Ah, Dante, the Medieval Italian Poet who told several popes to go to Hell, and then followed
through with a detailed description of their fiery eternal torment.
Gee, that makes even Martin Luther sound pretty tame.
When he isn’t pining over his long-lost love Beatrice or hanging on every word from
his Roman Senpai and afterlife travel-guide Virgil, Dante was starting the cultural and
philosophical trends that would culminate in the Florentine Renaissance one century
later.
But there’s a lot more to Dante Alighieri than literary fangirling and uncomfortably
graphic depictions of never-ending hellish torture.
Dante’s work is both an extremely detailed historical analysis of the problems with his
contemporary society, and an innovation in worldbuilding that draws from millennia of
religious precedent.
So, to peer behind the hellfire and figure out How Dante went about creating one of the
most transformative works in all of literature, as well as why he wrote the Divine Comedy
in the first place, Let’s do some History.
So let’s start at the beginning.
Dante was born in the Italian republic of Florence in 1265, in the midst of a multicentury
power-struggle between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.
In theory, the Holy Roman Empire was one big state governed by an emperor and spiritually
ruled by the Pope, but in practice, the emperor’s control over the many states in the HRE was
touchy at best, and the Popes often got grabby with lands of their Italian neighbors.
So rather than working neatly as a team, they played more like schoolyard rivals.
By Dante’s time, Florence was one of many Italian cities split between sympathies to
the Emperor and to the Pope.
One faction would gain the upper hand and exile their enemies, those exiles would grab
some spears and take revenge, rinse and repeat for 200 years.
Gotta love medieval politics.
But a 24-year-old Dante helped kick the Ghibellines out of Florence for good by fighting in the
battle of Campaldino in 1289.
Now this was all well and fine while the Pope was chill, but before too long, Saint Peter’s
throne was filled by none other than Pope Boniface VIII, whom you might remember for
maybe probably murdering his predecessor Celestine V during the first Pope Fights video.
Yeah, this guy.
Some Florentines weren’t huge fans of Boniface on account of how eager he was to glomp onto
his surrounding territories and spread his political influence, also, y’know, throwing
the last pope in jail and leaving him to die.
That probably factored into people’s approval of this guy.
So part of the Guelph faction split from the pack to tell Boniface to beat it, while many
remained firmly committed to the Pope, regardless of his belligerent and skeezball-y qualities.
It’s at this politically fragmented time that Dante first jumped into the city’s
politics.
Given Dante isn’t widely remembered for a long career in the Florentine civil service,
you might be able to guess where this is going.
Dante was a Guelph like his father, but soon schism time came and he needed to side with
the Neri or the Bianchi.
As context clues might have implied — Dante sided against Boniface.
As a member of the Apothecaries guild, he had the privilege of serving in the governing
Signoria.
This was cool until it very swiftly wasn’t, because in 1301 the Pope scheduled Florence
for an appointment with an invading French Army.
Boniface had sent the King of France’s brother to Tuscany as a nominal peacemaker, but the
suspiciously large size of his army left many Florentines a little antsy.
So Florence sent a delegation to Rome to figure out what exactly was going on.
But while Dante and friends were out doing diplomacy, the French stormed Florence, sacked
the city, and installed a new government full of Black Guelphs.
Dante only learned what had happened while he was on his way back to Florence.
Adding to his shock, any White Guelphs who weren’t killed in the sack were sentenced
to exile, which has to make this the absolute worst business trip in history.
Dante spent the rest of his life hopping from town to town across northern Italy, and in
1321 he died in Ravenna.
Now of course, Dante wasn’t just faffing about with his 2 decades in exile, he was
far too angry to let this go.
Whereas Machiavelli tried to play it clever and win himself back into good political graces
after getting exiled from Florence, Dante had no filter whatsoever, and doubled-down
on how much he hated the current state of the Papacy.
And what better way to express your discontent with ecclesiastical governance and vent your
frustration with an unfair exile than to literally throw the pope himself into the fiery pits
of Hell?
