Nevertheless, hell is filled with bloody and horrific torment. According to Dante, some sinners fully deserve what they get: for example, corrupt clergymen, including the Pope, are forced upside down into holes in the rocky ground, their legs shaking and fire licking their feet. (There are many churchmen in hell, as well as Florentines.) On other occasions, he takes pity on the souls he meets, and Virgil punishes him for this. To feel pity is to question God's judgment. For Satan has no power here; he himself suffers at the lowest level of Hell, bound in ice. It was God who sentenced unrepentant sinners to this place and devised elaborate torments to reflect their crimes. Thus, adulterous lovers are exposed to cruel winds that swirl them in each other's arms, simulating a violent passion that they cannot control. Fortune tellers—those who claim to know what only God can know—have their heads tilted back so they can't see anything except what's behind them. And Ulysses, the eloquent persuader of people, is enclosed in a tongue of flame. However, no matter how justly these criminals are condemned, they evoke not only Dante's sympathy, but also ours, luring us into the difficult position of doubting divine justice.
Having gone beyond boundaries, giving up everything for the sake of knowledge, Dante's Ulysses has much in common with the flawed prototype of humanity, Adam, whom Dante eagerly interrogates in paradise. (Question: How long did you live in the Garden before biting into the apple? Answer: About seven hours.) It has much in common with Dante himself, in the sheer audacity of the poet who took on this work: penetrating forbidden territories, exploring the worst and the best in man, trying to penetrate the mind of God. And although he cannot rid himself of painful doubts and dangerous questions, he gives fair warning to readers who are convinced by his silver tongue. “Turn back if you want to see your shores again,” Dante warns us. “The seas I sail on have never been visited before.”
Today it is generally accepted that Homer was not one person, but a slowly accumulating oral tradition that was given a name. Virgil's Aeneid ends abruptly, apparently unfinished, and after his death the poet is said to have asked for the manuscript to be burned. (Caesar Augustus intervened.) Dante Alighieri, the successor to these civilization-defining literary forces, was born into a middle-class family in an Italian city torn by political violence, in an era when the revival of classical education was just beginning. He was a contemporary and perhaps an acquaintance of the great Florentine artist Giotto, whom he mentions in the Comedy for having attracted the attention of Cimabue, Giotto's former master, who created images of iconic austerity, just as Dante himself would overtake the writers of his youth. Here, in two different arts, there comes a moment when medieval severity gives way to physical and psychological nuances, as human figures stretch out their limbs and catch their breath. A generation later, Boccaccio would write that Dante opened the way for the long-absent muses to return to Italy.
He was ambitious from the very beginning. Prue Shaw, in her new book Dante: The Essential Commedia (Liveright), emphasizes the extraordinary importance and nobility that Dante places on the vocation of a poet, and how from the very beginning he considered his powers equal to those of the great poets of classical antiquity. His early works reflected the popular style of the French troubadours, refined poet-musicians who sang of their longing for a beautiful lady. In his case, the lover was the unattainable Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a wealthy banker, whom Dante claimed to have loved from their first meeting when they were both children (a charming little self-mythologism) and continued to live until her untimely death at twenty-four. It didn't seem to matter that he rarely saw her or that both were married off to others for financial and political reasons. The Divine Comedy says nothing about Dante's wife and their four children. Beatrice was the love that fueled his poetry, which became more spiritual only after her death, when her very name, alluding to bliss, becomes for him a form of prayer.
If poetry made Dante's life, then politics turned it upside down. In 1300, when he was about thirty, he served on the ruling committee of Florence that exiled several leaders of two warring political factions in the hope of peace. The following year, while Dante was on a diplomatic mission in Rome, his own faction at home was overthrown and he was falsely accused of corruption. He found himself banished from Florence in absentia, and in 1302 he was sentenced to be burned at the stake if he ever returned. For the rest of his life—almost twenty years—he sought refuge in various Italian cities with their unfamiliar dialects and local culture, harboring both the bitterness and melancholy that is felt in the epic work he undertook. He probably began writing it around 1307, but very deliberately placed the poem before his exile – at Easter 1300. He simply called it “Comedy,” meaning a work that begins in darkness but, unlike tragedy, ends in light. The adjective “Divine” was added by a printer more than two hundred years later, reflecting both the work's subject matter and its status.
