Studies of the reception and “afterlife” of classic works are becoming something of a trend. Last year, Orlando Reade’s What in Me Is Dark received well-earned praise for its tracking of the surprising career of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the centuries following its composition – not least its role in shaping a revolutionary political imagination. Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy, written in the opening decades of the 14th century) is already a heavily and explicitly political text, in which the poet at times exhibits a positively Trumpian relish in imagining the defeat and torment of his enemies. But its long-term reception is about a great deal more than politics.
Joseph Luzzi has already written, movingly and insightfully, about his own journeyings with Dante during a time of profound personal grief. In this lively and engaging book, he explains how the Commedia (along with some of Dante’s other core writings) in turn attracted ecclesiastical suspicion and became something like a touchstone of ecclesiastical orthodoxy; how it laid the foundations of Italian literature by more or less inventing an “Italian” language – probing, stretching, renovating the Tuscan dialect to make it a credible vehicle for the most ambitious ideas and images; how it attained the status of a definitive portrait of the Romantic sensibility, only to be claimed by 20th-century modernists – Joyce, Pound and Eliot – in a successful counter-coup.
It is a dramatic story, appropriate to Dante’s own dramatic life. Deeply involved in public life in 13th- and 14th-century Florence, his strong resistance to the extension of papal influence in the politics of the city made him some powerful enemies. He ended up exiled from his native city and separated from his family; the Commedia is haunted by the themes of betrayal and homelessness and a passionate longing for the embrace of community, for true peace, internal and external.
But the poem, leading us in turn through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, is not itself an account of some single individual’s struggles and sufferings. It is a huge irony that Romantic (including some Victorian) readers treated it as a kind of hymn to the unconquerable human spirit: Luzzi quotes Macaulay rhapsodising about Dante as if he were some kind of Byronic action hero, and shows how Byron himself saw Dante as a paradigm for the “poet of action” – eliding Dante’s vigorous political career with the persona of the poet in the Commedia. One of the favourite passages for readers of this stamp was the speech Dante puts into the mouth of Ulysses in the Inferno – a rousing call to self-transcending exploration fitting for the splendour and dignity of the human soul: “You were not made to live your lives as brutes,” says Ulysses to his comrades.
Unfortunately, it is quite clear that this wonderful speech is there to illustrate just why (from Dante’s point of view) Ulysses is in Hell. His passion for endless adventure at all costs results in betrayals of his duties and the death of his friends. Luzzi has a fascinating discussion of the creative misunderstanding that Dante somehow endorses Ulysses’ pride and folly, showing how it pervades Madame de Staël’s great Romantic novel Corinne and is reflected, rather more startlingly, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – though, as Luzzi rightly notes, Shelley has grasped “the formidable ironies of Ulysses’ speech” as Dante frames it, the rhetorical elevation that conceals a raging Faustian pride, indifferent to the suffering of others. And yet, as a later chapter shows us, there is a further depth of irony to be plumbed. Primo Levi describes how, in Auschwitz, recalling the same speech of Ulysses, he experienced “a flash of disassociation, taking brief flight from his living hell”, a reminder of human dignity and solidarity. Paradoxically, Ulysses’ empty but stirring words, illustrating just why he is condemned to Hell for his arrogance, serve for a moment to release someone else from a hell of humiliation and isolation.
Luzzi has some helpful things to say about how, especially in 19th-century England and America, the understandable link between Dante and Milton as Christian epic poets led to a certain blurring of perceptions. Nothing, as Luzzi says, could be more different from Dante’s silent frozen Lucifer, eternally masticating the bodies of sinners with tears of ice on his cheeks, than Milton’s furious, manically talkative, feverishly resentful Satan. But somehow the Romantic fascination with Milton’s picture of a lost but defiantly rebellious spirit coloured the way Dante was interpreted. Luzzi discusses the way in which both poets treat free will as central to God’s gift of dignity to human beings, and suggests that Milton is drawing on Dante in this respect. But I am less convinced: there is nothing in Milton on this subject that is not part of a common heritage of Christian reflection. What is more, where Milton appeals to human freedom most eloquently in attempting to explain the fall of Adam and Eve, Dante is far less interested in arguments from or about free will, and more concerned with the paradox that the free surrender of our desires to God creates a deeper freedom in us, because we are then released to be ourselves as we should be, in harmony with God and the world.
Milton, says Luzzi, “drew on the literary energies of the Commedia” in his ideal of the artist as well as in his theological evaluation of freedom. Possibly; but the most direct bit of Dantean influence in Milton’s work is not in Paradise Lost but in the much earlier Lycidas, where St Peter’s eloquent polemic against faithless and incompetent Church leaders is, in effect, Dantean pastiche, echoing the way Dante puts his critiques of contemporary political and ecclesiastical life into the mouths of various figures – including St Peter – encountered in the landscapes of the afterlife.
By the time Milton was writing his great epic, any conscious influence from Dante had receded far behind the models of classical epic shaping his ambitions. If Dante has the great Roman poet Virgil alongside as guide and mentor in his wanderings through Hell and Purgatory, Milton speaks directly and authoritatively as a Christian Virgil, tutored only by the “muse” of the Holy Spirit’s immediate inspiration.
