Dante's Divine Comedy ~ Arguably our Greatest Poet's Greatest Work
“Dante is my spiritual food!” ~ James Joyce, the great Irish writer best known for the novel Ulysses
Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet, born in 1265 in Florence, Italy, wrote his masterpiece Divina Commedia, or as most of us know it The Divine Comedy, one of the most astonishing pieces of art and one of the greatest and most impressive poems ever created, a poem consisting of more than fourteen thousand lines, divided into a hundred cantos, cantos which mean songs, written in three-line units called tercets, rhyming in terza rima, a very demanding verse form that Dante developed as he put pen to paper, depicting the week-long three-pronged pilgrimage of the protagonist, Dante himself, undertaking an epic journey to the Christian after-life, a journey that takes him through Hell, Purgatory, and ultimately Heaven and back, an extraordinary journey that is cosmic in scale, transforming the traveler and us with him in the process, a true hero’s journey.
It is not just a journey through the afterlife, but it also takes us on a transformational trip as we travel inside, mapping the moral landscape, and giving us insights into the secrets and the meaning of life itself, making The Divine Comedy a book that along with The Bible and Milton’s equally epic piece of poetry, Paradise Lost, should not just be read by every Christian, but by every person on the planet.
It might seem like a grueling undertaking, almost as grueling as it is for Dante himself, but it can be done, and perhaps it is best done like professor Stephen Smith of Hillsdale College says, and here I paraphrase:
“It is best read in small doses, but well worth it since a canto a day helps keep the inferno away.”
Dante was well educated and he met and fell in love with a beautiful woman named Bice Portinari, a beauty that he called Beatrice, a Latin name that means “Bringer of joy and blessings,” in 1274, but she died suddenly at a young age in 1290, leaving Dante distraught and looking for consolation in theology, philosophy and poetry, which eventually inspired him to write about her. He got involved in the cut-throat world of Florentine politics in 1295, and by 1300 he was one of the most powerful men in the city. However, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, he fell from political power and in 1302, while he was absent from the city, Dante was permanently exiled from his beloved Florence. He began writing The Divine Comedy in 1306, perhaps as a way to make sense of his exile, and he finished shortly before his death in 1321, in Ravenna, showing that great art takes time, but that it is time well spent.
The poem starts in the year 1300, on the morning of Good Friday with Dante lost in a dark wood. He climbs a hill to the rising sun but three beasts, a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf, representing the sins of lust, pride, and greed respectively, which represent the primal sins of youth, manhood, and age, block his way. As Dante flees from the she-wolf, the ghost of the great Roman poet Virgil who wrote the Aenaid, the epic tale of how Aeneas, a Trojan prince, fled from his city Troy as it burned to the ground after the Greeks took it by deceiving the Trojans with the eponymous Trojan horse, a sad end to the great war recorded in the equally epic poems of the great Greek poet Homer The Iliad and The Odyssey, and who then went west to found Rome, the Eternal City, appears to him.
He tells Dante the only way to get past the beasts is to journey through Hell and he offers to be his guide. Dante hesitates, but Virgil tells him that no less than three blessed ladies the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucy, and his beloved Beatrice made this rescue attempt possible. Being Italian, Dante is strengthened by the thought of Beatrice and he walks through the broad gates of Hell over which is inscribed the famous words:
”Abandon all hope you who enter here.”
The idea that Dante first has to descend into hell to learn about the nature of sin from all the lost souls, learning how to overcome those sinful tendencies in himself, before he can find a way out and ascend towards God, is similar to the great British writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis who is probably best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters, who conceived of conversion as a process where you first have to realise that you can’t attain salvation for yourself and that you are ultimately limited and first have to go down before you can go up and then, with God’s help you will reach a higher level than you were before. However, this is a painful process since it is a rebirth after all.
Our two intrepid poets first come across the lukewarm souls, those who refused to make moral choices in their lives and who are rejected for this by both heaven and hell and doomed to chase after an empty banner while insects sting them to force them into action, our first example of contrapasso, the idea that a sinner’s punishment in hell fits his or her major misdeed in life, showing how well the poem is thought out. Let us not be timid, but boldly advance with our two artists deeper into the realm of evil, lest we find ourselves among these wretched souls.
