The Divine Comedy — themes & analysis

Contrapasso is the structural principle that holds the Inferno together. In each circle, the punishment is not arbitrary but logical: it is the sin, made visible and eternal. The lustful, who in life were tossed about by their passions, are blown forever on a dark wind that never rests (Canto 5). The wrathful, who could not contain their rage, are submerged in the muddy Styx fighting each other (Canto 7). The violent against self — the suicides — are imprisoned in the bodies of trees, their human form forfeit because they forfeited it themselves (Canto 13).

In the eighth circle, the contrapasso becomes more elaborate. The flatterers are plunged in excrement because they covered everything in filth (Canto 18). The diviners who presumed to see the future have their heads twisted backward, weeping into the cracks of their own buttocks, able only to look behind them (Canto 20). The hypocrites walk eternally in gilded cloaks of lead, glittering on the outside and crushing on the inside (Canto 23). The false counselors burn inside tongues of flame because they used their tongues to counsel falsely (Canto 26). The schismatics are cloven open by a demon's sword because in life they divided what should have been whole (Canto 28).

The principle reaches its fullest expression in the ninth circle, where the great traitors are frozen in the lake of Cocytus. Betrayal is the sin that, in Dante's moral architecture, most completely freezes the soul — it is fraud directed against those who trust, the ultimate abuse of the specifically human capacity for reason and relationship. Lucifer himself, at the bottom, is frozen in place, his six wings generating the wind that keeps the lake solid. The most energetic act of evil in the poem is the thing that imprisons evil. The contrapasso is the argument of the poem made concrete: what you did, you become.

In Purgatorio, the principle inverts. Each terrace applies a contrapasso of healing rather than torment. The proud, who could not look up in life, walk bent under enormous stones (Canto 11). The envious, who could not bear to see clearly, have their eyelids sewn shut with iron wire (Canto 13). The slothful, who moved too slowly toward God in life, must run continuously without rest (Canto 18). The logic is the same as in Inferno — the sin shapes its own correction — but the direction is reversed. The punishment ends; the soul climbs on.

Where to follow it: Inferno 5 (the lustful), Inferno 13 (the suicides), Inferno 28 (the schismatics), Purgatorio 10 (pride).

Dante saw Beatrice Portinari first when he was nine and she was eight, on a May morning in Florence in 1274. He saw her again at eighteen, when she greeted him in the street. She died on June 8, 1290, at twenty-four, married to the banker Simone dei Bardi. In his earlier book La Vita Nuova, Dante had already begun to read his love for her as something theological. By the time he begins the Comedy in exile, a decade after her death, she has become the figure of divine grace itself.

The poem's radical theological claim is that human love, properly directed, is the road to the divine. Beatrice does not represent God; she leads to him. In Inferno 2, before a single circle of Hell has been entered, the poem tells us that Beatrice descended from Heaven to Limbo to ask Virgil to rescue Dante from the dark wood — an act of mercy that is the precondition of everything that follows. Her motivation is stated plainly: love. She acts because she loves him and because love moves toward good.

She arrives at the summit of Mount Purgatory in Canto 30 with extraordinary theatrical force. The procession stops, a voice cries "Come, bride, from Lebanon," and Dante turns expecting Virgil — and Virgil is gone. Beatrice arrives in a chariot, veiled, dressed in the colors of faith (white), hope (green), and charity (red). She removes her veil, names him, and reproaches him for the years he spent loving lesser things after her death. The scene is at once a reunion and a judgement.

In Paradiso she guides him sphere by sphere, explaining the workings of the cosmos with the patience of a teacher and the authority of a saint, growing more radiant as they ascend. In the Empyrean she takes her seat in the white rose of the blessed, and smiles down at him — her last act in the poem — as Saint Bernard takes over to pray the Virgin for the final vision. The entire architecture of the poem, from the dark wood of Canto 1 to the vision of God in Canto 100, is the story of what one woman's love, rightly understood, can do for a soul.

Where to follow it: Inferno 2 (Beatrice commissions the journey), Purgatorio 30 (Beatrice arrives), Paradiso 1 (ascent begins), Paradiso 31 (Beatrice in the rose).

In November 1301, Dante traveled to Rome on a diplomatic mission. While he was away, his political enemies seized Florence and condemned him in absentia for corruption. He refused to appear for trial or pay the fine; the sentence was upgraded to death by burning if he ever returned. He never returned. He spent nineteen years moving between the courts of northern Italy, and he spent those nineteen years writing the Comedy.

The poem is saturated with this fact. Florence appears throughout — praised sarcastically, mourned, condemned. The great Florentines Dante meets in the afterlife are his neighbors, his political rivals, his friends. Ciacco the glutton in Canto 6 prophecies the political disasters that will soon befall Florence. Farinata degli Uberti, a political enemy, rises from his burning tomb in Canto 10 to conduct a conversation with Dante about Florentine politics that feels like a council chamber debate conducted across the boundary of death. Brunetto Latini, Dante's old teacher, is found among the sodomites in Canto 15, and the encounter is one of the most tender in the poem despite the torment.

