Zeitgeist lX
“Midway this life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”
Dante Alighieri, the florentine, IN Cantica I – L’inferno, Canto I, first verse.
And so it starts: the great story of Dante’s Pilgrimage in quest for Paradise, one of the greatest analogies ever made, and the first great writing and birth register of italian language.
Dante’s vison of the Dark Wood is of a choice, the choice of living without knowledge, “the image of the Sin of Error; not so much of any specific act or sin or intellectual perversion as of that spiritual condition called ‘hardness of heart’, in wich sinfulness has so taken possession of the soul as to render it incapable of turning to God, or even knowing which way to turn.”
(by Dorothy Sayers IN Penguin Classics’s Dante, The Divine Comedy, book one – Inferno, notes on “The Great Images”)
The whole literary work of Dante has been always to achieve this point of creating “The Divine Comedy”, on which he would present his understanding of life by an allegory of death, putting himself as the figure in pursuit of his beloved Beatrice through all the 24 circles of hell.
As romantic as it seems – or might be - for Dante, Beatrice was nothing less and nothing more than the “God Image Bearer”, the arquetip of the ideal human being, with innocence, grace and beauty; giving an living icon for his devotion.
Beatrice was the one who has been enlighted, so high that he would only reach her at the end of the journey, started at the dark wood, in heaven, beside God.
For me, to see how Dante’s masterpiece shows corruption, decadency, luxury; human perverted desires of all kinds as he walks on Virgil’s company, descending to nether hell in obvious reverse of what he will show later on the next two parts of the pilgrimage – Purgatory and Paradise – is as best as an story would have to be told. He goes opening the curtain slowly, giving to the reader the informations he has as he got them. Dante’s work is consider attemporal for showing the big universal themes: good and evil; God and the devil; the power of choosing; the one’s quest for a better understanding on life; principles and values; sin; forgiveness and blessing. The Human Nature against the Divine.
Ideal versus will.
To understand Dante’s Divine Comedy is to try to understand life itself with all the symbols – such as Beatrice itself – showed on our daily lives that there is something more, between heavens and earth, than supposed our empty filosofy…
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