A middle-aged man from a proud and wealthy family, well-educated, active in politics, famous in literary circles for his love lyrics, married, with four or more children, suddenly finds his life and his thoughts thrown into confusion. After a lifetime of being a loyal citizen of his town, devoted to the ideals and activities of his community, after having served on the governing council of his native Florence and travelling as an envoy to the Pope, he returns to find himself an exile, charged with fraud and corruption, forbidden entry to his beloved city unless he is willing to be “burned with fire till he be dead.” His wife and children choose to remain in the sanctuary of the city. “Thou shalt leave everything beloved most dearly; this is the first shaft which the bow of exile lets fly,” he wrote. For the rest of his life—twenty long years—this lonely wanderer climbs other men’s stairs and eats the salt at other men’s tables. Loving and wealthy patrons are generous to him, but he can never return to his former life. He carries with him scant but ample baggage: his anger, his love, his great talent, and his faith.
Although many of us in the middle of the journey of life find ourselves in a dark wood, not many know the hell of loneliness, indignation, and disappointment alloted to Dante Alighieri of Florence in his final years. His compensation lay in the deeply mystical experience that took him from the hell of self through the stages of renewal to the ecstasy of the vision of God. His legacy to the world is the complex and beautiful record of this marvelous journey, which has come to be known as The Divine Comedy, or The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine.
In the final years of his life looking back on the pain and the discovery of those middle years Dante acknowledged the redeeming power of love—not wealth, not talent, not family, not city—but love. Dante’s world was held together by love—as is ours. God’s love led him to create the universe and to place man in it. The medieval man thought that this universe was a three-storied one, and that God was the unmoving Mover of the heavens and the earth. Dante’s religion also was his cosmology, his geography, and his physics. In a thrillingly unified vision of God’s creation, he considered love as the key to all attraction—mental, physical, and spiritual. Thus, love of evil and the material stuff of creation draws man deeper into Hell, a place frozen and dark because of the absence of God’s love, where man gnaws at his fellows, mutilates them, lies to them, snarls at them, a place dominated by that lord of hate, Satan. God does not need to place man in his proper sphere of Hell; the individual’s love of his own peculiar evil draws him there to spend eternity repeating, without joy or hope, the sins he loved on earth.
If man loves Christ rather than Satan, he moves instead to the sunlit home of penitents—Purgatory. As he eagerly seeks both the whip and the bridle, he finds there that the one lashes him to enthusiasm for virtue, the other restrains him from vice. Again the sinful Christian determines by his own faith and failure his abode in the afterlife. Since on earth he divided his love between wrongful loves and rightful ones, he settles first in the place where his particular sin is to be confessed and cleansed. Living with both day and night, the rhythms of earth, he finds himself gradually cleansed of his sins, growing lighter and brighter and more joyful as he approaches purity and holiness. The rhythm of labor and rest, the sense of movement upward, the life of song, prayer, and penitence seems idyllically monastic. It is in startling contrast to the static despair of Hell.
Although the Protestant may reject the basic doctrine of Purgatory, he will find the perception of the psychology and theology of sin and salvation full of insight. The organization of Purgatory like that of Hell is based on the seven deadly sins. Purgatory’s highest point parallels Hell’s; in Dante’s natural history, Purgatory was formed when Satan fell to earth. Hell was a result of the impact and the shrinking from his evil by the very earth. The displaced land rose up to form the seven-story mountain. Psychologically as well as physically it is the counterpart of damnation. Thus, while Hell is founded on despair and hatred of God, Purgatory is based on hope and love of God.
The key to the ordering of the sins in Purgatory is distortions of love. Dorothy L. Sayers spent the last years of her life studying and interpreting and translating this great poem to make it more accessible to English readers. She explained the system of Purgatory in her preferatory notes. The lower section, where the proud, envious, and wrathful do their proper penance, is the farthest from primal innocence, for love has been perverted. Those who should love their neighbor instead seek their neighbor’s harm. Middle Purgatory, where the slothful hurry to their salvation, is the home of defective love—those whose lukewarm love keeps them from exertion for the love of God. Nearest to innocence are the covetous, the gluttonous, and the lustful. Their flaw is the love of God’s creation rather than of God himself. The drunkard, the miser, and the fornicator ignore the primary good and focus their desire on the secondary. The lustful soul is the closest to purity because his is the warmest of sins. His love of the flesh and his desire for another human being can be transferred to a delight in the incarnation and a dedication to Christ far more easily than the man who loves himself.
Dante uses the medieval Roman Catholic understanding of sin and of the psychology of repentance. He pictures the public confession of sin, the repentance (contrition), the penance (satisfaction), and makes each step clear. Although the mountain seems to stand physically in time, the journey from sin to salvation, the return of man to innocence through the redeeming love of Christ, the freeing of the will by the submission to Christ are timeless and universal. Dante studies each of the sins to discover its root causes; he acknowledges his own sins and bows his head in confession of his own pride and lust. His delight in redemption and renewal at the top of Mt. Purgatory is a thrilling moment.
