Song one
“Having completed half his earthly life,” Dante “found himself in a dark forest” of sins and errors. Dante considers thirty-five years of age to be the middle of human life, the peak of its arc. He reached it in 1300, and dates his journey to the afterlife to coincide with this year. This chronology allows the poet to resort to the technique of “predicting” events that occurred after this date.
Above the forest of sins and delusions rises the saving hill of virtue, illuminated by the sun of truth. The poet’s ascent to the hill of salvation is hindered by three animals: a lynx, personifying voluptuousness, a lion, symbolizing pride, and a she-wolf, the embodiment of self-interest. The spirit of the frightened Dante, “running and confused, turned back, looking at the path leading everyone to the foretold death.”
Before Dante appears Virgil, the famous Roman poet, author of the Aeneid. In the Middle Ages, he enjoyed legendary fame as a sage, sorcerer and harbinger of Christianity. Virgil, who will lead Dante through Hell and Purgatory, is a symbol of reason guiding people to earthly happiness. Dante turns to him with a request for salvation, calls him “the honor and light of all the singers of the earth,” his teacher, “a beloved example.” Virgil advises the poet to “choose a new road” because Dante is not yet prepared to defeat the she-wolf and climb the joyful hill:
The she-wolf that makes you cry
Happened to every creature,
She will seduce many, but the glorious
The Dog will come and it will end.
The dog is the coming savior of Italy, he will bring with him honor, love and wisdom, and wherever “the she-wolf strives to run, having caught up with her, he will imprison her in Hell, from where envy lured the predator.”
Virgil announces that he will accompany Dante through all nine circles of Hell:
And you will hear screams of frenzy
And the ancient spirits in distress there,
Prayers for a new death are in vain;
Then you will see those who are alien to sorrows
Among the fire, in the hope of joining
Someday to the blessed tribes.
But if you want to fly higher,
A most worthy soul is waiting for you.
The owner of the “most worthy soul” is none other than Beatrice, the woman whom Dante loved since childhood. She died at the age of twenty-five, and Dante vowed to “say things about her that have never been said about anyone else.” Beatrice is a symbol of heavenly wisdom and revelation.
Song two
Am I a powerful enough performer?
To call me to such a feat?
And if I go to the land of shadows,
I'm afraid I'll be crazy, no less.
After all, before Dante, visiting Hell was possible only for the literary hero Aeneas (who descended into the underground abode of shadows, where his late father showed him the souls of his descendants) and the Apostle Paul (who visited both Hell and Paradise, “so that others would be strengthened in the faith by which salvation are coming"). Virgil calmly replies:
It is impossible for fear to command the mind;
I was called so by a woman
beautiful,
That he pledged to serve her in everything.
It was Beatrice who asked Virgil to give special attention to Dante, to guide him through the underworld and protect him from danger. She herself is in Purgatory, but, driven by love, she was not afraid to descend to Hell for Dante’s sake:
You should only be afraid of what is harmful
The secret is hidden for the neighbor.
In addition, at the request of Beatrice, on Dante’s side are both the Virgin Mary (“There is a gracious wife in heaven; grieving for the one who suffers so severely, she persuaded the judge to show mercy”), and the Christian saint Lucia. Virgil encourages the poet, assures him that the path he has ventured on will end happily:
Why are you embarrassed by shameful timidity?
Why didn’t you shine with bold pride,
When three blessed wives
You have found words of protection in heaven
And a wondrous path has been foreshadowed for you?
Dante calms down and asks Virgil to go ahead, showing him the way.
Song three
On the gates of Hell, Dante reads the inscription:
I take you to the outcast villages,
I lead through the eternal groan,
I am taking you to lost generations.
My architect was inspired by the truth:
I am the highest power, the fullness of omniscience
And created by first love.
Only eternal creatures are older than me,
And I will remain equal with eternity.
Incoming ones, leave your hopes.
In Christian mythology, Hell was created by a triune deity: father (higher power), son (fullness of omniscience) and holy spirit (first love) to serve as a place of execution for the fallen Lucifer. Hell was created before all things transitory and will exist forever. The only things older than Hell are earth, heaven and angels. Hell is an underground funnel-shaped abyss, which, narrowing, reaches the center of the globe. Its slopes are surrounded by concentric ledges, the “circles” of Hell.
Virgil notes: “Here it is necessary for the soul to be firm; here fear should not give advice.”
Dante enters the “mysterious entrance.” He finds himself on the other side of the gates of Hell.
There are sighs, crying and frantic screams
In the starless darkness they were so great,
Scraps of all dialects, wild murmurs,
Words containing pain, anger, and fear,
The splashing of hands, and complaints, and cries
Merged into a hum, without time, in centuries,
Whirling in the unilluminated darkness,
Like a stormy whirlwind of indignant dust.
Virgil explains that here are the “insignificant”, those pitiful souls “who have lived without knowing either the glory or the shame of mortal affairs. And with them is a bad flock of angels,” who, when Lucifer rebelled, did not join either him or God. “Heaven cast them down, not tolerating the stain; and the abyss of Hell does not accept them.” Sinners groan in despair because
And the hour of death is unattainable for them,
And this life is so unbearable
That everything else would be easier for them.
They seem to be driven and pressed towards the waves,
As it may seem from afar.
Virgil leads Dante to Acheron - the river of the ancient underworld. Flowing down, Acheron forms the swamp of the Styx (the Stygian swamp in which the wrathful are executed), even lower it becomes the Phlegethon, a ring-shaped river of boiling blood in which rapists are immersed, crosses the forest of suicides and the desert where fiery rain falls. Finally, Acheron falls into the depths with a noisy waterfall to turn into the icy Lake Cocytus in the center of the earth.
“An old man covered with ancient gray hair” is sailing towards the poets in a boat. This is Charon, the carrier of souls of the ancient underworld, who turned into a demon in Dante's Hell. Charon tries to drive Dante away - living soul- from the dead who angered God. Knowing that Dante is not condemned to eternal torment, Charon believes that the poet’s place is in the light boat on which the angel transports the souls of the dead to Purgatory. But Virgil stands up for Dante, and the poet enters Charon’s gloomy boat.
The depths of the earth were blown by the wind,
The desert of sorrow flared up all around,
Blinding feelings with the crimson shine...
Dante faints.
Canto Four
Waking up from a fainting sleep, Dante finds himself in the first circle of Catholic Hell, which is otherwise called Limbo. Here he sees unbaptized babies and virtuous non-Christians. They did not do anything bad during their lifetime, however, if there is no baptism, no amount of merit will save a person. Here is the place of the soul of Virgil, who explains to Dante:
Who lived before Christian teaching,
He didn’t honor God the way we should.
So am I. For these omissions,
For no other reason, we are condemned
Virgil says that Christ, between his death and resurrection, descended into Hell and brought out the Old Testament saints and patriarchs (Adam, Abel, Moses, King David, Abraham, Israel, Rachel). They all went to heaven. Returning to Limbo, Virgil is greeted by four of the greatest poets of antiquity:
Homer, the greatest of all singers;
The second is Horace, who castigated morals;
Ovid is the third, and behind him is Lucan.
Dante finds himself sixth in this company of great poets, and considers this a great honor for himself. After a walk with the poets, a tall castle surrounded by seven walls appears in front of him. The famous Greek Trojans appear before Dante's eyes - Electra (daughter of Atlas, lover of Zeus, mother of Dardan, founder of Troy); Hector (Trojan hero); Aeneas. Next come the famous Romans: “Caesar, friend of battles” (commander and statesman who laid the foundations of autocracy); Brutus, first Roman consul; Caesar's daughter Julia, etc. The Sultan of Egypt and Syria, Saladin, known for his spiritual nobility, approaches. Sages and poets sit in a separate circle: “teacher of those who know,” Aristotle; Socrates; Plato; Democritus, who “believes the world to be accidental”; philosophers Diogenes, Thales with Anaxagoras, Zeno, Empedocles, Heraclitus; physician Dioscorides; the Roman philosopher Seneca, the mythical Greek poets Orpheus and Linus; Roman orator Tullius; geometer Euclid; astronomer Ptolemy; doctors Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; Arab philosopher Averrois.
“Having left the initial circle,” Dante descends into the second circle of Hell.
Song five
At the border, the circle of the second Dante is met by the just Greek king Minos, “the legislator of Crete,” who after death became one of the three judges of the afterlife. Minos assigns degrees of punishment to sinners. Dante sees the souls of sinners flying around.
That hellish wind, knowing no rest,
A host of souls rushes among the surrounding darkness
And torments them, twisting and torturing them.
...it's a circle of torment
For those whom earthly flesh called,
Who betrayed the mind to the power of lust.
Among the voluptuaries languishing in the second circle are Queens Semiramis, Cleopatra, Helen, “the culprit of difficult times.” Achilles, “the thunderstorm of battles, who was defeated by love,” is recognized as a voluptuary and suffers here torment; Paris, Tristan.
Dante turns to a pair of lovers who are inseparable even in Hell - Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. Francesca was married to an ugly and lame man, but soon fell in love with his younger brother. Francesca's husband killed both of them. Francesca calmly tells Dante that, despite the torments of Hell,
Love, commanding loved ones to love,
I was so powerfully attracted to him,
That you see this captivity as indestructible.
Francesca tells Dante the story of her love with Paolo. The reason for them to enter into a love affair was a joint reading of a novel about Launcelot, a knight of the Round Table, and his love for Queen Ginevra. “The torment of their hearts” covers Dante’s forehead with “mortal sweat”, and he falls unconscious.
Song Six
Dante, accompanied by Virgil, enters the third circle, the entrance to which is guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, a demon with the features of a dog and a man:
His eyes are purple, his belly is swollen,
Fat in the black beard, clawed hands;
He torments souls, tears skin and flesh.
In the third circle, where the gluttons languish, “the rain flows, damned, eternal, heavy, icy.” Virgil bends down, scoops up two handfuls of earth and throws them into the “voracious jaws.” Cerberus. While he is choking on the ground, poets are able to pass by him.
Dante meets Ciacco, a glutton known throughout Florence. Ciacco predicts the immediate fate of Florence, torn apart by enmity between two noble families (the Black and White Guelphs, to which Dante belonged):
After long quarrels
Blood will be shed and power will be shed by the forest
(White) will deliver,
And their enemies - exile and shame.
When the sun shows his face three times,
They will fall, and they will help them get up
The hand of one who is deceitful these days
(Pope Boniface VIII).
The Black Guelphs will crush the Whites, according to Chacko's prophecy. Many Whites, including Dante, will be expelled.
Virgil explains to Dante that when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead, each soul will hasten to its grave, where its body is buried, will enter it and hear its verdict. Virgil refers to the works of Aristotle, which states that “the more perfect the nature in existence, the sweeter the bliss in it, and the more painful the pain.” This means that the more perfect a being is, the more susceptible it is to both pleasure and pain. A soul without a body is less perfect than one united with it. Therefore, after the resurrection of the dead, sinners will experience even greater suffering in Hell, and the righteous will experience even greater bliss in Paradise.
Song seven
In the next circle Dante awaits greek god wealth Plutos, a beast-like demon who guards access to the fourth circle, where misers and spendthrifts are executed. These two groups lead a kind of round dance:
Two hosts marched, army against army,
Then they collided and again
We walked back with difficulty, shouting to each other:
“What to save?” or “What should I throw?”
Virgil reproaches Dante for his erroneous idea that Fortune holds human happiness in her hands, and explains that the goddess of fate is only the executor of God’s fair will, she controls worldly happiness, while each of the heavenly spheres has its own angelic circle in charge of heavenly happiness.
Virgil and Dante cross the fourth circle and reach
To the streams of the stream, which are spacious,
They rushed like a hollow, pitted by them.
Their color was purple-black...
The sullen key subsides and grows
Into the Stygian swamp, falling...
In the Stygian swamp, Dante sees a ferocious crowd of naked people.
They fought, not only with two hands,
With the head, and the chest, and the legs
They strive to gnaw each other to shreds.
Virgil explains that here the angry ones bear eternal punishment. Under the waves of the Stygian swamp, people are also punished “whose throats have been stolen by mud.” These are those who deeply concealed anger and hatred for themselves during their lifetime and seemed to be suffocating from them. Now their punishment is worse than that of those who splashed their anger to the surface.
Virgil leads Dante to the foot of the tower of the underground city of Dita, located on the other side of the Stygian swamp.
Canto Eight
Dante notices two lit lights. This is a signal about the arrival of two souls, to which a response signal is given from the tower of the city of Dita and from there a carrier sails on a canoe.
The evil guard of the fifth circle, the carrier of souls through the Stygian swamp - Phlegius, according to Greek myth king of the Lapiths. Phlegias burned the Delphic temple and was thrown into Hades by the angry Apollo.
