DANTE

What would it look like, this place that we should fear like no other? Dante Alighieri knew this very well. He created it himself, as a literary wonder of the world.

By Peter Kümmel
From ZEIT No. 50/2023

The Divina Comedy is one of those books that you open and lose yourself in. I move in it as if in an immense city, heading for favorite places and dark corners and forgetting the paths that led me there. Just as I will never “know” Paris, London or New York, I could say: I have read the Commedia. But I always get lost in it with awe and horror.

The protagonist of the comedy is also lost. He precedes us readers as a wanderer. On Good Friday in the year 1300, he stands at the gate to the afterlife without knowing how he got there. He can’t go back, three monsters cut him off. The only option left is to escape downwards: Dante descends into hell to its deepest point, past the damned who will spend eternity there atoning for their sins. When he reaches the bottom, he climbs back up past Lucifer. He ends up in purgatory, where the less hopeless cases work to erase their guilt. And finally he reaches paradise, where the woman he has loved all his life without ever touching awaits him: Blessed Beatrice. In the end he is let back to earth to tell the mortals about his journey – while Beatrice remains with God in the “Heavenly Rose”, the place of the blessed. This is, in careless brevity, the “plot” of the comedy. One could put it even more succinctly: A man is looking for his dead lover in the afterlife.

Who is the man? His name is Dante, and that is also the name of the author of the Comedy. So are we dealing with an autobiography? Not that, but Dante Alighieri (1265 to 1321) included a lot of his own life in his epic poem, which also has the characteristics of a drama – it is already an early piece of metaliterature. So you have to differentiate between Dante, the author of the comedy, and Dante, the wanderer from beyond, the narrative protagonist. The whole poem is a wonderful literary puzzle, a hidden gem of unforgettable performances, it vividly discusses and stages the knowledge, philosophy and religious principles of the 14th century, yes, this afterlife is full of people who really existed, one could easily confuse it with the world of thought of the poet Dante. And it is full of disturbing details and unanswered questions.
Dante research, for example, has been arguing for centuries about whether the Beatrice of the Comedy corresponds to the Beatrice Portinari that the real Dante once saw as a nine-year-old (she was eight) in his hometown of Florence and to whom he fell in love from then on without ever coming into any significant contact with her. As I understand it, a majority of researchers are in favor of equating the Beatrice of the Comedy with the real Beatrice, who died early and was idolized by Dante even after her death. Which would mean that the Comedy would be a work of transfiguration: the fulfillment of love using the means of literary fantasy. Did Dante himself have to go through hell to get over the loss of Beatrice?

The suspicion arises that this poetic afterlife serves to bring its author together with Beatrice, at least here, and to allow posterity to share in the (purely spiritual) intimacy between the two.
It is Beatrice who safely navigates the erring Dante through hell: the man whose love she still feels and whom – the author suggests – she also loves. From her place in paradise, close to God, she saw the plight he was in. So she sends a pilot to Dante to guide him. She sends him someone who will never achieve salvation because he is not baptized, but who will also be spared the punishments of hell because he is not a sinner – Virgil, the great Roman poet who lived 1,300 years before Dante and is ardently revered by him. And so they go together – down into a multi-level theater of horror drilled into the ground, narrowing in depth.

Why does hell have this shape? Dante explains it in the Commedia: When he turned away from God, Lucifer literally fell out of heaven and in his fall tore a funnel into the earth’s core, at the deepest point of which he himself is stuck – the inferno. The deeper you go, the more severe the punishments become. What is fascinating is the care with which Dante (the poet) placed countless contemporaries, popes, criminals, intellectuals, politicians as well as figures from mythology and history, as well as entire northern Italian citizens, in this hell. The reader feels a perverse sense of security when he walks through the circles of hell in the wake of Dante (the wanderer). Nothing worse can happen to those stuck here.

There is a sophisticated seating, lying and living arrangement. Every cubic centimeter is used carefully. Who was the builder? God or is it Lucifer, who, at the bottom of the ice of hell, feeds his hatred with the ever-renewing human food that he grinds back and forth in his three mouths? No, it’s Dante! Dante created this hell and filled it himself. He decided which sinner would be tortured on which rack, in which broth, in which demon teeth. Apparently a certain Minos is responsible for hurling the arriving damned to their final place, but in reality Dante is the usher. Each punishment of the Inferno is tailor-made for the sinner to whom it belongs. A fantastic, dark counter-creation howls to itself here, described with obsessive attention to detail. Anyone who thinks of Kafka’s penal colony is not entirely wrong, and associations with the concentration camps of Nazi Germany also come to mind, although this is not about extermination, but about the eternal preservation of the inmates; They remain intact, so to speak – and if one does get burned, its ashes immediately reassemble into a torturous whole.

From today’s perspective, it seems as if a sadist translated the sins of the damned into endless torments in hell and magnified them in order to live out his lust. Meanwhile, Dante, the wanderer, goes down into the pit of hell like an empathetic front-line reporter; he cries, faints, feels sorry for him. At certain places he pauses and lets the sinner explain to him the reason for his damnation. The poor provide information from the flames, storms, bubbling cauldrons, blocks of ice, and dragon mouths in which they sit. Nobody lies, nobody denies. They report how and why they died. It is a world of knowledge that comes too late. These encounters never last long, because Dante has to move on; the instinctive curiosity to fully savor this universal path of souls, ghosts and shadows keeps him on his feet. We readers follow him in the wake of a certain rhyme scheme, the terzines. Aba bcb cdc ded – and so on we quickly move through many thousands of verses. Two rhyming words enclose a third, which subsequently creates two new rhyming words. In the security of this formal principle, one dares to descend into the terrible, so to speak in the firm hand of the brilliant poet. However, the literary form is the only support there is here. Because we are on the backstage of the world. The players are stripped of make-up and exposed, even stripped of their flesh: shadow and flame existences. You see their pure essence. Gone are the intrigues they prepared in front of the audience. It’s too late for anything here. Just not for retaliation.

