To Hell and Back

 To Hell and Back

Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong books much of my life.  I’m not impugning a particular book or series but the type of books I gravitate toward.  Early on, age appropriate standards of the day were read to me.  I especially recall one in the 50s that stood out about a giant living in a castle made of odorous Limburger cheese, eating pickles, and drinking vinegar.  While its title eludes me, to this day, I have a lasting affinity for the strongest of cheeses.  The hard drive in my brain also vividly recalls a tale involving another unfriendly giant in Jack and the Beanstalk.  Surprisingly, I have no fear of giants, even the cyclopes variant, lurking in the dark recesses of my closet, but then I am a bit of a giant myself, haven’t any cows to trade for beans, or skills adequate to grow anything beyond San Marzano tomatoes.  Thankfully, about the time that dinosaurs became all the rage, I’d outgrown my thick-paged picture books only to be seduced by another type of illustrated adventure saga, the comic book.

My infatuation with comics began with the stack of comic books in a familiar barbershop along my hometown’s main street, where the memory of everything in my burgeoning world began.  It was

Blackhawk Comics

usually on a Saturday after I paid for the weeks’ worth of newspapers I’d delivered that I treated myself to a strawberry sundae at Nick’s Soda Shoppe alongside the local theater.  Farther along my way home, per Mom’s emphatic prompting, I’d detour into our neighborhood barbershop.  A reservation wasn’t needed, just enough time to wait your turn.  I didn’t mind. Waiting would insure there’d be plenty of time to devour the latest Blackhawk Comics edition that hopefully had arrived since I last visited.  The newest issue of this seven man team of WWII era ace pilots who fight tyranny and oppression was easy to spot among the pile of dog-eared publications splayed across the table in the cramped seating area.  I enjoyed reading the squadron’s fictional exploits once I understood how to maneuver through the sequence of word bubbles accompanying each picture panel.  Being a slow reader, I often passed my turn to the next waiting customer, leaving myself enough time to finish each issue.  This also assured I had time to check out the comic’s back pages.  Long before Amazon, this was where I’d find the most interesting mail-order items like live pet sea horses and eyeglasses which guaranteed you could see through clothing! 

By my teenage years, I'd moved on.  Comics had lost their attraction.  They'd been eclipsed by novels, soon followed by their audio narrations.  Whatever their genre, novels had the power to put me inside the scene, if not into the thoughts of a character that up to then had been limited to glimpses of action, one comic book panel at a time.  In later years, I’d read Dan Brown, Clive Cussler, and Vince Flynn in search of my heroes.  But I sensed I needed to expand my literary horizons.  This was the period when I put adventures aside for the moment and filled the void with murder mysteries.

A bestselling crime novel, The Word Is Murder, by British author Anthony Horowitz, is representative of this eye-opening genre.  I was quickly pulled into the action of this evolving who-done-it mystery as I had those formative Saturday mornings long ago.  It was easy to warm to Horowitz’s characters, flawed though many of his players would prove to be.  His chief inspector, a loner with multiple phobias, partners with the novel’s real-life author, Horowitz.  To complicate matters just a bit more, Horowitz, the book’s protagonist, plays the appropriate part of an author, who, as a murder is investigated, shadows the flawed detective.  If all went per their arrangement, the detective would solve the crime and Horowitz would have the makings for a profitable novel.  If you can follow that, great, but it took me a few replays of the audiobook.  The narrator’s British accent proved especially enjoyable when words like ‘client’ became ‘klee-ent’ as heavy emphasis pounced on a word’s first vowel.  A sprinkling of witty humor, many as asides to the reader, only added to its charming allure.  This highly recommended who-done-it was an eye-opener for me.  Better than reading it myself, the audiobook made the story come alive.  Hearing the voices of the various characters, their tonal inflections ranging from normal to expressions of passion or fear, was reminiscent of my earliest childhood memories, while nestled in my mother’s lap, listening as she dramatized the voice of each character.

This writing style, where the protagonist interacts with his reader, and in the case of the Horowitz novel where it also imparts insight into how to write a novel along the way, was like no story I’d ever encountered before.  Like trading ten baseball cards for a Micky Mantle in the schoolyard, I understood what I’d found.  By my teenage years, comics had lost their attraction.  They had been eclipsed by novels followed by audio narrations.  Whatever their genre, they had the power to put me inside the scene if not the thoughts of a character that up to then had been limited to glimpses into the action, one panel at a time.

