Kristman P.V.

Supervisor - Narmukhametova N.M.

Eurasian National University named after L.N. Gumilyov

Dante’s Divine Comedy as an imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife

The Divine Comedy is one of the first literary texts in Western civilization that openly mirrors the artistic self-consciousness of its maker. And we clearly see the humanist Dante shows a growing interest in poetry as a source of virtue and moral and religious perfection. Being influenced by the history of Florence it was easy to track the political context in the Divine Comedy with all the historical political and social personas. Having a keen eye for the political and religious disorders of his time, he cannot help but take up his pen as a weapon against corruption.

Being brought up in the context Medieval Christianity we clearly see it through the whole poem of Dante theologian. His use of the allegory of the theologians in the context of an epic where Earth and Heaven meet together, attests to this. The Comedy is a poem of ends. Its central question is one of the central questions of all Christian theology: what is humanity’s end and how do we attain to it. Dante creates his theological presentation of an answer on this question by showing the basis of holiness and spirituality, constitution of the universe and encourages striving for the Absolute. Dante theologian metaphorically alludes to the image of the Trinity and spiritual journey. Moreover, he was a pioneer in detailed description of Purgatory as it was often little more than a theologian’s abstraction.The task of fully imagining this intermediate kingdom would rest on the shoulders of a poet. After the Comedy Purgatory bears a universally recognized structure.

The survey shows that the whole work is very autobiographical, starting his spiritual journey in the dark wood, going through Hell, Purgatory and reaching the state of an absolute blessedness in Paradise. As seen from the context of the Comedy Dante doesn’t completely invent new worlds but allegorically represents the existing ones – both real (Florence, politics, religion, society, arts, etc.) and spiritual.

His personal literary preferences, respect for antique poets and the impact those had on Dante’s personality cause interviewing of antique literary components. The theme itself and the direction of the work is a mastered vision and prophesies of antique authors put into terminal context of the Middle Ages and eternal context of the absolute truth and morality. However, Dante took familiar issues but went further taking on responsibility of representing justice system and daring to arrange sinners, adjudge them, punish and elevate those who according to his opinion deserve it.

Meanwhile, he sets the vivid scenery in the three canticles of life and death, joy and despair, against an allegorical background of moral and religious dogma. However, the incongruities of life are not cancelled out by the rigour of allegory. On the contrary, human wrestling with destiny, the riddles and questions, pervade every page of the Divine Comedy. But some of these are dialectally disambiguated in the course of the story. In the wake of medieval hermeneutics, Dante presents truth as the personal experience of an event, not as a rock-solid principle to be grasped without discussion. He thereby takes advantage of the performative function of poetic language, staging open situations which confront the characters and the reader with the protean nature of life. It is this experiential hermeneutics, a time-bound process of staging and confrontation that makes Dante so stunningly modern.

By his work Dante puts the ultimate question before his readers which is whether one lives for this life or the next. Dante insists that if one believes in and lives for the next life with its rewards promised by God, he is unconquerable in this life. If all our life is simply a preparation for the next, which is eternal, we desperately need guides to help us achieve our end. As Dante himself says in what may be the most famous opening in this kind of literature “Midway upon the journey of life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost” (Inferno I: 1-3). He finds his guides in Vergil and, later Beatrice. Every person has other guides.

Dante creates a system of moral and aesthetic values which were topical in the middle ages as well as now. It becomes undisputable that Dante sees the journey to the Absolute truth as the core of the value picture with involves love, repentance, wisdom, free will, hope, pity and faith as its fundamental principles. The ultimate spiritual direction imparted by the Divine Comedy is the meaning Dante took back with him into his normal life after his supernatural journey: “the love that pervades the universe and how we either find harmony in that love or by opposing God's love damage the creation, ourselves, and others around us”.

In his Letter to Can Grando Dante explains that his purpose is to “remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of bliss” seeing the word and powerful pictures of afterlife world as the means to do it.

Keeping in mind all these conclusions it is much easier to see that the represented system of values represents fundamental principles for Dante what he tries to show throughout the entire Comedy. In other words it represents moral and aesthetic meaning of the work both for Dante himself and consequently his intended message for readers of the Divine Comedy.

References:

1. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Notes by Peter Armour. New York: Everyman, 1995.

2. Auerbach, Erich. Dante Poet of the Secular World. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007.

3. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

4. Dante's “Letter to Can Grande della Scala” Excerpts from a translation by Nancy Howe Web.Whittier.edu.

5. Jacoff, R., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, rpt. 2007.