Ah, Dante, the Medieval Italian Poet who told
several popes to go to Hell, and then followed through with a detailed description of their
fiery eternal torment. Gee, that makes even Martin Luther sound pretty
tame. When he isn’t pining over his long-lost
love Beatrice or hanging on every word from his Roman Senpai and afterlife travel-guide
Virgil, Dante was starting the cultural and philosophical trends that would culminate
in the Florentine Renaissance one century later. But there’s a lot more to Dante Alighieri
than literary fangirling and uncomfortably graphic depictions of never-ending hellish
torture. Dante’s work is both an extremely detailed
historical analysis of the problems with his contemporary society, and an innovation in
worldbuilding that draws from millennia of religious precedent. So, to peer behind the hellfire and figure
out How Dante went about creating one of the most transformative works in all of literature,
as well as why he wrote the Divine Comedy in the first place, Let’s do some History. So let’s start at the beginning. Dante was born in the Italian republic of
Florence in 1265, in the midst of a multicentury power-struggle between the Pope and the Holy
Roman Emperor. In theory, the Holy Roman Empire was one big
state governed by an emperor and spiritually ruled by the Pope, but in practice, the emperor’s
control over the many states in the HRE was touchy at best, and the Popes often got grabby
with lands of their Italian neighbors. So rather than working neatly as a team, they
played more like schoolyard rivals. By Dante’s time, Florence was one of many
Italian cities split between sympathies to the Emperor and to the Pope. One faction would gain the upper hand and
exile their enemies, those exiles would grab some spears and take revenge, rinse and repeat
for 200 years. Gotta love medieval politics. But a 24-year-old Dante helped kick the Ghibellines
out of Florence for good by fighting in the battle of Campaldino in 1289. Now this was all well and fine while the Pope
was chill, but before too long, Saint Peter’s throne was filled by none other than Pope
Boniface VIII, whom you might remember for maybe probably murdering his predecessor Celestine
V during the first Pope Fights video. Yeah, this guy. Some Florentines weren’t huge fans of Boniface
on account of how eager he was to glomp onto his surrounding territories and spread his
political influence, also, y’know, throwing the last pope in jail and leaving him to die. That probably factored into people’s approval
of this guy. So part of the Guelph faction split from the
pack to tell Boniface to beat it, while many remained firmly committed to the Pope, regardless
of his belligerent and skeezball-y qualities. It’s at this politically fragmented time
that Dante first jumped into the city’s politics. Given Dante isn’t widely remembered for
a long career in the Florentine civil service, you might be able to guess where this is going. Dante was a Guelph like his father, but soon
schism time came and he needed to side with the Neri or the Bianchi. As context clues might have implied — Dante
sided against Boniface. As a member of the Apothecaries guild, he
had the privilege of serving in the governing Signoria. This was cool until it very swiftly wasn’t,
because in 1301 the Pope scheduled Florence for an appointment with an invading French
Army. Boniface had sent the King of France’s brother
to Tuscany as a nominal peacemaker, but the suspiciously large size of his army left many
Florentines a little antsy. So Florence sent a delegation to Rome to figure
out what exactly was going on. But while Dante and friends were out doing
diplomacy, the French stormed Florence, sacked the city, and installed a new government full
of Black Guelphs. Dante only learned what had happened while
he was on his way back to Florence. Adding to his shock, any White Guelphs who
weren’t killed in the sack were sentenced to exile, which has to make this the absolute
worst business trip in history. Dante spent the rest of his life hopping from
town to town across northern Italy, and in 1321 he died in Ravenna. Now of course, Dante wasn’t just faffing
about with his 2 decades in exile, he was far too angry to let this go. Whereas Machiavelli tried to play it clever
and win himself back into good political graces after getting exiled from Florence, Dante
had no filter whatsoever, and doubled-down on how much he hated the current state of
the Papacy. And what better way to express your discontent
with ecclesiastical governance and vent your frustration with an unfair exile than to literally
throw the pope himself into the fiery pits of Hell? So Dante ran with that feeling and proceeded
