analysis
The procession is an allegorical pageant of the books of the Bible and of the Church, with the griffin generally read as Christ in his two natures. Charles Singleton saw Beatrice's arrival as an advent, carefully modelled on the coming of Christ, and many critics have since studied how Dante makes a woman he loved into a figure of revelation and grace (Singleton 1958) (Hollander 1969).
The disappearance of Virgil is one of the most moving moments in the poem. Dante's line to him translates Dido's words in Aeneid 4 about her old love, and the triple repetition of Virgil's name echoes the cries of Orpheus for Eurydice in the Georgics. The poet who gave Dante his style is given his farewell in his own words, and the scene sets classical loss against Christian recovery (Jacoff 2007) (Barolini 1984).
But us Virgilius of himself deprived Had left, Virgilius, sweetest of all fathers, Virgilius, to whom I for safety gave me:
'Virgilio dolcissimo patre': the threefold naming of the vanished guide echoes Orpheus calling Eurydice in the Georgics.
Part 23: Purgatorio 31–33: Confession; the pageant of the Church; Eunoe
Purgatorio, Cantos 31–33
Summary
Beatrice presses Dante to confess, and he does so, weeping: after her death the present things with their false pleasures turned his steps aside. Beatrice tells him that her death should have taught him the frailty of earthly beauty. He faints with remorse, and Matelda draws him through Lethe. The four cardinal virtues lead him to Beatrice's eyes, in which he sees the griffin reflected, now in one nature and now in the other, and the three theological virtues ask Beatrice to unveil her smile.
In Canto 32 the procession moves to a tree stripped bare, the tree of Adam's sin; the griffin binds the chariot to it and the tree blooms. Then the chariot suffers a series of disasters: an eagle strikes it, a fox enters it, a dragon tears its floor, it sprouts feathers and monstrous heads, and a harlot sits on it beside a giant who drags it off into the wood. In Canto 33 Beatrice prophesies that a 'five hundred, ten and five' sent by God will slay the harlot and the giant. Dante drinks of Eunoe and returns 'pure and disposed to mount unto the stars'.
Analysis
The confession turns the poem back on its author. Dante's sin, whatever it was precisely (a new love, philosophical pride, or a sensual life), is named only as a turning away from Beatrice, and the cantos make the Comedy a work of personal repentance as well as universal vision. Freccero and Singleton read the scene as the climax of the poem's pattern of conversion (Freccero 1986) (Singleton 1958).
The pageant of the chariot is an apocalyptic history of the Church: the persecutions, heresy, the Donation of Constantine, the corruption of the papacy and its removal to Avignon under the French king. The cryptic prophecy of the 'DXV', a figure sometimes read as the anagram DVX, a leader, is like the veltro of Inferno 1 one of the poem's unsolved riddles, and it shows how much of the poem's hope was political (Ferrante 1984) (Mazzotta 1979).
Pure and disposed to mount unto the stars.
'Puro e disposto a salire a le stelle': like the other two cantiche, Purgatorio ends on the word stelle.
Part 24: Paradiso 1–3: The ascent; the Moon; Piccarda
Paradiso, Cantos 1–3
Summary
The poet announces that he was in the heaven that receives most of God's light and saw things that cannot be told, and calls on Apollo for help. At noon in the Earthly Paradise Beatrice gazes at the sun, and Dante, gazing at her, is changed beyond the human, an experience for which he coins the verb trasumanar. They rise through the sphere of fire, and Beatrice explains that all things have an order and an inclination, and that a soul freed from sin rises to God as naturally as a river flows downhill.
In Canto 2 the poet warns readers in little boats to turn back: only those who have long fed on the bread of angels should follow. In the sphere of the Moon Beatrice explains the dark marks on its surface, refuting Dante's theory of density with an experiment of three mirrors and a theory of the different powers that flow from the heavens. In Canto 3 Dante sees faint faces like reflections in water. Piccarda Donati, Forese's sister, was taken from her convent by force and married; she explains that the souls in this lowest sphere desire nothing more, because their will is one with God's: 'his will is our peace'. She points out the Empress Constance, mother of Frederick II.
Analysis
The Paradiso begins with the problem of language and memory that will govern the whole cantica: what Dante saw cannot be repeated, and the poet must find images for what has no image. Beatrice's discourses on order and on the Moon spots are the first of many scientific and theological lectures, which modern readers have found difficult, but which Patrick Boyde has shown to be part of a coherent poetry of the cosmos (Boyde 1981).
Piccarda's speech is the cantica's first statement of its central theme, that the blessed are perfectly happy in different degrees because their wills are united with the divine will. Her line, quoted by T. S. Eliot as an example of the clarity of Dante's poetry, unites theology and feeling in a phrase of complete simplicity (Eliot 1929).
And his will is our peace; this is the sea To which is moving onward whatsoever It doth create, and all that nature makes.
'E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace': Piccarda's account of the happiness of the blessed.
Part 25: Paradiso 4–6: Will and vows; Justinian and the Roman eagle
Paradiso, Cantos 4–6
Summary
Dante is troubled by two doubts, and Beatrice resolves them. The souls do not live in the planets: all the blessed are in the Empyrean, and they appear in the spheres to show their degrees of glory to a human understanding that needs images. Those who were forced to break their vows were not to blame in their absolute will, but in their relative will gave way to fear. In Canto 5 she explains the sanctity of vows and the gravity of breaking them, and they rise to the sphere of Mercury, where the souls grow brighter with joy at the arrival of someone to love.
In Canto 6, which is spoken entirely by a single soul, the Emperor Justinian, codifier of Roman law, tells the history of the Roman eagle, the imperial standard, from Aeneas and the kings to Caesar, Augustus and Titus, who avenged the death of Christ by the destruction of Jerusalem, and on to Charlemagne. He condemns both the Guelfs who oppose the eagle and the Ghibellines who use it for party ends. He ends with the story of Romeo of Villeneuve, a faithful minister who was unjustly disgraced and left his master's court in poverty.