In the second circle of the Inferno, the circle of the lustful, they come across the former king of Crete, Minos, the son of the Greek god Zeus who kidnapped the Phoenician princess Europa by turning himself into a white bull and luring her onto his back, before whisking her off to the island where he raped her. Minos is depicted as a monstrosity, a connoisseur of sin who wraps his tail around the souls who venture this far into hell, forcing them to confess their failures and then flinging them to their appropriate place in the pits, showing that Dante drew inspiration from the drama of classical mythology.
However, he drew most heavily from the Christian Bible and the Aeneid, bringing together biblical and classical traditions. From Virgil’s great work he took the idea that one gets the kind of afterlife one deserves. C.S. Lewis also said we should respect pagan myths because they reflect glimpses of the truth if not the whole glorious revelation of God. Augustine of Hippo, the great Christian theologian’s book Confessions, is another strong influence on Dante. Dante also drew from the early works of the Roman poet Statius and the Christian historian Orosius, showing that most works of art are not created in a vacuum, but owe a great debt to those artists and thinkers who came before.
In the circle of the lustful, the souls are whirled around by a fierce wind. Dante recognizes Francesca de Rimini and her lover Paolo de Malatesta, the brother of her husband. Virgil tells him that if he wants to speak to the sinful souls in Satan’s principality, he must speak to them in the language of their strongest love. Francesca comes at his bidding and says:
“O living being, gracious and benign, who through the darkened air have come to visit our souls that stained the world with blood…”
She shows her self-centeredness by thinking that he came all this way just to speak to her, and she tells him her story, blaming all her bad decisions on love. She says:
“There is no greater grief than to recall a time of happiness while plunged in misery…”
She recounts how she and Paolo were reading the story of the brave Arthurian knight Lancelot who gave in to his lust for the wife of his king, Queen Guinevere, how she and Paolo started to glance at each other before he leaned over and kissed her, and then, in one of the sexiest lines in all of literature, she says:
“A pander was that author, and his book! That day we did not read another page.”
Like all sinners, Francesca shifts the blame from herself. This is the first of many confessions that Dante will hear in hell, most of which are inaccurate, evasive, and self-centered, showing that the sinners lack self-knowledge, that they want to justify themselves and that pride is truly the original sin. Nevertheless, Dante pities her and he is so moved by her story, because like most Italian men he is a sucker for a beautiful woman, that he faints.
As the two poets travel deeper into the nine circles of hell, they come to the gates of the city of Dis, where demons, in the form of the Furies, the winged Greek goddesses of vengeance draped in black and with snakes for hair, refuse to let them enter, but an angel of heaven marches through hell, waves his wand and opens the way for Dante and Virgil, showing how much more powerful the powers of heaven are and that nothing can stand in the way of the Will of God, nothing.
In the third ring of the seventh circle of the Inferno dwell those who committed acts of violence against God, the blasphemers, the sodomites, and the usurers, and here, among the homosexuals, Dante meets Brunetto Latini, a Florentine politician and poet who was one of his beloved teachers, a man who taught him how he can make himself eternal, by eternalizing himself through his writing, the very same reason I am learning how to write too.
At the bottom of hell, Dante and Virgil come across Satan, who has three faces, mimicking the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Lucifer who is surprisingly frozen fast in ice up to his waist while gorging himself on Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, the two main men responsible for double-crossing Julius Caesar, showing that betrayal is the most heinous sin of all. Satan says nothing to them, but he is a pitiful figure, a creature that was once beautiful and made to fly, he now ceaselessly beats his wings to no avail, creating the very ice that holds him in place, making him the most frustrated life form in hell, showing how sin corrupts and how it can make what was meant to be beautiful, ugly.
Dante decisively pulls away from Satan, allowing him to escape from Inferno, and he and Virgil follow an upward path that leads them out into the fresh air under the stars. Dante and Virgil’s journey through the Inferno took place over the evening of Good Friday and all of Holy Saturday. The three categories of moral failure that hell is made up of, incontinence, violence, and fraud, represent the inversion of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom articulated by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. Although Dante has escaped from hell, although he is free from the inferno, he must still learn what his liberty is for. This he will do by climbing up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory.
