Years ago, when I first started reading seriously, trying to go through most if not all of the classics, I picked up and read Dante's Inferno, the Longfellow translation, because that was the one available at Barnes and Noble. I didn't get much out of it: the next year, when I read Purgatorio and Paradiso in Mandelbaum's translation, I still didn't get much out of it; I was aware that Dante was important, the national poet of Italy--and you can tell, flipping through the endnotes of these volumes, that there is a lot of esoteric stuff you're just not going to get without a lot of work. In all of the Divine Comedy there are figures from history both famous (Judas, Cassius, Brutus) and mildly famous (Pope Boniface) as well as obscurities, like Dante Alighieri's contemporaries, who he either wanted to praise by putting them in the empyrean or criticize by putting them in one of his circles of Hell, because when you don't get along with someone, writing an epic poem and including them getting tortured for eternity is the best revenge.
In any event, I read the Comedy, found some of the poetry moving and found much of it going over my head in a way where I said to myself, I'll figure it out later, and by later, I meant never. I can't imagine ever putting in the effort to get Dante properly, but because of his place in the Western Canon (he's up there) I did want to get some appreciation of his impact. And so it was that I picked up Erich Auerbach's short study, "Dante: Poet of the Secular World," which is illuminating in large part if aimed at a more scholarly audience than myself.
This isn't going to be long. Auerbach's argument, or explanation, rather, goes like this: The Divine Comedy isn't just, as I may have initially thought, a power trip or a work of wonton imagination. Everyone knows that there are 100 cantos: 33 in each book, and a 1 canto prologue. That's not important beyond the symmetry of it all, as far as I can tell. What is most impressive is that Dante's vision of the afterlife is encyclopedic. In the first few pages, Auerbach talks about the evolution of the narrative--from Homer to Virgil and back to Sophocles. Man's fate reveals his character, in these works, and far beyond just serving a didactic purpose, the shades that Dante meets in the afterlife are characters removed from artifice and deception:
"The encounters do not take place in this life, where men are always met with in a state of contingency that manifests only a part of their essence, and where the very intensity of life in the most vital moments makes self-awareness difficult and renders a true encounter almost impossible. Nor do they take place in a hereafter where what is most personal in the personality is effaced by the shadows of death and nothing remains but a feeble, veiled or indifferent recollection of life. No, the souls of Dante's other world are not dead men, they are the truly living; though the concrete data of their lives and the atmosphere of their personalities are drawn from their former existences on earth, they manifest them here with a completeness, a concentration, an actuality, which they seldom achieved during their term on earth and assuredly never revealed to anyone else."
And after a passage like that--deeply insightful, albeit a mouthful--I don't know how much more I can add. By constructing a comprehensive afterlife where every living soul's actions take on a shadow existence in future death, and by through it expositing a theological worldview based both off of the works of Thomas Aquinas, Dante's own experiences in the Catholic church and Florentine politics, the Divine Comedy becomes comprehensive, an antiquated but wise manual for understanding the world, and one of the greatest works in the history of art.
Not that I understand much more than just that.
In any event, I read the Comedy, found some of the poetry moving and found much of it going over my head in a way where I said to myself, I'll figure it out later, and by later, I meant never. I can't imagine ever putting in the effort to get Dante properly, but because of his place in the Western Canon (he's up there) I did want to get some appreciation of his impact. And so it was that I picked up Erich Auerbach's short study, "Dante: Poet of the Secular World," which is illuminating in large part if aimed at a more scholarly audience than myself.
This isn't going to be long. Auerbach's argument, or explanation, rather, goes like this: The Divine Comedy isn't just, as I may have initially thought, a power trip or a work of wonton imagination. Everyone knows that there are 100 cantos: 33 in each book, and a 1 canto prologue. That's not important beyond the symmetry of it all, as far as I can tell. What is most impressive is that Dante's vision of the afterlife is encyclopedic. In the first few pages, Auerbach talks about the evolution of the narrative--from Homer to Virgil and back to Sophocles. Man's fate reveals his character, in these works, and far beyond just serving a didactic purpose, the shades that Dante meets in the afterlife are characters removed from artifice and deception:
"The encounters do not take place in this life, where men are always met with in a state of contingency that manifests only a part of their essence, and where the very intensity of life in the most vital moments makes self-awareness difficult and renders a true encounter almost impossible. Nor do they take place in a hereafter where what is most personal in the personality is effaced by the shadows of death and nothing remains but a feeble, veiled or indifferent recollection of life. No, the souls of Dante's other world are not dead men, they are the truly living; though the concrete data of their lives and the atmosphere of their personalities are drawn from their former existences on earth, they manifest them here with a completeness, a concentration, an actuality, which they seldom achieved during their term on earth and assuredly never revealed to anyone else."
And after a passage like that--deeply insightful, albeit a mouthful--I don't know how much more I can add. By constructing a comprehensive afterlife where every living soul's actions take on a shadow existence in future death, and by through it expositing a theological worldview based both off of the works of Thomas Aquinas, Dante's own experiences in the Catholic church and Florentine politics, the Divine Comedy becomes comprehensive, an antiquated but wise manual for understanding the world, and one of the greatest works in the history of art.
Not that I understand much more than just that.
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