According to the monk Gilarius, Dante began to write his poem in Latin. The first three verses were:
Ultima regna canam, fluido contermina mundo,
Spiritibus quae lata patent, quae praemia solvuut
Pro meritis cuicunque suis (data lege tonantis). -
"In dimidio dierum meorum vadam adportas infori." Vulgat. Biblia.
In the middle of the and. roads, i.e., at the 35th year of life, - the age that Dante in his Convito calls the pinnacle of human life. By all accounts, Dante was born in 1265: therefore, he was 35 years old in 1300; but, moreover, from the XXI Canto of Hell it is clear that Dante assumes the beginning of his journey in 1300, during the jubilee declared by Pope Boniface VIII, on Holy Week in good friday, - in the year when he turned 35 years old, although his poem was written much later; therefore, all incidents that happened later than this year are given as predictions.
Dark forest, according to the usual interpretation of almost all commentators, means human life in general, and in relation to the poet - his own life in particular, that is, a life full of delusions, overwhelmed by passions. Others, by the name of forest, mean the political state of Florence at that time (which Dante calls trista selva, Clean XIV, 64), and, combining all the symbols of this mystical song into one, give it political significance. For example: as Count Perticari (Apolog. di Dante. Vol. II, p. 2: fec. 38: 386 della Proposta) explains this song: in 1300, in the 35th year of his life, Dante, elected prior of Florence, was soon convinced of the troubles , intrigues and frenzies of parties, that the true path to the public good is lost, and that he himself is in dark forest disasters and exiles. When he tried to climb hills, the pinnacle of state happiness, he was presented with insurmountable obstacles from his native city (Leopard with a motley skin), pride and ambition French king Philip the Fair and his brother Charles of Valois (Leo) and the self-interest and ambitious plans of Pope Boniface VIII (She-wolf). Then, indulging in his poetic passion and placing all his hope in the military talents of Charlemagne, Lord of Verona ( Dog), he wrote his poem, where, with the assistance of spiritual contemplation (donna gentile) heavenly enlightenment (Luchia) and theology ( Beatrice), guided by reason, human wisdom, personified in poetry (Virgil), he goes through places of punishment, purification and reward, thus punishing vices, consoling and correcting weaknesses and rewarding virtue by immersion in the contemplation of the highest good. From this it is clear that the ultimate goal of the poem is to call a vicious nation, torn apart by strife, to political, moral and religious unity.
Dante escaped this life, full of passions and delusions, especially the discord of the party, into which he had to plunge as the ruler of Florence; but this life was so terrible that the memory of it again gives birth to horror in him.
In the original: “It (the forest) is so bitter that death is a little more painful.” – The eternally bitter world (Io mondo senia fine amaro) is hell (Paradise XVII. 112). “Just as material death destroys our earthly existence, so moral death deprives us of clear consciousness, the free manifestation of our will, and therefore moral death is slightly better than material death itself.” Streckfuss.
Dream means, on the one hand, human weakness, darkening of the inner light, lack of self-knowledge, in a word - sleep of the spirit; on the other hand, sleep is a transition to spiritual world(See Ada III, 136).
Hill, according to the explanation of most commentators, it means virtue, according to others, ascent to the highest good. In the original, Dante awakens at the foot of a hill; base of the hill- the beginning of salvation, that minute when a saving doubt arises in our soul, the fatal thought that the path along which we have followed until this moment is false.
The limits of the vale. The vale is a temporary area of life, which we usually call the vale of tears and disasters. From the XX Song of Hell, Art. 127–130, it is clear that in this vale the flickering of the month served as the poet’s guiding light. The month signifies the faint light of human wisdom. You save.
The planet that leads people on a straight path is the sun, which, according to the Ptolemaic system, belongs to the planets. The sun here has not only the meaning of a material luminary, but, in contrast to the month (philosophy), it is complete, direct knowledge, divine inspiration. You save.
Even a glimpse of divine knowledge is already able to reduce in us partly the false fear of the earthly vale; but it completely disappears only when we are completely filled with the fear of the Lord, like Beatrice (Ada II, 82–93). You save.
When climbing, the leg on which we rely is always lower. “Ascending from the lower to the higher, we move forward slowly, only step by step, only then, as we firmly and truly stand on the lower: spiritual ascent is subject to the same laws as physical.” Streckfuss.