Purgatorio
“Favor his coming then! He seeks his freedom. . .” ~ Virgil
Dante and Virgil arrive at the foot of Mount Purgatorio at dawn on Easter Sunday. Here the two intrepid poets come across Cato, a famous Roman senator who died opposing tyranny, and is now the guardian of Mount Purgatorio, showing how much God appreciates those, even pagans, who resist tyrants.
Virgil explains to Cato that they are here because Dante “seeks his freedom” and he tries to flatter Cato, but Cato quickly corrects him, showing that while in inferno they talked to the souls of the damned by speaking in the language of that which those poor souls loved most, here they will have to speak and act in a new way. Cato also tells them to take a bath and wash off the grime of hell in preparation for the journey to purity that lies ahead.
They meet Manfred, the son of Frederick II, the king of Sicily, who was killed by deadly wounds to his head and heart, but despite his battered body, he is in a jovial mood. Manfred says:
“After my body had been shattered by
two fatal blows, in tears, I then consigned
myself to Him who willingly forgives.
My sins were ghastly, but the Infinite
Goodness has arms so wide that It accepts
who ever would return, imploring It.”
By this Dante shows how merciful God is, saving those who turn to Him even at the last possible moment before death, and perhaps Dante also betrays a latent Protestant predisposition, for Manfred did not need the absolution of a priest, no, God accepted him directly, just like God told the man who hung on the cross next to His that he would be in heaven with Him that very day, thus skipping purgatory altogether. Because those souls on the shores of purgatory were saved by God, even though they only recanted at the last moment, it seems to me Dante believed we are saved by faith and God’s grace alone. No sacraments are needed.
To climb Mount Purgatorio and be purged of our sins, we must be filled with a great desire to do so, we must want to make the climb, and most importantly, we need God and His light to guide us as we progress up Mount Purgatorio, we need His grace. It’s all God’s grace, man; it is all God’s grace.
Three step lead up to the gates of Purgatorio, the first “all a white marble, scoured and cleansed so bright I saw myself in it as a glass,” the second step “a scorched and rough-cut stone, was veined with cracks all over and across,” and the third step “looked like a block of fiery porphyry, red as the blood that spurts out of a vein,” symbolizing the journey that souls take from self-knowledge, to purgation, and finally healing.
At the top of the stairs there sits an ash-colored angel on a diamond throne that guards the gates. The angel asks them:
“What is your will?” or perhaps a better translation of the Italian is: “What do you want?”
Virgil tells the angel:
“a lady came from Heaven and, familiar with these things, told us: ‘That’s the gate; go there.’”
“And may she speed you on your path of goodness!” says the angel.
Before they pass through the gates, the angel inscribes seven P’s, representing the Seven Deadly Sins, pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust on Dante’s forehead with the tip of his sword. Each level of Mount Purgatorio is dedicated to purging one of these sins.
The angel pushes the hammers of the sacred door and says:
“Enter, but you should be aware, those who look back are cast outside once more.”
Virgil tells Dante:
“The soul’s love strays if it desires what’s wrong or loves with too much strength, or not enough.” Love can thus be disordered by desiring what is wrong, by desiring too much, and by desiring too little. Mount Purgatorio reflects this structure, with the bottom three terraces dedicated to purging love that “desires what’s wrong”: pride, envy, and wrath, followed by sloth, meaning “desiring too little,” and then the terraces of avarice, gluttony, and lust, desiring too much.
When Dante is purged of pride, the primal sin, the parent of all human sin, the original sin of Satan when he rebelled and rallied some rebellious angels against God before they were kicked out of heaven, and the sin that snared Adam and Eve before they too were kicked out of Eden, the other sins inscribed on his head grow fainter, because if we overcome pride, it makes purging the other sins easier.
Dante did not believe that we should get rid of desire like Buddhists, for example, he did not think God is an enemy of our desires, but instead he was strongly influenced by Aristotle and his treatise on Ethics which promotes the ideas that our desires must be properly channeled and to become good we must form new habits and develop our character. Dante thought that souls must learn how to govern desire and direct it well and that we can do that through the grace of God.
On each terrace the soul is purged of a different sin by acquiring the opposite virtue. For example on the terrace of pride souls carry large stones and recite an extended version of the “Our Father” prayer, teaching them humility, on the terrace of sloth souls are required to constantly run, imbuing them with the virtue of zeal, and on the terrace of lust souls learn chastity and friendship by means of a refining fire. On each terrace the ordeal concludes with the words of Christ through one of the Beatitudes, referring to the blessings mentioned by Jesus in the famous Sermon of the mount and the Sermon on the Plain, making the soul one with the words of God as one of the P’s is wiped from the soul’s forehead.
