Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)

Durante degli Alighieri, known to history by the short form of his baptismal name, was born in Florence in the late spring of 1265, under the sign of Gemini, as he himself would later note with some pride. His family belonged to the minor nobility and sided with the Guelphs, the party loyal to the papacy. His mother died when he was a child, and his father, a moneylender, died not long after. The pivotal encounter of his youth came at nine, when he first saw Beatrice, whom scholars have generally identified with Bice, daughter of Folco Portinari. He would say that his life was changed from that hour. Whatever the historical facts behind the story, Beatrice became for him the figure through whom earthly love opened onto divine love, and she died in 1290, when he was twenty-five.

His formal education was the ordinary grammar and rhetoric of a Florentine boy of means, supplemented by his apprenticeship to the poet Guido Cavalcanti and his study with the notary and statesman Brunetto Latini. After Beatrice's death he turned, by his own account in the Convivio, to philosophy and to the religious schools of Florence, attending the lectures of the Franciscans at Santa Croce and the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella, where the thought of Thomas Aquinas was taught. He read Boethius and Cicero, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Victorines, and above all Virgil. He was not a cleric and held no ecclesiastical office; he was a layman, a married man, and a citizen. In 1285 he married Gemma Donati, with whom he had several children. Gemma is almost entirely absent from his writing, and she did not follow him into exile.

In 1295 Dante entered political life, matriculating in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, as the law required of aspirants to office, and in 1300 he served as one of the six priors who governed Florence. Florentine politics had by then split the Guelphs into Whites and Blacks, and Dante stood with the Whites, who resisted the ambitions of Pope Boniface VIII over the city. In late 1301, while Dante was away on an embassy to Rome, Charles of Valois entered Florence, and the Blacks seized power. Dante was charged with corruption, fined, and in 1302 sentenced in absentia to death by burning should he return. He never did. The man who had been among the most prominent citizens of Florence became, at thirty-seven, a wanderer who would never see his city again.

The nearly two decades of exile took him through the courts and cities of northern Italy, to Verona under the Scaligeri, to Lunigiana, perhaps to Paris, and finally to Ravenna, where Guido Novello da Polenta gave him shelter. Early on he joined, and then broke with, other exiled Florentines in failed attempts to force their way home. In 1311 he placed hopes of political renewal in the Emperor Henry VII, and those hopes ended with the emperor's death in 1313. In 1315 Florence offered an amnesty on humiliating terms, requiring public penance and a fine, and Dante refused in a letter that has come down to us. He lived on the hospitality of others, and he knew its bitterness, writing in the Paradiso of how salty is the taste of another man's bread and how hard the climbing of another man's stairs.

It was in exile that the Commedia was written. He died in Ravenna on the night of September 13 or 14, 1321, of a fever, apparently contracted on the return from a diplomatic mission to Venice. He was fifty-six. He was buried there in the church of San Pier Maggiore, now San Francesco, and Florence, which had condemned him, spent centuries asking for his bones.

The Commedia and Its Long Reception

Dante began writing as a lyric poet in the circle of Cavalcanti, and his first sustained work was the Vita Nuova, composed in the 1290s after Beatrice's death. It is a small book of prose and verse, a spiritual autobiography of a love that moves from longing to praise, and it closes with the promise to say of her what has never been said of any woman. In exile he turned to ambitious works in prose. The Convivio, an unfinished philosophical banquet in the Italian vernacular, set out to share learning with readers who had no Latin. The De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, argued for the dignity of the vernacular as a literary language. The Monarchia, composed in Latin and probably late, argued that temporal and spiritual authority have distinct ends and that the emperor does not derive his power from the pope. Its reception was hostile. In 1329 Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget condemned it, and in 1329 or soon after, the book was burned in Bologna. It was placed on the Index in 1554 and remained there until the Index was abolished.

The Commedia, which Dante called simply by that name and which later readers called Divina, was composed in the last years of his life. In roughly one hundred cantos of interlocking triple rhyme, the pilgrim descends through hell, climbs the mountain of purgatory, and ascends through the heavens to the vision of God. Virgil guides him until the earthly paradise, where Beatrice takes over; Bernard of Clairvaux leads him at the end. The poem's governing concern is the ordering of love: sin as love disordered, penance as love retrained, blessedness as love at rest in its true object. Dante read his own condition into this, and the poem is also an act of judgment on the Florence that cast him out and on the popes, emperors and neighbors he thought had betrayed justice. He placed Boniface VIII, still living at the poem's fictional date, in hell, and he did not spare the clergy of his day. Yet the poem rests on Aquinas and Augustine, on the liturgy, and on the patristic and scholastic tradition, and its theology has been read as orthodox, if boldly imagined. Its closing lines name the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

The manuscripts present difficulties. No autograph of any of his works survives, and the text of the Commedia has been reconstructed from hundreds of later copies, the earliest dating from some years after his death. According to Boccaccio, the final thirteen cantos of the Paradiso were found only after his death, a tale told by early biographers and one that scholars treat with caution. The poem circulated quickly, however. Commentaries began within a few years of his death, among them those by his sons Jacopo and Pietro, and within decades Florence had endowed public lectures on the poem.

Its influence on later Christian imagination is difficult to overstate. Much of what English-speaking Christians picture when they imagine the afterlife, the circles of hell, the terraces of purgatory, the rose of the blessed, comes through Dante rather than through Scripture or the councils. Chaucer drew on him, as did Milton, and Eliot and Pound returned to him in the twentieth century. Eliot said that Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them. Catholic and Protestant readers have both claimed him, and neither has been able to hold him entirely: Reformation polemicists cited his attacks on the papacy, while popes from Benedict XV to Francis have honored him in apostolic letters, the last in 2021 on the seven hundredth anniversary of his death. Reception has shifted with the age. Neglected in the eighteenth century, he was recovered by the Romantics, and his poem is now read as theology as much as literature.

Who should read Dante: Readers who suspect that the Christian life is more than moral instruction and who want to see a mind of enormous learning take the whole of the faith, doctrine, politics, love and grief, and make it into a single pilgrimage. He rewards those willing to read slowly, with a good translation and notes, and to follow the poem upward through the Purgatorio rather than stopping in hell, which is where most readers stop. He is not for those wanting a devotional companion for quiet moments or a simple summary of doctrine. The Commedia asks to be read as a whole, and as a long, demanding journey.