Dante
DanteDante Alighieri (1265-1321) was the famous Italian poet of
Florence who wrote the poem, The Divine Comedy which describes
a journey through hell, purgatory and heaven.
Dante was born in Florence in 1265 (about May 29th), to a poor
family of noble birth, as many of lasting fame are.
In 1274, when he was only nine, Dante saw Beatrice Portinari
(1266-90) for the first time and fell in love with her.
In 1285 Dante was married to Gemma Donati and had four kids (James,
Peter, John and Antonia).
In 1289, Dante fought in the battle of Campaldino against the
Ghibbelines. Dante wrote about this battle in The Comedy when
in purgatory. The Guelphs supported the pope and the
Ghibbelines the emperor (in Germany) of the Holy Roman Empire. Italy
in the day of Dante was torn apart by their repeated war.
In 1290, Beatrice died young and Dante, to escape his grief, buried
himself in the study of philosophy, theology and Provencal poetry and wrote
his first work, La vita nuova.
In 1296, Dante took part in Florentine politics, joining the party
of the White Guelphs.
In 1302, when Dante was away, the Black Guelphs conquered the
White Guelphs and Dante was exiled, losing everything. Dante traveled
throughout Europe -- to Paris and possibly Oxford -- and at last lived in
the Italian city of Verona and later Ravenna, where he wrote The
Comedy. Dante did all his important work in exile except for
La vita nuova.
Dante died in exile in Ravenna en 1321.
His house still stands in Florence (where I saw it with my own eye). He
went to mass at St John's. Giotto, the
painter, was his friend.
La Divina Commedia
(1314-21) ("The Divine Comedy"), a poem of 14 000 verses, a cry
against the moral degradation of the world, describes a voyage
through the post-mortum world of hell, purgatory and heaven,
which Dante populated with men Christian and pagan, historical and
contemporary. He even put a pope of his time (Nicholas III) in hell
(with many other clerics) and a pagan (Cato) in purgatory. Writing
while in exile, the poem has many hard words for Florence, his
hometown. Dante is guided through hell and purgatory by Virgil and by Beatrice through heaven.
The action takes place in spring of 1300, a dark part of Dante's life
just before his exile. The poem was done in terza rima, a
complicated form of pentameter.
The Comedy has three parts:
Inferno (Hell),
Purgatorio (Purgatory) and
Paradiso (Heaven).
Although it is full of speculation and can be interpreted as an
allegory, the description of the postmortum world is based on the
best knowledge of his day. According to Dante, hell is under the
earth, purgatory is a huge mountain in what we call the South
Pacific, exactly opposite of Jerusalem, and heaven is the heavens
from the Moon up to God Himself, who is outside the universe, outside of
space and time. As Dante confesses, much of heaven is beyond the
descriptive power of language.
Who's where (among others):
The sin which will put Dante in purgatory is his love of fame.
Note that Statius, the Latin poet of the first century, was a
pagan according to historical knowledge, but Dante supposes that he
converted to Christianity sometime before his death.
The poem beautifully summarizes the medieval worldview of Europe, being
the poetic brother of the philosophical Summa Theologica of Aquinas, describing a worldview both
Christian and Aristotelian. The Comedy was also the first
major work of Western literature written in neither Latin nor Greek. Three
centuries after The Comedy, nearly every original work of
literature in the West was composed in a national tongue, not in Latin.
In its use of a national language and also in its uniting the
Christian and the classical (from the characters to even the underlying
philosophy), The Comedy was a precursor of the
Renaissance.
Before this, Dante wrote La vita nuova ("The
new life") around 1293. It is a collection of prose and poetry
about Beatrice and love.
Dante also wrote about politics (De monarchia) and language
(De vulgari eloquentia).
Dante much admired the Latin poet, Vergil, of whom he said, "Honor and light of
the other poets ... You are my master and my author, you are alone the one
from whom I draw the beautiful style for which I am honored".
Among other books, Dante read:
Dante argued (in De vulgari eloquentia) and actually
showed (through The Comedy) that a national language,
and not just Latin, can be an effective and beautiful instrument of
high literature.
Dante wrote in both Latin and Italian, helping to shape modern Italian and
setting up his Tuscan dialect as the Italian of literature.
Dante influenced the English Romantic poet
Blake.
Dante assumed that his readers knew about Italian history during the
13th century (especially the history of Florence) and about ancient
writers, especially
Aristotle,
Vergil,
Ovid
and the
Bible.
If you lack such knowledge, then you should read him with footnotes or a
good introduction (although Dante is still well worth reading even without
such help).
Note that these authors are not only basic to Dante, but to European
literature generally during 1250-1650, therefore knowledge about this is
profitable in general.
....
~stefano@pobox.com/11.480 C 28 00:40:58
Life
Work
According to Catholicism, you go to one of
three places after death: if you gravely sin (murder, adultery, theft, etc)
and don't repent, you go to hell, where you are punished forever. If
you sin but later repent, you go to purgatory, where you are
punished but later go to heaven, the third place. If you believe and are
without sin before God (because your sins have been forgiven), you go to
heaven, where you live with God happily forever. Protestantism and Islam also believe in hell and heaven, but not
in purgatory.
Post Mortum
Advice to the Reader
Ligiloj:
Giotto
Originally created by Stefano KALB
at Mon Nov 16 22:24:21 UTC 1998.