So Dante ran with that feeling and proceeded to spend most of his exile composing The Divine
Comedy, a 3-part epic poem that uses a journey through the Christian afterlife as an allegory
for coping with the psychological pain of his exile.
So we know why Dante put quill to parchment, but before we go digging into the lore of
his mytho-historical afterlife, we should understand what kind of a writer Dante was.
Let’s be real here you’ve all seen the Classics Summarized series, I know, I know,
but this is History-Makers, where I go into extremely esoteric analysis of the political
and literary context of famous historical writers, you know, the first 15 minutes of
the lecture nobody ever pays attention to.
Yeah, That’s the quality content I’m here to provide you.
Hoof, anyway, Dante’s literary training started back when he was in Florence hanging
out with poets like Brunetto Latini and Guido Cavalcanti, who were all about drawing from
classical sources like Seneca, Cicero, and Aristotle while breaking from the stuffy and
worn-out style of Latin poems.
Dante’s first forays into poetry were inspired by the love of his life, a Florentine lady
named Beatrice Portinari.
Now, Dante first met Beatrice when they were nine, saw her once again when he was 18, aaaaand
that’s pretty much it.
If you ask me that’s a little… sparse, so I’m not gonna ponder the implications
of that one for too long and generously file it under Childhood Crush.
I mean, Dante had a wife, but you wouldn’t know it by reading his poetry.
In 1294, Dante published La Vita Nuova, a collection of poems and prose commentary on
his “relationship” with Beatrice, from their first meeting to Dante’s grief after
her death in 1290.
The core theme at work here is the idea that romantic love serves as a gateway to divine
love.
This notion matures during the early years of his exile, when earthly pleasures are understandably
a little harder to come by, and his Convivio tracks Dante’s substitution of physical
lust for his devotion to Lady Philosophy.
I’d ask why Philosophy has to be a damsel in this allegory but hey it’s better than
nothing.
Though Beatrice wasn’t out of the picture for long, despite her being dead and also
not Dante’s girlfriend, because her character becomes basically the entire narrative impetus
for The Divine Comedy.
So let’s talk story composition — A protagonist wants some goal, but there’s an obstacle
in their path which they have to overcome.
Here, Dante is after divine salvation, which is represented by his love for Beatrice, but
the pesky little roadblock here is this whole Exile business.
At its core, the Divine Comedy is a story about overcoming the trauma of being exiled.
You know the drill, Dante starts out in the middle of some dark woods, Virgil shows up
and tells him that the only way out is through literal Hell but it’s okay because Beatrice
is waiting for him on the other end, and it’s off to the races.
While the Inferno doesn’t have much in the way of character development, as Dante really
only starts growing as a character during his cleansing on Mount Purgatory, the first
book is steeped in the pain of exile and its effects on his mental and spiritual wellbeing.
And this is where Dante deviates from his predecessors in the field of epic poetry.
Homer and Virgil have scenes where “our hero takes a quick hop into the underworld
for an hour to schmooze with the dead”, but Dante makes that jaunt the entire story.
To Dante, the underworld isn’t something that you can just pop into and out of, because
the underworld, ie: death, IE: Exile, is a much more permanent deal that he needed to
come to terms with.
But beyond Dante’s own personal whatever, the real reason the Divine Comedy became such
a hit was for its vivid depiction of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven — eternal damnation
has never been so scenic.
See, from the time of Jesus through the middle ages, the conception of the afterlife had
been a little hazy.
There are descriptions of paradise and the kingdom of god spread throughout the New Testament,
but this being The Bible, it’s a little tricky to tell what’s literal and what’s
figurative.
Broadly speaking, Christian doctrine developed from preexisting Jewish theology — so there’s
a non-descript underworldly dead place referred to interchangeably as Hades, Gehenna, and
Sheol, and for those who are specifically saved by God’s grace, they go to an otherworldly
heavenly paradise.
But it’s not super clear whether this jump from death to heaven happens immediately,
so some theologians figured that there might be some sort of waiting room, meanwhile others
hoped that there might be an opportunity to clean up their morality even after death in
the hopes of getting into the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the late 1100s some theologians explored the concept of a “Cleansing Fire,” a “Purgatorius
Ignis,” that souls pass through to become purified before entering Heaven.
