How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume II we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the middle ages through the early renaissance. Today’s session is on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” Without a doubt, Dante (c.1265-1321) is one of the supreme poets of history, and his Divine Comedy one of the supreme achievements of literature. He wrote in the vernacular (Italian rather than Latin), thus helping to shift the world from “Roman” broadly speaking into the “romance” of modern Europe. Born in Florence, Dante was a vigorous participant in the political life of that Republic. His family was Guelph, which put them on the side of the papacy over against the Holy Roman Emperor in the Florentine power game. When the Guelphs won the struggle for control of Florence (at the 1289 Battle of Campaldino, in which Dante fought), they broke into two further factions: the Whites and the Blacks. Dante became a White Guelph, siding with those who wanted less interference from the Pope in the temporal affairs of the city. The Black Guelphs won in 1301 and exiled Dante, who would never return to Florence. In exile, he wrote The Divine Comedy, which sets the drama of human life within a vitally imaginative context of ultimate consequences. This context makes action freer by making it more thoughtful. Troubadour poetry was a formative influence on Dante, as was Thomistic theology. What Dante presents is a cosmic-Christian romance. The poem was composed between c.1308 and 1320, in three great parts. It supposedly recounts Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead, from the night before Good Friday to Easter Wednesday in 1300, guided by Virgil through the Inferno (hell) and most of Purgatory and by his beloved Beatrice through Paradise.