The new year commemorates the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, suffered in 1321 while enduring political exile from his native Florence. A product of the turbulent Middle Ages, the Florentine author witnessed firsthand the era’s political chaos and civic unrest, divided family loyalties and internecine warfare, thorny immigration issues and the construction of walls. He experienced poor urban air quality and climate change, disease and pandemics, great wealth and dismal poverty. Furthermore, after speaking truth to power, he so upset despotic rulers that he was banished for life from the city of his birth. He lost his home, his wife and most of his earthly possessions.
If such dire 14th-century problems sound familiar, it is because, as Ecclesiastes records, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
How did Dante deal with such pressing societal and personal problems? How might his Divine Comedy prove beneficial to similarly concerned women and men of the 21st century?
Early in his life, Dante strove to cope by balancing the contemplative life of a scholar with the active life of a citizen of the world. For example, he was an avid reader of religious and secular literature, an involved community member, and a committed Christian. Elected to political office, he fulfilled numerous municipal assignments while providing for a growing family. After his banishment, however, he became dependent on the kindness of strangers for lodging, food and protection. At that point the easier route would have been for him to drown himself in self-pity, to give up and renounce the world.
Instead, Dante embarked on the proverbial road less traveled. Drawing on his personal experiences and extensive studies, he focused on developing his literary talent and building on his belief in a better world. He dedicated the last two decades of his life to composing something that would last beyond his trying times and benefit humankind. He produced his magnum opus, which he entitled simply “The Comedy.” (The epithet “Divine” was added much later by an editor who regarded the poem as like unto scripture).
Divided into three parts — Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise — Dante’s Italian epic remains required reading, either in part or in full, in many high school literature classes and most college general education humanities courses. In this septicentennial year of the author’s passing, scholars have scheduled around the world scores of celebrations of his life and works. Attention notably has focused on the importance of reading his poetic masterpiece in its entirety.
Most who begin Dante’s long poem mistakenly limit their reading to the first part, which recounts how a Christian wayfarer named Dante descended to the bottom of Hell in order to recognize the true nature of sin and its consequences. These readers prefer to remain with the damned who have no hope of progression. Certainly Hell’s nine circles, each with an ingeniously appropriate “eye-for-an-eye” punishment (known as a contrappasso) never fail to captivate readers. Undoubtedly Dante found it cathartic to portray his enemies, among others, as suffering various forms of painful punishment: sowers of discord who divided families are split open by a sword-wielding devil, barrators who trafficked in under-the-table deals are submerged in hot black tar, flatterers who spewed “b.s.” become literal “brown-nosers” besmirched with excrement, and so forth.
While it may prove satisfying for us to imagine our own political adversaries undergoing similar pains, anyone who wishes to profit the most from the wayfarer’s experiences should continue reading. On the mount of Purgatory the pilgrim becomes far more introspective and rids himself of bad habits and sinful tendencies. Having come to a realization of what unrepentant sin leads to, he accepts that to progress he must confess and eliminate his own faults and bad tendencies: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, glutton and lust.
To move beyond the easy path of criticizing others’ mistakes, sentient readers are led to ponder, “What is my role in this chaos, conflict or war of words? Is my own pridefulness or enviousness partially at fault or even completely to blame? Am I too quick to anger, too lazy to take an active role in solving problems or too greedy to share of my own abundance to aid others?” The person who most benefits from the pilgrim’s experiences must embrace the virtues that oppose the Seven Deadly Sins, traits such as humility, altruism, forgiveness, active engagement in problem-solving, generosity and brotherly love.
In Paradise, the humbled pilgrim, freed from sin, speeds through the heavens to experience a vision of God that qualifies him to become a Christian poet and share a message of warning and hope with a deeply troubled world. He gains a perspective divorced from mundane preoccupations. From the heavens, he looks down on the distant planet earth and discerns the pettiness of most disagreements; simultaneously he realizes how blessed are those who eschew their own follies and focus on ameliorating the lot of others.
To follow Dante’s example, we must read widely and be open to more than one news source or a single viewpoint.
The final part of Dante’s poem spurs the reader to see things sub specie aeternitatis, the Latin phrase the philosopher Spinoza later used to describe looking at things from a long-term (eternal) perspective. The person who wishes to overcome all obstacles will keep eyes focused on the summum bonum, the highest good, and prioritize accordingly.
Many of us who face the start of 2021 are experiencing political and personal crises analogous to what Dante confronted seven centuries earlier. Families are split according to political alliances. Homes are being lost to foreclosures. More walls are going up than doors are being opened. Pride leads us to blame others rather than accept any personal responsibility. We prefer to react rather than act in ways that lead to positive, forward motion. Dante’s epic, if read to the end, teaches that there is a better and more hopeful way.
To follow Dante’s example, we must read widely and be open to more than one news source or a single viewpoint. We must recognize how breaking the law, whether God’s or man’s, easily leads to corruption, no matter how smart or rich the person is. We must take responsibility for our own actions, acknowledge when we are wrong, and engage in honest efforts to make amends. We must adopt long-term views and prioritize what matters most. Dante would argue that only then can one find the wisdom and the fortitude to endure to the end.
The poet calls his work a comedy because it starts on an unhappy note, with the wayfarer lost in the dark wood of error, but ends happily, with a vision of the good, the beautiful and the true. If we wish to create our own happy ending, we would do well to follow a trajectory parallel to Dante’s. We must embrace better choices, accept responsibility for when we are in the wrong, adopt positive traits and ennobling qualities, modify or change our course of action for the betterment of ourselves and others, and assume wherever possible a longer term and more informed view when problems present themselves.
We may feel at times that we are living in a Hell parallel to Dante’s, but we need not take up permanent residence.
Madison U. Sowell, professor emeritus of Italian and comparative literature at Brigham Young University and former provost at Southern Virginia University and Tusculum University, has lectured and written extensively about Dante and the Italian epic tradition.