Analysis
The doctrine that the souls appear in the planets only for Dante's sake is one of the most important statements about the poem's method: the whole Paradiso is a fiction of accommodation, in which heavenly truth is given a sensible form. Barolini has made this passage central to her account of the Comedy's narrative techniques (Barolini 1992).
Canto 6, like Inferno 6 and Purgatorio 6, is a political canto, and the series moves from Florence to Italy to the empire. Justinian's history shows that Dante saw the Roman Empire as willed by providence, and the story of Romeo, an exile who kept his integrity, is widely read as a portrait of Dante himself (Ferrante 1984) (Dante Alighieri 1996).
Caesar I was, and am Justinian, Who, by the will of primal Love I feel, Took from the laws the useless and redundant;
'Cesare fui e son Iustinïano': earthly title and eternal identity in one line.
Part 26: Paradiso 7–9: The Redemption; Venus
Paradiso, Cantos 7–9
Summary
Beatrice answers Dante's doubt about why the just death of Christ was justly avenged. Human nature, created good, fell through Adam's pride, and could not make satisfaction for itself; God chose to redeem it by both justice and mercy through the Incarnation and the Cross. She adds that what God creates directly is immortal, which is the ground for belief in the resurrection of the body.
In Canto 8 they rise to Venus, where the souls of lovers dance as lights. Charles Martel of Anjou, Dante's friend, who died young, explains how children can differ from their parents and why human society needs different natures and talents. In Canto 9 Cunizza da Romano, who had many lovers, says she does not regret the influence of her star; Folco of Marseille, a troubadour who became a bishop, points out Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the first soul taken up into this heaven at Christ's triumph, and attacks the Church's greed for the florin, the 'cursed flower' of Florence.
Analysis
Beatrice's discourse on the Redemption, set out in scholastic order, is a reminder that the Paradiso is a poem of thought as well as vision. John Took has described Dante as a poet whose theology and philosophy are inseparable from his experience of exile and of political life (Took 2020).
The heaven of Venus is a deliberate shock: the blessed include a woman of notorious love affairs, a love poet and a prostitute. These souls have turned their passion towards God, and their joy contrasts sharply with the punishment of the lovers in Inferno 5. The heaven of Venus shows the poem's view that love itself, rightly ordered, is the road to God (Jacoff 2007) (Singleton 1958).
Then know thou, that within there is at rest Rahab, and being to our order joined, With her in its supremest grade ’tis sealed.
Rahab in Venus: a sinner whose love served God now shines in the highest rank of this heaven.
Part 27: Paradiso 10–12: The Sun; Francis and Dominic
Paradiso, Cantos 10–12
Summary
In the sphere of the Sun the souls of the wise form a crown of twelve lights around Dante and Beatrice. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican theologian, introduces his companions: his teacher Albert the Great, Gratian, Peter Lombard, Solomon, Dionysius, Orosius, Boethius, Isidore, Bede, Richard of St Victor and Siger of Brabant, a philosopher Aquinas had opposed in life. The ring circles, singing, like a clock.
In Canto 11 Aquinas tells the life of St Francis of Assisi, who married Lady Poverty, a widow since the death of Christ, and lists the stages of his life to the stigmata and his death. He ends with a lament for the decline of his own Dominican order. In Canto 12 a second ring forms, and the Franciscan Bonaventure tells the life of St Dominic, the champion of the faith, and laments the divisions of the Franciscans. He introduces a second set of twelve, including the prophet Joachim of Fiore, whom Bonaventure had condemned.
Analysis
The Sun cantos are built on symmetry and reconciliation. A Dominican praises the founder of the Franciscans and a Franciscan the founder of the Dominicans, and each blames his own order; Aquinas praises Siger and Bonaventure praises Joachim, men they opposed on earth. In heaven the intellectual quarrels of the schools are resolved into harmony (Boyde 1981).
The life of Francis is one of the great saints' lives of medieval poetry, and Dante's emphasis on poverty connects it with his attack on clerical wealth. The presence of Siger, a controversial Aristotelian philosopher, has led scholars to debate whether Dante favoured a radical philosophy independent of theology; most now see the canto as celebrating the variety of truths within a single order (Took 2020) (Jacoff 2007).
For he in youth his father’s wrath incurred For certain Dame, to whom, as unto death, The gate of pleasure no one doth unlock;
Francis' marriage to Poverty: the image on which the canto's life of the saint is built.
Part 28: Paradiso 13–15: Solomon; Mars; Cacciaguida
Paradiso, Cantos 13–15
Summary
Aquinas explains how Solomon could be the wisest of all, though Adam and Christ were perfect in wisdom: Solomon asked for the wisdom proper to a king. He warns against hasty judgement, of sinners or of the saved. In Canto 14 Solomon explains how the resurrected body will increase the brightness and joy of the blessed. Beatrice and Dante rise to Mars, where the souls of those who fought for the faith form a great cross on which Christ flashes, an image the poet cannot describe.
In Canto 15 a light descends from the cross like a shooting star and greets Dante in Latin as its blood: it is his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, who was knighted by the Emperor Conrad III and died on the Second Crusade. He describes Florence in his own time, within its old walls, a sober, modest city of faithful wives and simple customs, where women did not paint their faces and families did not need large dowries.
Analysis
The crusader cross of Mars, like the eagle of Jupiter, is a figure in which the souls form a single sign. The poet's confession that memory and language fail him before the cross is an example of what Barolini has called the poem's rhetoric of ineffability, a way of claiming truth by admitting the limits of speech (Barolini 1992).
