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The chief imagination of Christendom,
Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself
That he has made that hollow face of his
More plain to the mind's eye than any face
But that of Christ. —W. B. Yeats

Scanning the "Book Review" section of the New York Times in 1999, I was surprised to see on the final page—a page generally devoted to a human interest story—the image at left. I will not speculate on the motivations of the editors for printing it; I doubt they were intending to further Christianity.

I can, however, guess what many readers were thinking: Science has brought us so far from that silly myth. But diagramming the great beyond was never Dante's main objective. He was less interested in the question, "What happens when we die?" than the more pressing question, "How should we live in light of eternity?"

Is it not instructive that the picture in the New York Times needed no caption, no comment? Seven hundred years after Dante's composition, his images remain familiar and forceful. This is because the principles that shape the images of the Divine Comedy, even if vehemently denied, still answer to something deep within the human consciousness. And it is the principles, not the images as such, that really matter.

Dante was fully conscious that he knew no more about the realities faced by departed souls than does anyone else. But as a mature Christian of his time, he was convinced of the reality of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

These convictions guided his fertile imagination as it speculated upon the concrete forms these realities might take. In giving them narrative embodiment, he expended great effort to achieve utter consistency, thoroughness, and comprehensiveness.

The form and structure of the Divine Comedy symbolize unity and completeness. The numbers three (for the Trinity), four (for man), and one (for final unity), as well as the "perfect" number ten, are omnipresent.

Consider the most obvious instances. The poem consists of three groupings of 33 cantos (poetic chapters) each, which, with the addition of the introductory canto, make 100, the square of 10. Dante's terza rima stanzas consist of three lines each, with interlocking rhymes; the first and third line of each stanza rhyme with the second line of the previous stanza.

Each canto ends with a one-line stanza. Each of the three regions of the afterlife has ten compartments grouped into seven and three. Pythagoras is reputed to have said the world was created by number. Dante's world certainly is.

The Divine Comedy offers compelling answers to many questions about the purpose of life and the principles of eternity.

The mythopoeic writers who follow in Dante's wake—Edmund Spenser, John Milton, John Bunyan, George MacDonald, C. S.Lewis— each have strengths, but none rises to the same level of comprehensiveness. Furthermore, they all owe a debt to Dante, an obligation many of them overtly acknowledge.

Among the basic convictions that shape the story line of Dante's great poem are these:

• People are responsible to God whether they know it or not.
  
  
• The human race was created by a loving God whose purpose was for people to choose righteously through life in order to see and be with God.
  
  
• Because people possess free will, their choices between good and evil shape their experience of life for time and eternity, and because decisions are shaped by desires, people must learn to desire God and his will.
  
  
• Right understanding leads to right conduct, while wrong choices frustrate God's intentions and justly lead to negative consequences.
  
  

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