It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of him.

-Francis Bacon as quoted by Martin Gardner in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

The consignment of souls to eternal torment and damnation not only of what may be viewed as evil persons, but unbelievers, is surely one of the weaknesses of Christianity. Yet it is almost universal in the greatest writings in the faith ranging through from the New Testament to Aquinas, Luther, John Milton to America’s Jonathan Edwards. The belief in a Deity who accepts, however reluctantly, eternal suffering in the next world, must affect the Church’s attitude in this world acceptance of hideous behaviors among believers, as in the Inquisition and religious wars.

Nevertheless, there is so much in the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1331) that resonant for me, even in our modern world.  Dante is still a hot topic in academia and popular culture alike especially for a poet who lived about 700 years ago.  He  is avatar and codifier  of  the Medieval doctrine of the Catholic church though his popularity declined somewhat during the enlightenment. His view of the world remains pre-eminent in many a modern minds particularly among Christians and Muslims of the West and so for that reason alone is worth examining.

The Comedy, later renamed Divine Comedy by Boccaccio, is Dante’s magnum opus and it is one of the greatest works in literature.  Literary works of this general type, may be conveniently dichotomized into comedies,  written in low or vulgar style which usually end happily, or tragedies which in Dante’s time in Italy might be written haughtily, in Latin serving higher ideas or purpose, reflected in the comic and tragic masks.  The humility or writing a Comedy in Italian, rather than Latin belies the profundity, and universal scope of the work. It all the more ironic that Dante’s Comedy deals with the deepest questions, man’s struggle to be close to God, and  Love itself.   Written in the vernacular, it served as embryo of the Italian language.  Dante was the quintessential Florentine, who was deeply enmeshed in the internecine mundane  political struggles confined to his own age and the Comedy is peppered with characters whose stories are lost on us now. My heart skipped a beat in seeing his monument at the Santa Croce Basilica which also contains the tomb of Galileo.

Dante was to have his first sight of the divine Beatrice in 1274 when he was 9 and she was 8. 1283 was his second sighting of Beatrice when he was18. She was the muse or love of his life, subject of his book La Vita Nuova  written before the Comedy.  Beatrice married another as Dante did himself. She died at the age of 24, but you have to imagine that the love he had for her, as many of us with memories of pure adolescent romance and she was to lead him with view of her amazing countenance through Paradise of the Afterlife, was the emotional impetus of his life’s work.  Perhaps he is with her now.

Numbers especially multiples of 3 for the Christian Trinity or triune God infuse the Comedy. The Comedy is comprised of 3 Canticas, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso each composed of 33 Cantos (33+1for Inferno as introduction adding to 99+1 or 100). It is all a poem of 14233 lines in terza rima scheme,  each stanza consisting of 3 hendadecasyllabic (11 syllable) Italian lines. The first and third lines rhyme while the middle line is made to rhyme with the first line of the the next stanza to make the 3 line stanzas interdigitate. There are 3X3=9 circles of Hell + 1 for Lucifer, 9 Rings of Purgatory + 1 for the Garden of Eden, 9 Celestial Spheres of Paradiso surrounded by the Empyrean for fire of the Trinity so each of the three abodes or Canticas supports a 3 square or 9+1 scheme. An example of the a perfect square + 1 scheme is that of the the ultimate completeness number 7 X 7=49 +1 is 50 for the Jubilee of the old testament, seventh day or year of rest in which slavery was abolished, fields went fallow as reflective of Sabbattical rest.  7 X 7 is the perfection of perfections the seven heavens of the Muslim faith. Jews count 49 days from the redemption of Passover until Shavuot Feast of Weeks and giving of the Torah. As it happened,  Dante places his Comedy in 1300 in the Spring from the night  before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter. The year 1300,was declared a Jubillee year by the Pope. The number 7 also plays a prominent role as in the 7 Deadly Sins of Purgatorio and 7 known planets but not nearly as prominent as the Trinity. Other groups of 3 are the three wild animals, she-wolf, Lion,Leopard taken from Jeremiah 5:6 of uncertain allegorical significance, and three women St Lucia who put out her own eyes, Virgin Mary and Beatrice.

