It is usual to suppose that Dante’s great poem La Divina Commedia is permeated so thoroughly with scholasticism and contemporary reference that it cannot be readily understood without considerable learning. But this is not so. A great poem is not so limited. Whatsoever has been integrated into an art-form derives prolonged vitality from that whole which is its new setting: and that whole is not readily antiquated. A careful inspection shows Dante’s work, like that of other poets, to be built mainly of imaginative effects: these are primary. The philosophy and historical references find their places in the imaginative scheme, and when seen like this, their significance is generally not hard to understand.
The poem is in three parts: L’Inferno, Il Purgatorio, and Il Paradiso. It narrates Dante’s progress through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. But what are we to say of these if we do not ourselves believe in any so rigid an eschatology? In what sense can an admirer be said to accept Dante’s attitude and conviction? The answer is simple. We can suggest first that the whole is to be seen as Dante’s personal spiritual progress, from an evil to a blessed state: but this alone does scant justice to the firmly objective system to which he introduces us. In this objective reality, he himself believed. Therefore we must blend our facts and say that the poem expresses Dante’s own experience of an objectively conceived evil or grace. We need not believe what Dante believes, but we must believe in his belief, thus tuning our minds to his experience. Then we shall see that the people he finds in Hell are there because he sees them as Hell-forces. Persons are not evil: evil needs ever a relation, reciprocity. Therefore, Dante’s progress through Hell shows Dante’s experience of evil in terms of people he knew or books he has read. We can follow exactly his Hell experience without at all agreeing to his judgment on pagans. All poetry must be read like this. The constituting elements in a poem or play grow out of date in a year, an hour, a minute. The symbolized experience is dateless. Dante Inferno is such an experience endued with poetic immortality.
Dante’s poem is a poem of fire. First, the hungry flames of Hell; next, the varying light of Purgatory; third, the light and still blaze of Paradise. But we must see how skilfully the poet incarnates his spirit-world into natural forms such as the Eagle, the Rose. And Goethe Faust more strongly still stresses the idea of incarnation. It is his final statement. The poem is rough and chaotic: it expresses the experience of a lifetime, speaking in terms of Renaissance aspiration and erotic intuition, often looking back to ancient Greece and considering to what extent poetry may recreate the future of our life. The final ideal is that of creative work, and the whole is crowned by Christian immortality. Historicity and time are to be considered flexible: the experience only is important.
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the discourse of confession was one of a large number of discourses of the self that confession may have originally been designed to suppress or compete with. Among these is the new emphasis on private piety that develops with mysticism; the new literacy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that encouraged the recording of private ruminations, the autobiographical emphasis of authorship in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, heralded by Dante and prefigured by the biographical interests of the Raza of the troubadours: and even the rise of the mercantile ethic, which, however corporately organized through guilds and urban governments, depended upon the acceptance of private risk and personal probity. The epic hero and the saint were no longer the exclusive subjects of biographically structured narrative—even contemporary nobles found themselves or could arrange to find themselves, the subject of chronicles organized around their accomplishments and conquests.
Another traditional way of understanding the impact of confession, however, is to see it as an attempt to constrain the individualism of the twelfth-century Renaissance, to see it as a conservative reaction. Contrition seeks a homogenization, a reduction of the “individuality” created by the experience of sinfulness. As an elite phenomenon, individual awareness had already appeared in the new spirituality of the twelfth century. However, the stress on confession and the institutionalization of conscience turned the development of individual spiritual awareness against itself, subsuming the freely unmoored quest (a staple of both narrative form and new developments in twelfth-century theology and history) to social and liturgical control. 7 Even the literary quest of Arthurian romance was repackaged as a moral collection of sorts. (The fourteenth-century secular collections combine a dynamic quest form with a collection of distinct tales, in which the outward form is often more resonant of moral and theological values than the individual tales.)
Despite Auerbach’s admiration for Boccaccio’s skills at narrative fluency, Boccaccio is condemned to a transitional limbo between the figural realism of Dante and the tragic realism of the Renaissance. Boccaccio studies both admire the quick sketch of character accomplished in the Decameron and regret the lack of depth in that sketch. It is as if Boccaccio had rejected medieval certainties that gravitated against the delineation of individual character but had not embraced the novelistic or tragic conception of character that literary history celebrates as Western literature’s great accomplishment. In fact, Boccaccio depends as much on the model he is rejecting as on the one he is apparently half-forging.