The Beatitudes are sayings of Jesus like:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” The last Beatitude on Mount Purgatorio is “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” summarizing the entire purpose of purgation, a process to purify the souls’ hearts so that they are capable of seeing God.
Finally, after he completes all the tasks and all the P’s are wiped off his forehead, Dante has to walk through a wall of fire to get to the Earthly Paradise. He hesitates, but Virgil encourages him by telling him that Beatrice waits for him on the other side. Even though the blaze is intense, Virgil keeps reminding him of Beatrice every step of the way and Dante pushes through. They emerge on the other end of the fiercely blazing fire and again, like at the end of inferno, they see the twinkling stars. Virgil says:
“Your judgment now is free and whole and true; to fail to follow its will would be to stray. Lord of yourself I crown and miter you.”
He crowns Dante as a free man, because through the process of climbing Mount Purgatorio, Dante overcame the tendency of people to be against themselves, me against me, and instead he is now lord over himself. Dante says that the Psalms of David, which are sung throughout Purgatory, taught him to hope and it can do the same for me and you.
They see a griffin, a symbol of Christ because the eagle part represents Christ’ divinity while the lion part represents His humanity, a griffin represents, courage, leadership and strength and because no-one can stop a griffin just like nobody can stop God. Beatrice appears to Dante, and he turns to talk to Virgil but his inspirational guide is gone.
Beatrice scornfully says:
“Look at me well! I’m Beatrice, I am she!
How did you deign to come upon the hill?
Didn’t you know that man is happy here?”
Luckily for him the angels intervene on his behalf and they sing a song in his defense. She confronts him and tells him the story of his life, pointing out where he was not true to his vows. At this, Dante confesses and he cries.
Beatrice takes him to the river of forgetfulness, where he drinks to forget all the bad experiences in life. Then they go to the griffin which draws Dante near and dazzles him. Finally Beatrice takes Dante to the river of good memories, he drinks and this brings his poetic powers back to life. Before they ascend into heaven, Beatrice, a very bossy beauty, orders Dante to give his poetry to the world.
Paradiso
“The glory of the One who moves all things penetrate the universe with light, more radiant in one part and elsewhere less: I have been in that Heaven He makes most bright, and seen things neither mind can hold nor tongue utter.”
Perhaps because he is still alive, Dante can only experience paradise through the eyes of his beloved Beatrice. Through the workings of God, Dante is transformed and becomes more than merely human, and he soars beyond normal human limits and follows Beatrice into the heavens, ascending through nine celestial spheres, the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the Primum Mobile, believed in the Middle Ages to be the outer sphere of the universe, and finally he reaches the Empyrean, the highest heaven, thought to consist out of fire and light, the top of Paradise where God and all His saints reside.
Dante’s trip through the heavens will correct his earthly education and helps him to live well afterwards, teaching him lessons that we all can use. From the get go he humbly admits that human language is too limited and his talents too small to adequately describe the glories he encountered, but that they are the true treasure that he found on his journey, the elixir that he can bring back from his quest, and that he will share it with us, the readers as best as he can so that it might “give birth to a great flame” that will hopefully inspire “Poets and Caesars,” artists and leaders, whose desires are base, weak, too small and instead help them to think bigger. This ties in nicely with C.S. Lewis who wrote in the essay Argument from Desire that we should aspire to bigger and better and greater things, all for the glory of God. Even though Dante is, in my estimate, and I have read all the greats, probably the greatest Christian poet, he humbly hopes that “Better voices perhaps will follow mine,” showing how far he has come from the man lost in the deep, dark woods.
As Dante and Beatrice alight on the moon, she tells him:
“Direct your thoughts to God in gratitude.”
Like the glory of God, gratitude becomes an important theme throughout this poem. Dante comes upon Piccarda, a nun who was forced to leave the convent and marry against her will. He soon learns that unlike in hell, the souls in paradise are joyful and full of laughter, they are utterly trustworthy, and you can talk to them about anything. He wants to know if they don’t aspire to rise higher in heaven, but she tells him:
“It is of the essence of this bliss to hold one’s dwelling in the divine Will, who makes our single wills the same. . . . In His will is our peace.”