Leopard (uncia, leuncia, lynx, catus pardus Oken), according to the interpretation of ancient commentators, means voluptuousness, Leo - pride or lust for power, She-Wolf - self-interest and stinginess; others, especially the newest ones, see Florence and the Guelphs in Leo, France and especially Charles Valois in Leo, the Pope or the Roman Curia in She-Wolf, and, according to this, give the entire first song a purely political meaning. According to Kannegiesser's explanation, Leopard, Leo and She-Wolf mean three degrees of sensuality, moral corruption of people: Leopard is awakening sensuality, as indicated by its speed and agility, motley skin and persistence; The lion is a sensuality that has already awakened, prevailing and not hidden, demanding satisfaction: therefore he is depicted with a majestic (in the original: raised) head, hungry, angry to the point that the air around him shudders; finally, the She-Wolf is the image of those who have completely given themselves over to sin, which is why it is said that she has already been the poison of life for many, and therefore she completely deprives Dante of peace and constantly drives him more and more into the vale of moral death.
In this terzina the time of the poet’s journey is determined. It, as stated above, began on Good Friday in Holy Week, or March 25: therefore, around the spring equinox. However, Philalethes, based on the XXI canto of Hell, believes that Dante began his journey on April 4. – Divine love, according to Dante, there is a reason for the movement of celestial bodies. – A crowd of stars denotes the constellation Aries, into which the sun enters at this time.
He could not call his work a tragedy only because they, like all genres of “high literature,” were written in Latin. Dante wrote it in his native language Italian. « The Divine Comedy" - the fruit of the entire second half of Dante’s life and work. This work most fully reflected the poet’s worldview. Dante appears here as the last great poet of the Middle Ages, a poet who continued the line of development of feudal literature.
The Divine Comedy is constructed extremely symmetrically. It is divided into three parts: the first part (“Hell”) consists of 34 songs, the second (“Purgatory”) and the third (“Paradise”) - 33 songs each. The first part consists of two introductory songs and 32 describing hell, since there can be no harmony in it. The poem is written in terzas - stanzas consisting of three lines. This tendency to certain numbers explained by the fact that Dante gave them a mystical interpretation - so the number 3 is associated with the Christian idea of the Trinity, the number 33 should remind of the years of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, etc. There are 100 songs in the Divine Comedy (the number 100 is a symbol of perfection).
Dante's meeting with Virgil and the beginning of their journey through the underworld (medieval miniature)
According to Catholic tradition, the afterlife consists of hell, where eternally condemned sinners go, purgatory- the location of sinners atoning for their sins, and Raya- abode of the blessed.
Dante details this idea and describes the structure of the underworld, recording with graphic certainty all the details of its architectonics. In the introductory song, Dante tells how, having reached the middle of his life, he once got lost in a dense forest and how the poet Virgil, having delivered him from three wild animals that blocked his path, invited Dante to travel through the afterlife. Having learned that Virgil was sent to Beatrice, Dante’s deceased beloved, he surrenders without trepidation to the poet’s leadership.
Hell looks like a colossal funnel consisting of concentric circles, narrow end which rests on the center of the earth. Having passed the threshold of hell, inhabited by the souls of insignificant, indecisive people, they enter the first circle of hell, the so-called limbo (A., IV, 25-151), where the souls of virtuous pagans reside, who have not known the true God, but have approached this knowledge and beyond then freed from hellish torment. Here Dante sees outstanding representatives ancient culture- Aristotle, Euripides, Homer, etc. The next circle is filled with the souls of people who once indulged in unbridled passion. Among those carried by a wild whirlwind, Dante sees Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, fallen victims of forbidden love for each other. As Dante, accompanied by Virgil, descends lower and lower, he witnesses the torment of gluttons forced to suffer from rain and hail, misers and spendthrifts tirelessly rolling huge stones, angry ones getting bogged down in the swamp. They are followed by heretics and heresiarchs engulfed in eternal flames (among them Emperor Frederick II, Pope Anastasius II), tyrants and murderers floating in streams of boiling blood, suicides turned into plants, blasphemers and rapists burned by falling flames, deceivers of all kinds, torment which are very diverse. Finally, Dante enters the final, 9th circle of hell, reserved for the most terrible criminals. Here is the abode of traitors and traitors, the greatest of them - Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius - they are gnawing with his three mouths by Lucifer, the angel who once rebelled against God, the king of evil, doomed to imprisonment in the center of the earth. Description scary looking Lucifer ends with the last song of the first part of the poem.