to spend most of his exile composing The Divine Comedy, a 3-part epic poem that uses a journey
through the Christian afterlife as an allegory for coping with the psychological pain of
his exile. So we know why Dante put quill to parchment,
but before we go digging into the lore of his mytho-historical afterlife, we should
understand what kind of a writer Dante was. Let’s be real here you’ve all seen the
Classics Summarized series, I know, I know, but this is History-Makers, where I go into
extremely esoteric analysis of the political and literary context of famous historical
writers, you know, the first 15 minutes of the lecture nobody ever pays attention to. Yeah, That’s the quality content I’m here
to provide you. Hoof, anyway, Dante’s literary training
started back when he was in Florence hanging out with poets like Brunetto Latini and Guido
Cavalcanti, who were all about drawing from classical sources like Seneca, Cicero, and
Aristotle while breaking from the stuffy and worn-out style of Latin poems. Dante’s first forays into poetry were inspired
by the love of his life, a Florentine lady named Beatrice Portinari. Now, Dante first met Beatrice when they were
nine, saw her once again when he was 18, aaaaand that’s pretty much it. If you ask me that’s a little… sparse,
so I’m not gonna ponder the implications of that one for too long and generously file
it under Childhood Crush. I mean, Dante had a wife, but you wouldn’t
know it by reading his poetry. In 1294, Dante published La Vita Nuova, a
collection of poems and prose commentary on his “relationship” with Beatrice, from
their first meeting to Dante’s grief after her death in 1290. The core theme at work here is the idea that
romantic love serves as a gateway to divine love. This notion matures during the early years
of his exile, when earthly pleasures are understandably a little harder to come by, and his Convivio
tracks Dante’s substitution of physical lust for his devotion to Lady Philosophy. I’d ask why Philosophy has to be a damsel
in this allegory but hey it’s better than nothing. Though Beatrice wasn’t out of the picture
for long, despite her being dead and also not Dante’s girlfriend, because her character
becomes basically the entire narrative impetus for The Divine Comedy. So let’s talk story composition — A protagonist
wants some goal, but there’s an obstacle in their path which they have to overcome. Here, Dante is after divine salvation, which
is represented by his love for Beatrice, but the pesky little roadblock here is this whole
Exile business. At its core, the Divine Comedy is a story
about overcoming the trauma of being exiled. You know the drill, Dante starts out in the
middle of some dark woods, Virgil shows up and tells him that the only way out is through
literal Hell but it’s okay because Beatrice is waiting for him on the other end, and it’s
off to the races. While the Inferno doesn’t have much in the
way of character development, as Dante really only starts growing as a character during
his cleansing on Mount Purgatory, the first book is steeped in the pain of exile and its
effects on his mental and spiritual wellbeing. And this is where Dante deviates from his
predecessors in the field of epic poetry. Homer and Virgil have scenes where “our
hero takes a quick hop into the underworld for an hour to schmooze with the dead”,
but Dante makes that jaunt the entire story. To Dante, the underworld isn’t something
that you can just pop into and out of, because the underworld, ie: death, IE: Exile, is a
much more permanent deal that he needed to come to terms with. But beyond Dante’s own personal whatever,
the real reason the Divine Comedy became such a hit was for its vivid depiction of Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven — eternal damnation has never been so scenic. See, from the time of Jesus through the middle
ages, the conception of the afterlife had been a little hazy. There are descriptions of paradise and the
kingdom of god spread throughout the New Testament, but this being The Bible, it’s a little
tricky to tell what’s literal and what’s figurative. Broadly speaking, Christian doctrine developed
from preexisting Jewish theology — so there’s a non-descript underworldly dead place referred
to interchangeably as Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol, and for those who are specifically
saved by God’s grace, they go to an otherworldly heavenly paradise. But it’s not super clear whether this jump
from death to heaven happens immediately, so some theologians figured that there might
be some sort of waiting room, meanwhile others hoped that there might be an opportunity to
clean up their morality even after death in the hopes of getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. In the late 1100s some theologians explored
