Summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy

Summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy

Instructions/Descriptions

Summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy

Introduction

The Divine Comedy is a long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun around 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the preeminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem’s imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of souls after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward, and describes Dante’s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul’s journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul’s ascent to God (Paradiso). Dante draws on medieval Roman Catholic theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy derived from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called “the Summa in verse.” In Dante’s work, the pilgrim Dante is accompanied by three guides: Virgil (who represents human reason), Beatrice (who represents divine revelation, theology, faith, and grace), and St. Bernard of Clairvaux (who represents contemplative mysticism and devotion to Mary).

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The Divine Comedy is composed of 14,233 lines that are divided into three canticles – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) – each consisting of 33 cantos.[footnoteRef:1] An initial canto, serving as an introduction to the poem and generally considered to be part of the first canticle, brings the total number of cantos to 100. It is generally accepted, however, that the first two cantos serve as a unitary prologue to the entire epic, and that the opening two cantos of each canticle serve as prologues to each of the three canticles. The number three is prominent in the work, represented in part by the number of canticles and their lengths. Additionally, the verse scheme used, terza rima,[footnoteRef:2] is hendecasyllabic (lines of eleven syllables), with the lines composing tercets according to the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, ded, … [1: The canto is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poetry. The word canto is derived from the Italian word for “song” or “singing,” which comes from the Latin cantus, “song,” from the infinitive verb canere, “to sing.” The use of the canto was described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as “a convenient division when poetry was more usually sung by the minstrel to his own accompaniment than read.” There is no specific format, construction or style for a canto and it is not limited to any one type of poetry.] [2: Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.]

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The total number of syllables in each tercet is thus 33, the same as the number of cantos in each canticle.

Written in the first person, the poem tells of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead, lasting from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil guides him through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, Dante’s ideal woman, guides him through Heaven. Beatrice was a Florentine woman he had met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition.

The structure of the three realms follows a common numerical pattern of 9 plus 1, for a total of 10: 9 circles of the Inferno, followed by Lucifer contained at its bottom; 9 rings of Mount Purgatory, followed by the Garden of Eden crowning its summit; and the 9 celestial bodies of Paradiso, followed by the Empyrean containing the very essence of God. Within each group of 9, 7 elements correspond to a specific moral scheme, subdivided into three subcategories, while 2 others of greater particularity are added to total nine. For example, the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church that are cleansed in Purgatory are joined by special realms for the late repentant and the excommunicated by the church. The core seven sins within Purgatory correspond to a moral scheme of love perverted, subdivided into three groups corresponding to excessive love (Lust, Gluttony, Greed), deficient love (Sloth), and malicious love (Wrath, Envy, Pride). The last word in each of the three canticles is stelle (“stars”).

Inferno

The poem begins on the night before Good Friday in 1300, “halfway along our life’s path”. Dante is 35 years old, half of the Biblical lifespan of 70 (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate), lost in a dark wood (understood as sin), assailed by beasts (a lion, a leopard, and a she-wolf) he cannot evade and unable to find the “straight way” – also translatable as “right way” – to salvation (symbolized by the sun behind the mountain). Conscious that he is ruining himself and that he is falling into a “low place” where the sun is silent, Dante is at last rescued by Virgil, and the two of them begin their journey to the underworld. Each sin’s punishment in Inferno is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice; for example, in Canto XX, fortune-tellers and soothsayers must walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life.

Allegorically, the Inferno represents the Christian soul seeing sin for what it really is, and the three beasts represent three types of sin: the self-indulgent, the violent, and the malicious. These three types of sin also provide the three main divisions of Dante’s Hell: Upper Hell, outside the city of Dis, for the four sins of indulgence (lust, gluttony, avarice, anger); Circle 7 for the sins of violence; and Circles 8 and 9 for the sins of fraud and treachery. Added to these are two unlike categories that are specifically spiritual: Limbo, in Circle 1, contains the virtuous pagans who were not sinful but were ignorant of Christ, and Circle 6 contains the heretics who contradicted the doctrine and confused the spirit of Christ.

Purgatorio

Having survived the depths of Hell, Dante and Virgil ascend out of the under-gloom to the Mountain of Purgatory on the far side of the world. The Mountain is on an island, the only land in the Southern Hemisphere, created by the displacement of rock which resulted when Satan’s fall created Hell (which Dante portrays as existing underneath Jerusalem). The mountain has seven terraces, corresponding to the seven deadly sins or “seven roots of sinfulness.” The classification of sin here is more psychological than that of the Inferno, being based on motives, rather than actions. It is also drawn primarily from Christian theology, rather than from classical sources. However, Dante’s illustrative examples of sin and virtue draw on classical sources as well as on the Bible and on contemporary events.

Love, a theme throughout the Divine Comedy, is particularly important for the framing of sin on the Mountain of Purgatory. While the love that flows from God is pure, it can become sinful as it flows through humanity. Humans can sin by using love towards improper or malicious ends (Wrath, Envy, Pride), or using it to proper ends but with love that is either not strong enough (Sloth) or love that is too strong (Lust, Gluttony, Greed). Below the seven purges of the soul is the Ante-Purgatory, containing the Excommunicated from the Church and the Late Repentant who died, often violently, before receiving last rites. Thus, the total comes to nine, with the addition of the Garden of Eden at the summit, equaling ten.

Allegorically, the Purgatorio represents the Christian life. Christian souls arrive escorted by an angel, singing “In exitu Israel de Aegypto.” In his Letter to Cangrande, Dante explains that this reference to Israel leaving Egypt refers both to the redemption of Christ and to “the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace.” Appropriately, therefore, it is Easter Sunday when Dante and Virgil arrive.

Summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy

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