Purgatory
Having passed narrow corridor, connecting the center of the earth with the second hemisphere, Dante and Virgil come to the surface of the earth. There, in the middle of an island surrounded by the ocean, a mountain rises in the form of a truncated cone - purgatory, like hell, consisting of a number of circles that narrow as they approach the top of the mountain. The angel guarding the entrance to purgatory allows Dante into the first circle of purgatory, having previously drawn seven Ps (Peccatum - sin) on his forehead with a sword, that is, a symbol of the seven deadly sins. As Dante rises higher and higher, passing one circle after another, these letters disappear, so that when Dante, having reached the top of the mountain, enters the “earthly paradise” located at the top of the latter, he is already free from the signs inscribed by the guardian of purgatory. The circles of the latter are inhabited by the souls of sinners atoning for their sins. Here the proud are purified, forced to bend under the burden of weights pressing on their backs, the envious, the angry, the careless, the greedy, etc. Virgil brings Dante to the gates of heaven, where he, as someone who has not known baptism, has no access.
In the earthly paradise, Virgil is replaced by Beatrice, seated on a chariot drawn by a vulture (an allegory of the triumphant church); she encourages Dante to repentance, and then takes him, enlightened, to heaven. The final part of the poem is dedicated to Dante's wanderings through the heavenly paradise. The latter consists of seven spheres encircling the earth and corresponding to the seven planets (according to the then widespread Ptolemaic system): the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, etc., followed by the spheres of the fixed stars and the crystal sphere, - behind the crystal sphere is the Empyrean, - the infinite the region inhabited by the blessed contemplating God is the last sphere that gives life to all things. Flying through the spheres, led by Bernard, Dante sees the Emperor Justinian, introducing him to the history of the Roman Empire, teachers of the faith, martyrs for the faith, whose shining souls form a sparkling cross; ascending higher and higher, Dante sees Christ and the Virgin Mary, angels and, finally, the “heavenly Rose” - the abode of the blessed - is revealed before him. Here Dante partakes of the highest grace, achieving communion with the Creator.
"Comedy" is Dante's last and most mature work.
In form, the poem is an afterlife vision, of which there were many in medieval literature. Like the medieval poets, it rests on an allegorical core. So the dense forest, in which the poet got lost halfway through his earthly existence, is a symbol of life’s complications. The three animals that attack him there: a lynx, a lion and a she-wolf are the three most powerful passions: sensuality, lust for power, greed. These allegories are also given a political interpretation: the lynx is Florence, the spots on the skin of which should indicate the enmity of the Guelph and Ghibelline parties. Leo is a symbol of roughness physical strength- France; she-wolf, greedy and lustful - papal curia. These beasts threaten the national unity of Italy, which Dante dreamed of, a unity cemented by the dominance of the feudal monarchy (some literary historians give Dante's entire poem a political interpretation). Virgil saves the poet from the beasts - reason sent to the poet Beatrice (theology - faith). Virgil leads Dante through hell to purgatory and on the threshold of heaven gives way to Beatrice. The meaning of this allegory is that reason saves a person from passions, and knowledge of divine science brings eternal bliss.
The Divine Comedy is imbued with political trends author. Dante never misses an opportunity to reckon with his ideological, even personal enemies; he hates usurers, condemns credit as “usury”, condemns his age as the age of profit and love of money. In his opinion, money is the source of all kinds of evil. He contrasts the dark present with the bright past of bourgeois Florence - feudal Florence, when simplicity of morals, moderation, knightly “courtesy” (“Paradise”, Cacciaguida’s story), and a feudal empire reigned (cf. Dante’s treatise “On the Monarchy”). The terzas of "Purgatory" accompanying the appearance of Sordello (Ahi serva Italia) sound like a real hosanna of Ghibellinism. Dante treats the papacy as a principle with the greatest respect, although individual representatives he hates him, especially those who contributed to the consolidation of the bourgeois system in Italy; Dante meets some popes in hell. His religion is Catholicism, although a personal element is woven into it, alien to the old orthodoxy, although mysticism and the Franciscan pantheistic religion of love, which are accepted with all passion, are also a sharp deviation from classical Catholicism. His philosophy is theology, his science is scholasticism, his poetry is allegory. Ascetic ideals in Dante have not yet died, and he considers free love to be a grave sin (Hell, 2nd circle, the famous episode with Francesca da Rimini and Paolo). But for him, love that attracts to the object of worship with a pure platonic impulse is not a sin (cf. “New Life”, Dante’s love for Beatrice). This is a great world force that “moves the sun and other luminaries.” And humility is no longer an unconditional virtue. “Whoever does not renew his strength in glory with victory will not taste the fruit he obtained in the struggle.” And the spirit of inquisitiveness, the desire to expand the circle of knowledge and acquaintance with the world, combined with “virtue” (virtute e conoscenza), encouraging heroic daring, is proclaimed as an ideal.