The meeting with Cacciaguida begins the longest single episode of the Paradiso, three cantos at the centre of the cantica. Its greeting echoes Anchises' greeting to Aeneas in the underworld of Aeneid 6, and Cacciaguida becomes Dante's Anchises, an ancestor who will reveal his future. The idealised old Florence is the poem's model of a just society (Ferrante 1984) (Jacoff 2007).
Florence, within the ancient boundary From which she taketh still her tierce and nones, Abode in quiet, temperate and chaste.
Cacciaguida's old Florence, 'sobria e pudica', a city of peace within its ancient walls.
Part 29: Paradiso 16–18: Florence and the prophecy of exile; Jupiter
Paradiso, Cantos 16–18
Summary
Dante admits that even in heaven he felt pride in his noble blood. Cacciaguida describes the population of the city in his day, a fifth of its present size and unmixed, and traces the decline of Florence to the arrival of families from the countryside and to the feuds of great families, especially the murder of Buondelmonte in 1216.
In Canto 17 Dante asks about the dark prophecies he has heard in Hell and Purgatory, and Cacciaguida tells him plainly: he will be driven from Florence, as Hippolytus was driven from Athens, and will learn how salt the bread of others tastes and how hard it is to go up and down another's stairs. His companions in exile will be foolish and wicked, and he will make a party of himself. He will find refuge with the Scaligeri in Verona, and with Can Grande, whose deeds will be marvellous. Cacciaguida commands Dante to tell all he has seen, whatever offence it gives. In Canto 18 the soldiers of the cross are named, and they rise to Jupiter, where the souls of just rulers spell out 'Love justice, you who judge the earth', and the final M transforms into an eagle.
Analysis
The prophecy of exile is the emotional centre of the Paradiso. All the darker hints given by Ciacco, Farinata, Brunetto and others are gathered into a single clear statement, and Dante's personal suffering is given the dignity of a heavenly mission. The poet's task, to tell the truth fearlessly, is the justification for the poem's political satire (Took 2020) (Ferrante 1984).
The skywriting of Jupiter, in which souls form letters, shows how literally the Paradiso treats the universe as a book. The first verse of the Book of Wisdom becomes an emblem of the empire, and the transformation of the M of Monarchia into an eagle makes divine justice and the universal monarchy one image (Dante Alighieri 1996).
Thou shalt abandon everything beloved Most tenderly, and this the arrow is Which first the bow of banishment shoots forth.
'Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta / più caramente': the first arrow of exile; the salt bread of others follows.
Part 30: Paradiso 19–21: The eagle of justice; Saturn
Paradiso, Cantos 19–21
Summary
The eagle speaks with one voice for all the just souls of which it is made. It addresses the question that has troubled Dante for years: a man born on the banks of the Indus who never hears of Christ, and lives a blameless life, dies unbaptised; where is the justice that condemns him? The eagle answers that divine justice is beyond the reach of human sight, and that many who cry 'Christ, Christ' will be further from him at the Judgement than those who did not know him. It then condemns the Christian kings of Dante's day.
In Canto 20 the eagle names the lights of its eye: David, Trajan, Hezekiah, Constantine, William II of Sicily and the Trojan Ripheus, whom Virgil called the most just of men. Trajan was raised from the dead by the prayers of Pope Gregory and believed; Ripheus received the grace to foresee the redemption. In Canto 21 the heaven of Saturn is silent, and a golden ladder rises out of sight. Peter Damian explains that no created mind can know why God predestines; he denounces luxurious prelates, and the souls shout a cry like thunder.
Analysis
The question of the man on the Indus is the poem's most open treatment of the problem of the salvation of the virtuous pagans. The eagle's answer insists on the mystery of justice, but the presence of Trajan and Ripheus, two pagans in heaven, shows that grace can reach where human understanding would not expect. Readers have connected this with the damnation of Virgil and the salvation of Cato and Statius, and asked whether Dante's theology is in tension with his humanism (Foster 1977) (Barolini 1984).
Ripheus is a minor figure in the Aeneid, mentioned by Virgil only at his death in the fall of Troy. His salvation is Dante's invention, and it is perhaps the poem's most tender answer to Virgil, who wrote of him without knowing it and is not saved himself (Hollander 1969) (Jacoff 2007).
For saidst thou: ‘Born a man is on the shore Of Indus, and is none who there can speak Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who can write;
The man born on the bank of the Indus: Dante's sharpest question to divine justice.
Part 31: Paradiso 22–24: The fixed stars; the threshing-floor; faith
Paradiso, Cantos 22–24
Summary
St Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, laments the corruption of the monasteries. Dante and Beatrice rise up the golden ladder into the eighth heaven, the sphere of the fixed stars, at the constellation of Gemini, under which Dante was born. Beatrice tells him to look down, and he sees all seven planetary spheres below him and, at the bottom, the little earth, 'the threshing-floor that maketh us so proud', and he smiles at its meanness.
In Canto 23 Beatrice waits like a bird for the dawn, and Christ appears in triumph with the souls of the redeemed, like a sun lighting thousands of lamps. Dante cannot bear the sight; when he looks again Beatrice is smiling, and her smile cannot be described. The Virgin Mary is crowned by the angel Gabriel and ascends after her son. In Canto 24 St Peter examines Dante on faith, as a teacher examines a student; Dante answers, defines faith in the words of Hebrews as 'the substance of things hoped for', and Peter circles around him three times in approval.
Analysis
The glance back at the earth is a moment of cosmic perspective that later writers from Petrarch to the modern age have imitated. The view from the stars shows the triviality of earthly ambition, yet Dante does not stop caring for the earth: the examinations that follow turn back to his own life and his hope of returning to Florence (Boyde 1981).
The examinations on the theological virtues are scenes of humour and humanity, with Dante as an anxious candidate for a degree. They also return to the poem's interest in authority: the poet who will write the vision must be shown to hold the faith of the Church, so that his poem can claim to be sacred (Barolini 1992) (Took 2020).