She teaches him that the essence of heavenly bliss is to dwell in the divine will, to follow the will of God.
“In His will is our peace: that is the sea whereto all creatures fare, fashioned by Nature or the hand of God,” she says.
Beatrice explains to Dante that all the souls in Paradiso are gathered together at the top level of Heaven, but that he experiences it as ascending celestial levels because of his intellectual limitations as a living man. To compensate for this, God uses cosmology, a branch of astronomy that studies the origin and development of the universe, something that Dante knows well, to help him better understand Heaven, thus speaking to Dante in a language he can comprehend.
Before they leave the Moon, Beatrice tells Dante that liberty or freedom is the greatest gift that God has given to man, liberty, another theme that runs like a golden thread throughout the Divine Comedy, encouraging us to value it and protect it with all our might.
In the Heaven of Venus, Dante comes across Charles Martel of Anjou, the titular King of Hungary and Croatia, who died of the plague in Naples. They discuss the nature of life’s troubles and Charles says:
“…the roots from which your tasks proceed must needs be different: so, one is born a Solon, one a Xerxes, and one a Melchizedek, and another, he who flew through the air and lost his son.”
With this he indicates that we are all different, unique, with unique tasks to perform, we have unique vocations for which we are uniquely suited.
Charles continues:
“…if the world below would set its mind on the foundation Nature lays as base to follow, it would have its people worthy. But you twist to religion one whose birth made him more fit to gird a sword, and make a king of one more fit for sermoning, so that the track you take is off the road.”
So according to Charles Martel, one of the greatest causes of trouble is when people do not follow nature or more precisely if they do not follow God’s order and design, when they are confused about what vocation they should pursue and they end up not doing what they are meant to do. This is a lesson I too learned the hard way and why I am now learning how to draw, write and make films. I listened to fools who think it is just important for you to have a job, any job, and be content with that, but whenever I do not create, when I do not write, draw, make films, or create, I feel I should be doing something else, I should create, and the only thing that stills this hunger is to indulge it, to create, because it screams from the bottom of my soul that I should. So Dante learns the wisdom that confusion about vocations is one of the greatest causes of trouble on Earth. I wish I read Dante earlier in my life.
In the Heaven of the Sun, Dante encounters Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic, the founders of the Franciscan and Dominican orders of monks, respectively, who led souls back to the love of God, to truth, and to faithfulness while they were on Earth. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that Providence sent them to renew the world and rekindle man’s friendship with God. Dante has much in common with them, but whereas the two Holy men did their good work, work that the world now needs as much as ever, work that the two monks did through preaching and prayer, Dante does it with poetry.
In the Heaven of Mars, Dante and Beatrice see a formation of stars in the shape of the cross, an image of Christ’s final victory. Dante meets his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, and they discuss his poetry. Dante worries about how his poems will be perceived, but Cacciaguida tells him:
“A conscience that is dark — either through its or through another’s shame — indeed will find that what you speak is harsh. Nevertheless, all falsehood set aside, let all that you have seen be manifest, and let them scratch wherever it may itch.”
This emboldens and encourages Dante to not be “too timid a friend of truth,” but to write with courage about everything he has seen, even if some readers may take offense and scorn its truth, something many of us should take to heart in this overly “politically correct” time, a time when people are too easily offended. In each of the realms Dante is encouraged to write his poem at least once, first by his old teacher Brunetto Latini, the sodomite in hell, then by Beatrice and Virgil in purgatory, and now also by his great-great-grandfather in paradise. How much more encouragement do you need? What more do you want? The blessing of God.
In the sphere of the twelve constellations of the zodiac, known as the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, Dante meets the Apostles Peter, James, and John, who test his knowledge and conviction of the theological virtues, faith, hope, and love.
Peter asks him:
“Good Christian, speak, show yourself clearly: what is faith?”
Dante gives the definition of faith from Hebrews 11, verse 1:
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
But then Peter asks whether he has faith, for having it is more important than defining it. Dante convinces Simon Peter, nicknamed Petros, the Greek version of Cephas, meaning the “rock,” that he has faith.