Dante built his vision from pieces real life. The design of the afterlife was based on individual corners of Italy, which are placed in it with clear graphic contours. And there are so many living human images scattered throughout the poem, so many typical figures, so many vivid psychological situations that literature even now continues to draw from there. People who suffer in hell, repent in purgatory (and the volume and nature of sin corresponds to the volume and nature of punishment), are in bliss in paradise - all living people. In these hundreds of figures, no two are identical. In this huge gallery of historical figures there is not a single image that has not been cut by the poet’s unmistakable plastic intuition. It was not for nothing that Florence experienced a period of such intense economic and cultural growth. That acute sense of landscape and man, which is shown in the Comedy and which the world learned from Dante, was possible only in the social environment of Florence, which was far ahead of the rest of Europe. Individual episodes of the poem, such as Francesca and Paolo, Farinata in his red-hot grave, Ugolino with the children, Capaneus and Ulysses, in no way similar to ancient images, the Black Cherub with subtle devilish logic, Sordello on his stone, still produce strong impression.
Dante and Virgil in Hell
In front of the entrance are pitiful souls who did neither good nor evil during their lives, including “a bad flock of angels” who were neither with the devil nor with God.
Building a model of Hell ( Hell , XI, 16-66), Dante follows Aristotle, who in his “Ethics” (Book VII, Chapter I) classifies the sins of intemperance (incontinenza) into the 1st category, and the sins of violence (“violent bestiality" or matta bestialitade), to 3 - sins of deception ("malice" or malizia). In Dante, circles 2-5 are for intemperate people, circle 7 is for rapists, circles 8-9 are for deceivers (the 8th is simply for deceivers, the 9th is for traitors). Thus, the more material the sin, the more forgivable it is.
Heretics - apostates from the faith and deniers of God - are specially singled out from the host of sinners filling the upper and lower circles into the sixth circle. In the abyss of lower Hell (A., VIII, 75), with three ledges, like three steps, there are three circles - from the seventh to the ninth. In these circles, anger that uses either force (violence) or deception is punished.
The three holy virtues - the so-called "theological" ones - are faith, hope and love. The rest are the four “basic” or “natural” (see note Ch., I, 23-27).
Dante depicts it as a huge mountain rising in the southern hemisphere in the middle of the Ocean. It looks like a truncated cone. The coastal strip and the lower part of the mountain form the Pre-Purgatory, and the upper part is surrounded by seven ledges (seven circles of Purgatory itself). On the flat top of the mountain, Dante places the deserted forest of the Earthly Paradise.
Virgil expounds the doctrine of love as the source of all good and evil and explains the gradation of the circles of Purgatory: circles I, II, III - love for “other people's evil,” that is, malice (pride, envy, anger); circle IV - insufficient love for true good (despondency); circles V, VI, VII - excessive love for false benefits (greed, gluttony, voluptuousness). The circles correspond to the biblical mortal sins.
(in brackets are examples of personalities given by Dante)
At the heart of Dante's poem is humanity's recognition of its sins and ascent to spiritual life and to God. According to the poet, in order to find peace of mind, it is necessary to go through all the circles of hell and renounce blessings, and atone for sins with suffering. Each of the three chapters of the poem includes 33 songs. “Hell”, “Purgatory” and “Paradise” are the eloquent names of the parts that make up the “Divine Comedy”. A summary makes it possible to comprehend the main idea of the poem.
Dante Alighieri created the poem during the years of exile, shortly before his death. It is recognized in world literature as a brilliant creation. The author himself gave it the name “Comedy”. In those days it was customary to call any work that had a happy ending. Boccaccio called it “Divine”, thus giving it the highest rating.