What Chaucer and Boccaccio call into question, however, is the possibility of the purity and integrity of human experience as defined from a single theological or secular point of view. Neither the dynamic will of Renaissance Faustianism, despite fragmentary prefigurations of that mode, nor the abnegation of the self typical of hagiography (despite occasional images held up as impossible ideals) are offered as real possibilities for human action. Chaucer and Boccaccio, more rooted in the secular realm in their tale collections, tend not to indulge in the revelation of the inner self that both Dante and Langland attempt. The narrators of the Commedia and Piers Plowman define themselves through the language of confession in ways that neither Chaucerian nor Boccaccian personae do. Indeed, Chaucer and Boccaccio are guarded, or represent themselves as guarded, in terms of their willingness, or their fictions’ willingness, to reveal much about their interiority.
The self in Boccaccio and Chaucer exists, then, as a powerfully contradictory artifact. Apparently accessing the new languages of commerce, travel, science, social dislocation, and protest, these vocabularies are contained within a syntax still structured on the model of a discourse designed at least partly to contain these new forces. Certainly, the tension between containment and explosiveness is negotiated in different ways by Chaucer and Boccaccio, but it is that tension which is partly responsible for the energy of their works in their entirety, rather than the interest of local passages or isolated tales.
In fact, the individual of the late Middle Ages is defined by corporate structures as well. But such corporate structures as early mercantilism, or the stirrings of absolutism or the city, highlighted individual accomplishment as an expression of their own power and success.
Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and even Dante, problematize the notion of a sharp periodic or epistemic break. Foucault’s own fascination with the eighteenth century as the fault line, in fact, obscures some of his insights. Foucault’s emphasis on this period, central in the development of French thought and of scientism, verges on a rewriting of Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility,” or a Robertsonian distinction between medieval social corporatism and modern romantic individualism. This does not mean that we need to reinvent Chaucer and Boccaccio as transitional figures, with one proverbial foot, awkwardly placed in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. Instead, we might learn from what Foucault meant rather than what he said and regard the literary text as a site for and enactment of conflicting cultural activities, whose historical destiny remains very much of an open question, and whose consistency and coherence into an overdetermined epistemic or periodic cultural whole is infinitely deferred.
Dante’s Commedia, called the Divine Comedy by some critics, is a tale of one sinner’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and heaven. Dante serves as an everyman figure of sorts witnessing the despair, pain, hope, and ecstasy of the dead as they exist in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In Inferno (Hell), he meets and talks with unrepentant sinners, guilty of a wide variety of crimes for which they will suffer eternally and never see God. The punishments are often fitted to the crime, as in the punishment for soothsayers, who try to peer too far ahead into the future and are damned to spend eternity walking along in pain with their heads facing backward. Through the intervention of Beatrice (a woman who served as Dante’s inspiration, but who died young), Virgil (who was greatly admired by Dante for his Aeneid and for living the life of a virtuous pagan) guides Dante through Hell, explaining some of its architecture and rules and vouching for Dante’s authority to visit the infernal realm to many of the classical beasts and devils that inhabit the nether region.
In Purgatorio (Purgatory), Dante and Virgil watch sinners do proper penance for their sins as they ascend the mountain of penance, and they grow to understand the forgiving nature of God as they discuss the nature of the mountain with various sinners. Torment and punishment are welcomed by the sinners in Purgatory because as soon as a sinner fully pays for her/his sins, she/he may enter heaven. Sins in Purgatory are fittingly remitted by the sinners suffering appropriate consequences for their sins: gluttons are starved; the slothful must run.
In Paradiso (Paradise), Dante leaves Virgil behind (only those who believed in Christ enter heaven). Beatrice serves as Dante—s guide as he meets the saints who inhabit the different levels of heaven and are united with the Godhead. He speaks with numerous famous saints who espoused different virtues in life and learns how different virtues fit into the overall picture of holiness and godliness. As he ascends higher and higher in heaven, he slowly adjusts to the divine light and beauty of each realm in preparation for seeing God and the union of saints in the empyrean. Upon seeing God, Dante is struck by the inadequacy of language and the human mind to comprehend the Godhead. The Commedia, in many ways, is an attempt to explain the most important journeys of the medieval Christian life (the journey of the soul toward heaven) to the average Christian.
Works Cited
Gardiner, Eileen. Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante. New York: Italica, 1989.
Jacoff, Rachel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Morgan, Alison. Dante and the Medieval Other World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.