Beyond Inferno: Why Dante’s Masterpiece is Worth a Complete Read
Dante’s Divine Comedy has been one of my favorite pieces of literature for years. I was excited to read it again for my Literature Humanities class freshman year. I was also looking forward to the class discussion on it, expecting that the theological ideas present in the book would provide great opportunities for me to be a gentle witness to my faith in Christ and that some of the philosophical claims Dante makes would generate interesting discussions and debates. However, when the time for the actual discussion came, that didn’t happen… not really. Of course people brought up the way Dante categorized sins, but they didn’t put much stock in the organization of the book other than pointing out the literary and artistic merit. Instead, the majority of people found themselves thinking of the book as primarily a political tract which used religious and classical symbolism to create an interesting fantasy mythology for Dante’s world.
At first, this take, and the almost unanimous agreement of my class, shocked me. It seemed obvious to me that the Comedy was, more than anything, a profound Christian reflection about living a life of faith and the nature of salvation. It seemed more akin to Pilgrim’s Progress than The Prince. However, there was one main difference between my experience of Dante’s work and that of the rest of the class: I had actually finished the book.
I don’t mean to say that the class hadn’t done the reading assigned to them. Instead, I realized the issue with only requiring students to read the first part of the Divine Comedy, namely, Inferno. While I was thinking of the book as a whole with three parts, the others, because they had only read the first third, thought of it as three distinct books in a series. The modern concept of a “Book Series” is a relatively new invention which came into current popularity mainly through the fantasy and science fiction series of the 1950s and 60s. There are older examples. John Milton, for example, followed Paradise Lost with (a much less popular) Paradise Regained, and recurring characters such as Sherlock Holmes popped up throughout 19th century popular fiction. However, even these are distinctly ‘modern’ works of literature. Dante was not writing an epic fantasy trilogy in 1321.
However, without reading the whole Comedy back to back as a complete, singular work, this is the mindset contemporary readers naturally fall into. By only requiring students to read Inferno, Columbia has unintentionally encouraged Lit-Hum students to view Dante’s masterpiece as a politically-edgy, Tolkien-esque trilogy. That’s not a slight to Tolkien, he is one of my favorite authors, but the Divine Comedy has little in common with a ‘Lord of the Rings’ type of narrative.
When read as a whole, Dante’s Comedy has an intricate, reoccuring layout which repeats in each third of the book. It is made up of three cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso), which detail Dante’s journey through the three spiritual realms. Each of the cantiche is divided into three sections, corresponding to a three layered structure in each of the three spiritual realms. Each of these sections is then made up of 11 cantos, adding up to a total of 33 per cantica across three cantiche, adding up to a total 99 cantos. There is an extra, introductory canto at the beginning of the book, bringing the total up to a 100 detailed, symbolically significant cantos. The entire story takes place on the day before Easter and on Easter itself, symbolically retelling the story of salvation by the turn of day occurring exactly when Dante crosses from Inferno to Purgatorio, from judgement to salvation and entrance into sanctification.
When the book is read as a whole, this detailed structure creates a sense of order and meaning. One is able to get a sense of what the Divine Comedy is and what its focus is on: not a treatise relying on the horrors of hell for shock factor, but a beautiful theological narrative synthesizing numerous cultural threads. Many of my classmates were inclined to read Inferno as a political work against Dante’s enemies. Dante was involved with an intense and violent political struggle which marked Florence throughout most of his life. He had even recently been exiled at the time of writing the Comedy when a rival party came into power.1 When reading Inferno in isolation and realizing that Dante puts many of his enemies in hell, it's tempting to read the work as a personal insult to his adversaries. However, a closer reading shows that Dante puts both adversaries and close friends in all levels of the Comedy, from the depths of hell to the heights of paradise. Indeed, as the book progresses, political tensions and arguments become less and less common. By the time Dante reaches Paradiso, they are completely irrelevant to the larger plot.
The political aspects of the work become a way to tie its mythology to the real world as it existed for Dante and his contemporaries, but they only play a small role in the larger tapestry of the work. Similarly, the mythological and ancient Greek figures present in the work aren’t meant to create a consistent, fantasy world-building, but rather to allow Dante to perform an Aquinas-style synthesis of secular and sacred wisdom for his protagonist to learn from. However, read any third of the work independently and you lose an understanding of what the Comedy actually is.
What then is the Divine Comedy? We have said that it is not a trilogy of independent books, a simple political treatise, or a work reliant on a grotesque shock-factor to attract attention. If reading Inferno alone leaves one to one miss out on the true nature of the Comedy, what is that nature, and why is it worth a read?