This means that Milton can offer without embarrassment something that Dante could never have written – dramatic conversations in Heaven between the persons of the Trinity. The final sections of Dante’s Paradiso display the impossible struggle of human language to respond adequately to this ultimate mystery. It is visualised by the “circle-squaring” image of a human form (Jesus) interwoven with the three circling paths of eternal light that display the divine nature. And what this raw paradox is meant to do is stir in us a renewed and purified desire that radically alters what is possible for human action, as we learn to yield to the rhythms of unlimited love moving through all things. This is the ultimate freedom, for Dante, when the will is completely in tune with the truth and the beauty of God. It is a very different theological world from Milton’s, one in which silence and delight are at the heart of everything. There are indeed passages of dense theological exposition in the Commedia, but the work is not dominated by the need to “justify the ways of God”.
What exactly did Dante think he was doing in the Commedia? It’s certainly not a “personal” memoir of any conventional kind; but, as several scholars have argued, it is a sort of autobiography – or perhaps autofiction. To grasp a bit of what this means, it is essential to avoid what Luzzi says is a common failing among Dante’s readers – focusing on the first section, the account of Hell and its torments. Dante is trying to make sense of his disrupted and damaged life; and so he imagines himself, at the notional half-way point of a human existence (35), taking stock of all that has happened to him and of all the deep hinterland of his political and religious world. His enemies and rivals are in Hell partly so that Dante can be clear that his resistance to them is not purely personal; it is something to do with their deep antipathy to the truth. Everyone in Hell is there because they do not recognise their debt to the truth, they have preferred their own fictions; and they live, miserably, with the effects of that absurd choice.
But he is not content to leave it there; the Inferno alone would be a gruesome revenge fantasy. The poet is learning as he travels, thanks first to Virgil, then to the radiant figure of Beatrice, the young girl Dante knew in childhood who remained for him an image of clarity and integrity, and who meets him in Purgatory to conduct him to Heaven. Purgatorio is full of souls repenting their sins but also animated by the promise of an ultimate homecoming. And Paradise is that home, where, in a dazzling variety of modes and contexts, human selves find they are released into absolute joy, both spiritual and sensuous.
The poet is learning: learning about repentance and the candour needed for it, learning from the diverse strands of wisdom represented by the souls at peace in Heaven, ranging from the great theologians and saints to the utterly unexpected figure of Cunizza da Romano, a rackety aristocratic lady whose sheer joyful generosity of spirit has triumphed over the legacy of a rather spectacular career of intrigue and affairs. Dante is working to see himself against the backdrop of all this, to understand more fully his own failures and his own gifts in relation to what he thinks of as lives of conspicuous spiritual shipwreck, lives of “convalescent” hopefulness, and lives of “transhuman” delight and fulfilment. And Dante does indeed coin the word trasumanar to express a self-transcendence utterly unlike the transhumanism or post-humanism of contemporary semi-scientific myth that is an irradiation and deepening of human nature, not its cancellation.
Luzzi is a generally highly reliable guide, writing with ample quotation and lucid interpretation. Now and then, there is a dropped catch. It is strange that in discussing Dante’s choice of Virgil as a guide, he ignores the role of Virgil in earlier Christian scholarly writing as an honorary “prophet” (Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue was widely read as anticipating the coming of Christ). Luzzi exaggerates and simplifies the suspicion of the medieval Church towards classical authorities in general – but in any case, of them all, it is Virgil who is by far the least problematic. Luzzi also misleads a little when describing the difficult and much-discussed conversation on the borders of Purgatory between Virgil and Cato, who acts as a gatekeeper between Hell and Purgatory. Cato is not (as Luzzi appears to assume) a Christian convert; he is not on the purgatorial path to full redemption. But he is an exemplar of pagan integrity and courage, who merits his place only just outside the realms of grace, and has thus in some way earned the right to be, as he is, rather abrupt with Virgil.
Again, the account in Luzzi’s second chapter of the criticisms of Dante advanced by late medieval theologians is full of valuable detail; but it seems to imply that Dante’s political opposition to the Pope’s secular power was straightforwardly unacceptable in the Church of the day (incidentally, Luzzi refers to “the Vatican” as the seat of ecclesiastical power; but the Vatican Hill only became the main papal residence well after Dante’s time). Dante’s view of the papacy is a high one, and his attacks on the popes of his day depend on precisely this. The separation of papal power from actual executive sovereignty was a vigorously argued issue of the 13th and 14th centuries, with reputable theologians on both sides of the question. Luzzi’s final chapter on the enthusiasm of modern popes for Dante suggests that any broken fences have been pretty definitively mended – even that Dante’s party has actually won the argument in the long run.
This is an attractive, fresh and accessible essay. For more on Dante’s presence in 20th-century English letters – not least in the work of Dorothy L Sayers and Charles Williams – we need to look elsewhere (the last chapter of AN Wilson’s 2011 book on Dante in Love is a good place to start). But the depth and diversity of cultural reactions treated here, including film and fiction as well as more conventional studies, make it a welcome introduction to the vast literature inspired by a masterpiece that evokes like no other the overwhelming creativity of an eternal peace that shapes faith and compels longing.
Rowan Williams is a former archbishop of Canterbury and a lead reviewer for the New Statesman. His “Collected Poems” is published by Carcanet Press
Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography
Joseph Luzzi
Princeton University Press, 232pp, £20
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out