From the Stands
Dante Alighieri
1265–1321
- Lived
- 1265–1321
- Place
- Florence and Ravenna
- Teacher
- Brunetto Latini
What the Divine Comedy talks about
Dante wrote the Commedia between about 1308 and 1321, in exile from his city, Florence. He wrote it in Italian rather than Latin, so that ordinary readers could follow it, and it shaped the Italian language. It has three parts and a hundred cantos.
A man lost in the middle of life. “Midway on the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” Dante is the traveller, and the journey that follows is the soul’s way from confusion to God.
| Part | What happens | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Inferno (Hell) | A funnel of nine circles down to the center of the earth. Each sin earns a punishment that mirrors it. | Virgil, the Roman poet, who stands for human reason |
| Purgatorio (Purgatory) | A mountain the soul climbs, terrace by terrace, cleansed of pride, envy, anger and the other deadly sins. | Virgil, until reason can go no further |
| Paradiso (Paradise) | A rise through the nine heavenly spheres to a vision of God, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” | Beatrice, the woman he loved, who stands for divine love and grace |
What it teaches. Reason can lead the soul a long way, through the knowledge of sin and its cure, but not all the way. The last ascent needs love. The heavens Dante climbs are the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic spheres, the same ladder of the cosmos that Greek thought had built.
In 1919 the Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios argued that Dante drew on Islamic accounts of the Prophet’s night journey (mi‘raj), one of which had been translated into Latin as the Book of the Ladder. The debate is still open. Iqbal’s Javid Nama answers the Comedy directly: a journey through the heavens, with Rumi in Virgil’s place.
Where they appear
Built by Umair Malik while studying Iqbal · Your Commentator