That’s definitely a start, but it’s still not terribly specific, so Dante had a lot
of room to play around — And in the process of developing his conceptions of Hell, Purgatory,
and Heaven, he also single-handedly invents the entire concept of worldbuilding.
Dante’s afterlife is loaded with Greek mythological characters, concepts, and even landmarks,
plus some medieval astronomy for good measure, and they’re all seamlessly incorporated
into the Christian framework.
This was a big deal.
While Homer and Virgil’s epic poems took place in a pre-existing mythological world
that would have been familiar to their contemporary audiences, Dante had single-handedly fashioned
something completely new and unique, with its own specialized geography, characters,
and comprehensive narrative logic.
The worlds he envisions are stunning, and they’re packed full of figures from Christianity,
Greek and Roman literature, and millennia of History — any story that seamlessly drops
Charon the Ferryman into the same underworld as Satan is bridging some serious gaps — and
one way or another, everything fits together in the Divine Comedy.
Dante didn’t need to go through every single one of his 25 circles, terraces, and spheres
in his purpose-built cosmos with pinpoint detail, but when you’re trying to single-handedly
flex on over 2,000 years of Western literature, you’ve got to commit.
Gosh, the father of world-building and the OG self-insert fanfic, truly Dante was a genius
ahead of his time.
But for all his innovations, what did his contemporaries think of all this hell-trotting,
purgatory-climbing, heaven-flying shenaniganery?
Well, Dante cast an extremely wide net of potential readers by dropping Latin to write
his epic in the vernacular Italian (Tuscan Dialect to be more precise) and open up his
work beyond the typical aristocratic audience.
Readers from all over were so impressed with Dante’s use of language that Italian (technically
speaking it was Tuscan Dialect) became the premier literary language in Europe for centuries.
And of course, the more people read the Divine Comedy, the more they heard his extremely
sharp criticisms about the serial abuses of power within the Papacy.
You don’t give saint peter himself a whole speech about how disappointed he is in the
recent Popes without raising some eyebrows.
In addition to accusations of simony and nepotism, Dante argues that the political ambitions
of the popes brings them into conflict with their neighbors, and thus kind of contradicts
their whole claim to being a universal and non-partisan church.
Unfortunately, the church had just relocated to Avignon France, and soon enough we’re
going to have a great schism on our hands, so in the short term, a lot of Dante’s criticisms
got brushed aside, but in 200 years, Martin Luther would start singing a very similar
tune to our Tuscan poet here.
So, looking through Dante’s historical context and the means by which he created his unique
take on the Christian afterlife, I don’t think it’s all too hot a take to say that
Dante marked an extremely big break from all the literature that came before him.
In a tradition steeped in preexisting mythology, Dante said “I’ll do it myself” and fleshed
out every last detail of his own original universe.
And I mean that literally, Heaven is one giant Space with a flowers sticking our of it.
While Dante’s afterlife as written didn’t make it into Catholic doctrine, he solidified
the popular belief in A Purgatory between death and heaven, and had a monumental impact
on the aesthetic of Christian art through the Renaissance and beyond.
Though beliefs will vary by time and place even within a single religion, modern Catholicism
tends to view Hell and Purgatory more as conditions of the soul in the absence of God rather than
specific pits underground or mountains in the middle of the ocean, and many Protestant
groups dropped the concepts entirely.
But regardless, I think we can all appreciate Dante’s genius as a philosopher, as a historian,
as a worldbuilder, and, quite literally, as one Damn fine storyteller.
Thank you so much for watching!
Between Machiavelli, Florence, and now Dante, I’ve been really spoiling myself the past
month and a half, but hey, I had a busy year, so merry Christmas to me.
It’s been an incredible year working on the channel and we’re so thankful that you
chose to spend part of it with us.
OSP some fantastic content planned for the coming year that Red and I think you’ll
love, We’ll see you then.