Phlegy is carrying Virgil and Dante on a boat. "In the middle of the dead stream" Dante sees a supporter of the Black Guelphs, a wealthy Florentine knight nicknamed Argenti ("silver") because he shod his horse with silver. During his lifetime, there was personal enmity between him and Dante; Argenti was distinguished by his arrogance and furious temper. He wraps both arms around Dante’s neck, trying to pull him into the dark waters, but “all the dirty people in great fury” attack Argenti and prevent him from fulfilling his vile intention. Argenti "tears himself with his teeth in wild anger."
Before Dante rises the city of Dit (the Latin name for Aida), in which “joyless people are imprisoned, a sad host.” The eternal flame blows beyond the city fence and paints the towers crimson. This is how the lower Hell appears before Dante. At the gate, Dante sees many hundreds of devils “raining down from the sky.” They were once angels, but together with Lucifer they rebelled against God and are now cast into Hell.
The devils demand that Virgil approach them alone, while Dante continues to stand at a distance. Dante is scared to death, but Virgil assures him that everything will be okay, you just have to believe and hope. The devils talk with Virgil briefly and quickly hide inside. The iron of the inner gate of Dita rattles. The outer gates were broken by Christ when he tried to bring the souls of the righteous out of Hell, and the devils blocked his way. Since then, the gates of hell have stood open.
Song Nine
Seeing that Dante had turned pale with fear upon his return, Virgil overcame his own pallor. The ancient poet says that he once passed here before, “the evil Erichto, the cursed one, who knew how to call souls back to bodies.” (Erichto is a sorceress who raised the dead and made them predict the future).
Before Dante and Virgil soar “three Furies, bloody and pale and entwined with green hydras.” They call upon Medusa, from whose gaze Dante should be petrified. However, Virgil warns Dante in time to close his eyes and turn away, and even covers his face with his palms. The Furies regret that at one time they did not destroy Theseus, who penetrated Hades to kidnap Persephone: then mortals would have completely lost the desire to penetrate the underworld.
In the sixth circle, Dante sees “only deserted places filled with inconsolable sorrow.”
The barren valley is covered with tombs, -
Because there were lights crawling between the pits here,
So I burn them, like in the flame of a crucible
Iron has never been hot.
Heretics languish in these mournful tombs.
Canto tenth
Suddenly, from one of the graves the voice of Farinata degli Uberti, the head of the Florentine Ghibellines (a party hostile to the Guelphs), is heard. He asks whose descendant Dante is. The poet tells his story honestly. Farinata begins to insult him, and Virgil henceforth advises Dante not to tell people he meets about himself. Dante faces a new ghost, Guelf Cavalcanti, the father of Dante's closest friend, Guido Cavalcanti. He is surprised that he does not see Guido next to Dante. The poet explains that he was brought to Hell by Virgil, whose works Guido “did not honor.”
Virgil warns that when Dante “enters the blessed light of beautiful eyes that see everything truthfully,” that is, he meets Beatrice, she will let him see the shadow of Cacciaguvida, who will reveal to Dante his future fate.
Canto Eleven
Virgil explains to his companion that in the abyss of lower Hell there are three circles. In these latter circles, anger that uses either violence or deception is punished.
Deception and force are the tools of the evil ones.
Deception, a vice that is only akin to man,
More vile to the Creator; it fills the bottom
And he is executed by hopeless torture.
Violence is included in the first circle,
Which is divided into three belts...
In the first zone, murder, robbery, arson (that is, violence against one’s neighbor) is punishable. In the second zone - suicide, gambling and extravagance (that is, violence against one’s property). In the third zone - blasphemy, sodomy and extortion (violence against deity, nature and art). Virgil mentions that “the most destructive are only three inclinations hated by heaven: incontinence, malice, violent bestiality.” At the same time, “incontinence is a lesser sin before God, and he does not punish it so much.”
Canto Twelfth
The entrance to the seventh circle, where rapists are punished, is guarded by the Minotaur, “the shame of the Cretans,” a monster conceived by the Cretan queen Pasiphae from a bull.
Centaurs rush around in the seventh circle. Dante and Virgil meet the fairest of the centaurs, Chiron, the educator of many heroes (for example, Achilles). Chiron orders the centaur Nessus to become a guide for Dante and drive away those who could interfere with the poet.
Along the shore, above the scarlet boiling water,
The counselor led us without any hesitation.
The scream of those being boiled alive was terrifying.
In the boiling bloody river, tyrants who thirsted for gold and blood are languishing - Alexander the Great (commander), Dionysius of Syracuse (tyrant), Attila (destroyer of Europe), Pyrrhus (who waged war with Caesar), Sextus (who exterminated the inhabitants of the city of Gabius).
Song thirteen
Wandering around the second zone of the seventh circle, where rapists are punished against themselves and their property, Dante sees nests of harpies (mythical birds with girlish faces). He and Virgil pass through the “desert of fire.” Virgil says that when Aeneas began to break the myrtle bush to decorate his altars with branches, blood came out of the bark, and the plaintive voice of the Trojan prince Polydorus, buried there, was heard. Dante, following the example of Aeneas, reaches out to the thorn tree and breaks a twig. Trunks exclaims that he is in pain.
So Dante enters the forest of suicides. They are the only ones on the day Last Judgment, having gone for their bodies, they will not be reunited with them: “What we ourselves have thrown off is not ours.”
There is no forgiveness for suicides, whose “soul, hardened, will arbitrarily tear the shell of the body,” even if the person “planned to prevent slander by death.” Those who voluntarily took their own lives turned into plants after death.
The grain is turned into a shoot and into a trunk;
And the harpies, feeding on its leaves,
Pain is created...
Canto fourteen
Dante walks along the third belt of the seventh circle, where the rapists against the deity languish in eternal torment. Before him “a steppe opened up, where there is no living sprout.” The blasphemers are thrown down, lying face up, the covetous sit huddled, the sodomites scurry about tirelessly.
An irreconcilable blasphemer, who does not give up his opinion even in Hell, “in great fury, he executes himself more cruelly than any court.” He “abhorred God - and did not become humble.”
Dante and Virgil move towards the high Mount Ida.
A certain great old man stands in the mountain;
His golden head shines
And the chest and arms are cast silver,
And further - copper, to where the split is;
Then - the iron is simple down to the bottom,
Ho clay right metatarsus,
All the flesh, from the neck down, is cut,
And drops of tears flow through the cracks
And the bottom of the cave is gnawed by their wave.
In the underground depths they will be born
And Acheron, and Styx, and Phlegethon.
This is the Elder of Crete, the emblem of humanity that has passed through the Golden, Silver, Copper and Iron Ages. Now it (humanity) rests on a fragile clay foot, that is, the hour of its end is near. The elder turns his back to the East, the region of the ancient kingdoms that have become obsolete, and his face to Rome, where, as in a mirror, the former glory of the world monarchy is reflected and from where, as Dante believes, the salvation of the world can still shine.
Song fifteen
A hellish river flows in front of Dante, the “burning Phlegethon,” above which “abundant steam” rises. From there comes the voice of the Florentine Brunetto, a scientist, poet and statesman from the time of Dante, whom the poet himself looks upon as his teacher. He accompanies the guest for some time. Dante
...did not dare to walk through the burning plain
Side by side with him; but he hung his head,
Like a person walking respectfully.
Dante sees how “the people of the church, the best of them, scientists known to all countries” are tormented in the bubbling scarlet waters of the infernal river.
Song sixteen
Three shadows fly up to Dante and Virgil from the crowd, which consists of the souls of military and statesmen. “All three of them ran in a ring,” because in the third belt of the seventh circle of Hell, souls are forbidden to stop even for a moment. Dante recognizes the Florentine Guelphs Guido Guerra, Teggio Aldobrandi and Picticucci, who became famous in Dante's time.
Virgil explains that now it’s time for them to descend into the most terrible place of Hell. A rope is found on Dante’s belt - he hoped “to catch a lynx with it someday.” Dante hands the rope to Virgil.
He stood sideways so that he
Do not catch on the ledges of the cliff,
He threw her into the gaping darkness.
I saw - from the abyss, like a swimmer, some image was soaring towards us, growing, Wonderful even for daring hearts.
Song seventeen
From the hellish abyss appears Geryon, the guardian of the eighth circle, where deceivers are punished.
He was clear-faced and majestic
The calmness of friendly and pure features,
But the rest of the composition was serpentine.
Two paws, hairy and clawed;
His back, and belly, and sides -
The pattern of spots and nodes is flowery.
Dante notices "a crowd of people sitting near an abyss in the burning dust." These are moneylenders. They are placed right above the cliff, on the border with the area where deceivers suffer torment. Virgil advises Dante to find out “what is the difference between their lot.”
Each one had a purse hanging over his chest,
Having a special sign and color,
And it seemed to delight their eyes.
Empty purses are decorated with the coats of arms of moneylenders, which indicates their noble origin. Dante and Virgil sit on Geryon's back, and he rushes them into the abyss. Horror seizes Dante when he sees that
...alone all around
The empty abyss of air turns black
And only the beast’s back rises.
Geryon lowers the poets to the bottom of the hole and disappears.
Song Eighteen
Dante enters the eighth circle (Evil Crevices), which is furrowed by ten concentric ditches (cracks). In Evil Crevices, deceivers are punished who deceived people who are not connected with them by any special ties. In the first ditch, sinners walk in two opposing streams, scourged by demons and therefore “walking larger” than Dante and Virgil. The row closest to the poets moves towards them. These are pimps who seduced women for others. The back row is formed by seducers who seduced women for themselves. Among them -
... a wise and brave ruler,
Jason, gold-acquirer rune.
He deceived, decorating his speech richly,
Young Hypsipyle, in turn
A product that once deceived me.
He left her there bearing fruit;
For this we scourge him viciously...
Dante ascends "on a bridge where there is room to look." His eyes see crowds of sinners “stuck in fetid feces” in the second ditch. These are flatterers. Dante recognizes Alessio Interminelli, who admits that he suffers such punishment “because of the flattering speech that he wore on his tongue.”
Song nineteen
In the third ditch, holy merchants, “church traders,” are punished. Here Dante sees Pope Nicholas III, who has been buried upside down for twenty years. The poet bends over him like a confessor over a murderer (in the Middle Ages in Italy, murderers were buried upside down in the ground, and the only way to delay the terrible execution was to ask the confessor to approach the condemned man again). Dante draws the symbol of papal Rome, merging together the image of a harlot and a beast (following the example of the author of the Apocalypse, who called Rome the “great harlot” sitting on a seven-headed and ten-horned beast).
Silver and gold are now a god for you;
And even those who pray to the idol
They honor one, you honor a hundred at once.
Song twentieth
In the fourth ditch of the eighth circle, the soothsayers languish, struck dumb. Dante recognizes the Theban soothsayer Tiresias, who, having struck two intertwined snakes with his staff, turned into a woman, and seven years later made the reverse transformation. Here is the daughter of Tiresias, Manto, also a soothsayer.
Song twenty-one
In the fifth ditch of the eighth circle, bribe-takers are punished. The moat is guarded by the demons of Zagrebala. Dante sees thick tar boiling in the ditch and notices “how a certain black devil, nicknamed Tail, is running up a steep path.”
He threw the sinner like a sack,
On a sharp shoulder and rushed to the rocks,
Holding him by the tendons of his legs.
...And up to a hundred teeth
They immediately pierced the sinner’s sides.
Song twenty two
Virgil and Dante walk “with a dozen demons” along the fifth ditch. Sometimes, “to ease the torment,” one of the sinners emerges from the boiling resin and hastily dives back, because demons are jealously guarding them on the shore. As soon as someone hesitates on the surface, one of the guards, Ruffnut, tears his forearm with a “hook” and snatches out “a whole piece of meat.”
As soon as the bribe-taker disappeared with his head,
He immediately pointed his nails at his brother,
And the devils grappled over the tar.
Song twenty-three
The sixth ditch contains hypocrites, dressed in lead robes, which are called cloaks. Hypocrites move forward very slowly under the weight of their armor. Virgil advises Dante to wait and walk with someone he knows along the road.
One of the sinners admits that he and his friend are Gaudents (in Bolonva, the order of “Knights of the Virgin Mary”, Gaudents, was established, the purpose of which was considered to be the reconciliation of warring parties and the protection of the disadvantaged. Since the members of the order cared most about their pleasures, they were nicknamed “merrymakers brothers"). The Gaudents are being punished for the hypocrisy of their order.
Dante sees "crucified in the dust with three stakes." This sinner is the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who, according to the Gospel legend, gave the Pharisees advice to kill Christ. Caiaphas hypocritically said that the death of Christ alone would save the entire people from destruction. Otherwise, the people may incur the wrath of the Romans, under whose rule Judea was, if they continue to follow Christ.
He is thrown across the path and naked,
As you see and feel all the time,
How heavy is everyone who walks.
The Pharisees themselves waged a fierce struggle against the early Christian communities, which is why the Gospel calls them hypocrites.
