Dante teaches us two great truths-that we need
to be saved and that
we cannot individually save ourselves.

The Divine Comedy
as a part of
Catholic education

by Adrian Calderone

n Poets arise from a society and express the deep sentiments which most people feel but haven't the power to put into words. But from any particular society there is usually one poet who is regarded as having defined its culture and given it a voice that sings across centuries. Such poets not only reveal the heart of their culture with consummate artistry, but also touch upon something which is universal and common to all humans.

In the entire history of the West there are but a handful of such luminaries. Shakespeare is one. Homer is another. Add Virgil to the list. Another poet we as Catholics can call our own, for he has embodied the Catholic world view in poetry which is unsurpassed in technical achievement and beauty. I refer to Dante Alighieri and his poem, the Divine Comedy. This work is unique. And as long as original sin remains an operating factor in the lives of human beings, it is universally relevant. Just as we wouldn't think of letting a student go through high school or college without at least some acquaintance with Shakespeare, we should regard the Divine Comedy as a required component of the curriculum of a Catholic college or university.

The purpose of this article is to show what we can learn from Dante, and why, more than ever, the study of the Divine Comedy should be an integral part of Catholic education. In Part I a brief outline of the Divine Comedy is presented, followed by a discussion of the spiritual implications of this work. In Part II several reasons are given for the importance of the Divine Comedy with respect to education.

Part I: Outline of the Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy sets forth a vision and a spiritual journey. Dante wrote it in his later life while in political exile from his native city of Florence. It comprises three canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, with a total of 100 cantos-33 cantos each for Purgatorio and Paradiso, 34 cantos for Inferno.

Dante himself is the main character. At the opening of the story Dante the wayfarer, in the middle of his life, finds himself in a dark wood. He does not know how he became lost in the dark wood. The wood is a tangle of growths, the origin of which is unknown. Dante cannot of his own effort get out. He sees a way up a mountain to escape. But the path is blocked by three beasts: a panther, a lion, and a ravenous wolf. The wolf drives him back down, and Dante loses hope. Then he sees the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil, who approaches and informs Dante that he had been sent by Beatrice to guide Dante. Beatrice is a girl whom Dante the author had loved from afar during her brief life. She, in turn was prompted by the Blessed Virgin and St. Lucia to assist Dante.

Virgil informs Dante that they cannot ascend the mountain, but must travel first through the underworld. Virgil will thereafter guide Dante through purgatory, after which Beatrice herself will guide Dante through heaven.

Virgil, with Dante following, then descends into hell where Dante meets and converses with various souls. Some of the souls are of real people from history. Others are fictional characters from pagan literature and mythology. Hell has a funnel shaped topography which is highly significant. The wayfarer and his guide circle about on one level, then they advance to a lower ring, and so on until they reach the very pit of hell where Satan himself lies frozen. At the upper levels are the carnal sinners. Next lower are the violent sinners. Finally, at the bottom are those whose sins are fraud and malice.

After reaching the bottom, the wayfarer and his guide climb up to the mountain of purgatory on the other side of the world. Purgatory is the inverse of hell. As Dante and Virgil circle around the mountain of purgatory, at each level one of the seven deadly sins is purged. Each punishment is suited to the characteristic of the sin being purged. Thus, at the lowest level, the most serious sin of pride is cured by the souls' being forced to carry heavy stones upon their backs. The souls are bent over so that they can see only the ground whereupon the history of the world is inscribed to illustrate the uselessness of vanity. When a soul is purged of one sin he or she then advances to the next level. At the top of the mountain is the Garden of Eden where Dante, having been purged of his sins, drinks from the river Lethe, which wipes out the memory of his sins.

Virgil quietly departs and Beatrice takes over as Dante's guide. Beatrice leads Dante through the various levels of heaven where he converses with the saintly souls. The arrangement of the heavenly bodies is in the Ptolemaic system. Dante first travels to the moon, then Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each planet has its own characteristic. The moon is the lowest level of heaven and is characterized by inconstancy. Mercury is characterized by ambition. Venus is characterized by earthly love, the Sun by prudence, Mars by fortitude, Jupiter by justice, and Saturn by temperance. Dante then travels to the primum mobile, where the angels are found. Finally, Beatrice resumes her place in heaven and St. Bernard guides Dante the last portion of the journey into the Empyrean itself where Dante catches a glimpse of God, seen as the Blessed Trinity, "the Love which moves the sun and the other stars." Here the vision ends.

Dante teaches us two great truths

Right from the outset Dante teaches us two great truths. The first is that we need to be saved. The second is that we cannot individually save ourselves. These are the foundation for the Divine Comedy. Without understanding these truths everything that follows is meaningless.

The dark wood in which Dante finds himself is symbolic of a state of alienation from God, and from God's creation, including himself. It is a state of sin. Significantly, he does not know how he became lost, only that he was in a state of sleep when he deviated from the true path.

