Because we are all creatures subject to many natural forces that seem to invisibly advance our slightest impulses toward extremity— like gravity, or momentum, or thermodynamics— it seems intuitive that certain strongly-held human principles, like justice, must also have an inevitable nature. It seems only right that virtue ought to be rewarded, and vice be punished. It’s also tempting to believe that justice should work along the same precedent established by the nature of the act, “unless acted on by an outside force.” There is a delight to the completion of an inevitable arc: in “poetic justice” one is served one’s “just deserts.”
One might say— not me, but “one” might— that Dante Alighieri was an innovator in just deserts. This is not only because in his Commedia, sinners are punished by the contrapasso (from the Latin contra and patior, which means "to suffer the opposite," and derives from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica along with other medieval visionary texts), that is, by processes that resemble, reflect, or contrast with the sin itself— most hilariously and poignantly in the first cantica, the Inferno. It is also because the second two cantiche, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, are concerned with the ways in which divine love, that natural force, is distorted and defiled as it runs through the motives and ways of fallen people.
It was published as the Commedia— Boccacio later called it Divina. It is gossipy, sublime, familiar; it contains Dante’s friends and enemies and idols and lovers, public figures and mythological entities. It is compact and dense and ludicrously comprehensive, filled with allusion to classical, Biblical, and medieval writing, as concerned with theology and philosophy as it is with history and contemporary politics, and for the modern reader is best read with a good Companion fluent in the relevant texts. Dante composes these myriad acts of spectral ventriloquism in his Tuscan language, and with hendecasyllabic terza rima remakes the Italian vernacular in his image. Threes proliferate, always with a plus one: three cantiche (or cantos, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso), nine circles in Hell (three times three, plus one), the Sins and Virtues split into two groups of threes-plus-one, the nine spheres of Heaven plus one. Each cantica concludes with the word stelle, “stars” (and with an additional line appended to the final tercet). Most wonderfully, the work synthesizes the logic of the medieval universe together with a theological order, and charts a literal map of Hell that includes the EXIT sign.
When one reads a lot and is also constantly exposed to images and details of the lives of others (as everyone is, all the time, in this the most literate and image-dazzled society in the history of the world), the temptation to both treat every written text or image as a work of fiction, and to then look to these works of fiction for instruction, emulation, or example, is overwhelming. While Aristotle might have seen poetry as more universal than particular,1 there is a great deal of both truth and specificity in Dante, not only his understanding of sin, of guilt, of suffering, and of progression toward perfection, but also his appreciation of the kindly inclination that lies at the apex of the divine, and the length of the journey required to approach.
Dante’s Commedia is called a “comedy” because, in the Aristotelian sense of kōmōidía, it is a work that accepts an ordered universe as foundational. It begins with the traveler lost on life’s way, who after circling the drain and climbing in cycles, at last approaches the spirals of the divine, illuminated by the music of the spheres. But in Northrop Frye’s much later parsing, comedy and tragedy are opposites on life’s wheel: tragedy the progression of life to death, comedy death advancing into life. In A Natural Perspective Frye isolates the strangeness and illogic of the move from death to rebirth: “We can see that death is the inevitable result of birth, but new life is not the inevitable result of death. It is hoped for, even expected, but at its core is something unpredictable and mysterious, something that belongs to the imaginative equivalents of faith, hope, and love, not to the rational virtues.”2 Progressing the comedy to its conclusion requires mysterious exertion of a natural force, with something beyond logic.
The Commedia is infused with a total confidence in a divine order, even a sense of inevitability; for we modern (and likely secular) readers, steeped in equal-and-opposite reactions and equations that merely move variables back and forth across an equals sign, the idea that a story beginning in death and Hell could possibly conclude on the brink of the Empyrean seems too good to be true, and reek a little of the proselytizer. It is this inevitability that makes the poems into a map of the soul’s journey— not a straight line, but a series of spirals, in continual approach.
As an aside, a great deal of what I find to be the more interesting fiction of our current wrestles with “the straight line” imposed by the sentence, it’s “inadequacy for our complex interiority.” Timothy Bewes in Free Indirect goes a step further and argues that everything in fiction today can be read as “free indirect speech and thought.”3 Bewes calls this principle “postfiction,” which is to say that any thoughts encountered in fictions are deauthorized, defanged, and contradicted by virtue of being in a work of fiction, and thereby the novel evades definitive thought and refuses ideologies. In a hasty gloss, it’s impossible to know what a novel “really thinks” as fiction cannot be reliably called a container for any kind of thought, due to the slippery nature of this “free indirect thought.”4 This is a somewhat modern concern, in the current era when fiction and nonfiction themselves are blending together and the ineffable mysterious essence that is conjured by a novel’s representations of thinking are so much more than the “thought” itself that turns away from human understanding. I only bring this up because to consider what the Commedia “really thinks” about theology, philosophy, or history, at least in the historical materialist habit of thought that is so dominant in some criticism, is beside the point. The Commedia describes a world that revolves in its harmonies, wherein we are outside looking in on a divine immensity, and it is the poetic resonance of the poem— not only its rhyme and meter, but also the “universal truths” encoded in the poet’s parsing of individual minds, and the geography in which they move.
Speaking of geography, a word on the universe. As Dante and his guides, alternately Virgil and Beatrice, advance toward Paradise, it becomes increasingly clear that the spatial does not reflect the spiritual truth, in fact it is the opposite: the real mirrors, and therefore reverses, the spiritual truth of reality. C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image describes the medieval “model” of the world that brings together cosmology, theology, Ptolemaic science, and history as they understood it into a comprehensive vision of the whole.5 The medieval cosmology viewed creation as a finite, ordered universe (an ideal site for comedy!), maintained by a divine hierarchy. This model deeply predates Dante but informed, and was informed by, the Commedia. Dante’s visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven can be examined through its lens.
