Search results :

Like Virgil, I must now fall silent. Here are Dante’s last written words, leading up to the beatific vision that ends his Comedy:

Beatrice appears more beautiful than ever as she nears the end of her ‘special relationship’ with Dante. Doing her bidding one last time, he bathes his eyes in a river of light to free his vision from the last vestiges of earthly defects. Born a Florentine girl and now among the redeemed in paradise, Beatrice […]

Mystics often describe their relationship with God as a love affair. Dante’s is full of joy, even ecstasy, but he also gets angry with God – a less acceptable emotion that is harder to deal with. In Paradiso 27 we see the poet moving from one extreme to the other, then turning to Beatrice for […]

Dante’s “earthrise” moment is entirely imagined – no astronaut’s photos were available in 1320. Its emotional impact is no less powerful for that. As we leave Saturn, the most remote of the planets, to enter the heaven of the fixed stars, Beatrice addresses him: In the array of the seven planets, each sphere enclosing another […]

In the sphere of Saturn Dante meets a kindred spirit, Peter Damian, who leaves him in no doubt about the limits to human knowledge. Saturn is the outermost of the seven planets, the coldest and most remote from earth. This is the heaven of the mystics – those who, on earth, led a contemplative life […]

In the sphere of Mars, spiritual home of the courageous, Dante meets his great-great grandfather, Cacciaguida degli Elisei, who predicts the poet’s exile from his beloved Florence. A 12th century nobleman who fought in the second crusade and died a martyr in the Holy Land, Cacciaguida speaks of a Florence long vanished, a city “sober […]

Dante and Beatrice emerge from the earth’s shadow into a new clarity and brightness in the heaven of the Sun. This is the light by which the wise know God. The poet invites us to join him in celebrating the order we see in the created world, which gives a direct taste of its Creator: […]

The souls in the heaven of Venus enjoy spiritual telepathy – wordless communication made possible by their participation in each other’s minds through the all-knowing mind of God. Dante invents new verb forms to convey their ecstatic mingling of identities. Venus is the third and last heaven on which the earth casts a shadow. Here […]

The opening cantos of Paradiso contain an extended and complex argument about how we gain new knowledge and how we can trust what we perceive. The challenge, for Dante, is to understand that spiritual reality works differently to the physical world he is leaving behind him. Dante begins Canto 2 with a challenge to his […]

Here’s how Dante begins his Paradiso – not with himself, as in his previous two canticas, but with God: This third and final phase of Dante’s journey begins in the relative world – the world of more or less, of hierarchy, of the many not the One, of the universe as a separate physical entity. […]

Two streams from the same source flow through the verdant earthly paradise. Dante must get a dunking in both of them before he is ready to ascend to the stars. After his evisceration at the hands of Beatrice, Matilda brings Dante to Lethe, the stream of forgetfulness, which purges him of all his shameful memories: […]

It’s the moment Dante’s been waiting for! He is to meet Beatrice again, after more than 20 years of separation. We might expect a joyous reunion, but that’s not at all what we get. We left Dante relaxing amidst the grass, flowers and trees of the earthly paradise, beside the stream of Lethe. A woman, […]

Reason can only take you so far. At the summit of purgatory Virgil reaches the limits of his knowledge. His task done, he crowns Dante master of himself, ushers him into the earthly paradise, watches in silence for a while, then turns for home in limbo. The wall of fire that purges the soul of […]

Bird similes abound throughout the Comedy. I find this one, in which Dante compares himself to a fledgling stork, delightful: Ostensibly, Dante is making a play for our sympathy here by presenting himself as young and eager for knowledge yet hesitant to ask a question, doubtless out of reverence for the older and wiser Virgil. […]

Except for the good pagan poets found in limbo, Dante places all the poets in his Comedy among the saved, most of them high on the slopes of purgatory. Poets have a high calling in life and this is reflected in their fate after death. Dante is keenly aware of the poet’s mission as prophet: […]