All of this leaves us little doubt about Dante’s towering genius.  I don’t doubt that he had OCD first of all,  given his poetics and emphasis on numbers.   I am unable to cite another example of such fidelity to a classificatory scheme as vast as his.  Dante sought a place for eternity each and every single human person who ever lived or shall live into his or her own place as best illustrated in Inferno. Everyone has their personal place and it is according to the principle of poetic justice termed Contapasso or comeuppance as in those fortune tellers who seek to give a false prediction of the future are condemned forever to walk backwards into the future seeing only  the past.

Dante’s OCD ramifies into his single minded journey which occurred somehow at the “Midway along the road of our life” in 1300 in his 35th year, when he says, as happens with probably all persons, he lost his way, from the known right path. He would continue to write this work until his death in 1331. The Comedy is a survey of the Afterworld, but for us in the twenty first century it is a survey of the entire known world of his day That, above all is what fascinates. There is a survey of what is felt to happen after death, but in doing so, he catalogs the entire known world. And it isn’t just the world of the Catholic Church at the time of which it does seem to be an excellent representation,  but of humankind’s struggle to understand the Deity, not even this, but to understand All.

The characters represented include all of the mythological figures from Greek and Roman pantheons. His admired poet Virgil is his guide through Hell and Purgatory, with his bona fides of having described the underworld of Aeneas. It is interesting how the characters of the Hebrew Bible are dealt with almost as an afterthought.  Since Moses, Abraham, David according to Christian doctrine did not know Christ, though through no fault of their own, they had to be placed in the Inferno. These holy men as well as other admirable  personages, Homer, Plato all the Greek philosophers, have their own places at the outer limit of the Inferno, namely Limbo.  After the crucifixion  Christ enters Limbo for what is known as the Harrowing of Hell to rescue the Holy Men (but leaves the Greeks).  This difficultly might have been more deftly avoided by ancient teachings among of the great prophets, particularly Moses and Abraham, they these men actually did have explicit knowledge of the future and even in their own time, did know Christ, who lived over 1000 years later. We are talking about men of vision. The Harrowing of Hell seems rather inelegant to this observer.

The Comedy’s struggle  to give a view of the Afterlife  and classify every past and future human is as wide as it can possibly be in its breadth as it tells us all about the then known world. Many twenty first century religionists still subscribe to a version of the Afterlife very similar to Dante’s. What was this view?

Dante’s 14th century view of Everything was that of Ptolemy and Aristotle.  Since Dante lived before Columbus many people expect he thought the world was flat. That is not the case. For Dante and many educated persons of his age, the earth was round. Maimonides, who lived over a  century before Dante, commented that educated persons of his time all know the world is round.  Anyone could easily see ships disappear into the distance, the round shadow cast but the earth over the moon during and eclipse.  Eratosthenes had measured the circumference of the earth some 200 years before the Common Era though Dante knew Latin and not Greek and it is possible he was unaware of this. In any case, Dante’s model of the earth was round, albeit it is very likely that even Dante’s picture  of the earth was a great deal smaller than it is.  According to his Ecclesiastical model at the time, the entrance to Hell was somewhere close to Jerusalem perhaps signifying  a certain navel of a round world. Lucifer had been cast out of Heaven and now resided close to the center of a round earth so that Dante’s journey through Hell was something like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. The shadow cast by Lucifer’s being thrown through the rock of the earth was reflected in the rising of the Island of Purgatorio in the Southern Hemisphere. Most of the southern hemisphere was thought to be comprised of water. But even so Dante was well  aware of the difference in the stars of the southern sky and speaks of the changes in timezones inherent to a round earth. The Northern hemisphere was inhabited but then living people.

The remainder of the Heavens were comprised of Ptolemaic geocentric concentric rotating spheres as is seen in Paradiso. There is one sphere for each of the 7 known heavenly bodies the moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn followed by the fixed stars, then the primum mobile, home of the Angelic orders followed by the fiery Empyrean home of the Triune God and Blessed angels in another 3 X 3 + 1 scheme. This was the view of the entire known world in Dante’s time which he spent the latter part of his life describing, the Dantean Cosmology. So I have come to admire Dante for many reasons, none more than for the breadth of his Vision which was as wide as it could possibly be given the limits of knowledge of his time.

I intend to explore further, how many modern twenty first century persons still seem to be laboring with just this same limited view of the world and afterlife as admirable as it is or was, and to examine alternative visions.