Undead Scribe

Dante's Divine Comedy: A Video Review

Dante Alighieri, commonly referred to as simply Dante, is the author of the text known as “The Divine Comedy”. The text is as famous as it is influential, the “Divine Comedy” serving to shape the way people would write literature. Not only that, it also altered how Western society viewed the Christian afterlife, or at the very least, the Christian view of Hell.

The video, “Gnosis-Dante’s Divine Comedy, Interpretations”, performs an in-depth analysis on the Divine Comedy itself, discussing exactly how Dante created his masterpiece and what could possibly have influenced his work. The piece itself, as mentioned in the video, is the greatest epic poem created during the middle ages and was originally known as just “The Comedy”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the piece was intended to be funny or light-hearted as one would expect, neither does Dante try all that hard to evoke any humorous reactions with his writing, A comedy, during that time, meant a work in which the protagonist moves from a less pleasant position in life to a much more pleasant one. Essentially, a comedy is any piece with a happy ending, interestingly enough.

“The Divine Comedy” was written in Italian, and starred Dante himself as the main character. Drawing on his own experiences, Dante wrote a journey that can be defined as a classic comedy, a tale in which he, as a protagonist, takes us on a path through “despair, revelation, repentance”, and finally, towards, “ultimate salvation (Panameno, 2013)”. Dante’s work would also go on to influence multiple artists and their own works, with his specific vision of paradise and hell, especially. The video discussed how the French engraver Gustave Dore borrowed heavily from Dante’s “Divine Comedy”.

Dante himself was born in the 13th century, specifically 1265 A.D., in Florence, an Italian city-state. Even though his family was not wealthy per se, they had lived in Florence for several generations and were well-established enough to provide him a good education. He learned about classical literature from a master teacher and studied at the University of Bologna and was already writing sonnets at the age of eighteen. During this time, it was mentioned that he met a girl named Beatrice, whom he fell in love with at the age of nine when she herself was eight. However, he could never marry her as they both were betrothed to different people. Beatrice was said to have influenced his early poems and was in fact the inspiration and motivation for his “Divine Comedy.”

As he grew, Dante would go on to fight as a cavalryman in Florence’s defense forces, during the period in which the German Emperor’s forces attempted to attack. Gaining political influence as he aged, he became an ardent supporter of Florence’s independence. In fact, his influence had grown to the point that, in 1301, Dante was sent to Rome as an ambassador to negotiate with the Pope for the freedom of his city-state.

However, it was at this point that a rival faction in Florence seized power and accused him of corruption, trying him in his absence and sentencing him to be burnt at the stake. Aware of this, Dante never returned to his beloved home city, spending the last twenty years of his life as a man in exile in other cities in Italy. It could be said that this betrayal of sorts is what inspired to create his “Divine Comedy.”

It was after four years of his exile that Dante began to pen his divine comedy, starting in his early forties. The “Divine Comedy” itself would be divided into three parts; the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradisio. Simply, that can easily be understood as the three portions of the Catholic Afterlife. The “Inferno” today remains the most well-known portion of Dante’s Divine comedy, particularly for it’s description and perception of Hell itself. This description is what has influenced so many parts of Western culture and understanding of the punishment that one can expect in that afterlife. While the Paradisio is rather static as it is a happy ending, Purgatorio is essentially slow and boring, the Inferno is dynamic and energetic, grabbing your attention with ridiculousness.

The most violent and crude of the three parts, Dante essentially used this portion of his epic poem to insult everyone he didn’t like and those who he felt wronged him. Dante also defined the famous “Nine Circles of Hell” in his Inferno; Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery. His epic poem is Dante’s attempt at explaining the world and afterlife entirely based around his personal understanding of the Christianity of the thirteenth century. It also portrays just how unforgiving Christianity, Catholicism especially, can often be, placing so many in eternal punishment and denying so many from Paradise for extremely petty reasons. The fact that this is written from Dante’s perspective, an imperfect man, and yet, this doesn’t seem too far what many expect Hell to be, shows how strange that is. Yet, The Divine Comedy, for all the talk about its loftiness, was written simply because of how much Dante loved Beatrice, a girl he never got to marry.

It is important to note that in the Divine Comedy, Dante did not refrain from being highly political, going after senators and people he personally disliked. It could be considered the equivalent of writing a scathing article or a comedy show mocking hypocritical politicians. One can’t say that this was unsurprising, when one considered how influential and engaged in politics Alighieri was. Some could say that it was petty, placing the people he didn’t like in Hell to suffer the inferno and all those he did in Heaven, to enjoy paradise.

However, The Divine Comedy was based off Dante’s understanding of Christianity and why wouldn’t that influence his choices? Would his own bias not inure him to the idea that those who he viewed as bad deserved Hell and those who he had fond thoughts of earning Heaven? In a sense, Dante had placed himself as God, using his own understanding of Christianity to assign people to their eternal resting place using his own judgement. Yet, despite its lofty reaching, we must keep in mind the origins; a story a man writes simply for the love he never got to have.

Works Cited

Panameno, R. (2013, April 2). Gnosis - Dante,The Divine Comedy Interpretations. Retrieved from YouTube:

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