Song twenty-four
Thieves are punished in the seventh ditch. Dante and Virgil climb to the top of the collapse. Dante is very tired, but Virgil reminds him that there is a much higher ladder ahead of him (meaning the path to Purgatory). Moreover, Dante's goal is not simply to get away from sinners. This is not enough. You have to achieve inner perfection yourself.
“Suddenly a voice came from the crevasse that didn’t even sound like speech.” Dante does not understand the meaning of the words, does not see where the voice comes from and who it belongs to. Inside the cave, Dante sees “a terrible lump of snakes, and so many different ones were visible that his blood ran cold.”
Among this monstrous crowd
Naked people, rushing about, not a corner
He didn't wait to hide, nor did he wait for heliotrope.
Twisting their arms behind their backs, sides
The snakes pierced with their tail and head,
To tie the ends of the ball in front.
Thieves suffer punishment here. The snakes incinerate the thief, he burns, loses his body, falls, falls apart, but then his ashes close together and return to their previous form so that the execution begins all over again.
The thief admits that he was a lover of “living like a bestial, but couldn’t live like a human.” Now he is “thrown so deep into this pit because he stole the utensils in the sacristy.”
Song twenty-fifth
At the end of the speech, raising my hands
And sticking out two figs, the villain
He exclaimed: “Oh, my God, both things!”
Since then I have become a friend of snakes:
I'm not in any of the dark circles of Hell
The spirit could not appear more obstinate to God...
The snakes bite into the bodies of the thieves, and the thieves themselves turn into snakes: their tongues fork, their legs grow together into a single tail,” after which
The soul crawls in the guise of a reptile
And with a thorn he retreats into the ravine.
Song twenty-six
In the eighth ditch, crafty advisers are executed. “Here every spirit is lost within the fire with which it burns.” In the eighth ditch, Ulysses (Odysseus) and Diomedes (Trojan heroes who always acted together in battles and cunning enterprises) are tormented, “and so together, as they went to anger, they go through the path of retribution.”
Odysseus tells Dante that he is guilty of leading people astray all his life. true path, deliberately suggested to them cunning, wrong ways out of the situation, manipulated them, for which he now suffers the torments of Hell. More than once his sly advice cost his companions their lives, and Odysseus had to “replace his triumph with crying.”
Song twenty-seven
Another crafty adviser is Count Guido de Montefeltro, the leader of the Roman Ghibellines, a skilled commander, who was sometimes at enmity with papal Rome, and who was reconciled with it. Two years before his death, he took monastic vows, which Dante now informs about:
I exchanged my sword for a Cordillera belt
And I believed that I accepted grace;
And so my faith would be fulfilled,
Whenever you lead me into sin again
Supreme Shepherd (bad fate to him!);
I knew all kinds of secret paths
And he knew tricks of every stripe;
The edge of the world heard the sound of my undertakings.
When I realized I had reached that part
My path, where is the wise man,
Having removed his sail, he reels in the tackle,
Everything that captivated me, I cut off;
And, having made a contrite confession, -
Woe is me! - I would be saved forever.
However, the count was unable to abandon the cunning and cunning habitual to his mind, the perverted logic with which he ruined the lives of less far-sighted people. Therefore, when the hour of death of Guido de Montefeltro came, the devil came down from heaven and grabbed his soul, explaining that he was a logician too.
Song twenty-eighth
In the ninth trench the instigators of discord suffer. According to Dante, “the ninth ditch will be a hundred times more monstrous in its massacre” than all the other circles of Hell.
Not so full of holes, having lost the bottom, the tub,
How one's guts gaped here
lips to where they stink:
A pile of intestines hung between my knees,
A heart with a disgusting purse was visible,
Where what is eaten passes into feces.
One of the sinners is troubadour Bertram de Born, who fought a lot with both his brother and neighbors and encouraged others to war. Under his influence, Prince Henry (whom Dante calls John) rebelled against his father, who had crowned him during his lifetime. For this, Bertram's brain was cut off forever, his head was cut in half.
Song twenty-nine
The sight of these crowds and this torment
So intoxicated my eyes that I
I wanted to cry without hiding the suffering.
The tenth ditch is the last refuge of counterfeiters. metals, counterfeiters of people (i.e. impersonating others), counterfeiters of money and counterfeiters of words (liars and slanderers). Dante sees two people sitting back to back, “scarred from the feet to the crown.” They suffer from foul-smelling scabies and are relaxed.
Their nails completely tore off the skin,
Like scales from large-scaled fish
Or withThe bream scrapes off the knife.
Song Thirty
Before Dante are
...two pale naked shadows,
Which, biting everyone around,
They rushed...
One was built just like a lute;
He just needs to be cut off in the groin
The whole bottom that people have is forked.
These are Gianni Schicchi and Mirra, posing as other people. Mirra, the daughter of the Cypriot king Kinir, was inflamed with love for her father and quenched her passion under a false name. Having learned about this, her father wanted to kill her, but Mirra fled. The gods turned her into a myrrh tree. Gianni Schicchi pretended to be a dying rich man and dictated his will to a notary for him. The forged will was drawn up and was largely in favor of Schicchi himself (who received an excellent horse and six hundred gold pieces, while donating pennies to charitable causes).
In the tenth ditch of the eighth circle, Potiphar’s wife, “who lied against Joseph,” languishes, who tried in vain to seduce the beautiful Joseph, who served in their house, and as a result slandered him in front of her husband, and he imprisoned Joseph. In the tenth ditch, “the Trojan Greek and liar Sinon,” an oathbreaker who convinced the Trojans to bring a wooden horse into Troy with a false story, is executed in eternal shame.
Song thirty-one
Virgil is angry with Dante for paying so much attention to such scoundrels. But Virgil’s tongue, which stung Dante with a reproach and brought a blush of shame to his face, itself heals his spiritual wound with consolation.
Towers emerge from the gloomy light in the distance. Coming closer, Dante sees that this is the Well of Giants (giants who, in Greek mythology, tried to take the sky by storm and were overthrown by the lightning of Zeus).
They stand in the well, around the mouth,
And their bottom, from the navel, is decorated with a fence.
Among the giants, King Nimrod also languishes, who planned to build a tower to heaven, which led to the displacement of the previously common language, and people stopped understanding each other’s speech. The giant Ephialtes is punished by the fact that he can no longer move his arms.
The Titan Antaeus emerges from a dark basin. He did not participate in the struggle between the giants and the gods. Virgil cajoles Antaeus, praises his supernatural strength, and he takes him and Dante “to the chasm where Judas and Lucifer are swallowed up in the ultimate darkness.”
Song thirty-two
The bottom of the well, guarded by giants, turns out to be the icy Lake Cocytus, in which those who deceived those who trusted them, that is, traitors, are punished. This is the last circle of Hell, divided into four concentric zones. In the first zone, traitors to their relatives are executed. They are immersed up to their necks in ice, and their faces are turned downwards.
And their eyes, swollen with tears,
They poured out moisture and it froze,
And frost covered their eyelids.
In the second zone, traitors to the homeland suffer punishment. By chance, Dante kicks one sinner in the temple. This is Bocca degli Abbati. He cut off the hand of the standard bearer of the Florentine cavalry in battle, which led to confusion and defeat. Bocca begins to make trouble and refuses to introduce himself to Dante. Other sinners scorn the traitor. Dante promises that Bocca, with his help, will “forever strengthen his shame in the world.”
Two other sinners are frozen in a pit together.
One was covered like a hat by the other.
Like a hungry bitch gnaws bread,
So the upper one sank his teeth into the lower one
Where the brain and neck meet.
Song thirty-three
In the third belt, Dante sees traitors to his friends and dinner companions. Here he listens to the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. He ruled Pisa jointly with his grandson Nino Visconti. But soon discord arose between them, which Ugolino’s enemies took advantage of. Under the guise of friendship and promising help in the fight against Nino, Bishop Ruggiero raised a popular rebellion against Ugolino. Ugolino, along with his four sons, was imprisoned in a tower where he had previously locked his prisoners, where they were starved to death. At the same time, the sons repeatedly asked their father to eat them, but he refused and saw how the children, one after another, died in agony. For two days Ugolino called out to the dead with cries of anguish, but it was not grief that killed him, but hunger. Ugolino asks to remove the oppression from his gaze, “so that grief may pour out at least for a moment as a tear, before the frost covers him.”
At a distance, the monk Alberigo is suffering, who, when a relative slapped him in the face, invited him to his feast as a sign of reconciliation. At the end of the meal, Alberigo cried out for fruit, and at this sign his son and brother, together with the hired killers, attacked the relative and his young son and stabbed them both. “Brother Alberigo’s fruit” became a proverb.
Song thirty-four
Poets enter the last, fourth belt, or more precisely, the central disk of the ninth circle
Ada. Traitors of their benefactors are executed here.
Some are lying; others froze while standing,
Some are up, some are head down, frozen;
And who - in an arc, cut his face with his feet.
Lucifer rises up to his chest from the ice. Once the most beautiful of the angels, he led their rebellion against God and was cast from heaven into the bowels of the earth. Transform into the monstrous Devil, he became the lord of the underworld. This is how evil arose in the world.
In the three mouths of Lucifer those whose sin, according to Dante, is the most terrible of all are executed: traitors to the majesty of God (Judas) and the majesty of man (Brutus and Cassius, champions of the republic who killed Julius Caesar).
Judas Iscariot is buried inside with his head and heels out. Brutus hangs from Lucifer's black mouth and writhes in silent grief.
Virgil announces that their journey through the circles of Hell has come to an end. They make a turn and head towards the southern hemisphere. Dante, accompanied by Virgil, returns to the “clear light”. Dante completely calms down as soon as his eyes are illuminated by “the beauty of heaven in the yawning gap.”
Purgatory
Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell to the foot of Mount Purgatory. Now Dante is preparing to “sing the Second Kingdom” (i.e., the seven circles of Purgatory, “where souls find purification and ascend to eternal existence”).
Dante depicts Purgatory as a huge mountain rising in the southern hemisphere in the middle of the Ocean. It looks like a truncated cone. The coastal strip and the lower part of the mountain form the Pre-Purgatory, and the upper part is surrounded by seven ledges (seven circles of Purgatory). On the flat top of the mountain, Dante places the deserted forest of the Earthly Paradise. There human spirit gains the highest freedom in order to then go to Paradise.
The Guardian of Purgatory is Elder Cato (a statesman of the last times of the Roman Republic, who, not wanting to survive its collapse, committed suicide). He “wanted freedom” - spiritual freedom, which is achieved through moral purification. Cato dedicated and gave his life to this freedom, which cannot be realized without civil freedom.
At the foot of Mount Purgatory, newly arrived souls of the dead crowd. Dante recognizes the shadow of his friend, composer and singer Casella. Kasella tells the poet that the souls of those “who are not drawn by Acheron,” that is, not condemned to the torments of Hell, fly after death to the mouth of the Tiber, from where an angel takes them in a canoe to the island of Purgatory. Although the angel did not take Casella with him for a long time, he did not see any offense in this, being convinced that the desire of the angel-carrier “with the highest truth similar." But now it’s spring 1300 (the time of action of the “Divine Comedy”). In Rome, starting from Christmas, the church “jubilee” is celebrated, the sins of the living are generously forgiven and the lot of the dead is alleviated. Therefore, for three months now, the angel has been “freely taking” into his boat everyone who asks.
At the foot of Mount Purgatory stand the dead under church excommunication. Among them is Manfred, king of Naples and Sicily, an irreconcilable opponent of the papacy, excommunicated. To fight him, the papal throne called Charles of Anjou. At the Battle of Benevento (1266), Manfred died and his kingdom went to Charles. Each warrior of the enemy army, honoring the brave king, threw a stone on his grave, so that a whole hill grew.
On the first ledge of the Pre-Purgatory there are those who are careless, who delayed repentance until the hour of death. Dante sees the Florentine Belacqua, who is waiting for the living to pray for him - his own prayers from the Pre-Purgatory are no longer heard by God.
their fate, careless, dead violent death. Here are those who fell in battle and those who were killed by a treacherous hand. The soul of Count Buonconte, who fell in battle, is carried away by an angel to Paradise, “using a tear” of his repentance. The devil decides to take possession of at least the “other things,” that is, his body.
Dante meets Sordello, a 13th-century poet who wrote in Provençal and who, according to legend, died a violent death. Sordello was a native of Mantua, like Virgil.
Virgil says that he was deprived of seeing God (the Sun) not because he sinned, but because he did not know the Christian faith. He “learned to know it late” - after death, when Christ descended into Hell.
In a secluded valley reside the souls of earthly rulers who were absorbed in worldly affairs. Here are Rudolf of Habsburg (emperor of the so-called “Holy Roman Empire”), the Czech king Přemysl-Ottokar II (fell in battle with Rudolf in 1278), the snub-nosed French king Philip III the Bold (defeated by “tarnishing the honor of the lilies” of his coat of arms) etc. Most of these kings are very unhappy in their offspring.