The threshing-floor that maketh us so proud, To me revolving with the eternal Twins, Was all apparent made from hill to harbour!
'L'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci': the earth seen from the stars, a threshing-floor.
Part 32: Paradiso 25–27: Hope, love and Adam; Peter's invective
Paradiso, Cantos 25–27
Summary
Canto 25 opens with the poet's hope that his sacred poem may one day overcome the cruelty that keeps him out of Florence, so that he might return as a poet and be crowned in the baptistery where he was baptised. St James examines him on hope. St John the Evangelist appears so bright that Dante is blinded, and John tells him that his body is not in heaven, but in the earth.
In Canto 26 John examines Dante on love; at the end of the examination Beatrice restores his sight with a glance. The soul of Adam appears and answers Dante's unspoken questions: the sin of Eden was not the tasting of the fruit but the transgression of the limit, his first language had died out before the Tower of Babel, and he lived in Eden only about seven hours. In Canto 27 the heavens sing Gloria, and then Peter, turning red, denounces the popes who have usurped his place and made his burial place a sewer of blood and filth; all heaven blushes. Dante rises to the Primum Mobile, and Beatrice explains that time has its roots in this heaven.
Analysis
The opening of Canto 25 is the most personal statement in the poem: an ageing exile's wish to return home as a poet. It shows that the poem's claim to authority is bound up with Dante's political defeat, a theme John Took has followed through the whole of his intellectual biography (Took 2020).
Adam's speech on language corrects Dante's earlier treatise, De vulgari eloquentia, which had said that the Hebrew of Adam lasted until the Tower of Babel. The admission that all human languages change, even the first one, gives the vernacular of the Comedy a new dignity. Peter's invective in Canto 27, the fiercest attack on the papacy in the poem, shows that even at the edge of the material universe the history of the Church on earth is never forgotten (Ferrante 1984) (Barolini 1992).
He who usurps upon the earth my place, My place, my place, which vacant has become Before the presence of the Son of God,
'Quelli ch'usurpa in terra il luogo mio': Peter's threefold condemnation of the pope who holds his place.
Part 33: Paradiso 28–30: The angels; the Empyrean; the river of light
Paradiso, Cantos 28–30
Summary
In the Primum Mobile Dante sees, reflected in Beatrice's eyes, a point of intense light surrounded by nine circles of fire; the circle nearest the point is the smallest and fastest. Beatrice explains that this is the order of the angels, and that the universe is the inverse of this model: the farther a heaven is from the earth, the larger and more divine it is. She names the nine orders of angels, following Dionysius, and laughs at Gregory the Great, who later discovered his mistake about them.
In Canto 29 she explains the creation of the angels, their fall and the number of the faithful angels, and criticises preachers who invent stories and jokes. In Canto 30 they enter the Empyrean, the heaven of pure light, intellectual and full of love. Dante's sight is renewed, and he sees a river of light with sparks like gems; when his eyes drink from it, the river becomes a circle, and he sees the great white rose of the blessed. Beatrice shows him an empty seat reserved for the Emperor Henry VII, and her last words in the poem condemn Pope Clement V, who betrayed him.
Analysis
The inverted cosmos of Canto 28, in which God is a point and the universe is wrapped around it, is one of the poem's boldest images, and some mathematicians and historians of science have compared its geometry to that of a hypersphere. It shows how Dante's cosmology is at once Aristotelian and visionary (Boyde 1981).
Beatrice's farewell speech in Canto 30 has surprised readers: the guide who has led Dante through the heavens ends with a promise of Henry VII's throne and the damnation of a pope. It is a sign of how far the poem's vision of eternity remains bound to the history of Dante's own time (Ferrante 1984) (Took 2020).
Light intellectual replete with love, Love of true good replete with ecstasy, Ecstasy that transcendeth every sweetness.
'Luce intellettüal, piena d'amore': Beatrice defines the Empyrean as light that is both understanding and love.
Part 34: Paradiso 31–33: The rose; Bernard; the vision of God
Paradiso, Cantos 31–33
Summary
The blessed are arranged in the white rose, and angels fly like bees between them and God. Dante turns to speak to Beatrice and finds instead an old man: St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great contemplative and devotee of the Virgin, who will guide him to the end. Beatrice has returned to her seat in the rose, and Dante thanks her in a prayer for leading him from slavery to freedom; she smiles and turns to the eternal fountain. In Canto 32 Bernard explains the order of the rose: the saints of the Old and New Testaments, separated by a line of women including Mary and Eve, and the souls of children saved before they could choose.
Canto 33 begins with Bernard's prayer to the Virgin: 'Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son'. Mary looks favourably on Dante, and Bernard signals him to look up. Dante's sight passes into the eternal light, and he sees the universe bound by love into one volume, then three circles of three colours and one size, and in the second circle a human image. Like a geometer who tries to square the circle, he struggles to understand how the image fits the circle, until a flash of light fulfils his desire. His fantasy fails, but his desire and will are turned like a wheel by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Analysis
The last canto is often ranked among the highest achievements of European poetry; T. S. Eliot judged it so in his essay of 1929 (Eliot 1929). It achieves its effect less by description than by repeated admission of failure: memory fails, speech fails, the poet becomes a child at the breast. The final vision of the Incarnation is described through the image of the geometer, so that understanding comes not through argument but as a gift (Barolini 1992) (Jacoff 2007).
Bernard's replacement of Beatrice is the last of the poem's changes of guide. The poet's love for Beatrice is completed and surpassed by the contemplative's love for Mary. The final line gathers the whole poem into one image: the movement of desire, first lost in the dark wood, is at last moved in harmony with the love that moves the universe (Singleton 1958) (Freccero 1986).
Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
Fantasy fails and the will turns like a wheel; the last line, 'l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle', names what moves it.
Characters
Others
- Dante
- The pilgrim and the poet are the same man at different times: the pilgrim is the Dante of 1300, lost, frightened, curious and often wrong; the poet is the exile who writes years later and knows how the journey ended. Much of the poem's subtlety comes from the distance between them, which John Freccero described as the distance of conversion (Freccero 1986).
- Boniface VIII
- Pope from 1294 to 1303, whose interference in Florence led to Dante's exile. He is still alive in 1300 and therefore cannot appear in Hell, but his damnation is predicted in Inferno 19, and he is condemned by St Peter in Paradiso 27.
- Henry VII
- Henry of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor, who came to Italy in 1310 to restore imperial order and died in 1313. Dante supported him with letters, and Beatrice shows him his seat in the Empyrean in Paradiso 30.
Guides
- Virgil
- The Roman poet of the Aeneid (70–19 BC), sent by Beatrice to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory. He stands for the best of human reason and of classical poetry, and he is a loving, sometimes fallible father to Dante. Because he lived before Christ and did not believe, he belongs to Limbo, and he disappears at the top of the mountain when Beatrice arrives.
- Beatrice
- The Florentine woman Dante loved, who died in 1290 and whose story he told in the Vita Nuova. In the poem she sets the journey in motion, appears in the Earthly Paradise, reproaches Dante for his infidelity and leads him through the heavens. She is a real woman remembered and a figure of grace and revelation, and the relation between these roles is one of the poem's main questions.
- St Bernard of Clairvaux
- The twelfth-century Cistercian abbot and contemplative, famous for his devotion to the Virgin, who replaces Beatrice in the Empyrean. He explains the order of the heavenly rose and prays to Mary that Dante may see God.
Inferno
- Francesca da Rimini
- Daughter of Guido da Polenta of Ravenna, married to Gianciotto Malatesta and killed by him with his brother Paolo, her lover, around 1285. In Inferno 5 she tells the story of their love in the language of courtly poetry, and her speech has been read both as a cry of tragic passion and as a self-deceiving justification.
- Farinata degli Uberti
- A Ghibelline leader who defeated the Florentine Guelfs at Montaperti in 1260 but opposed the destruction of Florence; he was condemned posthumously as a heretic. In Inferno 10 he rises from his burning tomb, proud and scornful, and predicts the difficulty of Dante's return from exile.
- Pier della Vigna
- Chancellor and poet at the court of the Emperor Frederick II, accused of treachery, blinded and imprisoned, who killed himself in 1249. In Inferno 13 he speaks from a tree in the wood of the suicides and protests his loyalty to his lord.
- Brunetto Latini
- Florentine notary, statesman and scholar (c. 1220–1294), author of the French encyclopedia Li Livres dou Trésor. Dante treats him with filial love in Inferno 15, though he finds him among the sodomites.
- Ulysses
- The Greek hero, punished in a twin flame with Diomedes among the fraudulent counsellors. Dante makes him tell of a last voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules in pursuit of knowledge, which ends in shipwreck within sight of the mountain of Purgatory.
- Guido da Montefeltro
- A Ghibelline commander who became a Franciscan friar and gave fraudulent counsel to Boniface VIII after the pope absolved him in advance. In Inferno 27 his false trust in absolution is set against his son Buonconte's last-minute repentance in Purgatorio 5.
- Count Ugolino
- Ugolino della Gherardesca, a Pisan noble accused of treachery, imprisoned with his sons and grandsons by Archbishop Ruggieri and starved to death in 1289. In Inferno 33 he gnaws Ruggieri's skull in the ice and tells the story of their deaths.
- Lucifer
- Also called Dis, the rebel angel fallen from heaven, frozen to the waist at the centre of the earth. He has three faces and six wings, chews Judas, Brutus and Cassius, and weeps; he is the poem's image of evil as absolute loss.
Purgatorio
- Cato of Utica
- The Roman Stoic who killed himself in 46 BC rather than submit to Julius Caesar. Dante makes this pagan suicide the guardian of the mountain of Purgatory, and implies he will be saved, an example of his reverence for Roman virtue and liberty.
- Manfred
- King of Sicily, illegitimate son of Frederick II, excommunicated and killed at Benevento in 1266. In Purgatorio 3 he tells how his repentance at death saved him despite the curses of the Church.
- Sordello
- A thirteenth-century troubadour from the region of Mantua who wrote in Provençal. His embrace of his fellow Mantuan Virgil provokes Dante's invective against Italy, and he guides the poets to the valley of the princes.
- Statius
- The Roman poet of the Thebaid (c. AD 45–96), whom Dante makes a secret convert to Christianity through the reading of Virgil. Freed from Purgatory in Canto 21, he accompanies Dante and Virgil to the summit and is a living proof of what poetry can do.
- Matelda
- The lady who sings and gathers flowers in the Earthly Paradise, explains its nature and draws Dante through Lethe and Eunoe. She is not named until Purgatorio 33, and her identity and meaning are much debated.
Paradiso
- Piccarda Donati
- Sister of Forese and of the Black leader Corso Donati, taken from her convent and forced to marry. In the sphere of the Moon she explains that the blessed are content with their place, because God's will is their peace.
- Justinian
- The sixth-century Roman emperor who codified Roman law. He speaks all of Paradiso 6, telling the providential history of the Roman eagle.
- Thomas Aquinas
- The Dominican theologian (c. 1225–1274), whose synthesis of Aristotle and Christian doctrine underlies much of the poem. In the sphere of the Sun he introduces the wise and tells the life of St Francis.
- Cacciaguida
- Dante's great-great-grandfather, a crusader who died in the Holy Land around 1147. In the sphere of Mars he describes the sober Florence of his time and prophesies Dante's exile, commissioning him to write the poem.
