“Aban­don hope, all ye who enter here”. No, not to this blog (though it’s a con­sid­er­a­tion) but to the entrance to Hell, this inscrip­tion appear­ing on the gates there­of in the ear­ly part of Dante Alighieri’s Infer­no, Book I of his Divine Com­e­dy (Div­ina Com­me­dia). Thus begins an epic jour­ney through the Infer­no (Hell), the Pur­ga­to­rio (Pur­ga­to­ry), and the Par­adiso (Heav­en). And we are talk­ing epic here: 14,233 lines of terza rima (three-line rhyming scheme in the pat­tern aba bcb cdc ded etc), begun in 1308 and com­plet­ed in 1320, a year before Dante’s death. It is wide­ly recog­nised as one of the great­est works of world lit­er­a­ture; indeed, in T S Eliot’s esti­ma­tion, “Dante and Shake­speare divide the world”.

The nar­ra­tive describes Dan­te’s trav­els through Hell, Pur­ga­to­ry, and Heav­en, alle­gor­i­cal­ly rep­re­sent­ing the soul’s jour­ney towards God. He is accom­pa­nied through­out by a guide: in Hell and Pur­ga­to­ry it’s the great Roman poet, Vir­gil, whilst in Heav­en it’s Beat­rice, thought to be Dante’s “ide­al woman” and based on a real Flo­ren­tine woman he had admired from a dis­tance.

In Hell, Vir­gil shows Dante the poor souls suf­fer­ing a pun­ish­ment direct­ly relat­ed to the nature of their sin. This is con­tra­pas­so (“suf­fer the oppo­site”): for exam­ple, the pun­ish­ment for sooth­say­ers and for­tune-tellers (who had tried to see the future by for­bid­den means) is to walk with their heads on back­wards so that they can­not see what is ahead. The lust­ful, who allowed their pas­sions to blow them astray, are now con­stant­ly buf­fet­ed back and forth by stormy winds. Such poet­ic jus­tice is sim­i­lar­ly met­ed out to the glut­to­nous and greedy, the wrath­ful and vio­lent, the fraud­u­lent and hyp­o­crit­i­cal, and to the heretics and blas­phe­mers. Many real per­son­ages of Dante’s time are named and shamed, damned by their incon­ti­nence in life. It paid to live an upright life in Dan­te’s day!

Pur­ga­to­ry is con­ceived as a ter­raced moun­tain to climb, rep­re­sent­ing spir­i­tu­al growth. Dante dis­cuss­es the nature of sin, vice and virtue, and moral issues preva­lent in the Church and pol­i­tics of the day. The 13^th cen­tu­ry was a rich time for medieval the­ol­o­gy and phi­los­o­phy, and Dante draws heav­i­ly from the body of work pro­duced by philoso­phers such as Siger of Bra­bant, Bonaven­ture and Thomas Aquinas.

The third and final part, Heav­en, is depict­ed as a series of con­cen­tric spheres around Earth, and here, Beat­rice takes over the role of guide from Vir­gil, rep­re­sent­ing divine knowl­edge super­sed­ing human rea­son. Here we encounter the car­di­nal virtues, such as pru­dence, for­ti­tude, jus­tice and tem­per­ance, and ever upward, Dante final­ly has a vision of the ulti­mate and in a flash of under­stand­ing that he can­not express, he sees God him­self.

If you’re imag­in­ing that a read­ing of the Divine Com­e­dy could be a great adven­ture, you’d be right, but if you’re baulk­ing at its length, an excel­lent alter­na­tive is to seek out the audio book nar­rat­ed by (of all peo­ple) John Cleese, who does a smash­ing job of nar­rat­ing this great poem.