Two bright angels descend to the earthly rulers to guard the valley, since “the appearance of the serpent is near.” Dante sees Nino Visconti, friend and rival of Count Ugolini, whom the poet met in Hell. Nino complains that the widow soon forgot him. Three bright stars rise above the horizon, symbolizing faith, hope and love.
Virgil and other shadows do not need sleep. Dante falls asleep. While he is sleeping, Saint Lucia appears, she wants to take the poet herself to the Gates of Purgatory. Virgil agrees and obediently follows Lucia. Dante must climb three steps - white marble, purple and fiery scarlet. On the last one sits the messenger of God. Dante reverently asks that the gates be opened for him. He, having inscribed seven “Rs” on Dante’s forehead with a sword, takes out the silver and gold keys and opens the Gates of Purgatory.
In the first circle of Purgatory, souls atone for the sin of pride. The circular path along which Dante and Virgil move runs along a marble wall of a mountain slope, decorated with bas-reliefs depicting examples of humility (for example, the Gospel legend about the humility of the Virgin Mary before the angel announcing that she will give birth to Christ).
The shadows of the dead give praise to the Lord, asking to guide people on the true path, to admonish them, for “the great mind is powerless to find the way itself.” They walk along the edge, “until the darkness of the world falls from them.” Among those present is Oderisi of Gubbio, the famous miniaturist. He says that “he always diligently aimed to be the first,” which he must now atone for.
“The path that souls follow is paved with slabs that “show who was who among the living.” Dante’s attention, in particular, is drawn to the image of the terrible torment of Niobe, who was proud of her seven sons and seven daughters and mocked Latona, the mother of only two twins - Apollo and Diana. Then the children of the goddess killed all the children of Niobe with arrows, and she was petrified with grief.
Dante notes that in Purgatory souls enter each new circle with chants, while in Hell - with cries of agony. The letters “P” on Dante’s forehead fade, and it seems easier for him to rise. Virgil, smiling, draws his attention to the fact that one letter has already completely disappeared. After the first “P”, the sign of pride, the root of all sins, was erased, the remaining signs became dull, especially since pride was Dante’s main sin.
Dante reaches the second circle. The poet realizes that he sinned much less with envy than with pride, but he anticipates the torment of the “lower cliff,” the one where the proud are “oppressed by a burden.”
Dante finds himself in the third circle of Purgatory. It hits him in the eyes for the first time bright light. This is a heavenly ambassador who announces to the poet that the future path is open to him. Virgil explains to Dante:
The riches that attract you are so bad
That the more you are, the scarcer the part,
And envy inflates sighs like fur.
And if you directed passion
To the supreme sphere, your concern
It should inevitably fall away.
After all, the more people who say “ours” there,
Them a larger share everyone is endowed
And the more love burns brighter and more beautiful.
Virgil advises Dante to quickly achieve healing of the “five scars,” of which two have already been erased by the poet’s repentance for his sins.
The blinding smoke into which the poets enter envelops the souls of those who have been blinded by anger in life. Before Dante’s inner gaze, the Virgin Mary appears, who, having found three days later her missing son, twelve-year-old Jesus, talking in the temple with a teacher, speaks meek words to him. Another vision is of the wife of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, with pain in her voice, demanding revenge from her husband on the young man who kissed their daughter in public. Peisistratus did not listen to his wife, who demanded that the impudent man be punished, and the matter ended with a wedding. This dream was sent to Dante so that his heart would not for a moment turn away the “moisture of reconciliation” - meekness that extinguishes the fire of anger.
The fourth circle of Purgatory is reserved for the sad. Virgil expounds the doctrine of love as the source of all good and evil and explains the gradation of the circles of Purgatory. Circles I, II and III cleanse from the soul love for “other people’s evil,” that is, ill will (pride, envy, anger); circle IV - insufficient love for true good (despondency); circles V, VI, VII - excessive love for false benefits (greed, gluttony, voluptuousness). Natural love is the natural desire of creatures (whether primary matter, plant, animal or man) for that which is beneficial to them. Love never makes a mistake in choosing its goal.
In the fifth circle, Dante sees misers and spendthrifts, and in the sixth, gluttons. The poet notes Erysichthon among them. Erysichthon cut down the oak tree of Ceres, and the goddess sent such an insatiable hunger upon him that, having sold everything for food, even my own daughter, Erysichthon began to eat his own body. In the sixth circle, Boniface Fieschi, the Archbishop of Ravenna, undergoes purification. Fieschi not so much fed his spiritual flock with moral food as he fed his associates with delicious dishes. Dante compares the emaciated sinners with the hungry Jews during the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans (70), when the Jewish Mariam ate her infant.
The poet Bonagiunta of Lucca asks Dante if he is the one who sang love best. Dante formulates the psychological basis of his poetics and, in general, of the “sweet new style” that he developed in poetry:
When I breathe love
Then I am attentive; she just needs
Give me some words, and I write.
In the seventh circle, Dante sees voluptuous people. Some of them angered God by indulging in sodomy, while others, like the poet Guido Guinicelli, are tormented by shame for their unbridled “bestial passion.” Guido has already “begun to atone for his sin, like those who grieved their hearts early.” They commemorate Pasiphae to their shame.
Dante falls asleep. He dreams of a young woman picking flowers in a meadow. This is Leah, a symbol of active life. She collects flowers for her sister Rachel, who loves to look in a mirror framed with flowers (a symbol of a contemplative life).
Dante enters the Lord's forest - that is, the Earthly Paradise. Here a woman appears to him. This is Matelda. She sings and picks flowers. If Eve had not violated the ban, humanity would have lived in the Earthly Paradise, and Dante, from birth to death, would have tasted the bliss that is now revealed to him.
Creator of all good things, satisfied only with himself,
He introduced a good man, for good,
Here, on the eve of eternal peace.
The time was interrupted by the guilt of people,
And they turned into pain and crying in the old way
Sinless laughter and sweet play.
Dante is surprised to see water and wind in the Earthly Paradise. Matelda explains (based on Aristotle's Physics) that “wet vapors” generate precipitation, and “dry vapors” generate wind. Only below the level of the gates of Purgatory are such disturbances generated by the steam that, under the influence of the sun's heat, rises from the water and from the earth. At the height of the Earthly Paradise there are no longer disorderly winds. Here one feels only the uniform circulation of the earth’s atmosphere from east to west, caused by the rotation of the ninth heaven, or the Prime Mover, which sets in motion the eight heavens closed in it.
The stream flowing in the Earthly Paradise is divided. The river Lethe flows to the left, destroying the memory of committed sins, and to the right - Eunoe, resurrecting in a person the memory of all his good deeds.
A mystical procession is marching towards Dante. This is a symbol of the triumphant church coming to meet the repentant sinner. The procession opens with seven lamps, which, according to the Apocalypse, “are the seven spirits of God.” Three women at the right wheel of the chariot represent three “theological” virtues: scarlet - Love, green - Hope, white - Faith.
The holy line stops. His beloved Beatrice appears before Dante. She died at the age of twenty-five. But here Dante again experienced “the charm of his former love.” At this moment Virgil disappears. Next, the poet’s guide will be his beloved.
Beatrice reproaches the poet for the fact that on earth after her death he was unfaithful to her both as a woman and as heavenly wisdom, seeking answers to all his questions in human wisdom. So that Dante “would not follow evil paths,” Beatrice arranged for him to travel through the nine circles of Hell and the seven circles of Purgatory. Only in this way did the poet become convinced with his own eyes: salvation can only be given to him by “the spectacle of those who are lost forever.”
Dante and Beatrice talk about where the poet’s unrighteous paths led. Beatrice washes Dante in the waters of the Lethe River, which gives oblivion of sins. The nymphs sing that Dante will now be forever faithful to Beatrice, marked supreme beauty, "harmony of heaven." Dante discovers the second beauty of Beatrice - her lips (Dante learned the first beauty, her eyes, in earthly life).
Dante, after a “ten-year thirst” to see Beatrice (ten years have passed since her death), does not take his eyes off her. The holy army, the mystical procession turns back to the east. The procession surrounds the biblical “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” from which Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruits.
Beatrice instructs the poet to describe everything that he now sees. The past, present and future destinies of the Roman Church appear before Dante in allegorical images. An eagle descends to the chariot and showers it with its feathers. These are the riches that Christian emperors bestowed on the church. The dragon (devil) tore off part of its bottom from the chariot - the spirit of humility and poverty. Then she instantly dressed herself in feathers and acquired riches. The feathered chariot transforms into an apocalyptic beast.
Beatrice expresses confidence that the chariot stolen by the giant will be returned and take on its former appearance. Events will show who will be the coming deliverer of the church, and the solution of this difficult riddle will lead not to disaster, but to peace.
Beatrice wants Dante, returning to the people, to convey her words to them, without even delving into their meaning, but simply keeping them in memory; thus a pilgrim returns from Palestine with a palm branch tied to a staff. The dream sends Dante to the Zvnoe River, which returns his lost strength. Dante goes to Paradise, “pure and worthy to visit the luminaries.”
Paradise
Dante, having drunk from the streams of Eunoia, returns to Beatrice. She will lead him to Paradise; the pagan Virgil cannot ascend to heaven.
Beatrice “pierces” her gaze into the sun. Dante tries to follow her example, but, unable to withstand the brilliance, directs his eyes to her eyes. Unbeknownst to himself, the poet begins to ascend to the heavenly spheres together with his beloved.
The celestial spheres are rotated by the ninth, crystalline sky, or Prime Mover, which in turn rotates with inconceivable speed. Every particle of it longs to unite with every particle of the motionless Empyrean that embraces it. According to Beatrice's explanation, the heavens do not rotate themselves, but are set in motion by angels, who endow them with the power of influence. Dante denotes these “movers” with the words: “deep wisdom”, “reason” and “minds”.
Dante's attention is drawn to the harmonic harmonies produced by the rotation of the heavens. It seems to Dante that they are covered with a transparent, smooth, thick cloud. Beatrice raises the poet to the first sky - the Moon, the closest luminary to the earth. Dante and Beatrice plunge into the depths of the Moon.
Dante asks Beatrice “if it is possible to compensate for the breach of vow with new deeds.” Beatrice replies that a person can do this only by becoming like divine love, which wants all the inhabitants of the heavenly kingdom to be like it.
Beatrice and Dante fly to the “second kingdom,” the second heaven, Mercury. “Countless sparkles” are rushing towards them. These are ambitious doers of good. Dante asks some of them about their fate. Among them is the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who during his reign “removed every flaw in the laws,” embarked on the path of true faith, and God “marked him.” Here “retribution according to his deserts” is given to Cincinnatus, the Roman consul and dictator, famous for his severity of character. Torquatus, the Roman commander of the 4th century BC, Pompey the Great and Scipio Africanus are glorified here.
In the second sky, “inside the beautiful pearl shines the light of Romeo,” a modest wanderer, i.e. Rome de Vilnay, a minister who, according to legend, allegedly came to the court of the Count of Provence as a poor pilgrim, put his property affairs in order, and gave away his daughters for four kings, but envious courtiers slandered him. The count demanded from Romeo an account of the management, he presented the count with his increased wealth and left the count's court the same beggar wanderer as he had come. The count executed the slanderers.
Dante, in an incomprehensible way, flies together with Beatrice to the third heaven - Venus. In the depths of the luminous planet, Dante sees the circling of other luminaries. These are the souls of the loving. They move at different speeds, and the poet suggests that this speed depends on the degree of “their eternal vision,” that is, the contemplation of God available to them.
The brightest is the fourth sky - the Sun.
No one's soul has ever known anything like this
Holy zeal and give your ardor
The creator was not ready for this,
As I listened, I felt it;
And so my love was absorbed by him,
Why did I forget about Beatrice -
the poet admits.
A round dance of sparkles encircles Dante and Beatrice, like “a burning row of singing suns.” From one sun the voice of Thomas Aquinas, philosopher and theologian, is heard. Next to him are Gratian, a legal monk, Peter of Lombardy, theologian, biblical king Solomon, Dionysius the Areopagite, the first bishop of Athens, etc. Dante, surrounded by a round dance of wise men, exclaims:
O mortals, foolish efforts!
How stupid is every syllogism,
Which crushes your wings!
Some analyzed the law, some analyzed the aphorism,
Who pursued the degrees of the priesthood jealously,
Who comes to power through violence or sophistry,
Some were attracted by robbery, some by profit,
Who is immersed in the pleasures of the body,
I was exhausted, and those who dozed lazily,
While, detached from troubles,
I'm with Beatrice in the sky far away
He was honored with such great glory.
Dante imagines the souls of saints in the fourth celestial sphere to be radiant, to whom God the Father reveals the mystery of the descent of God the Spirit and the birth of God the Son. Sweet voices reach Dante, which, in comparison with the sound of “earthly sirens and muses,” that is, earthly singers and poets, are inexplicably beautiful. Above one rainbow rises another. Twenty-four wise men surround Dante with a double wreath. He calls them flowers sprouted from the grain of true faith.