The scene with Count Ugolino, who is frozen in an ice hole with his enemy, the former Archbishop of Pisa, in the ninth circle of hell is unforgettable. Ugolino sinks his teeth into the skull and neck of the enemy – not just now, but again and again and for all time. When Dante asks him where this terrible hatred comes from, Ugolino wipes his mouth (with the hair of the angry man!) and explains his motives. And see: you understand them. The archbishop had let Ugolino and his four sons die of starvation, and it is possible – Dante leaves it in suspense – that Ugolino ate his own children in his hunger madness. Now, in the inferno, he eats away forever at the one who starved him to death. There is no escape; one does not escape from the enemy or from the one against whom one has sinned; In the intimacy of excessive retaliation, they crouch on top of each other, one ingests the other, hacks open his skull and eats his brain matter, without the other’s substance disappearing – the skull and brain apparently grow back. And apparently the bodies of the traitors (Brutus, Longinus, Judas), who are constantly being crushed by Lucifer’s three mouths, are also being renewed; Lucifer’s teeth run aground here. Dante, the author, locks up all the people who he believes deserve to survive in the great poem, so that Dante, the wanderer, can talk to them, learn from them, and secretly triumph over them – as the one who escapes their hell. The comedy contains more than 600 characters; They are protected in the only system of order that can contain so many people from different eras and countries, dead and imagined – in the poet’s head. In an afterworld that is like a vast, multi-dimensional spider’s web full of floundering victims.

What other than the joy of creating a hell can drive such a work? What other than the desire to be a flame yourself? Well, the comedy does not only consist of hell, the place of complete hopelessness, but also of purgatory and paradise. In Purgatory there is hope, and in Paradise you no longer need it. In all of these places you can look back on your past life. In the Comedy, one could say, humanity discusses its options for escaping its own carnality: as the damned, as the hopeful, or as the blessed. But while I believe every word and every detail of the Inferno author, Paradiso leaves me rather cold. Here, among the blessed, Dante meets his great-great-great-grandfather, so our author obviously comes from a good family – which he makes quite self-aggrandizing. How he leaves no doubt at all that paradise is the only possible destination for him.

In the very last canto (song) of the Commedia, Saint Bernard even prays for Dante, asking Mary to free him from the “fog of mortality”. So Dante makes a plea for his immortality in his own literary creation. And you have to say: in the end he fulfilled the request himself, through his work. But how can someone ascend to heaven happily when they know that beneath them, in hell, billions of unfortunate people will suffer immense torment for all time? How can he endure such chosenness?

The ruthlessness of those who believe they are on the right side, with the right God, the relentlessness and arrogance of Dante – even towards those who had no chance of reaching paradise because they were born too early – all of this makes the Divine Comedy, this literary wonder of the world, an eerie, fundamentalist work.
As a reader today, you have the bizarre impulse to liberate Dante’s hell and all its inmates and bring its torturers to justice. Or to storm up into paradise and spit the cold bliss up there into its high lights.

But seriously, who actually built hell? In Dante’s poem it seems like a collective effort, formed according to God’s plan, deformed by the devil’s hatred and lined with blood and the excrement of sinners. But above the gate to hell there are still the terrible words “You who enter: Abandon all hope!” something else: “Nothing created was found before me,” which in the words of the philosopher, historian and Dante translator Kurt Flasch means this: “Nothing earthly was created before her, she will exist forever.” Doesn’t it follow that hell must have once been empty? It did not develop parallel to humanity’s sin, it was already there beforehand, operational and ready for use. And it had been planned in such a way that it could hold more damned people than there were alive on earth in Dante’s time. In other words: Hell is the work of a Creator who expects the worst, a God who distrusts his own creation.

Dante escapes hell. The love of a woman leads him to the throne of God. At the top, “in the third circle of the highest rank”, Dante sees her one last time: Beatrice, who determined his life, the unattainable one towards whom he lived and yet missed, sits further than ever in a wreath of light. But he now has to return to this world to tell the mortals about his journey. Of course he is sure that when he enters the afterlife forever, his place will be in paradise. This is – like the entire Divine Comedy – a huge presumption. Wouldn’t it be more likely that Minos would assign the author of this work a place in the Inferno?
Anyone who reads the Commedia inevitably thinks about where, in what circle of hell, their place would be. Since I have committed sins of various kinds, I have to ask myself which was the most serious and how far down Minos would throw me. And I wonder how full hell must be right now, at this moment. It is estimated that the eight billion people alive today are compared to around 100 billion people who lived before us. So hell would have to be a mega-cosmopolitan city: Mumbai plus Mexico City, São Paulo, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Cairo, Lagos, Istanbul, New York – all grown together and to the power of ten.

Let us be glad that it does not exist, but has found its flowering, terrible perfection in Dante’s head. Hopefully. Hopefully just there.