- Ripheus and Trajan
- A Trojan hero whom Virgil called the most just of men, and the Roman emperor whose justice to a widow became a legend. Both appear in the eye of the eagle of Jupiter as pagans saved by grace, a surprise that the poem makes deliberate.
Themes
Love and its ordering
The poem is built on a single idea of love. Love moves the universe, it moves the creature towards its end, and when it is misdirected it is the root of every sin. Virgil's discourses at the centre of the Purgatorio explain how love can be turned to evil, too weak for the good, or excessive towards lesser goods, and the whole structure of the mountain follows (Singleton 1958).
The journey therefore is a re-education of desire. Francesca's love that does not let the beloved go, Dante's love for Beatrice and the final love that moves the sun belong to one continuum, and the poem asks how the first can become the last.
Divine justice
The gate of Hell declares that it was made by justice and love together, and the damned suffer punishments that express their sins. The poem asks the reader to accept a justice that is often painful to contemplate, and the pilgrim's pity is repeatedly tested.
Yet the poem does not hide the questions that justice raises. The fate of the virtuous pagans, the man born on the Indus, the damned Virgil and the saved Ripheus are confronted openly, and the answer, that divine justice exceeds human understanding, does not silence the pathos of the problem (Foster 1977) (Barolini 1984).
Free will
Against astrological and deterministic theories, the poem insists that human beings are free and therefore responsible for their actions. Marco Lombardo's discourse in Purgatorio 16 and Beatrice's teaching on vows put free will at the heart of the moral universe.
The poem's whole system of rewards and punishments depends on this freedom, and its hope for the world also depends on it: if the world has gone astray, the cause is in humans, and humans can change (Boyde 1981).
Church and Empire
Dante believed that God had given mankind two guides, the pope for eternal life and the emperor for temporal life, and that the confusion of the two was the cause of the world's corruption. The poem attacks the greed and worldly ambition of popes, from Nicholas III in Hell to Peter's invective in Paradiso 27, and celebrates the providential role of the Roman Empire.
Joan Ferrante showed how deeply this political vision shapes the whole poem: Hell is the image of corrupt society, Purgatory of a society being reformed, and Paradise of the perfect community (Ferrante 1984) (Dante Alighieri 1996).
Exile and Florence
Florence is everywhere in the poem, as a city of envy, avarice and factional violence, and as a lost home. The prophecies of exile build to the clear statement in Paradiso 17, and in Paradiso 25 the poet still hopes to return.
The exile's perspective gives the poem its sharpness and its universality. Dante writes as a man with no city, whose only citizenship is in the heavenly community and in the poem itself (Took 2020).
Poetry and its authority
The poem is full of poets, from the classical poets of Limbo to Statius, Guinizzelli and Arnaut, and of reflections on the poet's own work. Dante measures himself against Virgil, Ovid and Lucan, and tells his own history of the Italian lyric.
Above all, the poem claims to be true, a vision granted by God and a sacred poem 'to which both heaven and earth have set their hand'. Barolini has argued that the poem's techniques of narrative, its encounters and its claims of truth deserve attention in their own right (Barolini 1984) (Barolini 1992).
Language and the ineffable
The poem moves from the harsh rhymes of the lower Inferno to the images of the Paradiso, where the poet repeatedly confesses that memory and speech fail him. Language itself becomes a theme in Nimrod's babble, in Adam's account of the first speech and in the coinage of new words such as trasumanar.
The admissions of failure are part of the poem's art: the poet uses them to suggest experiences that no language can contain, and to mark the point at which human speech gives way to vision (Jacoff 2007).
Conversion and the self
The journey is a conversion, from the dark wood to the vision of God, and it follows patterns of conversion from Scripture and Augustine. The confession in the Earthly Paradise turns that pattern into a personal story of sin and repentance.
Freccero argued that the poem itself is the product of this conversion: the poet can write because he has died to his old self, and the distance between pilgrim and poet is the distance between the old self and the new (Freccero 1986).
Motifs
Numbers and the Trinity
The poem's form reflects the Trinity: three cantiche of thirty-three cantos, a total of one hundred (the perfect number ten squared), and the three-line tercets of terza rima. Each realm is divided into nine or ten parts, and the number three and its multiples appear throughout, from the three beasts to the three faces of Lucifer and the three circles of the final vision. Singleton made the poem's symmetries a key to its meaning (Singleton 1954).
Contrapasso
The principle that punishment fits the sin, stated by Bertran de Born in Inferno 28. The punishments are often images of the sin itself, so that the damned are shown to have chosen what they suffer. Purgatory has a corresponding but healing logic, with each penance remedying the vice (Durling 2011).
Light
The Inferno is dark, the Purgatorio passes through days and nights, and the Paradiso is made of light. The blessed appear as lights, God as a point and a flash, and the Empyrean as 'pure light'. Dante's theology of light draws on medieval optics and on the Neoplatonic idea that light is the first form of creation (Boyde 1981).
The stars ending each cantica
Each of the three cantiche ends on the word stelle, 'stars': Dante comes out of Hell to see the stars again, leaves the Earthly Paradise ready to rise to them, and ends moved by the love that moves them. The repetition binds the three parts of the journey and points its direction upwards (Singleton 1954).
Prophecies of exile
Ciacco, Farinata, Brunetto, Vanni Fucci, Currado Malaspina, Oderisi and others predict, more or less darkly, the misfortunes of Dante and his party, until Cacciaguida tells the whole story in Paradiso 17. The device allows events after 1300 to be included in a poem set in that year, and it makes Dante's exile a thread running through the whole journey (Took 2020).
Journeys and voyages
The poem uses images of the road and the sea: the pilgrim's lost way, Ulysses' voyage, the boat of souls at Purgatory, the poet's little vessel and the warning to readers in small boats. Ulysses' 'mad flight' recurs as an image of the danger of a journey without grace (Boitani 1994) (Freccero 1986).