Dante and Beatrice ascend to the fifth heaven - Mars. Here they are met by warriors for the faith. In the depths of Mars, “surrounded by stars, a sacred sign was formed from two rays,” that is, a cross. A wonderful song sounds around, the meaning of which Dante does not understand, but admires the wonderful harmonies. He guesses that this is a song of praise to Christ. Dante, absorbed in the vision of the cross, even forgets to look at beautiful eyes Beatrice.
Down along the cross slides one of the stars, “whose glory shines there.” This is Cacciaguida, Dante's great-great-grandfather, who lived in the 12th century. Kachchagvida blesses the poet, calls himself “the avenger of evil deeds,” who now deservedly tastes “peace.” Cacciaguida is very pleased with his descendants. He only asks that Dante, through good deeds, shorten his grandfather’s stay in Purgatory.
Dante finds himself in the sixth heaven - Jupiter. Individual sparks, particles of love are the souls of the just who reside here. Flocks of souls, flying, weave different letters in the air. Dante reads the words that arise from these letters. This is the biblical saying, “Love justice, you who judge the earth.” At the same time, the Latin letter “M” reminds Dante of a fleur-de-lis. The lights flying to the top of the "M" turn into the head and neck of a heraldic eagle. Dante begs Reason to “become indomitably angry that the temple has been made a place of bargaining.” Dante compares the clouds of smoke that obscure the just Reason with the papal curia, which does not allow the earth to be illuminated by a ray of justice, and the popes themselves are famous for their greed.
Beatrice again encourages Dante to move on. They ascend to the planet Saturn, where the poet appears the souls of those who devoted themselves to the contemplation of God. Here, in seventh heaven, the sweet songs that are heard in the lower circles of Paradise do not sound, because “hearing is mortal.” Contemplatives explain to Dante that “the mind that shines here” is powerless even in the heavenly spheres. So on earth his power is all the more transitory and it is useless to seek answers to eternal questions by means of the human mind alone. Among the contemplatives there are many humble monks, whose “hearts were strict.”
Dante ascends to the eighth, starry sky. Here the triumphant righteous enjoy the spiritual treasure that they accumulated in their sorrowful earthly life, rejecting worldly wealth. The souls of the triumphant people form many whirling round dances. Beatrice enthusiastically draws Dante's attention to the Apostle James, famous for his message of the generosity of God, symbolizing hope. Dante peers into the radiance of the Apostle John, trying to discern his body (there was a legend according to which John was taken to heaven alive by Christ). But in paradise, only Christ and Mary, “two radiances,” who shortly before “ascended into the Empyrean,” have soul and body.
The ninth, the crystal sky, is otherwise called by Beatrice the Prime Mover. Dante sees a Point shedding an unbearably bright light, around which nine concentric circles diverge. This Point, immeasurable and indivisible, is a kind of symbol of deity. The point is surrounded by a circle of fire, which consists of angels, divided into three “tripartite hosts”
Dante wants to know “where, when and how” angels were created. Beatrice answers:
Outside of time, in its eternity,
Eternal love itself revealed itself,
Boundless, countless loves.
Even before that she was
Not in an inert sleep, then that deity
Neither “before” nor “after” floated over the water
Apart and together, essence and substance
They took off on their flight to the world of perfection...
Dante penetrates into the Empyrean, the tenth, already immaterial, heaven, the radiant abode of God, angels and blessed souls.
Dante sees a shining river. Beatrice tells him to prepare for a spectacle that will quench his “great thirst to comprehend what appears before you.” And what appears to Dante as a river, sparks and flowers, soon turns out to be different: the river is a circular lake of light, the core of a paradise rose, the arena of a heavenly amphitheater, the shores are its steps; flowers - by the blessed souls sitting on them; sparks - flying angels
The empyrean is illuminated by an insubstantial light that allows creatures to contemplate the deity. This light continues in a ray which falls from above upon the summit of the ninth heaven, the Prime Mover, and imparts to it life and power to influence the heavens below. Illuminating the top of the Prime Mover, the beam forms a circle much larger than the circumference of the sun.
Around the luminous circle are located, forming over a thousand rows, the steps of the amphitheater. They are like an open rose. On the steps sits in white robes “everyone who has returned to the heights,” that is, all those souls who have achieved heavenly bliss.
The steps are overcrowded, but the poet bitterly notes that this heavenly amphitheater “from now on awaits few,” that is, it points to the depravity of humanity, and at the same time reflects the medieval belief that the end of the world is near.
Having surveyed the general structure of Paradise, Dante begins to look for Beatrice, but she is no longer around. Having fulfilled her mission as a guide, Beatrice returned to her place in the heavenly amphitheater. Instead, Dante sees an old man in a snow-white robe. This is Bernard of Clairvaux, a mystical theologian who took an active part in the political life of his time. Dante considers him a "contemplator." In the Empyrean, Bernard is the same mentor to the poet as the active Matelda was in the Earthly Paradise.
The Virgin Mary sits in the middle of the amphitheater and smiles at everyone whose eyes are turned to her. John the Baptist sits opposite Mary. To the left of Mary, first in the Old Testament semicircle, sits Adam. To the right of Mary, first in the New Testament semicircle, sits the Apostle Peter.
Elder Bernard calls to “raise the gaze of your eyes to your ancestral love,” that is, to God, and to pray to the Mother of God for mercy. Bernard begins to pray, says that in the womb of the Mother of God love between God and people was kindled again, and thanks to the heat of this love, the color of paradise increased, that is, paradise was populated by the righteous.
Dante looks up. “The Highest Light, so elevated above earthly thoughts,” appears to his gaze. The poet does not have enough words to express the entire immensity of the Infinite Power, the Ineffable Light, his delight and shock.
Dante sees the mystery of the triune deity in the image of three equal circles of different colors. One of them (god the son) seems to be a reflection of the Other (god the father), and the third (god the spirit) seems to be a flame born of both of these circles.
In the second of the circles, which seemed to be a reflection of the first (and symbolizing God the Son), Dante distinguishes the outlines of a human face.
Having reached the highest spiritual tension, Dante stops seeing anything. But after the insight he experienced, his passion and will (heart and mind), in their aspiration, are forever subordinated to the rhythm in which divine Love moves the universe.
He could not call his work a tragedy only because they, like all genres of “high literature,” were written in Latin. Dante wrote it in his native Italian. “The Divine Comedy” is the fruit of the entire second half of Dante’s life and work. This work most fully reflected the poet’s worldview. Dante appears here as the last great poet of the Middle Ages, a poet who continues the line of development of feudal literature.
Editions
Translations into Russian
- A. S. Norova, “Excerpt from the 3rd song of the poem Hell” (“Son of the Fatherland”, 1823, No. 30);
- F. Fan-Dim, “Hell”, translation from Italian (St. Petersburg, 1842-48; prose);
- D. E. Min “Hell”, translation in the size of the original (Moscow, 1856);
- D. E. Min, “The First Song of Purgatory” (“Russian Vest.”, 1865, 9);
- V. A. Petrova, “The Divine Comedy” (translated with Italian terzas, St. Petersburg, 1871, 3rd edition 1872; translated only “Hell”);
- D. Minaev, “The Divine Comedy” (LPts. and St. Petersburg. 1874, 1875, 1876, 1879, translated not from the original, in terzas);
- P. I. Weinberg, “Hell”, canto 3, “Vestn. Heb., 1875, No. 5);
- Golovanov N. N., “The Divine Comedy” (1899-1902);
- M. L. Lozinsky, “The Divine Comedy” (, Stalin Prize);
- A. A. Ilyushin (created in the 1980s, first partial publication in 1988, full publication in 1995);
- V. S. Lemport, “The Divine Comedy” (1996-1997);
- V. G. Marantsman, (St. Petersburg, 2006).
Structure
The Divine Comedy is constructed extremely symmetrically. It is divided into three parts: the first part (“Hell”) consists of 34 songs, the second (“Purgatory”) and the third (“Paradise”) - 33 songs each. The first part consists of two introductory songs and 32 describing hell, since there can be no harmony in it. The poem is written in terzas - stanzas consisting of three lines. This tendency towards certain numbers is explained by the fact that Dante gave them a mystical interpretation - so the number 3 is associated with the Christian idea of the Trinity, the number 33 should recall the years of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, etc. In total, there are 100 songs in the Divine Comedy (the number is 100 - a symbol of perfection).
Plot
Dante's meeting with Virgil and the beginning of their journey through the underworld (medieval miniature)
According to Catholic tradition, the afterlife consists of hell, where eternally condemned sinners go, purgatory- the location of sinners atoning for their sins, and heaven- abode of the blessed.
Dante details this idea and describes the structure of the underworld, recording with graphic certainty all the details of its architectonics. In the opening song, Dante tells how, having reached the middle life path, once got lost in a dense forest and, like the poet Virgil, having saved him from three wild animals that blocked his path, he invited Dante to travel through the afterlife. Having learned that Virgil was sent to Beatrice, Dante’s deceased beloved, he surrenders without trepidation to the poet’s leadership.
Hell
Hell looks like a colossal funnel consisting of concentric circles, the narrow end of which rests on the center of the earth. Having passed the threshold of hell, inhabited by the souls of insignificant, indecisive people, they enter the first circle of hell, the so-called limbo (A., IV, 25-151), where the souls of virtuous pagans reside, who have not known the true God, but have approached this knowledge and beyond then delivered from hellish torment. Here Dante sees outstanding representatives of ancient culture - Aristotle, Euripides, Homer, etc. The next circle is filled with the souls of people who once indulged in unbridled passion. Among those carried by a wild whirlwind, Dante sees Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo, fallen victims of forbidden love for each other. As Dante, accompanied by Virgil, descends lower and lower, he witnesses the torment of gluttons forced to suffer from rain and hail, misers and spendthrifts tirelessly rolling huge stones, angry ones getting bogged down in the swamp. They are followed by heretics and heresiarchs engulfed in eternal flames (among them Emperor Frederick II, Pope Anastasius II), tyrants and murderers floating in streams of boiling blood, suicides turned into plants, blasphemers and rapists burned by falling flames, deceivers of all kinds, torment which are very diverse. Finally, Dante enters the final, 9th circle of hell, reserved for the most terrible criminals. Here is the abode of traitors and traitors, the greatest of them - Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius - they are gnawing with his three mouths Lucifer, the angel who once rebelled against God, the king of evil, doomed to imprisonment in the center of the earth. The last song of the first part of the poem ends with a description of the terrible appearance of Lucifer.
Purgatory
Purgatory
Having passed the narrow corridor connecting the center of the earth with the second hemisphere, Dante and Virgil emerge on the surface of the earth. There, in the middle of an island surrounded by the ocean, a mountain rises in the form of a truncated cone - purgatory, like hell, consisting of a series of circles that narrow as they approach the top of the mountain. The angel guarding the entrance to purgatory allows Dante into the first circle of purgatory, having previously drawn seven Ps (Peccatum - sin) on his forehead with a sword, that is, a symbol of the seven deadly sins. As Dante rises higher and higher, passing one circle after another, these letters disappear, so that when Dante, having reached the top of the mountain, enters the “earthly paradise” located at the top of the latter, he is already free from the signs inscribed by the guardian of purgatory. The circles of the latter are inhabited by the souls of sinners atoning for their sins. Here the proud are purified, forced to bend under the burden of weights pressing on their backs, the envious, the angry, the careless, the greedy, etc. Virgil brings Dante to the gates of heaven, where he, as someone who has not known baptism, has no access.
Paradise
In the earthly paradise, Virgil is replaced by Beatrice, seated on a chariot drawn by a vulture (an allegory of the triumphant church); she encourages Dante to repentance, and then takes him, enlightened, to heaven. The final part of the poem is dedicated to Dante's wanderings through the heavenly paradise. The latter consists of seven spheres encircling the earth and corresponding to the seven planets (according to the then widespread Ptolemaic system): the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, etc., followed by the spheres of the fixed stars and the crystal sphere, - behind the crystal sphere is the Empyrean, - the infinite the region inhabited by the blessed contemplating God is the last sphere that gives life to everything that exists. Flying through the spheres, led by Bernard, Dante sees the Emperor Justinian, introducing him to the history of the Roman Empire, teachers of the faith, martyrs for the faith, whose shining souls form a sparkling cross; ascending higher and higher, Dante sees Christ and the Virgin Mary, angels and, finally, the “heavenly Rose” - the abode of the blessed - is revealed before him. Here Dante partakes of the highest grace, achieving communion with the Creator.
"Comedy" is Dante's last and most mature work.
