Well friends Dante in 100 days a hundred
cantos we're embarked on a wonderful journey a trip through the greatest of all christian epics Dante's divine comedy. If we read and heed this
epic well, it will change our lives, but first of all there's just a few data there are a few things
that we need to know Dante's dates are 1265-1321. He was a native of Florence an important cultural
and political city during the middle ages yet Dante was struck with tragedy fairly
early in his life. It occurred in 1302 when dante was exiled from his high public office
in florence on trumped-up charges of corruption he was never allowed to return. We can't really
fathom what that meant to Dante. For Dante he had been stripped of his identity you were your
city and if i were exiled from houston I wouldn't mine very much i'd be glad! Not in the middle
ages you were your community. He died in 1321 he's buried in ravenna the seacoast italian city
and yet in a paradoxical way we can be grateful for Dant's exile. For it was during these
years that he wrote the divine comedy from probably 1308 to 1320. Dante would become
eventually a married man with three children, yet his poetic inspiration came a good deal
earlier it came through his personal vision of a young woman who embodied something
transcendent in herself: evident beauty and goodness. She was a
Florentine damsel named Beatrice Putinari remember that name Beatrice and
pronounce it that way, it happens also to be the word that means blessed. He saw her
actually only three times in his whole life first when he was only nine years old
imagine and she was only eight. Again nine years later when they exchanged greetings
in the street he would have been 18, she 17. And then finally a few years later
when she met him in the street and she mocked him for this excessive
attention he was given to her but dante was not deterred he remained convinced
that he had discerned an eternal beauty and goodness that lies beyond mere human sight it
called him to order his loves to the love of god and therefore to enable us as we read his great
book to do the same. Beatrice therefore remains the central figure of the entire divine comedy
now Dante did something really quite daring. He constructed this epic poem not
in the grand latin of virgil's aeneid but in the ordinary speech of cultivated
italians, florentines specifically, and therefore this was to be a colloquial epic an unheard
of thing and yet he would seek to account for the existence of the entire cosmos the
whole universe in the language of the people Italian. More startling still, he called this
book the divine comedy he called it truth of the comedy the divine was lighted later because
for people in the middle ages stories that begin in darkness and sorrow and sadness but
end in gladness and hope and victory are a far off echo of the gospel itself so the
word comedy does not have anything to do with guffaws, belly laughs, side splitting humor.
There's some humor in Dante but it's very sly it means instead that while tragedies close
down to death often noble deaths comedy becomes a Christian form that opens up the new life and
that's the word of course for the gospel good news so Dante did something even more daring than that:
he decided to include contemporary florentines in his epic: people who were known on the
streets and in the city of Florence and throughout the whole of Italy. So if you
can imagine Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in an epic poem of our time that strikes
us as ludicrous but Dante brings it off. So we encounter people who were still alive
in his own time many of them already in hell where maybe those two belong i don't know
so for example the corrupt Boniface VIII is in hell Dante's beloved teacher Brunetto Latini
is in hell though they're both still living but in making his epic poem something as engaging
and direct and down to earth as he could, he did not neglect form, structure,
patterns. The best way to read the divine comedy is to think about a medieval
cathedral: it has a magnificence of symmetry and that symmetry depends upon the
trinitarian number three God is three and one and one in three so what do we get in Dante
three books each of them have 33 cantos plus this one introductory canto making a total of
100 and 100 was thought to be the perfect number 10 times 10. He does one other thing
that i would like to bring out that is he deepens and dignifies the poem by
his use of what's called an epic simile. An epic simile is a long careful
comparison of one thing with another, so as to help us not simply stay on the
surface of life reading things just literally, but to see their great depth. So here's the
first one it appears it appears in the first page and that is he's had this awful, awful dream that
he awakens from (he awakens by the way on march 25 the year 1300 good Friday the day of
