La Divina Comedia
If the power that the Church had over the human mind was a camel, the straw that broke its back was neither a secular decree, nor a philosophical revelation or a scientific revolution, nor the doctrines of a powerful sect. It was a poem…
Dante Alighieri was born at the right time to see Boniface VIII’s condemnation, in the right family (not quite wealthy enough) to keep Beatrice only as his platonic love, in the right place (Florence) to see troubadours begin to sing of romance instead of chivalry, around the right people to make him a scholar, and with enough (mis)fortune to marry the descendant of the oldest Florentine aristocracy—making him a political target. In his twenties he wrote poems about Beatrice and mourned her death, in his thirties he wrote manuscripts condemning papal power and political factions, in his forties (now in exile) he planned his revenge, and in his fifties he poured all his strength into his poem—and could not long survive its completion. He owes a significant fraction of his legacy to his friend Guido, who inspired him to write La Divina Comedia in the vernacular language. Had Dante written it in Latin, it may have been circulated chiefly amongst scholars and would have further delayed the Renaissance by many decades.
They say the Divine Comedy can only be truly appreciated by Italians. No translation can reach its dolce bellezza. He himself, in advance, condemned all translations—for “nothing that hath the harmony of musical connection can be transferred from its own tongue to another without shattering all its sweetness and harmony.”
The first few lines are already a perfect example:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost
Doesn’t ring quite the same as
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.
They also say the Divine Comedy can only be really understood by scholars. Nonetheless, it had enough beauty to pique the curiosity of the masses.
The whole world knows the premise: Dante, accompanied by Virgil (the most lovable of Romans), stands in front of the gates of hell and reads a sign above: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”. They go in, and go down a funnel of nine circles. Through these they run into Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Thales, Zeno, Cicero, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Averroes… also Paris, Helen, Dido, Semiramis, Cleopatra, Tristan, and Paolo and Francesca. They also see some contemporaneous politicians and enemies of Dante, whom he couldn’t resist but vividly narrate their suffering. In the ninth circle, the giant Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitor in each of three jaws—Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. Then, with the time-disdaining swiftness of a dream, the two poets traverse in two days the diameter of the Earth. They emerge in the southern hemisphere on Easter morning, drink in the light of day, and stand at the foot of the terraced mountain which is purgatory. There are nine levels, seven of which are for each deadly sin. Climbing it, they meet Cato, Manfred (Frederick II's son), Emperor Rudolf, King Ottokar of Bohemia, Peter III of Aragon, Henry II of England, Philip III of France. Reaching the top, an angel guides them through fire, by the last ascent, into the Earthly Paradise. Here Virgil bids him farewell… and here’s where it turns interesting… How can Dante, this “constitutional materialist”, this scholar and historian, this incarnation of human intellect, conceive a heaven of purely spiritual bliss? His philosophical development forbade him to represent God, or the angels and saints of heaven, in anthropomorphic terms; rather he visions them as forms and points of light. This is a serious blow to Christianity. He travels through eight spheres (now accompanied by Beatrice). These spheres represent the Moon, Mercury (where he meets Justinian), Venus (where he sees Boniface VIII), the Sun (meeting Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Bede, Peter Lombard, Gratian, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Siger de Brabant), Mars (Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Charlemagne, even Robert Guiscard, ravager of Rome), Jupiter (David, Hezekiah, Constantine, Trajan), Saturn, and the Stars, where from the constellation of Gemini he looks down and sees the infinitesimal Earth “so pitiful of semblance that it moved my smiles.” And finally the ninth sphere, where God is represented as a point of light, and where Mary takes an almost higher plane… And so, this majestic epic ends with Dante's gaze still fixed upon that radiance (Mary), drawn and impelled by “the Love that moves the Sun and all the stars.”
[...]
It is the strangest and most difficult of all poems. Dante loved to teach, and tried to pour into one poem nearly all that he had ever learned. He knew that exposing his readers to the names of notable humans of the past was but the first step to expose future generations to the minds and ideas of these thinkers (not only those whom he sees in his adventure but the countless more that he mentions for context). Furthermore, the basic thread of the tale is that most of these souls are (in many cases) condemned by no fault of their own—which provided a liberating feeling to a society strangled by fear of divine punishment. And so… Like any artist he fused existing material, transformed it from chaos to order, and set it on fire with his passionate imagination and his burning sincerity. Like any philosopher, he codified his wisdom into memorable passages of hidden meaning that would have future generations trying to decode it. Like any politician, he didn’t let a single enemy escape his pen—exposing corruption and unfairness at all levels of power. Like any human, he built a solace of love and life, bound with passion. But like he alone could, he gave it a structure and order that no man has since equaled. It is no wonder he is often referred to as the "Supreme Poet" (il Sommo Poeta). Today, his tomb lies in an almost unnoticed corner from Ravenna's busiest square; where its custodian, for an euro or two, will recite sonorous beauties from the poem that all humanity praises, but only a few read; the poem that marked the beginning of the Renaissance and paved the way for the enlightenment.
Source: Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization, Vol. 4: The Age of Faith, A History of Medieval Civilization, Christian, Islamic, and Judaic, From Constantine to Dante, A.D. 325-1300. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!