But there was a higher, more elusive form of written expression called literature I was yet unfamiliar with.  This is a body of distinguished works, that by the excellence of their execution, are perceived to have lasting artistic merit.  Beginning in 1901, some of these works of poetry and prose have buttressed the award of a Nobel Prize to their authors.2 John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea), and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury) come to mind.  Adding to this list, four Italians, relatively unknown outside their native Italy, have received Nobel Prizes in Literature over the last one hundred years.  They include poet Giosuè Carducci (1906), novelist Grazia Deledda (1926), playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello (1934), and playwright and satirist Dario Fo (1997).  

But there was one standout Italian writer who

Dante Gazing at Purgatory

lived well before awards for literary achievement were in vogue, before Barnes and Noble bookstores, and well before the NY Times would weekly bring the best sellers to our attention.  He was actually a poet, whose marks on paper became the poetic equivalent of those on the surfaces of the Sistine Chapel and in epics like Beowulf and the Iliad.  In 1265, he was born in Florence to a middle-class family.  His name was Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, better known to us simply as Dante, meaning ‘enduring’, which he certainly remains.

Although he claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans, little is known of his early life beyond his development from an only child of a middle-class family of a notary into a poet, writer, philosopher, soldier, ambassador, and politician.³  He is known to have studied Tuscan poetry, likely at home or in a church-related school.  He would marry Gemma Donati and father at least three children.  

In 1295, a law decreed required nobles who aspired to public office to enroll in one of the guilds.  To further his political ambition, he obtained admission to the Physicians' and Apothecaries' Guild.  Although he did not intend to practice pharmacy, it was a close fit since books were sold from apothecary shops.  As a politician, he held various offices and became embroiled in the Guelph–Ghibelline political factions and ensuing military conflicts.  The Ghibellines backed The Holy Roman Emperor while the Guelphs faction, opposed to imperial influence, supported the Pope.  Dante and his family were loyal to the Guelphs.³ 

Following years of political strife that led to the defeat of the Ghibellines, the Guelphs split into two factions: Blacks Guelphs in support of the Pope while the Whites sought more freedom from

Dante, Father of the Italian Language

Rome.  In 1302, the Black Guelphs took power in Florence and accused Dante of corruption for the two months in 1300 when he’d served as city mayor.³  Under Black Guelph rule, Florence branded Dante a fugitive and confiscated his possessions.  He was condemned to exile for two years and ordered to pay a fine of five thousand florins.  With his assets seized, he could not pay the fine.  This resulted in his permanent exile, which lasted 20 years.  During this time he lived under a death sentence for had he returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could have been burned at the stake.  Later, in 1315, following Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts dictum in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s “off with their heads,” he faced public decapitation.  Dante shied from either of these predicaments, choosing instead to preserve life and limb by making Ravenna his home base.  From there he wondered throughout Italy seeking patrons who valued his talents.  His days as a politician at an end, he devoted himself to writing prose and La Commedia, later called The Divine Comedy.  He would never see his wife again.  His Divine Comedy, estimated to have taken 11 years to compose, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.³

Although titled a comedy, there is nothing funny about it, even by today’s dark comedy standards.  Here, reference to comedy follows the classic story arc we see to this day in many sitcoms (Frasier comes to mind) where some sort of misunderstanding or confusion is the driving element until it is resolved by the end with everyone in high spirits (no pun intended).  In La Commedia, Dante’s movement from Purgatory to Paradise follows this pattern as sin is mollified, the Divine is pleased, and all is again right with the world.

Written in an Italian vernacular, not scholarly Latin readable only by the learned, it was clearly intended for the common people.  The Italian he used was his own, the Italian dialect of Florence, one of the fourteen competing versions of Italian then in use on the peninsula.  La Commedia became so widely read and prestigious that it formed the basis for modern-day Italian language, making Dante the “Father of the Italian Language.”

I am not a fan of poems.  The few I do enjoy, the likes of Kilmer (Trees) and Frost (The Road Not Taken), are by an equally few in number list of poets.  For much of my life, I kept La Commedia at arm’s length.  I still don’t fully understand it but have developed a smidgen of appreciation for its attempt to describe the state of souls after death in an imaginatively complex otherworld.  Like a Venn diagram might depict the intersection of Heaven and Hell as Purgatory, Dante, with his spheres, circles, and ascending and descending levels, took mankind on an imaginative journey into a contemplative world where life intersected death, for Dante “without having died traverses the kingdom of the dead,” (The Inferno, Canto 8), was yet mortal.  The poem became a nagging exception to my tentativeness about poetry.  Do I like it?  Possibly, but the jury is still not unanimous.  Clearly written by a genius, it is not a creation of stone but one of words.  As a vast literary construction, it is filled with illusions, hidden meaning, mystery, and a surprising amount of pagan and mythological references from such a devout Christian author.