Symbols
The three beasts
The leopard (Longfellow's 'panther'), the lion and the she-wolf block Dante's ascent in Inferno 1. The early commentators read them as lust, pride and avarice, others as the three kinds of sin in Hell or as political powers such as Florence, France and the papacy (Sayers 1949) (Durling 2011). The she-wolf, the worst, is linked with the greed that the poem condemns everywhere.
The dark wood
The selva oscura of the opening line is the state of sin and confusion in which the journey begins. It is answered at the summit of Purgatory by the 'divine forest' of the Earthly Paradise, the wood restored to its first innocence.
Lucifer
The once-beautiful angel at the bottom of the universe, frozen, silent and weeping, with three faces that parody the Trinity. He is the point farthest from God, the source of cold rather than fire, and his body is the ladder by which the pilgrim leaves Hell.
The mountain
Purgatory is a mountain rising from the sea in the southern hemisphere, formed, Dante says, by the earth that fled from Lucifer's fall. It is the hill of Inferno 1 that Dante could not climb alone, and the mountain that Ulysses saw before his shipwreck; its ascent becomes easier as the soul is purified.
The rose
The white rose of the Empyrean, in whose petals the blessed sit, gathers the whole community of the saved into one image. The rose was a traditional symbol of Mary and of love, and Dante makes it the final figure of the city of God.
Critical debates
Allegory and the Letter to Cangrande
The Letter to Can Grande della Scala, which dedicates the Paradiso to the lord of Verona, explains the poem as 'polysemous', with a literal sense and an allegorical sense, and illustrates the four senses of scripture with the psalm of the Exodus. Charles Singleton argued that the Comedy uses the 'allegory of the theologians', in which the literal sense is historically true, rather than the 'allegory of the poets', in which a fiction hides a truth; his phrase that the fiction of the poem is that it is not fiction became famous. Robert Hollander developed the argument in his Allegory in Dante's Commedia (Singleton 1954) (Hollander 1969).
The letter's authenticity is itself disputed. Some scholars have argued that its opening dedication may be Dante's but its literary theory is a later compilation; Henry Ansgar Kelly argued against Dante's authorship, while Hollander defended it in a book-length study. The question matters because the letter has been the main external evidence for reading the poem allegorically (Kelly 1989) (Hollander 1993).
Auerbach and figura
Erich Auerbach argued that Dante's poem depends on figural interpretation, in which a historical event or person is both real in itself and a prefiguration of a future fulfilment, as the Old Testament prefigures the New. In the afterlife the souls appear as the fulfilment of their earthly lives: Cato, Virgil and Beatrice are historical persons and also figures of a truth beyond them (Auerbach 1959) (Auerbach 1961).
Auerbach's essay on Farinata and Cavalcante in Mimesis showed how the figural view makes possible the intense realism of the encounters: eternity does not cancel character but intensifies it. Giuseppe Mazzotta later extended this approach to the poem's understanding of history (Auerbach 1953) (Mazzotta 1979).
Francesca: sympathy and judgement
For Romantic readers Francesca was a tragic heroine, and Dante's faint was a sign of the poet's own sympathy against the harshness of his theology. Twentieth-century critics, often following the moral readings of commentators, emphasised her self-deception, her blaming of love and the book, and her use of the language of the love poetry that Dante himself had written.
More recent scholarship has looked at the historical case, the gendering of the episode and its place in the poem's structure. Barolini argued that the canto deliberately sets romance against a historical crime and shows Dante's art of creating sympathy for a judged soul (Barolini 2000) (Kirkpatrick 1987).
Ulysses' last voyage
Dante's Ulysses is a figure of heroic curiosity and of a fatal transgression. Romantic and humanist readers admired his speech as an expression of the dignity of the human search for knowledge, and later writers from Tennyson to Primo Levi adopted it.
Others read the voyage as the 'mad flight' of an intellect without grace, and as the opposite of Dante's own journey, which reaches the mountain by humility. Freccero, Boitani and others have shown how the poem returns to the image of Ulysses' ship, so that the episode is part of the poem's reflection on its own daring (Freccero 1986) (Boitani 1994).
Virgil and the salvation of pagans
Virgil, the guide who brings Dante to Beatrice, is damned to Limbo, and the poem never hides the sadness of his fate. At the same time Cato, Statius, Trajan and Ripheus are saved, and the eagle in Paradiso 19 admits that the question of the virtuous unbelievers is a mystery.
Kenelm Foster saw a tension between Dante's humanist admiration for the ancient world and his Augustinian theology. Barolini has stressed that Dante's treatment of Virgil is a deliberate construction in which the poem's love for its master is never allowed to escape the truth of his loss (Foster 1977) (Barolini 1984).
Dante's politics and the Monarchia
The poem's attacks on the papacy and on Florence and its praise of the Roman Empire are rooted in Dante's political theory. In the Monarchia he argued that a universal monarch was necessary for human peace and that the emperor's authority came directly from God. The treatise was burned as heretical in 1329 and put on the Index of prohibited books in the sixteenth century (Dante Alighieri 1996).
Joan Ferrante argued that the whole poem is shaped by a political vision of human society, in which the sins of Hell are social sins and Paradise is a perfect community. The dating of the Monarchia, before or during the writing of the Paradiso, remains debated (Ferrante 1984).
The 'undivine' Comedy
Teodolinda Barolini argued in The Undivine Comedy that critics too often accept the poem's own claims to truth and read it as a theological document. She proposed 'detheologizing' the reading, paying attention to the narrative techniques by which the poem creates the illusion of a true vision.
The approach has been widely influential, but some scholars argue that it underestimates the theological conviction behind the poem. The debate concerns how far a modern reader should accept the poem's own claims to be inspired (Barolini 1992) (Jacoff 2007).