the concept of a “Cleansing Fire,” a “Purgatorius Ignis,” that souls pass through to become
purified before entering Heaven. That’s definitely a start, but it’s still
not terribly specific, so Dante had a lot of room to play around — And in the process
of developing his conceptions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, he also single-handedly invents
the entire concept of worldbuilding. Dante’s afterlife is loaded with Greek mythological
characters, concepts, and even landmarks, plus some medieval astronomy for good measure,
and they’re all seamlessly incorporated into the Christian framework. This was a big deal. While Homer and Virgil’s epic poems took
place in a pre-existing mythological world that would have been familiar to their contemporary
audiences, Dante had single-handedly fashioned something completely new and unique, with
its own specialized geography, characters, and comprehensive narrative logic. The worlds he envisions are stunning, and
they’re packed full of figures from Christianity, Greek and Roman literature, and millennia
of History — any story that seamlessly drops Charon the Ferryman into the same underworld
as Satan is bridging some serious gaps — and one way or another, everything fits together
in the Divine Comedy. Dante didn’t need to go through every single
one of his 25 circles, terraces, and spheres in his purpose-built cosmos with pinpoint
detail, but when you’re trying to single-handedly flex on over 2,000 years of Western literature,
you’ve got to commit. Gosh, the father of world-building and the
OG self-insert fanfic, truly Dante was a genius ahead of his time. But for all his innovations, what did his
contemporaries think of all this hell-trotting, purgatory-climbing, heaven-flying shenaniganery? Well, Dante cast an extremely wide net of
potential readers by dropping Latin to write his epic in the vernacular Italian (Tuscan
Dialect to be more precise) and open up his work beyond the typical aristocratic audience. Readers from all over were so impressed with
Dante’s use of language that Italian (technically speaking it was Tuscan Dialect) became the
premier literary language in Europe for centuries. And of course, the more people read the Divine
Comedy, the more they heard his extremely sharp criticisms about the serial abuses of
power within the Papacy. You don’t give saint peter himself a whole
speech about how disappointed he is in the recent Popes without raising some eyebrows. In addition to accusations of simony and nepotism,
Dante argues that the political ambitions of the popes brings them into conflict with
their neighbors, and thus kind of contradicts their whole claim to being a universal and
non-partisan church. Unfortunately, the church had just relocated
to Avignon France, and soon enough we’re going to have a great schism on our hands,
so in the short term, a lot of Dante’s criticisms got brushed aside, but in 200 years, Martin
Luther would start singing a very similar tune to our Tuscan poet here. So, looking through Dante’s historical context
and the means by which he created his unique take on the Christian afterlife, I don’t
think it’s all too hot a take to say that Dante marked an extremely big break from all
the literature that came before him. In a tradition steeped in preexisting mythology,
Dante said “I’ll do it myself” and fleshed out every last detail of his own original
universe. And I mean that literally, Heaven is one giant
Space with a flowers sticking our of it. While Dante’s afterlife as written didn’t
make it into Catholic doctrine, he solidified the popular belief in A Purgatory between
death and heaven, and had a monumental impact on the aesthetic of Christian art through
the Renaissance and beyond. Though beliefs will vary by time and place
even within a single religion, modern Catholicism tends to view Hell and Purgatory more as conditions
of the soul in the absence of God rather than specific pits underground or mountains in
the middle of the ocean, and many Protestant groups dropped the concepts entirely. But regardless, I think we can all appreciate
Dante’s genius as a philosopher, as a historian, as a worldbuilder, and, quite literally, as
one Damn fine storyteller. Thank you so much for watching! Between Machiavelli, Florence, and now Dante,
I’ve been really spoiling myself the past month and a half, but hey, I had a busy year,
so merry Christmas to me. It’s been an incredible year working on
the channel and we’re so thankful that you chose to spend part of it with us. OSP some fantastic content planned for the
coming year that Red and I think you’ll love, We’ll see you then.
Me: but where’s Virgil?