Virgil’s great exposition on love is centrally placed in the Comedy, occupying Cantos 17 and 18 of Purgatorio. With this, Dante signals that love, and the understanding of love, are at the heart of his poetic matter. Doctrinally, the ideas Dante attributes to Virgil are standard-issue medieval philosophy, derived from the teachings of Aristotle and […]

Life’s not a zero-sum game, say the souls on the terrace of envy, so don’t live it that way. Dante doesn’t ‘get it’ at first, but Virgil explains. We have just met Guido del Duca, scion of one of the leading families of Romagna, the region next-door to Tuscany, where Dante comes from. Like all […]

The Divine Comedy is primarily a vision. It is the story of how one man, through grace, becomes pure in heart and hence able to see God. During his first night on the mountain, Dante’s damaged inner sight is cleansed and healed in preparation for the work of penitence that awaits him in purgatory proper. […]

Like the penitent souls, the poets cannot climb once the sun has gone down and so must halt for the night. The twilight hour draws from Dante some of his loveliest lines: These lines are recalled every evening at the tomb of Dante in Ravenna, where the bell of the nearby church chimes 13 times […]

The first canto of Purgatorio celebrates our release from the pain and grief of hell. Virgil washes Dante’s face in the morning dew. Dante begins by announcing the change of mood: Boats and ships feature strongly in the Comedy, as symbols of the soul’s journey towards the divine. Here Dante is at the helm, his […]

We are out of hell, but still close to the centre of the earth and it is still dark. Through the blackness, Dante can hear the trickling of a stream: The hidden passage that connects Inferno and Purgatorio is one of Dante’s masterstrokes, entirely his own invention. It conveys the idea that there is, after […]

In the final canto of the Inferno Dante must confront Satan, where he lies trapped in ice at the centre of the material world and the universe. The deepest part of hell, the ninth circle, is Cocytus, a frozen lake shrouded in thick fog and blasted by icy winds. It is fitting that this place […]

Ulysses is the greatest of the Inferno’s tragic heroes. Dante’s invented story of his last voyage is about leaders who lie.   We are among the false councillors, in the eighth ditch of the Malebolge in Circle 8, the first circle of the fraudulent, close to the lowest depths of hell. These gifted people, often […]

There are moments in the Comedy when Dante burns with righteous anger. One of them is his encounter with the simoniac popes. Strictly defined, simony is the buying or selling of spiritual gifts, offices or artefacts. A form of corruption, it’s named after Simon Magus, a first-century sorcerer who is said to have asked the […]

On burning sands, under a soft rain of flames, Dante meets his former mentor, Brunetto Latini. His “sin” is homosexuality, according to the dictates of formal religion. But what does Dante think? We are in the circle of the violent against God, nature and art. The naked souls here, whose baked features are caked with […]

Suicide is the ultimate form of self-harm. In Inferno 13, Dante forges a new language of pain and despair to evoke the tortured minds of those who choose this ending. At the start of the canto we return to the landscape of the poem’s prologue, finding ourselves, again, in a pathless wood – not coincidentally, […]

Among the carnal sinners in the second circle of hell, we meet Paolo and Francesca. Of all the stories in the Inferno, theirs is perhaps the one that most invites our empathy: which of us has not been where they are? Dante’s scene-setting is a powerful example of contrapasso ­– the idea that the punishment […]

No sooner are the poets through the gate than the full force of hell hits Dante: I so admire this passage! In a few deft strokes Dante evokes the overwhelming cacophony of sounds that is his first impression of hell. Sounds not sights, for he can see little in the dim light where no stars […]

Led by Virgil, Dante sets out on his journey. At the entrance to hell he sees these words inscribed over a dark gateway: The famous line here is the last, wryly quoted today in many a workplace and home. The absence of hope is the defining feature of hell, as anyone stuck in a dead-end […]

Reason, sweet reason! How we – or some of us, at least – long for you in the age of Brexit, Trumpism and other mass delusions. As in our time, so in Dante’s. At the end of my first tasting note we left Dante confused and terrified, alone in the “dark wood” of his erring […]