The modernity of the Divine Comedy
wrote this for uni and liked the outcome, so here it is: a small essay on the Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy couldn’t be written in any other time, but its own. If it was more recent, it could not possibly bear the greatness and almost holiness that it carries to this day. Time alone, and the poem’s endurance through it, added more significance to Dante’s work than I believe he could ever imagine. Much less could he imagine the grandiosity and relevance of his work to the society of eight centuries ahead of his own.
The Divine Comedy is such an extensive piece, both in means of length and of subjects it encompasses, that it’s easy to find traces of Dante’s work in the literature of many other writers since his time, even if that similarity is unknown to the writer himself. I was recently reading Anais Nin’s House of Incest, which couldn’t be more far from Dante’s poem in its length or encompassment , and yet as I read it, I kept being reminded of it. Something of Nin’s essence in her book reminded me deeply of Dante’s own essence. Maybe the answer lies in their lyricism, or maybe in something more profound, as there are many things in The Divine Comedy that make it an eternal work, that has endured for so many centuries and that will endure for many more. But one thing that I believe to be in the center of its eternity is the human search for a meaning, an absolution of sins and for a guiding light. And in that I made a connection between Nin’s and Dante’s works. Nin who created a world of lies, in the hopes to create a version of herself for the other to find solace in her, seeking to encompass everyone and everything in herself. Those lies created for her another reality, a dimension of dreams, a place where she could only love herself in the other, and where the other only loved itself in her. That place was the house of incest, where she meets the modern Christ that is horrified by her sins and of the other two women with her, of which she wants to scape, but cannot, because she fears to loose herself in the darkness of her own lies. And yet she clings to the daylight that shines in the other side of the walls.
“If only we could all scape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves, said the modern Christ.”
“But none of us could bear to pass through the tunnel which led from the house into the world on the other side of the walls, where there were leaves on the trees, where water ran beside the paths, where there was daylight and joy. (…) we feared to be trapped into darkness again; we feared to return whence we had come, from darkness and night.”
“We all looked now at the dancer who stood at the center of the room dancing the dance of the woman without arms. She dances as if she were deaf, and could not follow the rhythm of the music. (…) She was listening to a music we could not hear, moved by hallucinations we could not see. My arms were taken away from me, she sang. (…) I wanted to embrace and hold the light, the wind, the sun, the night, the whole world. (…) And I strained and held so much that they broke; they broke away from me. Everything eluded me then. I was condemned not to hold. (…) And she danced, she danced with the music and with the rhythm of earth’s circles; (…) dancing towards daylight.”[1]
In the same way that Dante wakes up in the shadowed forest, and sees a mountain bathed in sunlight, and attempts to walk to it. He is stopped however, by three wild animals that block his path. Virgil comes to his rescue and explains that Dante can reach the mountain, but only through a different path. The path that leads him through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. And so Dante’s journey starts in direction to that divine light, in which he searches for answers for his existence throught the harshness and pain of that other world (or maybe other dimension of our own), and especially, within himself.
Furthermore, Dante’s work is a thread that cannot be broken by any moment in time, because he made his work eternal, in the lack of passage of time in his Inferno and Paradiso (that infinite time that extends itself to this very moment ) and, especially, in including the whole humanity in his journey. For example, when he writes
“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.”[2]
he puts us all in his poem, forever. Dante makes us question again and again, despite the hundreds of years that have passed since our first questioning that, why we are here, and what is our purpose. He reminds the society of today, that seems to have all answers already, all explications sufficiently rooted in science and reason, that there are some answers that can only be found in the divine, in poetry, and in the individual’s search within himself, within his own soul. Or if we look at it in a religious view, within the individual’s soul encounter with God.
In the end, we will always find our way back to Dante, to The Divine Comedy, because he made his work immortal, above all through his representation of the human condition of forever searching for that light, divine or not, that will guide us to happiness, to fulfilment. And so I believe that in truth, there is no such a thing as the “modernity” of the Divine Comedy, in the sense that Dante’s work is eternal, and forever relevant, to the society of today and of tomorrow. A constant in literature and in art forever.
[1] NIN, Anaïs. House of Incest. Swallow Press, 2020.
[2] ALIGHIERI, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Everyman’s Library, 1995.
other sources:
Dante’s journey to the Divine, and the modern quest for meaning. See https://www.abc.net.au/religion/john-kinder-dante-divine-comedy-quest-for-meaning/13534806