Its structure was revolutionary, for in it, Dante introduced the terza rima, an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme never before seen.  Amazingly, every three lines see their first and third lines rhyme.  From there, the rhyme of the middle line becomes the rhyme for the first and third lines of the next three-line stanza, known as a terzine.  In total, this remarkable and complex inter-rhyming goes on for 14,233 lines. 

To create what would become the cornerstone of Western literature, Dante employs a cast of characters familiar in Dante's time but far from everyday household names familiar to today’s readers.  The cast contains 408 characters, with an additional 426 mentioned by name, along with indirect references to 112 additional persons through the inclusion of their quotes.¹

If I attempted to read it as Dante wrote it, there would be a problem.  First off, it is in a 13th-century version of Italian.  While purists, in order to appreciate its full majesty, will learn 13th-century Italian, I remain mired in the present tense (presente) of that horde of 21 Italian verb tenses of modern Italian.  In addition to understanding the bizarre geography of La Commedia that Dante travels through, medieval Florence of which he was a product, requires its own understanding.  As you would expect, his was an entirely different social order and culture from ours.  It was one where religion dominated everything through papal political manipulation, to the extent that often the Pope himself was a political appointment.  Church and state were one and the same.  Anyone who questioned the pope’s authority over temporal matters risked accusations of treason or heresy.

Dante’s crowning gift to the world, his opus magnum, was and remains The Divine Comedy.  Throughout its terzine superstructure, each line consists of eleven syllables distributed among 100 cantos, a word for the grouped divisions of a long poem derived from the Italian word for song.  These cantos are divided into the three major songs or sections that describe Dante’s journey as follows:

Inferno (Hell)

Dante described Hell, that xanadu of suffering, as a gigantic funnel that moves downward through nine levels to the very center of the Earth.  The least offensive sinners occupy the upper circles of Hell, while those with more

The Boatman Charon Begin the Descent into L’Inferno (Hell)

grievous sins inhabit greater depths and suffer greater torment.  Along the way, as in other regions of his journey, he encounters and converses with known and legendary figures of his time.  Noteworthy, we learn that all torment is not by fire.  Traitors, for instance, are frozen in ice to their necks, while gluttonous shades suffer endless cold and dirty rain. 

Purgatorio (Purgatory)                                    

Terraced Purgatory Island

Purgatory Island is where penitent sinners cleanse themselves of sin before ascending to Heaven.  Beginning with the excommunicated and spiritually lazy, Dante spirals upward through seven terraces, each associated with the seven deadly sins.  Dante defined them as Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice and Lavishness, Gluttony, and Lust.  Reaching the summit, he entered the Forest of Eden leading to Heaven.

Paradiso (Heaven)

Dante describes Paradise as a place of light and contentment, a land of luxury and fulfillment containing everlasting bliss.⁶  It is the heavenly abode of God, the angels, and the ‘virtuous dead’ presented as a series of nine concentric spheres surrounding the Earth.  Souls in Paradise are perceived to inhabit these different spheres according to

Purgatory Connects to the Spheres  
of Heaven Surrounding the Earth 
With Hell Deep Inside

their rank.  Empyrean, the Mind of God (tenth sphere), is the highest part of heaven.

It is challenging to understand the nuances of The Divine Comedy.  I doubt there will ever be a perfect way to tackle the text.  To get through the poem absent a deep understanding of Dante's world, I needed all the help I could get, as Dante did.  For him, as for me, it was a strange netherworld.  On his journey, Dante used guides.  His first would be the Roman poet-theologian Virgil of Aeneid fame, who appears at Hell’s Gate and saves Dante from three beasts.  Although a pagan from centuries past, in Dante’s day Virgil was believed to have been a proto-Christian because of his prophecy of Christ’s coming and thus was seen as a bridge from pagan to Christian.  Virgil assists Dante on his journey to the farthest depths of Hell, speaks on his behalf at times, and ascends with him to the garden summit of Purgatory.  There, drawing closer to God, Dante says goodbye to Virgil and meets his next guide, veiled Beatrice.  Beatrice was Dante’s lifelong muse and plutonic love, and serves as a symbol of faith as they depart Purgatorio and enter the celestial spheres of Paradiso (Moon, Planets, Sun, etc).  Only later, without fanfare, does she depart, replaced by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who in life was renowned for his devotion to the Virgin Mary, who then serves as a go-between to Christ.⁵  In Paradise, Saint Bernard mediates with the Virgin Mary on Dante’s behalf to allow Dante a “glimpse of the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ.” ¹  Even in Heaven,  human nature comes into play when you want something from someone else, even a deity:  Want God to do something for you?—Just ask his mother to intercede for you.