Dante's poem "The Divine Comedy", a summary of which schoolchildren study in the 9th grade, is difficult to comprehend modern teenagers. Detailed analysis some songs cannot give a complete picture of the work, especially taking into account today's attitude towards religion and human sins. However, acquaintance, albeit only a review, with Dante’s work is necessary to create a complete understanding of world fiction.
"The Divine Comedy". Summary of the chapter "Hell"
Main character the works are Dante himself, to whom the shadow of the famous poet Virgil appears with an offer to travel through Dante at first doubts, but agrees after Virgil informs him that Beatrice (the author’s beloved, by that time long dead) asked the poet to become his guide.
The path of the characters begins in hell. Before entering it there are pitiful souls who during their lifetime did neither good nor evil. The Acheron River flows outside the gates, through which Charon transports the dead. The heroes are approaching the circles of hell:
Having gone through all the circles of hell, Dante and his companion went up and saw the stars.
"The Divine Comedy". Brief summary of the part "Purgatory"
The main character and his guide end up in purgatory. Here they are met by the guard Cato, who sends them to the sea to wash themselves. The companions go to the water, where Virgil washes the soot of the underworld from Dante’s face. At this time, a boat sails up to the travelers, ruled by an angel. He lands on shore the souls of the dead who did not go to hell. With them, the heroes travel to the mountain of purgatory. On the way, they meet Virgil's fellow countryman, the poet Sordello, who joins them.
Dante falls asleep and in his sleep is transported to the gates of purgatory. Here the angel writes seven letters on the poet’s forehead, indicating the Hero goes through all the circles of purgatory, cleansing himself of sins. After completing each circle, the angel erases the letter of the overcome sin from Dante’s forehead. On the last lap, the poet must pass through the flames of fire. Dante is afraid, but Virgil convinces him. The poet passes the test by fire and goes to heaven, where Beatrice is waiting for him. Virgil falls silent and disappears forever. Beloved washes Dante in sacred river, and the poet feels strength pouring into his body.
"The Divine Comedy". Brief summary of the part "Paradise"
Beloved ones ascend to heaven. To the surprise of the main character, he was able to take off. Beatrice explained to him that souls not burdened with sins are light. Lovers pass through all the heavenly skies:
After ascending to the last heaven, the hero sees the Virgin Mary. She is among the shining rays. Dante raises his head up into the bright and blinding light and finds the highest truth. He sees divinity in its trinity.
The action of “The Divine Comedy” begins from the moment when the lyrical hero (or Dante himself), shocked by the death of his beloved Beatrice, tries to survive his grief, setting it out in poetry in order to record it as specifically as possible and thereby preserve the unique image of his beloved. But here it turns out that her immaculate personality is already not subject to death and oblivion. She becomes a guide, the savior of the poet from inevitable death.
Beatrice, with the help of Virgil, the ancient Roman poet, accompanies the living lyrical hero - Dante - around all the horrors of Hell, making an almost sacred journey from being to non-existence, when the poet, just like the mythological Orpheus, descends into the underworld to save his Eurydice. On the gates of Hell it is written “Abandon all hope,” but Virgil advises Dante to get rid of fear and trepidation of the unknown, because only with open eyes can a person comprehend the source of evil.
Sandro Botticelli, "Portrait of Dante"
Hell for Dante is not a materialized place, but a state of soul of a sinned person, constantly tormented by remorse. Dante inhabited the circles of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided by his likes and dislikes, his ideals and ideas. For him, for his friends, love was the highest expression of the independence and unpredictability of the freedom of the human person: this is freedom from traditions and dogmas, and freedom from the authorities of the church fathers, and freedom from various universal models of human existence.
Love comes to the fore with capital letters, aimed not at the realistic (in the medieval sense) absorption of individuality into a ruthless collective integrity, but towards the unique image of a truly existing Beatrice. For Dante, Beatrice is the embodiment of the entire universe in the most concrete and colorful image. And what could be more attractive to a poet than the figure of a young Florentine woman, accidentally met on a narrow street? ancient city? This is how Dante realizes the synthesis of thought and concrete, artistic, emotional comprehension of the world. In the first song of Paradise, Dante listens to the concept of reality from the lips of Beatrice and is unable to take his eyes off her emerald eyes. This scene is the embodiment of deep ideological and psychological shifts, when artistic comprehension of reality strives to become intellectual.