Heaven too is portrayed as a place of love, where the saints of the Church triumphant live in the radiant presence of God. They see face to face and know the truth, remembering no part of earthly life with regret, loving fully without need to possess either things or people. In the light of God’s love, their vision is restored so that they can see and love all things properly. The nine spheres, each with its planet, its supervising angels, and its inhabitants are contained in the mind of God. The image breaks through in Paradise and lives outside time and space. The saints seem to be in the various spheres. But the spheres are only metaphors. All the saints live in the presence of God, in the primum mobile, in the glorious light of his love. In a blinding moment Dante finally experiences God and admits that his mystical moment is ineffable; his art cannot record the truth:
Thither my own wings could not carry me,
But that a flash my understanding clove,
Whence its desire came to it suddenly.
High phantasy lost power and here broke off;
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Paradiso, Canto XXXIII
This divine love that Dante experiences so richly takes different forms for him, as it does for each of us. His art is his own loving response to God; his love of other artists (such as Virgil) is not adoration of secondary goods, but delight in the image of God shining through human experience. Dante so identified his love of God and his love of beauty that he organized his divine comedy on the basis of the Trinity—three in one. The three parts of the poem, the divisions within the poem, the three-fold interlocking verse form all testify to his delight in the majesty and unity of God’s three-fold nature.
His love of other people follows a parallel pattern. Another human being, Beatrice, serves as God-bearer for him. Using the frame-of-reference provided by his age to explain his experience and his emotions, he discovers in the image of Beatrice a means of access to the love of God. Her intervention for him, her prayers for his salvation, her delight in his redemption culminate in her appearance at the top of Mt. Purgatory, where she crowns him as his own pope and emperor, a free man in Christ, who is now pure and prepared to leap up to the stars (Canto XXXIII).
As we watch the various appearances of the God-bearer Beatrice through the story we come to understand that she is not simply the beautiful wife of a Florentine banker who stirred and snubbed the young Dante and haunted him all his life. She becomes instead a human form through which God speaks to the young man and encourages him to love more than the flesh, to climb the platonic ladder of love to a higher love than lust alone can ever know. In her appearance in the Earthly Paradise she becomes an image of the Church, which encourages man to leave his limited loves for the immortal love of Christ. Like a good wife—the Bride of Christ—she nags man out of his preference for the physical to an adoration of the spiritual. Her admonitions shame him and her love heals him. She is a good mother as much as a good wife, warning the erring child, encouraging him, laughing gently at his confusion, helping him toward his next stage of development.
With Beatrice as his guide Dante bursts into Paradise. There in the presence of the saints he gradually discovers insights into theological truths. With each sphere Beatrice grows more beautiful, her smile more brilliant, until she finally must turn from Dante for fear of blinding him. As divine illumination floods into his life Beatrice becomes (in Sayers’s phrase) a “divine schoolmistress,” leading, explaining, protecting, nudging, hinting, helping the learner to see more clearly. By the time she turns him over to his final guide, the saintly Bernard, she has become unnecessary to his spiritual development and can return to her blessed rest. The human love that she represents can lead mankind to God because it mirrors his love. Not seeking oneself like the proud, nor desiring to possess another like the lustful, the true love is content to lead the pilgrim upward and to release him to the waiting hands of God.
Dante then discovers, as do many people, that we learn love first from human images—fathers, mothers, friends, and mates. The quality of that love may stop with self or lead the beloved on to a larger experience of immortal love in God. The beloved Dante, without rejecting Beatrice, is content to look beyond her to the greatest lover of all: the archetype of father, mother, sister, brother, husband, and lover. And Beatrice is fulfilled in the knowledge that Dante has used her image to see through it to God.
Perhaps the story is old-fashioned and quaint in many ways. Certainly the richly physical view of the afterlife and the detailed account of its geography and inhabitants lead many modems to classify it flatly as fiction. We may argue with the physical nature and origin of Purgatory and dispute the cosmology of Paradise. We may smile condescendingly from our liberated heights at his hopelessly romantic view of women and the idealized notions of the Holy Roman Empire. But we can learn a great deal from him—the psychology of sin, the path to repentance, the nature of free will, the priorities of the Christian life, the reality of evil, and the redemptive power of love. In the poem he quotes the Scripture passage we all know so well: “Faith—hope—love—but the greatest of these is love.” Having lost in the middle of the journey of life all those human loves that are so central to existence, he discovers the fuller meaning of the Scripture. Not the love of a woman, who could die, or the love of a family, which could be lost, or the love of a city, which could fail, but the love of God, who himself is love.
Nancy M. Tischler is professor of English and humanities, Pennsylvania State University, Capitol Campus, Middletown, Pennsylvania.
