Danate Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was the greatest of the poets of Christendom. He was deeply involved in Florentine politics, and walked the city’s streets when its finest monuments were under construction. His literary and visionary powers are unsurpassed. As a youth, he had charged in the front ranks at Campaldino. He served as one of the municipal priors in the regime of the White Guelphs, only to be banished for life by the Blacks. Embittered by twenty years in exile, he died in Ravenna at the court of Can Grande de Polenta, who placed the laurel wreath on his fading brow. His Vita Nuova (The New Life) makes a rare medieval excursion into a man’s internal emotions. His De Monarchia (On Monarchy) makes an impassioned plea for restoration of imperial rule. In De Vulgaris Eloquentia, his reasoned advocacy of the vernacular makes him the father of modern European literature.

Dante’s masterwork, the Commedia, a poem of 100 cantos, acquired the epithet of ‘Divine’ from its admiring readers. It described the poet’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife – through the Pit of Hell in the Inferno, the Mount of Expiation in the Purgatorio, and the sunlit Circles of Heaven in the Paradiso. At one level like the Odyssey or the Aeneid, it is a voyage of fictional adventure, where Virgil is Dante’s initial guide, and where the convincing setting is created for meeting the shades of people past and present. At another level it is an extended allegory of the spiritual journey of a Christian soul from sin to salvation, rewarded by a blinding vision of God. At yet another level is an elaborate exercise in moral architecture, whose teeming inhabitants are precisely located according to their vices and virtues among the Damned, the Hopeful, or the Blessed. The language dazzles by its beautiful economy. The tales enrapture both by the quaint detail of the poet’s encounters any by the grandeur of the moral landscape in which they occur. Appropriately, the lowest point of human experience is to be found where all Love is lost – in the icy infernal depths round the frozen figure of Judas. The Earthly Paradise is reached beyond the Primum Mobile, in the heart of the heavenly Rose of Light, in ecstasy too intense for words. This is the source of ‘the Love that moves the Sun and other stars’, ‘L’amore che move il sole e l’altre stelle’. Excerpt: Page 400 (Europe – A history)

VISION OF HELL books.google.com/books?id=T94wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PR3&source=gb_mobile_entity&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&gl=US#v=onepage&q&f=false