Illustration for The Divine Comedy, 1827
The afterlife appears before the reader in the form of a solid building, the architecture of which is calculated in the smallest detail, and the coordinates of space and time are distinguished by mathematical and astronomical accuracy, complete numerological and esoteric overtones.
The number three and its derivative, nine, appear most often in the text of the comedy: a three-line stanza (terzina), which became the poetic basis of the work, which in turn is divided into three parts - cantics. Minus the first, introductory song, 33 songs are devoted to the depiction of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and each part of the text ends with the same word - stars (stelle). To the same mystical number series one can also include the three colors of clothes in which Beatrice is clothed, three symbolic beasts, three mouths of Lucifer and the same number of sinners devoured by him, the triple distribution of Hell with nine circles. This entire clearly constructed system gives rise to a surprisingly harmonious and coherent hierarchy of the world, created according to unwritten divine laws.
The Tuscan dialect became the basis of the literary Italian language
Speaking about Dante and his “Divine Comedy”, one cannot help but note the special status that the great poet’s homeland – Florence – had in a host of other cities of the Apennine Peninsula. Florence is not only the city where the Accademia del Chimento raised the banner of experimental knowledge of the world. This is a place where nature was looked at as closely as anywhere else, a place of passionate artistic sensationalism, where rational vision replaced religion. They looked at the world through the eyes of an artist, with elation and worship of beauty.
The initial collection of ancient manuscripts reflected a shift in the center of gravity of intellectual interests to the device inner world and the creativity of man himself. Space ceased to be the habitat of God, and they began to treat nature from the point of view of earthly existence, they looked for answers to questions understandable to man, and took them in earthly, applied mechanics. A new way of thinking - natural philosophy - humanized nature itself.
The topography of Dante's Hell and the structure of Purgatory and Paradise follow from the recognition of loyalty and courage as the highest virtues: at the center of Hell, in the teeth of Satan, there are traitors, and the distribution of places in Purgatory and Paradise directly corresponds to the moral ideals of the Florentine exile.
By the way, everything we know about Dante’s life is known to us from his own memoirs, set out in The Divine Comedy. He was born in 1265 in Florence and remained loyal to his hometown all his life. Dante wrote about his teacher Brunetto Latini and his talented friend Guido Cavalcanti. The life of the great poet and philosopher took place in the circumstances of a very long conflict between the emperor and the Pope. Latini, Dante's mentor, was a man with encyclopedic knowledge and based his views on the sayings of Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle and, of course, the Bible - general ledger Middle Ages. It was Latini who most influenced the development of the personality of Buddhism. a great Renaissance humanist.
Dante's path was replete with obstacles when the poet was faced with a difficult choice: for example, he was forced to contribute to the expulsion of his friend Guido from Florence. Reflecting on the theme of the vicissitudes of his fate, Dante in the poem “ New life» dedicates many fragments to his friend Cavalcanti. Here Dante created the unforgettable image of his first youthful love - Beatrice. Biographers identify Dante's lover with Beatrice Portinari, who died at the age of 25 in Florence in 1290. Dante and Beatrice became the same textbook embodiment of true lovers as Petrarch and Laura, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet.
Dante spoke to his beloved Beatrice twice in his life
In 1295, Dante entered the guild, membership in which opened the way for him into politics. Just at this time, the struggle between the emperor and the Pope intensified, so that Florence was divided into two opposing factions - the “black” Guelphs, led by Corso Donati, and the “white” Guelphs, to whose camp Dante himself belonged. The Whites were victorious and drove their opponents out of the city. In 1300, Dante was elected to the city council - it was here that the poet’s brilliant oratory abilities were fully revealed.
Dante increasingly began to oppose himself to the Pope, participating in various anti-clerical coalitions. By that time, the “blacks” had stepped up their activities, burst into the city and dealt with their political opponents. Dante was summoned several times to testify before the city council, but each time he ignored these demands, so on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other members of the “white” party were sentenced to death in absentia. To save himself, the poet was forced to leave hometown. Disillusioned with the possibility of change political situation affairs, he began to write his life’s work - “The Divine Comedy”.