Analysis of the work
In form, the poem is an afterlife vision, of which there were many in medieval literature. Like the medieval poets, it rests on an allegorical core. So the dense forest, in which the poet got lost halfway through his earthly existence, is a symbol of life’s complications. The three animals that attack him there: a lynx, a lion and a she-wolf - the three most strong passions: sensuality, lust for power, greed. These allegories are also given a political interpretation: the lynx is Florence, the spots on the skin of which should indicate the enmity of the Guelph and Ghibelline parties. The lion is a symbol of brute physical strength - France; she-wolf, greedy and lustful - papal curia. These beasts threaten the national unity of Italy, which Dante dreamed of, a unity cemented by the dominance of the feudal monarchy (some literary historians give Dante's entire poem a political interpretation). Virgil saves the poet from the beasts - reason sent to the poet Beatrice (theology - faith). Virgil leads Dante through hell to purgatory and on the threshold of heaven gives way to Beatrice. The meaning of this allegory is that reason saves a person from passions, and knowledge of divine science brings eternal bliss.
The Divine Comedy is imbued with the author's political tendencies. Dante never misses an opportunity to reckon with his ideological, even personal enemies; he hates usurers, condemns credit as “usury”, condemns his age as the age of profit and love of money. In his opinion, money is the source of all kinds of evil. He contrasts the dark present with the bright past of bourgeois Florence - feudal Florence, when simplicity of morals, moderation, knightly “courtesy” (“Paradise”, Cacciaguida’s story), and a feudal empire reigned (cf. Dante’s treatise “On the Monarchy”). The terzas of "Purgatory" accompanying the appearance of Sordello (Ahi serva Italia) sound like a real hosanna of Ghibellinism. Dante treats the papacy as a principle with the greatest respect, although he hates its individual representatives, especially those who contributed to the consolidation of the bourgeois system in Italy; Dante meets some popes in hell. His religion is Catholicism, although a personal element is woven into it, alien to the old orthodoxy, although mysticism and the Franciscan pantheistic religion of love, which are accepted with all passion, are also a sharp deviation from classical Catholicism. His philosophy is theology, his science is scholasticism, his poetry is allegory. Ascetic ideals in Dante have not yet died, and he considers free love to be a grave sin (Hell, 2nd circle, the famous episode with Francesca da Rimini and Paolo). But for him, love that attracts to the object of worship with a pure platonic impulse is not a sin (cf. “New Life”, Dante’s love for Beatrice). This is a great world force that “moves the sun and other luminaries.” And humility is no longer an unconditional virtue. “Whoever does not renew his strength in glory with victory will not taste the fruit he obtained in the struggle.” And the spirit of inquisitiveness, the desire to expand the circle of knowledge and acquaintance with the world, combined with “virtue” (virtute e conoscenza), encouraging heroic daring, is proclaimed as an ideal.
Dante built his vision from pieces of real life. The design of the afterlife was based on individual corners of Italy, which are placed in it with clear graphic contours. And there are so many living human images scattered throughout the poem, so many typical figures, so many vivid psychological situations that literature even now continues to draw from there. People who suffer in hell, repent in purgatory (and the volume and nature of sin corresponds to the volume and nature of punishment), are in bliss in paradise - all living people. In these hundreds of figures, no two are identical. In this huge gallery of historical figures there is not a single image that has not been cut by the poet’s unmistakable plastic intuition. It was not for nothing that Florence experienced a period of such intense economic and cultural growth. That acute sense of landscape and man, which is shown in the Comedy and which the world learned from Dante, was possible only in the social environment of Florence, which was far ahead of the rest of Europe. Individual episodes of the poem, such as Francesca and Paolo, Farinata in his red-hot grave, Ugolino with the children, Capaneus and Ulysses, in no way similar to ancient images, the Black Cherub with subtle devilish logic, Sordello on his stone, still produce strong impression.
The concept of Hell in The Divine Comedy
Dante and Virgil in Hell
In front of the entrance are pitiful souls who did neither good nor evil during their lives, including “a bad flock of angels” who were neither with the devil nor with God.
- 1st circle (Limbo). Unbaptized Infants and Virtuous Non-Christians.
- 2nd circle. Voluptuaries (fornicators and adulterers).
- 3rd circle. Gluttons, gluttons.
- 4th circle. Misers and spendthrifts (love of excessive spending).
- 5th circle (Stygian swamp). Angry and lazy.
- 6th circle (city of Dit). Heretics and false teachers.
- 7th circle.
- 1st belt. Violent people against their neighbors and their property (tyrants and robbers).
- 2nd belt. Violators of themselves (suicides) and of their property (gamblers and spendthrifts, that is, senseless destroyers of their property).
- 3rd belt. Violators against deity (blasphemers), against nature (sodomites) and art (extortion).
- 8th circle. Those who deceived those who did not trust. It consists of ten ditches (Zlopazukhi, or Evil Crevices), which are separated from each other by ramparts (rifts). Toward the center, the area of the Evil Crevices slopes, so that each subsequent ditch and each subsequent rampart are located slightly lower than the previous ones, and the outer, concave slope of each ditch is higher than the inner, curved slope ( Hell
, XXIV, 37-40). The first shaft is adjacent to the circular wall. In the center yawns the depth of a wide and dark well, at the bottom of which lies the last, ninth, circle of Hell. From the foot of the stone heights (v. 16), that is, from the circular wall, stone ridges run in radii, like the spokes of a wheel, to this well, crossing ditches and ramparts, and above the ditches they bend in the form of bridges or vaults. In Evil Crevices, deceivers are punished who deceived people who are not connected with them by special bonds of trust.
- 1st ditch Pimps and Seducers.
- 2nd ditch Flatterers.
- 3rd ditch Holy merchants, high-ranking clergy who traded in church positions.
- 4th ditch Soothsayers, fortune tellers, astrologers, witches.
- 5th ditch Bribe takers, bribe takers.
- 6th ditch Hypocrites.
- 7th ditch Thieves.
- 8th ditch Crafty advisors.
- 9th ditch Instigators of discord (Mohammed, Ali, Dolcino and others).
- 10th ditch Alchemists, false witnesses, counterfeiters.
- 9th circle. Those who deceived those who trusted. Ice Lake Cocytus.
- Belt of Cain. Traitors to relatives.
- Antenor's belt. Traitors to the motherland and like-minded people.
- Tolomei's Belt. Traitors to friends and table mates.
- Giudecca Belt. Traitors to benefactors, divine and human majesty.
- In the middle, in the center of the universe, frozen into an ice floe (Lucifer) torments in his three mouths the traitors to the majesty of the earthly and heavenly (Judas, Brutus and Cassius).
Building a model of Hell ( Hell , XI, 16-66), Dante follows Aristotle, who in his “Ethics” (Book VII, Chapter I) classifies the sins of intemperance (incontinenza) into the 1st category, and the sins of violence (“violent bestiality" or matta bestialitade), to 3 - sins of deception ("malice" or malizia). In Dante, circles 2-5 are for intemperate people, circle 7 is for rapists, circles 8-9 are for deceivers (the 8th is simply for deceivers, the 9th is for traitors). Thus, the more material the sin, the more forgivable it is.
Heretics - apostates from the faith and deniers of God - are specially singled out from the host of sinners filling the upper and lower circles into the sixth circle. In the abyss of lower Hell (A., VIII, 75), with three ledges, like three steps, there are three circles - from the seventh to the ninth. In these circles, anger that uses either force (violence) or deception is punished.
The concept of Purgatory in the Divine Comedy
The three holy virtues - the so-called "theological" ones - are faith, hope and love. The rest are the four “basic” or “natural” (see note Ch., I, 23-27).
Dante depicts it as a huge mountain rising in the southern hemisphere in the middle of the Ocean. It looks like a truncated cone. The coastal strip and the lower part of the mountain form the Pre-Purgatory, and the upper part is surrounded by seven ledges (seven circles of Purgatory itself). On the flat top of the mountain, Dante places the deserted forest of the Earthly Paradise.
Virgil expounds the doctrine of love as the source of all good and evil and explains the gradation of the circles of Purgatory: circles I, II, III - love for “other people's evil,” that is, malice (pride, envy, anger); circle IV - insufficient love for true good (despondency); circles V, VI, VII - excessive love for false benefits (greed, gluttony, voluptuousness). The circles correspond to the biblical mortal sins.
- Prepurgatory
- The foot of Mount Purgatory. Here the newly arrived souls of the dead await access to Purgatory. Those who died under church excommunication, but repented of their sins before death, wait for a period thirty times longer than the time they spent in “discord with the church.”
- First ledge. Negligent, who delayed repentance until the hour of death.
- Second ledge. Negligent people who died a violent death.
- Valley of the Earthly Rulers (not related to Purgatory)
- 1st circle. Proud people.
- 2nd circle. Envious people.
- 3rd circle. Angry.
- 4th circle. Dull.
- 5th circle. Misers and spendthrifts.
- 6th circle. Gluttonians.
- 7th circle. Voluptuous people.
- Earthly paradise.
The concept of Heaven in the Divine Comedy
(in brackets are examples of personalities given by Dante)
- 1 sky(Moon) - the abode of those who observe duty (Jephthah, Agamemnon, Constance of Normandy).
- 2 sky(Mercury) is the abode of reformers (Justinian) and innocent victims (Iphigenia).
- 3 sky(Venus) - the abode of lovers (Charles Martell, Cunizza, Folco of Marseilles, Dido, “Rhodopean woman”, Raava).
- 4 heaven(Sun) is the abode of sages and great scientists. They form two circles (“round dance”).
- 1st circle: Thomas Aquinas, Albert von Bolstedt, Francesco Graziano, Peter of Lombardy, Dionysius the Areopagite, Paulus Orosius, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Bede the Venerable, Rickard, Siger of Brabant.
- 2nd circle: Bonaventure, Franciscans Augustine and Illuminati, Hugon, Peter the Eater, Peter of Spain, John Chrysostom, Anselm, Aelius Donatus, Rabanus the Maurus, Joachim.
- 5 sky(Mars) is the abode of warriors for the faith (Joshua, Judas Maccabee, Roland, Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert Guiscard).
- 6 sky(Jupiter) is the abode of just rulers (biblical kings David and Hezekiah, Emperor Trajan, King Guglielmo II the Good and the hero of the Aeneid, Ripheus).
- 7 heaven(Saturn) - the abode of theologians and monks (Benedict of Nursia, Peter Damiani).
- 8 sky(sphere of stars).
- 9 sky(Prime Mover, crystal sky). Dante describes the structure of the heavenly inhabitants (see The ranks of angels).
- 10 sky(Empyrean) - Flaming Rose and Radiant River (the core of the rose and the arena of the heavenly amphitheater) - the abode of the Deity. Blessed souls sit on the banks of the river (the steps of the amphitheater, which is divided into 2 more semicircles - the Old Testament and the New Testament). Mary (Mother of God) is at the head, below her are Adam and Peter, Moses, Rachel and Beatrice, Sarah, Rebecca, Judith, Ruth, etc. John is sitting opposite, below him are Lucia, Francis, Benedict, Augustine, etc.
Scientific points, misconceptions and comments
- Hell , XI, 113-114. The constellation Pisces rose above the horizon, and Voz(constellation Ursa Major) inclined to the northwest(Kavr; lat. Caurus- the name of the north-west wind). This means there are two hours left before sunrise.
- Hell , XXIX, 9. That their route is twenty-two miles around.(about the inhabitants of the tenth ditch of the eighth circle) - judging by the medieval approximation of the number Pi, the diameter of the last circle of Hell is 7 miles.
- Hell , XXX, 74. Baptist sealed alloy- Florentine gold coin, florin (fiormo). On the front side was the patron saint of the city, John the Baptist, and on the reverse side was the Florentine coat of arms, the lily (fiore - flower, hence the name of the coin).
- Hell , XXXIV, 139. Each of the three cants of the Divine Comedy ends with the word “luminaries” (stelle - stars).
- Purgatory , I, 19-21. Beacon of love, beautiful planet- that is, Venus, eclipsing with its brightness the constellation Pisces in which it was located.
- Purgatory , I, 22. To the spine- that is, to the celestial pole, in in this case southern
- Purgatory , I, 30. Chariot- Ursa Major hidden behind the horizon.
- Purgatory , II, 1-3. According to Dante, Mount Purgatory and Jerusalem are located at opposite ends of the earth's diameter, so they have a common horizon. In the northern hemisphere, the apex of the celestial meridian (“midday circle”) crossing this horizon is above Jerusalem. At the hour described, the sun, visible in Jerusalem, was setting, soon to appear in the sky of Purgatory.
- Purgatory , II, 4-6. And the night...- According to medieval geography, Jerusalem lies in the very middle of the land, located in the northern hemisphere between the Arctic Circle and the equator and extending from west to east by only longitudes. The remaining three quarters of the globe are covered by the waters of the Ocean. Equally distant from Jerusalem are: in the extreme east - the mouth of the Ganges, in the extreme west - the Pillars of Hercules, Spain and Morocco. When the sun sets in Jerusalem, night approaches from the direction of the Ganges. At the described time of year, that is, at the time of the spring equinox, the night holds scales in its hands, that is, it is in the constellation Libra, opposing the Sun, located in the constellation Aries. In the fall, when she “overcomes” the day and becomes longer than it, she will leave the constellation Libra, that is, she will “drop” them.