The audacity reaches its peak in the placement of the popes. Nicholas III is found head-down in a burning rock in the third ditch of the eighth circle (Canto 19), and specifically names Boniface VIII — the reigning pope when Dante begins the poem — as the next occupant of his position. Boniface is condemned while still alive, by a poet under sentence of death, in a vision that claims divine authority. In Paradiso 27, Saint Peter himself delivers a furious condemnation of the contemporary papacy.

Dante's own trajectory through the poem is shaped by exile. In Purgatorio 17, his ancestor Cacciaguida — encountered in Mars in Paradiso 15-17 — explicitly foretells the exile: "You will leave behind everything most dearly loved, and this is the arrow that the bow of exile first lets fly." Cacciaguida instructs him to make his vision public regardless of the cost. The Comedy is, among its other registers, Dante's answer to his sentence: not compliance but creation, the counter-verdict of a soul that has seen the whole moral order of the universe and placed his judges accordingly.

Where to follow it: Inferno 6 (Ciacco on Florence), Inferno 10 (Farinata), Inferno 19 (the simoniacs, living popes condemned), Paradiso 15-17 (Cacciaguida and the prophecy of exile).

Dante's cosmos is Ptolemaic: the earth is at the center; nine spheres — Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Fixed Stars, Primum Mobile — revolve around it; beyond all the spheres is the Empyrean, the formless realm of pure light and love where God dwells. This cosmology, derived from Aristotle through Arabic commentators, gives Dante his spatial structure. Heaven is literally above, Hell literally below, and the journey from one to the other traces the full extent of the moral universe.

Hell is a funnel descending from the surface of the earth to its center, created when Lucifer fell and the earth recoiled from him. Nine circles, each more confined and more severe. At the very center, Lucifer is frozen in the lake of Cocytus, and the center of the earth is the lowest point of the universe — the furthest possible distance from God. Dante and Virgil pass through Lucifer and emerge on the other side, at the antipodes, where the mountain of Purgatory rises from the sea.

Purgatory is a mountain with seven terraces, one for each of the deadly sins, arranged in inverse order of severity to Hell: pride (worst) at the bottom, lust (least severe) at the top. The souls there work off the residual stain of their sins through contemplation, prayer, and the contrapasso of healing, then pass through the fire on the seventh terrace and enter the Earthly Paradise at the summit. There Virgil departs and Beatrice arrives.

The ascent through Paradiso follows the Ptolemaic spheres, but the souls Dante meets are not actually located in the spheres — all the blessed dwell in the Empyrean; they descend to meet Dante at the level appropriate to their virtue. The Moon holds those who broke vows through no fault of their own. Mercury holds those whose good works were motivated partly by desire for fame. Venus holds those whose virtue was tempered by love. The higher spheres hold the great theologians, the crusaders, the just rulers, the contemplatives. At the apex of the Primum Mobile, Dante sees the point of pure light that is God surrounded by nine rings of angels. Then he enters the Empyrean and, in the final cantos, is granted what no other living human has been given.

Where to follow it: Inferno 4 (Limbo, structure of Hell explained), Inferno 11 (Virgil explains Hell's moral geography), Purgatorio 1 (shore of the mountain), Paradiso 28 (the point of light, angelic orders).

Around 1308, when Dante begins the Comedy, serious intellectual work — theology, philosophy, formal poetry, science, law — is written in Latin. The vernaculars are for love songs, sermons to the unlearned, popular tales that the grammarians do not count as literature. Dante is capable of Latin; he writes his political treatise De Monarchia and his defense of vernacular literature De Vulgari Eloquentia in elegant scholastic Latin. His decision to put the Comedy — the most ambitious poem of his age — in Tuscan Italian is a wager that the vulgar tongue can carry the full weight of what Latin has carried.

He was right. The wager succeeded so completely that within a century Italian had displaced Latin as the language of serious literature in the peninsula. The prestige form of Italian was specifically Tuscan. Within five centuries, the Tuscan of the Divine Comedy had become, with relatively minor adjustments, the standard form of modern Italian. No other writer in any European language had this kind of effect on the language he was writing in. Shakespeare did not invent English; Cervantes did not invent Spanish; Goethe did not invent German. Dante invented Italian in the strict sense: the literary Italian of the next seven hundred years is continuously and recognizably the language of this poem.

The verse form reinforces the linguistic achievement. Terza rima — three-line stanzas with interlocking rhymes (aba bcb cdc) that Dante invented for the project — pulls the reader forward without rest, creating a forward momentum that resists stopping. It has proven so intrinsically Italian that no major poet writing in any other language has been able to use it at length: the Italian word-endings that generate the rhymes so naturally have no equivalents in other tongues. Dante wrote his poem in the only language that could have made it.

The Comedy also incorporates, through the shades Dante meets, the full range of previous literary traditions: Virgil the guide embodies Latin epic; Brunetto Latini represents vernacular learning; the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, appearing in Purgatorio 26, speaks the only lines of Provençal in the entire poem; Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan appear in Limbo as the great pre-Christian poets who could not be saved but could not be left out. The Comedy absorbs the literary past and rearranges it under the authority of Italian.

Where to follow it: Inferno 4 (Homer and the classical poets in Limbo), Purgatorio 26 (Arnaut Daniel, Provençal), Paradiso 2 (address to the reader), Paradiso 25 (Dante on his poem and his hope of return).