Sandro Botticelli "Hell, Canto XVIII"
In the 14th century, in The Divine Comedy, the truth revealed to the poet who visited Hell, Purgatory and Paradise is no longer canonical, it appears to him as a result of his own, individual efforts, his emotional and intellectual impulse, he hears the truth from the lips of Beatrice . For Dante, an idea is the “thought of God”: “Everything that will die and everything that will not die is / Only a reflection of the Thought to which the Almighty / With His Love gives existence.”
Dante's path of love is the path of perception of divine light, a force that simultaneously elevates and destroys a person. In The Divine Comedy, Dante placed special emphasis on color symbolism the universe he depicts. If Hell is typical dark colors, then the path from Hell to Heaven is a transition from dark and gloomy to light and shining, while in Purgatory there is a change in lighting. For the three steps at the gates of Purgatory, symbolic colors are allocated: white - the innocence of the baby, crimson - the sinfulness of the earthly being, red - redemption, the blood of which whitens so that, closing this color series, white appears again as a harmonious combination of the previous symbols.
“We do not live in this world for death to find us in blissful laziness.”
In November 1308, Henry VII became king of Germany, and in July 1309, the new Pope Clement V declared him king of Italy and invited him to Rome, where the magnificent coronation of the new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire took place. Dante, who was an ally of Henry, returned to politics, where he was able to use his literary experience productively, writing many pamphlets and speaking publicly. In 1316, Dante finally moved to Ravenna, where he was invited to spend the rest of his days by the city's lord, philanthropist and patron of the arts, Guido da Polenta.
In the summer of 1321, Dante, as ambassador of Ravenna, went to Venice with a mission to make peace with the Doge's Republic. Having completed an important assignment, on the way home Dante falls ill with malaria (like his late friend Guido) and suddenly dies on the night of September 13-14, 1321.
"The Divine Comedy" is an immortal work with a philosophical meaning. In three parts the plot is revealed about the purpose of love, the death of the beloved and universal justice. In this article we will analyze the poem “The Divine Comedy” by Dante.
The poem consists of three parts called cantics. Each cantik contains thirty-three songs. One more song was added to the first part; it is a prologue. Thus, there are 100 songs in the poem. The poetic meter is terza.
The main character of the work is Dante himself. But, when reading the poem, it becomes clear that the image of the hero and the real person are not the same person. Dante's hero resembles a contemplator who only observes what is happening. He is different in character: hot-tempered and pitiful, angry and helpless. The author uses this technique to show the whole range of emotions of a living person.
Beatrice is the highest wisdom, a symbol of goodness. She became his guide to various areas, showing love in all its forms. And Dante, captivated by the forces of love, obediently follows her, wanting to achieve heavenly wisdom.
In the prologue we see Dante at the age of 35, who stands at a crossroads in his life. An associative series is created: the season is Spring, he met Beatrice also in the spring, and God’s world was created in the spring. The animals he meets on his way are symbolic of human vices. For example, lynx - voluptuousness.
Dante shows through his hero both his own tragedy and the global one. Reading the poem, we see how the hero loses heart, resurrects and seeks consolation.
He also encounters sleepy crowds. These people did neither good nor bad deeds. They look lost between two worlds.
Analyzing the poem “The Divine Comedy”, one can see that Dante’s innovation occurs already when he passes through the first circle of Hell. The best poets languish there together with old people and babies. Such as: Verligius, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Dante himself.
The second circle of Hell is opened by a half-dragon. How many times will he wrap his tail around a person and he will end up in that circle of Hell.
The third circle of Hell is spiritual torment, which is more terrible than earthly.
In the fourth circle are the Jews and spendthrifts, whom the author has endowed with the epithet “vile.”
The fifth circle contains angry people for whom no one feels pity. Afterwards the path to the city of devils opens.
Passing through the cemetery, the path to the sixth circle of Hell opens. It is home to all the political haters, among them there are people who are burning alive.
The most terrible circle of Hell is the seventh. There are several stages in it. Murderers, rapists and suicides suffer there.
The eighth circle is deceivers and the ninth is traitors.
With each lap, Dante opens up and becomes more realistic, rough and reasonable.
We see a significant difference in the depiction of Paradise. It is fragrant, the music of the spheres sounds in it.
Summing up the analysis of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” it is worth noting that the poem is filled with allegories that allow us to call the work symbolic, biographical, and philosophical.
