Christian History Magazine Collection

By describing a pilgrimage through the realms of death, Dante shares his vision of how Christians should live.

by Rolland Hein from Christian History magazine no. 70

The chief imagination of Christendom,
Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself
That he has made that hollow face of his
More plain to the mind’s eye than any face
But that of Christ.
—W. B. Yeats

Scanning the “Book Review” section of the New York Times in 1999, I was surprised to see on the final page—a page generally devoted to a human interest story—the image at left. I will not speculate on the motivations of the editors for printing it; I doubt they were intending to further Christianity.

I can, however, guess what many readers were thinking: Science has brought us so far from that silly myth. But diagramming the great beyond was never Dante’s main objective. He was less interested in the question, “What happens when we die?” than the more pressing question, “How should we live in light of eternity?”

Is it not instructive that the picture in the New York Times needed no caption, no comment? Seven hundred years after Dante’s composition, his images remain familiar and forceful. This is because the principles that shape the images of the Divine Comedy, even if vehemently denied, still answer to something deep within the human consciousness. And it is the principles, not the images as such, that really matter.

What it Is, and Isn’t

Dante was fully conscious that he knew no more about the realities faced by departed souls than does anyone else. But as a mature Christian of his time, he was convinced of the reality of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

These convictions guided his fertile imagination as it speculated upon the concrete forms these realities might take. In giving them narrative embodiment, he expended great effort to achieve utter consistency, thoroughness, and comprehensiveness.

The form and structure of the Divine Comedy symbolize unity and completeness. The numbers three (for the Trinity), four (for man), and one (for final unity), as well as the “perfect” number ten, are omnipresent.

Consider the most obvious instances. The poem consists of three groupings of 33 cantos (poetic chapters) each, which, with the addition of the introductory canto, make 100, the square of 10. Dante’s terza rima stanzas consist of three lines each, with interlocking rhymes; the first and third line of each stanza rhyme with the second line of the previous stanza.

Each canto ends with a one-line stanza. Each of the three regions of the afterlife has ten compartments grouped into seven and three. Pythagoras is reputed to have said the world was created by number. Dante’s world certainly is.

The Divine Comedy offers compelling answers to many questions about the purpose of life and the principles of eternity.

The mythopoeic writers who follow in Dante’s wake—Edmund Spenser, John Milton, John Bunyan, George MacDonald, C. S.Lewis— each have strengths, but none rises to the same level of comprehensiveness. Furthermore, they all owe a debt to Dante, an obligation many of them overtly acknowledge.

Dante’s Bedrock Beliefs

Among the basic convictions that shape the story line of Dante’s great poem are these:

• People are responsible to God whether they know it or not.
• The human race was created by a loving God whose purpose was for people to choose righteously through life in order to see and be with God.
• Because people possess free will, their choices between good and evil shape their experience of life for time and eternity, and because decisions are shaped by desires, people must learn to desire God and his will.
• Right understanding leads to right conduct, while wrong choices frustrate God’s intentions and justly lead to negative consequences.
• Unforgiven sin diminishes sinners, depriving them of their very humanity, whereas Christian virtues enable people to develop into the full stature God intended them to have.

These principles must not be confused with the sometimes peculiar and eccentric images Dante uses to convey them.

God as Dante envisions him is no petty tyrant or vindictive divinity, as some cursory readers have concluded. Nor is Dante, writing as a political exile, a bitter curmudgeon gleefully assigning his friends to heaven and his enemies to hell.

Instead, the Divine Comedy presents a vision of the love of God evident in his government of the universe and in his grace expressed to humankind. The poem explores the central issues affecting the meaning and purpose of life and culminates in consuming praise for the wisdom of God’s ways.

One should not assume, however, that it is a great theological treatise buried within a curiously medieval narrative or an intellectual puzzle to decipher. Dante is doing his utmost to engage our imaginations. The Divine Comedy is first of all an engaging story and should be read as one would read a novel, fully imagining the images and identifying with Dante the character as he gives testimony of how he was led on a complete tour of hell, purgatory, and heaven.