Next they come to the Apostle James who says:
“…do tell what hope is, tell how it has blossomed within your mind, and from what source it came to you”
Beatrice says:
“There is no child of the Church Militant who has more hope than he has…”
Dante replies:
“Hope is the certain expectation of future glory; it is the result of God’s grace and of merit we have earned. This light has come to me from many stars; but he who first instilled it in my heart was the chief singer of the Sovereign Guide.”
Here he refers to the Psalms of David. This satisfies James and Dante is given the title “Son of Hope.”
John tests him about love. He passes and then, before Dante enters the Empyrean, he sees a vision of the cosmos as a single point of light around which angels swirl and dance. Beatrice tells him:
“On that Point depend the heavens and the whole of nature.”
That point, is God Almighty Himself. It is revealed that all things depend upon God and the souls in heaven have been rightly ordered towards Him.
They come to a River of Light and Beatrice tells him to drink from it with his eyes so that he can enter the Empyrean, a strange phrasing, but perhaps she means he has to put some of the water of light in his eyes. Whichever way, as soon as his eyes touch the water, Dante is transported into the Empyrean, a place so beautiful that it takes his breath away. He compares it to a rose, both simple and yet wondrously beautiful.
He turns to talk to Beatrice, but to his shock he sees that she is gone and in her place there stands a small, old man, kind of like Yoda to my mind. It is Bernard of Clairvaux, a famous medieval mystic, who becomes his final guide. Dante asks Bernard about Beatrice, and Bernard points to the third-highest ring of angels, where Beatrice swirls in her assigned position. Dante thanks her for rescuing him from the dark wood and for bringing him this far. She smiles at him and then she directs his eyes towards God.
Bernard of Clairvaux encourages Dante to ask the Virgin Mary for help so that he can complete his journey, for it was she who had pity on him and it was she who sent the angels on their mission to rescue him from the dark wood of sin.
Bernard says:
“Into the face that most resembles Christ now look: for by her radiance only she can render you prepared for seeing Christ.”
Bernard says Dante must entreat Mary and ask for grace because he must not try to soar too high by his own efforts and then he too directs Dante’s gaze to God. Dante devotes his entire attention to God and he sees the Trinity represented by three rings. In the second ring he makes out the figure of a man, a man who must be Christ. The experience so overwhelms Dante that human language cannot encapsulate what he sees and feels. He wrote:
“As the geometer intently seeks to square the circle, but he cannot reach, through thought on thought, the principle he needs, so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see the way in which our human effigy suited the circle and found place in it — and my own wings were far too weak for that.”
Dante ends his epic poem with this:
“Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy. Already were all my will and my desires turned — as a wheel in equal balance — by The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
The entire journey from the deep, dark forest, through hell, purgatory and finally through heaven, lasted one week (although it might take you a little longer to read about it). The poem is a comedy because it begins badly and ends happily, which is also the overall Christian narrative, a narrative which is ultimately positive, giving us hope.
Dante’s journey may seem exhausting and at times it is painful, but this is fitting, for many great Christian writers, like C.S. Lewis have posited that only once we have been humbled and hurt can we truly convert, since a true conversion often goes hand in hand with great pain, being a rebirth after all, and only then can we begin to search God and His divine will. A true man is humble, not a doormat, but humble. If you think about it long enough, you realize that it is all God’s grace man; it is all God’s story, all for His great glory.
When Dante was exiled, he first took refuge in Verona, that self-same fair Verona where Shakespeare put his two famous star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, but soon he wandered as far as Paris, The City of Light, some say he even went as far as Oxford in England, but eventually he returned to his homeland and settled in Ravenna, where he died in 1321 and where he remains buried, even though Florence repented and built him a grand tomb in the nineteenth century.
He is, I think, a prime candidate for the greatest poet of all time. For Dante, poetry proclaims who we really are and one of the reasons that he wrote so well is because he loved it, an important lesson for all of us. I am convinced that if you want to become truly great at what you do, you have to do what you love, and boy, do I love this poem.
What do you think?
If you want to read The Divine Comedy online, you can do so here: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/ [Accessed 17 May 2024]
If you want to do a terrific free course about it, you can do so here: https://online.hillsdale.edu/landing/dantes-divine-comedy [Accessed 17 May 2024]
If you want to do a longer course, this is a very good one by two terrific scholars: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/dante-s-divine-comedy [Accessed 17 May 2024]
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