Lewis describes this model of the world as deriving from a “bookish” medieval sensibility that loved allusion, reference, and the dense interweavings between texts, while not always being terribly particular about specifics of citation; and a love of system and order.6 In Lewis’ description of this model, a series of metaphors are visualized as places, with different zones and levels. (One might think of Giordano Bruno’s forty nine Planetary Images, and would begin to catch something of the flavor.)
In this model, the earth is a sphere. (Consider the end of the Inferno where Virgil and Dante climb down Lucifer’s sides, and find themselves climbing up his feet.) Earth is at the center of the universe, surrounded by a series of transparent, hollow globes: the spheres. Each sphere has its own luminary body: first the Moon, then Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each sphere is ruled by its own intelligence, or luminous body, the qualities of which, if one is at all familiar with astrology,7 one will immediately recognize, these qualities— along with the metals, and character of each— being a strange pagan holdover into the medieval era. Each planet exerts influence, and this planetary influence is not bad or good but except it is received by those on earth. It was Dante who posited that the Earth was ruled by the intelligence (and therefore the influence) of Fortune.
Between Earth and the other spheres is the Moon, a transition zone. Consider the word “sublunary,” from the Latin sublunaris; per Bertand Russell, parsing Aristotle: “Things below the moon are subject to generation and decay; from the moon upwards, everything is ungenerated and indestructible.” Beneath the Moon— both below the sphere of the Moon, and in the literal moonlight— all things are corruptible, conditional, contingent. Doubt lives under the moon, and uncertainty. Those who wander and search are protected by the moon. Yet, without contingence, there cannot be luck.
In this model of the universe, outer space is not filled with endless blackness, but with light: as Beatrice says, “From matter’s largest sphere, / we now have reached the heaven of pure light, / light of the intellect, light filled with love, / love of true good, love filled with happiness, / a happiness surpassing every sweetness.” (Paradiso XXX, 38-42).8 (Perhaps only an imagined love could retain the purity required to navigate toward this domain.) In a space of all things illuminated by the sun, night is merely a shadow cast by the Earth, extending a long black column out into as far as Venus. Consider for a moment the idea of the dark as something you look through and see through, like water: that when you look at the night sky, you are seeing the shadow of Earth, of ourselves.
In this model of the universe, the default is not silence, but music: musica universalis envisions the movement of these bodies as music, audible possibly to the soul. “When that wheel which You make eternal through / the heavens’ longing for You drew me with / the harmony You temper and distinguish,” Paradiso (I, 76-78).
Beyond Saturn is the Stellatum, which contains all of the other stars, called “fixed” as their positions were not thought to move relative to Earth as the planets do. Beyond the Stellatum is the Primum Mobile, and inferred zone that is implied by all the rest. Motion of this universe proceeds from the top down, from the Primum Mobile and the Empyrean beyond it. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον, ‘He moves as beloved.’ Or, as Dante sees at the very end of the Paradiso: “Here force failed my high fantasy; but my / desire and will were moved already—like / a wheel revolving uniformly—by / the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” (XXXIII, 142-145)9
Consider the end of the Paradiso, nearing the divine at the center of light, looking back on whence we came. When we think of the medieval model, when we look up at the night sky, we are not looking into a void of endless expanse. Instead, we are looking inward toward the heart of all things, from far outside. There is a wonderful, vertiginous delight this shift induces, along with a wistful longing. One is in fact on the outside, looking in, and far away from the light of love. Yet in a universe illuminated and resonant with music, how can one be afraid? Dante feels little horror at the space beyond the spheres of earth. As Lewis says, he is “...like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.”
A later lens would look at the poetry of Dante in the tradition of the epic, one originating with Homer and continuing with Virgil and Lucan. Virgil resounds in the voice of the victorious, while Lucan’s epics take the position of the defeated and the thwarted; likewise, linear progressions of the victorious empire; wandering, romantic sagas of the defeated, where details settled are endlessly debated even though the facts have been settled. As David Quint puts it in his book on what he calls “the politicization of epic poetry” Epic and Empire: “To the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering.”10 It’s maybe a little glib to say that Dante achieves a synthesis of the linear path (from the death of Hell, through to the loving light of Paradise) with the spiraling gyres (of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) required to approach the divine. Yet just as easily can one hold multiple notions at the same time: of the universe as our Fortune-ruled sphere, both far away from, and at the heart of it all.11
διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει.
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective. (1965) Columbia University Press.
In the novel, the “free indirect” mode merges together first- and third-person, such that a narrator speaks with a character’s voice— James Woods How Fiction Works contains an excellent essay parsing how this mode works in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Butterfly.
Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. (2022) Columbia University Press.
C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. (1964) Cambridge University Press.
Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945), take place in a universe that reflects this medieval model.
For an introduction into planets and their influences, from the astrological dimension one might look at the practical instruction in Grant Lewi’s Astrology for the Millions (1940); for the mythological context, see Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and Charles Martin’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Allen Mandelbaum’s are my favorite translations of Dante, though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (first in English) are fine if ornate. You can compare them at the Digital Dante site. All quotes from the Commedia in this essay come from the Mandelbaum.
ibid.
David Quint, Epic and Empire. (1993) Princeton University Press.
I intended this post to be something more like BLDGBLOG’s Topography of Hell, one I really like.