In truth, it's hard to give a succinct answer to that very natural question. Columbia University’s own Edward Mendelson has coined the Divine Comedy an “encyclopedic novel” alongside other works such as Don Quixote, Faust, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and Gravity's Rainbow.2 The formal definition Professor Mendelson uses for an “encyclopedic novel” is a novel which “attempt[s] to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge”.3 In simpler terms, an “encyclopedic novel” like the Comedy contains a worldview. And, because it attempts to layout a worldview in all of its complexity and depth rather than ‘make a point’ or send a singular ‘message’, it's impossible to nail down a single ‘thing’ which the Comedy is or a single reason why one should read it.
That said, I would like to highlight two key aspects of the Comedy, two individual threads in the worldview-tapestry which it creates, that I think are valuable. The first of these is its all-permeating theology of love. From beginning to end, love is the key principle on which all of Dante’s theological-philosophical beliefs, plot motivations, and relationships hang. At the very center of Purgatorio, the very center cantica, Virgil lays out for Dante a complex theology about the nature of love. For Dante, love is not a vague, mystic force. It is not a feeling which gives meaning to a meaningless life. At its core, love is desire, and everybody pursues those things which they love.
If I love ice cream or travel or friendship, those things will inevitably be the things that I pursue. If I love a person, I do something similar, I pursue them in relational terms, and, to paraphrase Aristotle, I desire their well being.4 However, we are complicated and broken people, and love manifests in harmful ways as well. If I act selfishly and steal or cheat or lie or ignore those I care about, all those things are done out of love as well. However, they were done out of love for money or pride or my own comfort. I will have exercised those loves over my love for other people and, even more significantly, over my love for God.
When Dante paints his symbolic mythology of heaven and hell, he uses Augustine’s definition of virtue and vice: love either “rightly ordered” or in “disorder”.5 We see that those in hell have ‘disordered’ love. They love money, violence, or themselves more than God, and they are categorized in hell relative to their own disorder. In an even more profound turn, some of those in hell love good things. Most of the characters in the circle of hell reserved for the lustful did not have a wrong love; we even encounter a couple whose romance has admirable qualities. However, they loved another person more than they loved God and chose to do things their own way. Hell is the place of disordered loves, good and bad, which, in some form or another, Dante believes is the heart of all vice.
In contrast, in Paradiso all individuals have their loves rightly ordered. They love each other and music and Dante as a guest among them. However, they all have been completely sanctified. Now, made to perfectly represent the image of their Creator, they worship God in spirit and truth, moving towards him and pursuing him first and foremost. And, though they have reached God, they pursue him still. Love is movement after all. Rather, they move around the throne room of God, dancing with the heavenly bodies in worship of the Trinity.
The second reason why reading the Divine Comedy as a whole is valuable is the unique Christian struggle presented throughout the story. Dante (as the protagonist), goes through a love-based journey through the book. In the introductory canto, Dante is not yet in hell. We learn that he is in danger, but his loves, as of yet, aren’t disordered. He is not prey to vice or struggling with a particular sin. Instead, we find him in the ‘woods of despair’. Here, Dante faces a different struggle common to the Christian life: apathy. Dante, at the beginning of the novel, is a Christian who has ‘lost his way’ and his strength to climb back to the path which God has set before him. He does not have a love drawing him away from God, he simply does not love enough. He doesn’t love God enough to pursue him, to follow after him, to desire him first and foremost above all things. Midway through his life’s journey, he finds himself at a stalemate.
And so, out of God’s love (symbolized by Beatrice) he is sent help: Virgil, the embodiment of reason and learning. Reason and learning aren’t the answer to Dante’s problem, but they serve as an aid in the journey which Dante must take to relearn love of God. That journey is the Divine Comedy. We as readers, whether we are in a state of apathy or simply needing a small reminder, are allowed to journey with Dante to remember what God has done for us and is doing for us through the death and resurrection of his son. We see the depravity of Man without God in Inferno and learn to see mankind’s need for a savior. We cross into Purgatorio on Easter morning and, by God’s grace, see the joy and work of sanctification, following Christ up the mountain and into Paradiso. There, surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and heavenly hosts, we worship with Dante around the throne of God.
If we only dwell on the depravity of ‘Man without God’ presented in Inferno, we miss out on the hope and joy and thoughtful reflection which the Comedy is meant to induce in its readers. So, if at some point “midway upon the journey of this our life” you, like Dante find yourself “within a dark forest” and it seems that the “path straight ahead has been lost”, perhaps find encouragement in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso: three parts, one journey, one book. I prefer the John Ciardi translation. Happy reading.
1 Moore, Malcolm (June 17, 2008). "Dante's infernal crimes forgiven". The Daily Telegraph.
2 Mendelson, Edward. “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon.” MLN 91, no. 6 (1976): 1267–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/2907136. 1267
3 Ibid, 1269
4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII 2.
5Augustine, City of God, XV.23
Silas Link is a third year undergraduate at Columbia College pursuing a degree in English and Medieval & Renaissance Studies. When not studying, he enjoys reading, hiking, and exploring New York City.