Dante died 700 years ago. A N Wilson salutes a master of love, poetry – and Christianity
The God behind the Divine Comedy
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n the mud and cold of Auschwitz, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was approached by an Alsatian Jew, who had never read Dante. Could Levi please explain why people spoke of this medieval poet in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, as one of the greatest European spirits? Levi recited to him the 26th Canto of the Divine Comedy. It is the passage that describes the encounter with Ulysses. Dante and his guide through hell and purgatory, Virgil, have entered the infernal realms, and climbed down from circle to circle of hell, meeting now the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, now his old tutor everlastingly running on hot sands for the sin of sodomy, here forgers of currency, there corrupt clerics, here men Dante had known, there suicides, there drunkards, there the great villains of history, such as those pagan priests who egged on Agamemnon to perform the ritual killing of his daughter Iphigenia, to get a wind in the sails of the Greek fleet, bound for Troy; or the high priests who condemned Christ to death. But in the 26th book, we encounter Ulysses. This is not the Odysseus of Homer. It is an intellectually and spiritually restless old man, probably best known to English readers as the Ulysses of Tennyson who was inspired by this passage in Dante to write his great poem. Bored by life after his return to Ithaca, Dante’s Ulysses has set off with some of his old piratical shipmates to find the
22 The Oldie September 2021
limits of the known world. They have sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and thereby sailed off the edge of the world. The lines that so appealed to Primo Levi are Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti: Ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza (Consider your roots. You were made not to live like mindless animals but to follow virtue and intelligent knowledge) The setting in which Levi recited these lines makes many people choose this as an illustration of why Dante is one of the immortals. In a camp where humanity was reduced to sub-animal levels, where the Nazi horror was so great that even Dante in his most grotesque and furious modes could not have imagined it, Levi remembered this inspiring speech. Dante – who died in Ravenna 700 years ago on September 14, 1321, aged around 56 – stretches us. Just as Paolo and Francesca, thrown about by the storms and winds of passion, make us weep at the wrenching sadness of love, so Ulysses, by his proud preparedness to go beyond the limits of the world, stretches our imagination, and our aspirations. Even in hell, in other words, Dante’s poem bids us raise our eyes to the ways in which the human experience can be elevated; ennobled. Exciting as the Inferno is, with its powerful descriptions of the monsters of antique legend, such as the Harpies and the Minotaur, and its satisfying depictions of corrupt clerics undergoing appallingly
obscene humiliations, it is really in the next two books of the poem, Purgatory and Paradise, that Dante’s greatness is revealed. Although he was hugely admired by poets of the Middle Ages such as Boccaccio and Chaucer, his reputation went to sleep for centuries after his death in 1321, and it was really in the 19th century that he came into his own. We begin to see him reviving in the Romantic Age, with William Blake’s and Gustave Doré’s incomparable illustrations. Nineteenth-century humanity, with its tragic sense of the depths to which human wickedness could