our Lord's own descent into hell), he knows he's just barely escaped with the
hope of getting out of that terrible plight. So listen: "as a man with labor
breathing drags his legs out of the water and ashore fixes his eyes upon the dangerous sea so to my mind while still a fugitive
turned back to gaze again upon that past which never let a man escape alive." And
that pass of course is the pass into hell. But you see Dante just said well i got a guy
by jam he says with that epic assembly he's elevating he's dignifying he's showing this is
something of cosmic transcendent significance. He does that throughout so look out for the
epic similes everywhere to be found in Dante. One final word about matters of fact: be
sure to distinguish between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim. Dante the poet is
the author of the entire great grand work whereas he also impersonates himself as Dante the
pilgrim. So when our narrative is not spoken it's always Dante the poet, but when it is spoken
it's Dante himself the pilgrim and of course we're one of those as well. We are embarking
then, on a trip to the depths of hell up to the mountain of purgatory finally into paradise
itself. Look at the very first line remarkable: "midway upon the journey of our
life i found myself in a dark wilderness for i had wandered from
the straight and the true." Notice it's midway this story begins on Good
Friday of the year 1300 the trinitarian year. Dante is 35; in that year he's halfway
to the biblically allotted seventy. And at the same time he universalized
it in a big way in our journey I found myself so this poem is once
universal and very direct and particular. He summons us to be his fellow
pilgrims along this way. It's important to note that
for Dante we will not discover truth goodness happiness beauty
until we know we have lost it. And therefore Dante must discover the extent of
which his life is damned before he can come up out of the entrapments that cage that he is himself
caught in. And so for Dante so we must as well plumb the depths of hell with him so
that we can go up to happier things at the end. Now Dante has to get past however this
awful she-wolf she's called and she is a symbol of greed avarice and obsessive desire for more and
more. Dante believed that greed damns more people than any other sin among all the sin. Not
the worst sin, but numerically it damns most and Dante can't get past her. He himself
knows he's greedy he's got to get around her and there's no way around. When suddenly
there appears this shadowy figure whom Dante can't identify. He looks and says
"who's that" and so Virgil has to identify himself saying "I'm not a living man but a shade from
the underworld" because Virgil has depicted that underworld in the aeneid he knows what that
dismal world is like and therefore he can lead Dante down into it. And Dante is just overjoyed
overwhelmed at the prospect of having Virgil - Virgil! - as his guide. At this point we
might ask ourselves who are our guides in our time? Who are leading us out of the abyss?
So the first thing Virgil does is to call for an all-out attack on this pervasive
greed that's consuming all of Italy. And he thus prophesies the coming of the
greyhound. Who in the world is the greyhound? Well probably something pretty obvious! Con grande
is the Italian for big dog and he had been Dante's host and he was a prominent figure in his time
he hoped that a figure like khan grande, could come and rip out with his fierce denunciations
the terrible greed pervading all of Italy. Here's a crucial point we'll discover
throughout the comedy for Dante: salvation in the religious world is inseparable
from uprightness in the political realm. Without fair and just government the people's
moral and religious life will be compromised. Our time rings loud this means also that
for Dante life is profoundly communal: we don't live as isolators to ourselves.
We are webbed together in an inextricable life with others it was so for
Dante. We often think that we live as self-made creatures not for Dante. We live
and move and have our being only among others. now though this Virgil never knew the true god
this doesn't disqualify him to be Dante's guide. For his moral and religious wisdom is poetic
supreme poets like Virgil traffic in the concrete and the particular. While Virgil also
represents reason: reason can often get lost in very highfalutin abstractions that are
hard to understand and difficult to apply, not so with poetry. It deals with the
concrete the particular unlike these theoretical areas speculation new images sounds characters
events victories defeats that remain unforgettably alive in our imagination. They have the
permanent power to transform us. Dante therefore salutes Virgil with the highest
of all possible accolades: poeta! Poet! So let's follow them on this poetic
journey of unparalleled importance.