- Purgatory , III, 37. Quia- a Latin word meaning “because”, and in the Middle Ages it was also used in the sense of quod (“that”). Scholastic science, following Aristotle, distinguished between two types of knowledge: scire quia- knowledge of existing - and scire propter quid- knowledge of the reasons for existing things. Virgil advises people to be content with the first kind of knowledge, without delving into the reasons for what exists.
- Purgatory , IV, 71-72. The Road Where the Unlucky Phaeton Ruled- zodiac.
- Purgatory , XXIII, 32-33. Who is looking for "omo"...- it was believed that in the features of a human face one could read “Homo Dei” (“Man of God”), with the eyes depicting two “Os”, and the eyebrows and nose representing the letter M.
- Purgatory , XXVIII, 97-108. According to Aristotelian physics, “wet vapors” generate atmospheric precipitation, and “dry vapors” generate wind. Matelda explains that only below the level of the gates of Purgatory are such disturbances generated by steam, which “following the heat,” that is, under the influence of the sun’s heat, rises from the water and from the earth; at the height of the Earthly Paradise, only a uniform wind remains, caused by the rotation of the first firmament.
- Purgatory , XXVIII, 82-83. Twelve venerable elders- twenty-four books of the Old Testament.
- Purgatory , XXXIII, 43. Five hundred fifteen- a mysterious designation for the coming deliverer of the church and restorer of the empire, who will destroy the “thief” (the harlot of Song XXXII, who took someone else’s place) and the “giant” (the French king). The numbers DXV form, when the signs are rearranged, the word DVX (leader), and the oldest commentators interpret it this way.
- Purgatory , XXXIII, 139. The score is due from the beginning- In the construction of the Divine Comedy, Dante observes strict symmetry. Each of its three parts (cantik) contains 33 songs; “Hell” also contains one more song, which serves as an introduction to the entire poem. The volume of each of the hundred songs is approximately the same.
- Paradise , XIII, 51. And there is no other center in the circle- There cannot be two opinions, just as in a circle only one center is possible.
- Paradise , XIV, 102. The sacred sign was composed of two rays, which is hidden within the boundaries of the quadrants- segments of adjacent quadrants (quarters) of a circle form a cross sign.
- Paradise , XVIII, 113. In Lilley M- Gothic M resembles a fleur-de-lis.
- Paradise XXV, 101-102: If Cancer had a similar pearl...- WITH
"Divine Comedy" - immortal work with a philosophical meaning. In three parts the plot is revealed about the purpose of love, the death of the beloved and universal justice. In this article we will analyze the poem “The Divine Comedy” by Dante.
The history of the poem
Analysis of the composition of “The Divine Comedy”
The poem consists of three parts called cantics. Each cantik contains thirty-three songs. One more song was added to the first part; it is a prologue. Thus, there are 100 songs in the poem. The poetic meter is terza.
The main character of the work is Dante himself. But, when reading the poem, it becomes clear that the image of the hero and the real person are not the same person. Dante's hero resembles a contemplator who only observes what is happening. He is different in character: hot-tempered and pitiful, angry and helpless. The author uses this technique to show the whole range of emotions of a living person.
Beatrice is the highest wisdom, a symbol of goodness. She became his guide to various areas, showing love in all its forms. And Dante, captivated by the forces of love, obediently follows her, wanting to achieve heavenly wisdom.
In the prologue we see Dante at the age of 35, who stands at a crossroads in his life. An associative series is created: the season is Spring, he met Beatrice also in the spring, and God’s world was created in the spring. The animals he meets on his way are symbolic of human vices. For example, lynx - voluptuousness.
Dante shows through his hero both his own tragedy and the global one. Reading the poem, we see how the hero loses heart, resurrects and seeks consolation.
He also encounters sleepy crowds. These people did neither good nor bad deeds. They look lost between two worlds.
Description of the Circles of Hell by Dante
Analyzing the poem “The Divine Comedy”, one can see that Dante’s innovation occurs already when he passes through the first circle of Hell. The best poets languish there together with old people and babies. Such as: Verligius, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Dante himself.
The second circle of Hell is opened by a half-dragon. How many times will he wrap his tail around a person and he will end up in that circle of Hell.
The third circle of Hell is spiritual torment, which is more terrible than earthly.
In the fourth circle are the Jews and spendthrifts, whom the author has endowed with the epithet “vile.”
The fifth circle contains angry people for whom no one feels pity. Afterwards the path to the city of devils opens.
Passing through the cemetery, the path to the sixth circle of Hell opens. It is home to all the political haters, among them there are people who are burning alive.
The most terrible circle of Hell is the seventh. There are several stages in it. Murderers, rapists and suicides suffer there.
The eighth circle is deceivers and the ninth is traitors.
With each lap, Dante opens up and becomes more realistic, rough and reasonable.
We see a significant difference in the depiction of Paradise. It is fragrant, the music of the spheres sounds in it.
Summing up the analysis of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” it is worth noting that the poem is filled with allegories that allow us to call the work symbolic, biographical, and philosophical.
The Divine Comedy, Dante's crowning work, began to emerge when the great poet had just experienced his exile from Florence. "Hell" was conceived around 1307 and was created over the course of three years wanderings. This was followed by the composition “Purgatory,” in which Beatrice occupied a special place (the poet’s entire work is dedicated to her).
And in recent years life of the creator, when Dante lived in Verona and Ravenna, “Paradise” was written. The plot basis of the vision poem was the afterlife journey - a favorite motif of medieval literature, which received its artistic transformation under the pen of Dante.
Once upon a time, the ancient Roman poet Virgil depicted the descent of the mythological 3ney into the underworld, and now Dante takes the author of the famous “Aeneid” as his guide through hell and purgatory. The poem is called a “comedy”, and unlike the tragedy, it begins anxiously and gloomily, but ends with a happy ending.
In one of the songs of “Paradise,” Dante called his creation a “sacred poem,” and after the death of its author, descendants gave it the name “Divine Comedy.”
In this article we will not outline the content of the poem, but will dwell on some of its features artistic originality and poetics.
It is written in terzas, that is, three-line stanzas in which the first verse rhymes with the third, and the second with the first and third lines of the next terza. The poet relies on Christian eschatology and the doctrine of hell and heaven, but with his creation he significantly enriches these ideas.
In collaboration with Virgil, Dante steps beyond the threshold of a deep abyss, above the gates of which he reads an ominous inscription: “Abandon hope, all who enter here.” But despite this grim warning, the satellites continue their march. They will soon be surrounded by crowds of shadows, which will be especially interesting for Dante, since they were once people. And for a creator born of a new time, man is the most fascinating object of knowledge.
Having crossed the hellish river Acheron in Heron's boat, the companions end up in Limbo, where the shadows of the great pagan poets count Dante among their circle, declaring him sixth after Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Lucan.
One of the remarkable features of the poetics of a great creation is the rare recreation of artistic space, and within its limits, the poetic landscape, a component that did not exist in European literature before Dante. Under the pen of the creator of The Divine Comedy, the forest, the swampy steppe, the icy lake, and steep cliffs were recreated.
Dante's landscapes are characterized, firstly, by bright depiction, secondly, permeation with light, thirdly, their lyrical coloring, and fourthly, natural variability.
If we compare the description of the forest in “Hell” and “Purgatory”, we will see how the terrible, frightening picture of it in the first songs is replaced by a joyful, bright image, permeated with the green of the trees and the blue of the air. The landscape in the poem is extremely laconic: “The day was passing, And the dark air of the sky / The earthly creatures were led to sleep.” It is very reminiscent of earthly paintings, which is facilitated by extensive comparisons:
Like a peasant, resting on a hill, -
When he hides his gaze for a while
The one by whom the earthly country is illuminated,
and mosquitoes, replacing flies, circle, -
Sees the valley full of fireflies
Where he reaps, where he cuts grapes.
This landscape is usually inhabited by people, shadows, animals or insects, as in this example.
Another significant component in Dante is the portrait. Thanks to the portrait, people or their shadows turn out to be alive, colorful, vividly conveyed, and full of drama. We see the faces and figures of giants sitting chained in stone wells, we peer into the facial expressions, gestures and movements of former people who came to the afterlife from the ancient world; we contemplate both mythological characters and Dante’s contemporaries from his native Florence.
The portraits sketched by the poet are distinguished by their plasticity, which means they are tactile. Here is one of the memorable images:
He carried me to Minos, who, entwining me
The tail eight times around the mighty back,
Even biting him out of anger,
Said …
The spiritual movement reflected in the self-portrait of Dante himself is also distinguished by great expressiveness and vital truth:
So I rose up, with the courage of grief;
The fear in my heart was decisively crushed,
And I answered, boldly saying...
There is less drama and dynamics in the appearance of Virgil and Beatrice, but the attitude of Dante himself towards them, who worships them and loves them passionately, is full of expression.
One of the features of the poetics of the Divine Comedy is the abundance and significance of numbers in it, which have a symbolic meaning. A symbol is a special kind of sign, which already in its external form contains the content of the representation it reveals. Like allegory and metaphor, a symbol forms a transference of meaning, but unlike these tropes, it is endowed with a huge variety of meanings.
A symbol, according to A.F. Losev, has meaning not in itself, but as an arena for the meeting of known constructions of consciousness with one or another possible object of this consciousness. The above also applies to the symbolism of numbers with their frequent repetition and variation. Researchers of literature of the Middle Ages (S.S. Mokulsky, M.N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, N.G. Elina, G.V. Stadnikov, O.I. Fetodov, etc.) noted the huge role of number as a measure of things in the Divine Comedy » Dante. This is especially true for the numbers 3 and 9 and their derivatives.
However, when talking about these numbers, researchers usually see their meaning only in the composition, the architectonics of the poem and its stanza (three edges, 33 songs in each part, 99 songs in total, three times repetition of the word stelle, the role of the xxx song of “Purgatory” as a story about the poet's meeting with Beatrice, three-line stanzas).
Meanwhile, the entire system of images of the poem, its narration and descriptions, the disclosure of plot details and detailing, style and language are subordinated to mystical symbolism, in particular the trinity.
The trinity is revealed in the episode of Dante’s ascent to the hill of salvation, where he is prevented by three animals (the lynx is a symbol of voluptuousness; the lion is a symbol of power and pride; the she-wolf is the embodiment of greed and selfishness), while depicting the Limbo of Hell, where beings of three kinds reside (the souls of the Old Testament righteous , the souls of infants who died without baptism, and the souls of all virtuous non-Christians).
Next we see three famous Trojans (Electra, Hector and Aeneas), a three-headed monster - Cerberus (having the features of a demon, a dog and a man). Lower Hell, consisting of three circles, is inhabited by three furies (Tisiphone, Megaera and Electo), three gorgon sisters. 3 Here three ledges are shown - steps representing three vices (malice, violence and deception). The seventh circle is divided into three concentric zones: they are notable for their reproduction of three forms of violence.
In the next song, we, together with Dante, notice how “three shadows suddenly separated”: these are three Florentine sinners who “all three ran in a ring” when they found themselves on fire. Next, the poets see three instigators of bloody strife, the three-body and three-headed Geryon and the three-peaked Lucifer, from whose mouth three traitors (Judas, Brutus and Cassius) stick out. Even individual objects in Dante's world contain the number 3.
So, in one of the three coats of arms there are three black goats, in the florins there are 3 carats of copper mixed in. The tripartite pattern is observed even in the syntax of the phrase (“Hecuba, in grief, in distress, in captivity”).
We see a similar trinity in “Purgatory”, where the angels have three lights (wings, clothes and faces). Three holy virtues are mentioned here (Faith, Hope, Love), three stars, three bas-reliefs, three artists (Franco, Cimabue and Giotto), three types of love, three eyes of Wisdom, which looks at the past, present and future with them.
A similar phenomenon is observed in “Paradise”, where three virgins (Mary, Rachel and Beatrice) sit in the amphitheater, forming a geometric triangle. The second song tells of three blessed wives (including Lucia) and speaks of three eternal creatures
(heaven, earth and angels).
Three generals of Rome are mentioned here, the victory of Scipio Africanus over Hannibal at the age of 33, the battle of “three against three” (three Horatii against three Curiatii), the third (after Caesar) Caesar, three angelic ranks, three lilies in the coat of arms of the French dynasty.
The named number becomes one of the complex adjective definitions (“triple-shaped” fruit,” “triune God”) and is included in the structure of metaphors and comparisons.