Beatrice
Who is Beatrice? Boccaccio identified her with Beatrice Portinari, and most scholars accept the identification, but her role in the poem goes far beyond biography. She has been read as theology, as divine wisdom, as grace and as a figure of Christ.
Singleton argued that her coming in the Earthly Paradise is modelled on the coming of Christ, and Auerbach saw her as a figura in which the real woman is fulfilled. Recent critics have also studied how the poem makes a woman the bearer of authority, and how Dante's devotion to her combines personal love and theology (Singleton 1958) (Auerbach 1961) (Jacoff 2007).
Key passages
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
The opening, 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita', sets the journey in the middle of a human life and makes Dante's crisis representative. The dark wood and the lost way begin the poem's allegory of sin and conversion.
Through me the way is to the city dolent; Through me the way is to eternal dole; Through me the way among the people lost.
The gate speaks in the first person, insisting on the eternity of Hell; a few lines later it ends with 'Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate'. The inscription also says that Hell was made by divine power, wisdom and love.
And she to me: “There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.
Francesca's lament before she tells of the book is one of the most quoted passages in the poem. Its sadness and its literary allusion to Boethius make her both a tragic figure and a self-conscious speaker.
Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.
Ulysses' exhortation to his crew, which urges them to pursue virtue and knowledge, has been read as a noble expression of human dignity and as the rhetoric of a fraudulent counsellor.
Horrible my iniquities had been; But Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms, That it receives whatever turns to it.
The excommunicated king tells how he was saved by a last repentance. The poem stresses the width of God's mercy against the narrowness of human judgement.
To say unto Virgilius: “Not a drachm Of blood remains in me, that does not tremble; I know the traces of the ancient flame.”
Dante's words to the vanished Virgil translate Dido's line in Aeneid 4. At the moment of meeting Beatrice he speaks in Virgil's words, and the farewell to his guide follows.
And his will is our peace; this is the sea To which is moving onward whatsoever It doth create, and all that nature makes.
'E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace': the souls in the lowest heaven are perfectly happy because their will is one with God's. The line expresses the cantica's whole idea of blessedness.
Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt The bread of others, and how hard a road The going down and up another’s stairs.
The prophecy of exile: Dante will learn how salty the bread of others tastes and how hard it is to climb another's stairs. Personal suffering is placed at the centre of the heavenly journey.
Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son, Humble and high beyond all other creature, The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,
'Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio': Bernard's prayer to the Virgin is built on paradox, and it prepares for the final vision.
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
The final line, 'l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle': after the poet's imagination fails, his will and desire are moved like a wheel by divine love. The poem ends with the word stelle, like the other two cantiche.
Questions for study
Why does Dante choose Virgil as his guide, and what does Virgil's fate in the poem suggest about classical culture?
Think about Inferno 1 and 4, Statius in Purgatorio 21–22, and Virgil's disappearance in Purgatorio 30.
How far does the poem invite the reader to share Dante's pity for Francesca?
Consider the language of her speech, the role of the book, the pilgrim's faint and the place of the canto in the structure of Hell.
What is the contrapasso, and how well does it explain the punishments of Hell?
Start from Inferno 28.142 and test the principle on the gluttons, the simonists, the soothsayers and the traitors in the ice.
Is Ulysses a hero or a warning?
Compare his speech with the pilgrim's journey, with Purgatorio 1 and with the siren of Purgatorio 19.
How does Purgatory differ from Hell in its treatment of time, community and pain?
Look at the prayers, songs and examples on the terraces, the earthquake for Statius and the souls' wish to be remembered.
What is the relation between love and sin in the Comedy?
Read Virgil's discourses in Purgatorio 17 and 18 and compare Francesca, Cunizza and the final line of the poem.
How does Dante combine personal autobiography with universal vision?
Consider the prophecies of exile, the confession to Beatrice and the opening of Paradiso 25.
What is Beatrice: a remembered woman, an allegory, or both?
Compare the Vita Nuova with Purgatorio 30–31 and with Beatrice's teaching role in the Paradiso; think about Auerbach's idea of figura.
How does the Paradiso represent what it says cannot be represented?
Look at the ineffability topos, the doctrine of accommodation in Paradiso 4 and the image of the geometer in Paradiso 33.
What does the poem say about the relation between Church and Empire?
Compare Marco Lombardo in Purgatorio 16, Justinian in Paradiso 6, Peter's invective in Paradiso 27 and the Monarchia.
Further reading
- Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
- Auerbach, Erich. 'Figura.' (1938) Trans. Ralph Manheim. In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 11–76. New York: Meridian Books, 1959.
- Auerbach, Erich. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
- Barolini, Teodolinda. Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
- Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
- Barolini, Teodolinda. 'Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender.' Speculum 75 (2000): 1–28.
- Boitani, Piero. The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth. Trans. Anita Weston. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- Boyde, Patrick. Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
- Durling, Robert M., ed. and trans., with Ronald L. Martinez. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011.
- Eliot, T. S. Dante. London: Faber and Faber, 1929.
- Ferrante, Joan M. The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
- Foster, Kenelm. The Two Dantes and Other Studies. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977.
- Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
- Gragnolati, Manuele. Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
- Hollander, Robert. Allegory in Dante's Commedia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
- Hollander, Robert. Dante's Epistle to Cangrande. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
- Jacoff, Rachel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
- Kirkpatrick, Robin. Dante's Inferno: Difficulty and Dead Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
- Sayers, Dorothy L., trans. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica I: Hell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.
- Dante Alighieri. Monarchy. Ed. and trans. Prue Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Singleton, Charles S. Dante Studies 1: Commedia: Elements of Structure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.
- Singleton, Charles S. Dante Studies 2: Journey to Beatrice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.
- Took, John. Dante. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.