52. Dante

Dante is one of those world figures so famous, that we refer to him only by his first name. When Dante decided to write The Divine Comedy, his masterpiece, in the language spoken in Florence rather than in Latin, the literary language of his day, he succeeded in establishing the local dialect of Tuscany as "official" Italian for centuries to come. Born in Florence in 1265, he heralds the dawning of that great rebirth of classical humanism that led to the Renaissance. Because The Divine Comedy was written as an allegory-that is a literary work with meanings beyond the literal-it has occasioned more critical commentary and exegeses than any other book in Western civilization other than the Bible.

The Divine Comedy (Dante called it the Commedia; the adjective "Divine" was added by critics in the sixteenth century) is the story of a pilgrim's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and it is from this monumental work that we get our modern conception of these otherworldly places. The pilgrim is guided by the great Latin poet Virgil, whose Aeneid is Dante's literary model for the poem he is writing. The epic also immortalizes Dante's extraordinary love for Beatrice, a woman he first met as a child. Dante carried Beatrice in his soul for his entire life, although both he and she married others, and she died in 1290, some thirty one years before he did (in 1321). The story of Dante and Beatrice is told more literally in La Vita Nuova, a sonnet sequence that was his first important literary work. In The Divine Comedy, he must traverse the depths of human suffering and depravity and the middle ground of human desire and indecision before encountering her again in the bright light of Paradise, the epitome of human harmony and possibility.

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