What explains this trinity? Firstly, the teaching of the Catholic Church about the existence of three forms of other existence (hell, purgatory and heaven). Secondly, the symbolization of the Trinity (with its three hypostases), the most important aspect of Christian teaching. Thirdly, the influence of the chapter of the Templar Order, where numerical symbolism was of paramount importance, had an impact. Fourthly, as the philosopher and mathematician P.A. Florensky showed in his works “The Pillar and Statement of Truth” and “Imaginary in Geometry”, trinity is the most general characteristics being.
The number “three,” the thinker wrote. manifests itself everywhere as some basic category of life and thinking. These are, for example, the three main categories of time (past, present and future), the three-dimensionality of space, the presence of three grammatical persons, the minimum size complete family(father, mother and child), (thesis, antithesis and synthesis), three main coordinates of the human psyche (mind, will and feelings), the simplest expression of asymmetry in integers (3 = 2 + 1).
There are three phases of development in a person’s life (childhood, adolescence and adolescence or youth, maturity and old age). Let us also recall the aesthetic pattern that encourages creators to create a triptych, a trilogy, three portals in gothic cathedral(for example, Notre Dame in Paris), they built three tiers on the facade (ibid.), three parts of the arcade, dividing the walls of the naves into three parts, etc. Dante took all this into account when creating his model of the universe in the poem.
But in the “Divine Comedy” we find subordination not only to the number 3, but also to the number 7, another magical symbol in Christianity. Let us remember that the duration of Dante’s unusual journey is 7 days, they begin on the 7th and end on April 14 (14 = 7+7). Canto IV remembers Jacob serving Laban for 7 years and then another 7 years.
In the thirteenth song of “Hell,” Minos sends the soul to the “seventh abyss.” Song XIV mentions 7 kings who besieged Thebes, and song XX mentions Tiriseus, who experienced the transformation into a woman and then, after 7 years, the reverse metamorphosis from woman to man.
The week is most thoroughly reproduced in “Purgatory,” where 7 circles (“seven kingdoms”) and seven stripes are shown; here it talks about seven deadly sins (seven “R” on the forehead of the hero of the poem), seven choirs, seven sons and seven daughters of Niobe; a mystical procession with seven lamps is reproduced, 7 virtues are characterized.
And in “Paradise” the seventh radiance of the planet Saturn, the seven star of the Big Dipper, is conveyed; speaks of the seven heavens of the planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) in accordance with the cosmogonic concepts of the era.
This preference for the week is explained by the prevailing ideas in Dante’s time about the presence of seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, despondency, avarice, gluttony and voluptuousness), about the desire for seven virtues, which are acquired through purification in the corresponding part of the afterlife.
Life observations of the seven colors of the rainbow and the seven stars of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the seven days of the week, etc. also had an impact.
Played an important role biblical stories, associated with the seven days of the creation of the world, Christian legends, for example, about the seven sleeping youths, ancient stories about the seven wonders of the world, seven wise men, seven cities arguing for the honor of being the birthplace of Homer, about seven fighting against Thebes. Images had an impact on consciousness and thinking
ancient folklore, numerous tales about seven heroes, proverbs like “seven troubles - one answer”, “there is room for seven, but cramped space for two”, sayings like “seven spans in the forehead”, “sipping jelly seven miles away”, “a book with seven seals” ", "seven sweats came off."
All this is reflected in literary works. For comparison, let’s take later examples: playing with the number “seven”. In “The Legend of Ulenspiege” by S. de Coster and especially in Nekrasov’s poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” (with its seven wanderers,
seven eagle owls, seven large trees, etc.). We find a similar effect in the presentation of the magic and symbolism of the number 7 in the Divine Comedy.
The number 9 also acquires a symbolic meaning in the poem. After all, this is the number of the celestial spheres. In addition, at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, there was a cult of nine fearless ones: Hector, Caesar, Alexander, Joshua, David, Judah Maccabee, Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon.
It is not at all accidental that there are 99 songs in the poem, before the pinnacle xxx song “Purgatory” there are 63 songs (6+3=9), and after it there are 36 songs (3+6=9). It is curious that the name Beatrice is mentioned 63 times in the poem. The addition of these two numbers (6+3) also forms 9. And this special name - Beatrice - rhymes 9 times. It is noteworthy that V. Favorsky, when creating a portrait of Dante, placed a huge number 9 above his manuscript, thereby emphasizing its symbolic and magical role in the “New Life” and “The Divine Comedy”.
As a result, numerical symbolism helps to consolidate the framework of the “Divine Comedy” with its multi-layered and multi-populated nature.
It contributes to the birth of poetic “discipline” and harmony, forms a rigid “mathematical structure”, saturated with the brightest imagery, ethical richness and deep philosophical meaning.
Dante's immortal creation amazes with its very frequently encountered metaphors. Their abundance is closely related to the peculiarities of the poet’s worldview and artistic thinking.
Starting from the concept of the Universe, which was based on the Ptolemaic system, from Christian eschatology and ideas about hell, purgatory and heaven, confronting the tragic darkness and the bright light of the afterlife, Dante had to broadly and at the same time succinctly recreate worlds full of acute contradictions, contrasts and antinomies, containing a grandiose encyclopedic knowledge, their comparisons, connections and their synthesis. Therefore, movements, transfers and rapprochements of compared objects and phenomena became natural and logical in the poetics of “comedy”.
To solve the given problems, a metaphor was best suited, connecting the concreteness of reality and the poetic imagination of man, bringing together the phenomena of the cosmic world, nature, objective world and the spiritual life of a person according to similarity and relatedness to each other. This is why the language of the poem is so powerfully based on metaphorization, which contributes to the knowledge of life.
The metaphors in the text of the three cantikas are unusually diverse. Being poetic paths, they often carry significant philosophical meaning, as, for example, “a hemisphere of darkness” and “enmity rages” (in “Hell”), “joy rings”, “souls rise” (in “Purgatory”) or “the morning flared up” and “the song rang” (in “Paradise” "). These metaphors combine different semantic plans, but at the same time each of them creates a single indissoluble image.
Showing the afterlife as a frequently encountered plot in medieval literature, using theological dogma and conversational style as necessary, Dante sometimes introduces commonly used linguistic metaphors into his text
(“the heart is warmed”, “his eyes are fixed”, “Mars is burning”, “the thirst to speak”, “the waves are beating”, “a golden ray”, “the day has passed”, etc.).
But much more often the author uses poetic metaphors, characterized by novelty and great expression, so essential in the poem. They reflect the variety of fresh impressions of the “first poet of the New Age” and are designed to awaken the recreative and creative imagination of readers.
These are the phrases “the depth howls”, “crying hit me”, “a roar broke in” (in “Hell”), “the firmament rejoices”, “the smile of the rays” (in “Purgatory”), “I want to ask for light”, “the labor of nature "(in "Paradise").
True, sometimes we encounter an amazing combination of old ideas and new views. In the juxtaposition of two judgments (“art... God’s grandson” and “art... follows nature”) we are faced with a paradoxical combination of traditional reference to the Divine principle and the interweaving of truths, previously learned and newly discovered, characteristic of “comedy”.
But it is important to emphasize that the above metaphors are distinguished by their ability to enrich concepts, enliven the text, compare similar phenomena, transfer names by analogy, contrast the direct and figurative meanings of the same word (“crying”, “smile”, “art”), identify the main, permanent feature of the characterized object.
In Dante’s metaphor, as in comparison, features (“overle” and “picks”) are compared or contrasted, but comparative connectives (conjunctions “as,” “as if,” “as if”) are absent in it. Instead of a two-term comparison, a single, tightly fused image appears (“the light is silent,” “screams fly up,” “the prayer of the eyes,” “the sea beats,” “enter my chest,” “running in four circles”).
The metaphors found in the “Divine Comedy” can be divided into three main groups depending on the nature of the relationship between cosmic and natural objects and living beings. The first group includes personifying metaphors, in which cosmic and natural phenomena, objects and abstract concepts are likened to the properties of animate beings.
These are Dante’s “a friendly spring ran,” “earthly flesh called,” “the sun will show,” “vanity will turn away,” “the sun lights up.” etc. The second group should include metaphors (for the author of the “comedy” these are “splashing hands”, “towers in formation”, “mountain shoulders”, “Virgil is a bottomless spring”, “beacon of love”, “sign of embarrassment”, “fetters”) evil").
In these cases, the properties of living beings are likened to natural phenomena or objects. The third group consists of metaphors that unite multidirectional comparisons (“the face of truth”, “words bring help”, “the light shone through”, “a wave of hair”, “the thought will disappear”, “the evening has fallen”, “the distances are on fire”, etc.).
It is important for the reader to see that in the phrases of all groups there is often an author’s assessment, which allows one to see Dante’s attitude to the phenomena he captures. Everything that has to do with truth, freedom, honor, light, he certainly welcomes and approves (“taste honor”, “the shine has grown wonderfully”, “the light of truth”).
The metaphors of the author of the “Divine Comedy” convey various properties of the captured objects and phenomena: their shape (“the circle lies at the top”), color (“accumulated color,” “black air torments”), sounds (“a roar burst in,” “the chant will rise,” “the rays are silent”) the location of parts (“into the depths of my slumber”, “the heel of the cliff”) lighting (“the dawn has overcome”, “the gaze of the luminaries”, “the light calms the firmament”), the action of an object or phenomena (“the lamp rises”, “ the mind soars", "the story flows").
Dante uses metaphors of different designs and composition: simple, consisting of one word (“petrified”); forming phrases (the one who moves the universe, “a flame that fell from the clouds”): expanded (metaphor of the forest in the first song of “Hell”).
5 (100%) 2 votesAt the heart of Dante's poem is humanity's recognition of its sins and ascent to spiritual life and to God. According to the poet, in order to find peace of mind, it is necessary to go through all the circles of hell and renounce blessings, and atone for sins with suffering. Each of the three chapters of the poem includes 33 songs. “Hell”, “Purgatory” and “Paradise” are the eloquent names of the parts that make up the “Divine Comedy”. A summary makes it possible to comprehend the main idea of the poem.
Dante Alighieri created the poem during the years of exile, shortly before his death. It is recognized in world literature as brilliant creation. The author himself gave it the name “Comedy”. In those days it was customary to call any work that had a happy ending. Boccaccio called it “Divine”, thus giving it the highest rating.
Dante's poem "The Divine Comedy", a summary of which schoolchildren study in the 9th grade, is difficult for modern teenagers to perceive. A detailed analysis of some songs cannot give a complete picture of the work, especially taking into account today’s attitude towards religion and human sins. However, acquaintance, albeit only a review, with Dante’s work is necessary to create a complete understanding of world fiction.
"The Divine Comedy". Summary of the chapter "Hell"
The main character of the work is Dante himself, to whom the shadow of the famous poet Virgil appears with an offer to travel through Dante. At first he doubts, but agrees after Virgil informs him that Beatrice (the author’s beloved, by that time long dead) asked the poet to become his guide. ).
Path characters starts from hell. Before entering it there are pitiful souls who during their lifetime did neither good nor evil. Outside the gates flows the Acheron River, through which Charon transports the dead. The heroes are approaching the circles of hell:
Having gone through all the circles of hell, Dante and his companion went up and saw the stars.
"The Divine Comedy". Brief summary of the part "Purgatory"
The main character and his guide end up in purgatory. Here they are met by the guard Cato, who sends them to the sea to wash themselves. The companions go to the water, where Virgil washes the soot of the underworld from Dante’s face. At this time, a boat sails up to the travelers, ruled by an angel. He lands on shore the souls of the dead who did not go to hell. With them, the heroes travel to the mountain of purgatory. On the way, they meet Virgil's fellow countryman, the poet Sordello, who joins them.
Dante falls asleep and in his sleep is transported to the gates of purgatory. Here the angel writes seven letters on the poet’s forehead, indicating the Hero goes through all the circles of purgatory, cleansing himself of sins. After completing each circle, the angel erases the letter of the overcome sin from Dante’s forehead. On the last lap, the poet must pass through the flames of fire. Dante is afraid, but Virgil convinces him. The poet passes the test by fire and goes to heaven, where Beatrice is waiting for him. Virgil falls silent and disappears forever. The beloved washes Dante in the sacred river, and the poet feels strength pouring into his body.
"The Divine Comedy". Summary of the part "Paradise"
Beloved ones ascend to heaven. To the surprise of the main character, he was able to take off. Beatrice explained to him that souls not burdened with sins are light. Lovers pass through all the heavenly skies:
- the first sky of the Moon, where the souls of nuns are located;
- the second - Mercury for ambitious righteous people;
- third - Venus, here the souls of the loving rest;
- the fourth - the Sun, intended for sages;
- fifth - Mars, which receives warriors;
- sixth - Jupiter, for just souls;
- the seventh is Saturn, where the souls of contemplators are located;
- the eighth - for the spirits of the great righteous;
- ninth - here are angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim.
After ascending to the last heaven, the hero sees the Virgin Mary. She is among the shining rays. Dante raises his head up into the bright and blinding light and finds the highest truth. He sees divinity in its trinity.