For my Cliff Notes ‘guiding’ equivalent, I relied on The Divine Comedy by Joseph Gallagher, whose canto after canto summaries served like Virgil and the others as my modern-day chaperon through the purifying souls of Purgatory, the torturous levels of Hell, until rising to the blissful epiphany of Paradise.

While it is unclear where Dante’s soul is today, we are certain concerning the whereabouts of his mortal remains.  Inside Florence’s Santa Croce Church, dubbed ‘Temple of Italian Glories,’ visitors will

The Dante Cenotaph, Santa Croce 
Church, Florence

find a crypt heralding Dante.  It properly lies among other eminent Florentines such as Michelangelo and Galileo.  By all appearances, though somewhat smaller than the tombs of other luminaries, it fits in with the similar sarcophagi that adorn the wall’s perimeter.  Impressively crafted, adorned, and personalized with figures, they ooze testaments of importance.  Few, however, are aware that although Dante is honored there, his remains are absent.  In fact, absent his remains, it is properly called a cenotaph; an honorary monument absent a body.  Because of his political exile, Dante was at arm’s length, a persona non grata, when he died in Ravenna after contracting malaria.  The figure atop this cenotaph announces, “Honor the Most High Poet,” but we do it symbolically from afar since Dante lies in Ravenna where he always has.  The pensive scowl of the figure poised atop his Santa Croce monument, which in fact, may be a caricature of Dante, may hint at this vacancy.  Exile meant exile.  For almost two centuries, a standoff pull and tug ensued, with Ravenna refusing to return his body despite Florence’s attempts to bring the body of its eminent citizen home.  Florence almost succeeded in 1519, but something went wrong.  Pope Leo X, a Florentine himself, concurred with the demands of the Accademia Medicea and authorized the transfer of Dante’s remains to Florence.  With the Pope's backing, everything seemed settled.  How could Ravenna

Dante's Tomb in Ravenna

resist the Pope’s will, especially since Ravenna was part of his Italian holdings?  But when the papal ambassadors arrived and opened the sarcophagus, the tomb was empty.⁴  It was only in 1865 when a box secreted inside the Ravenna church’s wall revealed the truth.  Apparently, local monks moved Dante’s remains into this box when his departure looked certain.  There they remained as conflicts came and went until their surprising discovery.

Reading through The Divine Comedy, can be a transformational eye-opener.  I can only imagine the impact such a revolutionary story had on the Florentine faithful of the time and later as it spread throughout medieval Italy.  Anecdotal reports following its unveiling recount how children, ran after Dante in hopes of touching the cloak of a man who, in their minds, had visited Hell, Heaven, and seen God.¹  In their households, a term we use, ‘Been through hell,’ took on a literal meaning.

Books help the winter months melt away.  Choose as you might among the plethora of subject matter from A to Z or, in the case of The Divine Comedy, from Α-Ω (Alpha to Omega).  Some people spend their entire lives studying The Divine Comedy.  In stark contrast, with but only a smattering of Duolingo Italian levels of accomplishment, I invested a few weeks trying to unravel its content with about as much headway as trying to untie a wet sneaker’s shoelace with gloves on.  I finally took the gloves off and read La Comedia naked in an English translation, having sacrificed its three-line poetic rhythm.  Searching to comprehend this field guide to a world following death, I took a chisel to it in an attempt to find that lodestone of comprehension that had liberated people from misery, expressed the power of love, outlined the intransigence of power, and the justice of salvation and punishment.  At this, I remained essentially a babe on my mother’s lap, equivalent to my youthful self, trying not to interpret the bubble dialog of comics but the melody of a gifted and, who knows, prescient poet. 

From That Rogue Tourist,

Paolo

 

1  A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante's The Divine Comedy, Joseph Gallagher, Triumph Publications, 1999

2  Facts on the Nobel Prize in Literature, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/facts-on-the-nobel-      prize-in-literature/

3  Dante Alighieri, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri

4  The Mystery of Dante Alighieri’s Remains, https://www.travelemiliaromagna.it/en/mystery-dante-alighieri-remains/

5  Clarifying Catholicism,

https://clarifyingcatholicism.org/articles/platonic-guides-virgil-and-beatrice/#:~:text=Beatrice's%20role%20as%20a%20guide,%2C%20to%20Christ%2C%20than%20Beatrice

6  Pardise, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise#:~:text=Paradise%20is%20a%20place%20of%20contentment%2C%20a%20land%20of%20luxury,or%20underworlds%20such%20as%20Hell