No one can accuse Dante the author of being ignorant about the world. From his earliest years Dante was a man of both learning and action. He was so deeply involved in worldly affairs that he was exiled from his home, Florence, for his political activities. In what sense, then, does he say that he, as wayfarer, lost the true path because he was full of sleep?

The answer is that he was paying too much attention to the world and was distracted from the eternal things. Worldliness puts us asleep with respect to spiritual things. But in the middle of his life he comes to himself, and discovers that he is lost. Why not earlier?

In Dante's case perhaps it was the shock of his exile later in life which led him to his new understanding. More generally, though, one can say that in the middle of our lives the sense of one's mortality provides a wake up call. We ignore this wake up call at our spiritual peril.

Dante the wayfarer heeds the call and tries to climb out of the dark forest. But his efforts are blocked by the three beasts which symbolize sensual pleasure, pride, and avarice. These appear outside of him, but they are also states of his own soul. Virgil, who symbolizes reason, comes to guide him. But intellect comes to one's aid only when prompted by grace, i.e., Beatrice and St. Lucia. And for Dante this grace is at the prompting of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the mediatrix of grace. As one will see, reason by itself does not aid the sinner. Hell is filled with souls for whom sharp intellects have done no good. As Virgil explains to Dante at the gate of hell:

We have come to the place where I have told thee
Thou shalt behold the dolorous people
Who have foregone the good of the intellect.

Another way of looking at this is that we are members of a community. We are collectively part of the Mystical Body of Christ. It is our prayers and efforts in association with the efforts and prayers of the community by which we are saved. Intelligence is a necessary condition for salvation, but not a sufficient condition. With all of his intelligence Dante could not save himself. He needed the intervention of heaven to make his intelligence fruitful. The souls in Inferno do not form a community. Not only do they not communicate with each other, they refuse even to recognize the existence of each other. They are imprisoned within the boundary of their own little egos.

It is necessary for Dante to go through hell, to see what the effects of sin are. This is one way reason helps the soul seeking salvation, for the understanding of causal relationships is a proper function of the intellect. Here begins the journey into one of the most vivid portrayals of hell in Western literature. And here the reader must always keep in mind some basic principles, lest he get the erroneous impression that God is some ferocious being who created hell to torture the wayward.

First, the sinners are not punished by God, they are punished by their sins which, by their very nature, result in suffering. Our souls naturally tend towards the ultimate fulfillment of their desire, which is God. Sin is a frustration of that desire.

Second, sinners are in hell because they want to be there. One will see that the distinction between the souls in heaven and purgatory and those in hell is not that some are sinners and others are not, but that some repented and others did not. All that is needed for the souls in hell to escape is for them to let go of their sins by repentance. For it is the sins which torture them

Alas, a person who dies unrepentant does not wish to change. For it is through the body that change comes to the soul. After the soul is separated from the body there is no new information, no new way of looking at something, no new reasoning, and no new emotion. So there is no new impetus and no reason to prompt the soul to change. The will becomes fixed. A soul in hell does not pray because it doesn't want to. It is in self imposed exile from God. Its will has been perverted and although it recognizes its own alienation from the very thing needed by its nature for its happiness, it persists in hating goodness. It desires its own suffering out of spitefulness to God. Nor do we need to pass the threshold of death to witness some manifestation of hell. Even in life we see people living in hell, people bound to behavior which is self destructive, and which they refuse to give up.

It is necessary to keep this in mind because, in traveling through hell with Dante, one's first inclination is to have sympathy for those in hell. Some of them have truly pathetic stories to tell. But one must be aware that the souls in hell are con artists. They all want Dante to see things from their worldly perspective. And it is sometimes difficult not to be drawn into their world view. We, too, are sinners. We commit the same sins, albeit not in so great a degree as most of the sinners in Inferno. There is always the subconscious tendency to rationalize sin: I can't avoid such sin, I'm not such a bad person, therefore the sin is not so bad. But unless one looks behind the stories of the sinners in Inferno one's sympathy is misplaced. And if you try to rationalize sin while reading the Inferno you will be in for a jolt, because the natural tendency of hell is to draw the soul deeper and deeper.

The hell of Inferno is funnel shaped. This topology teaches us something about the nature of sin. For each sin blinds our conscience a little bit more, making it harder to recognize sin in the future.

To borrow terminology from cybernetics, sin is a positive feedback system. In such a system, deviation from a set norm causes a greater deviation. Positive feedback systems are unstable and either explode or collapse. In the moral realm, sins of incontinence lead to sins of violence, which lead to sins of malice, fraud, betrayal, and hate. Little lies lead to bigger lies. Little thefts lead to felonies. We need only read the daily newspapers to witness the topology of hell.

If this is the nature of sin, the question arises: How do any of us keep from falling into the abyss? Once again one turns for the answer to the Mystical Body of Christ. Through the prayers and works of the community of the faithful and the heavenly spirits we receive the grace of God. And it is this grace ultimately which sustains us and prevents our descent into hell. It helps us to listen to the prompting of our conscience and to pursue a good life. It helps restore the moral vision distorted by sin. Grace even makes possible what nature, by itself, finds impossible.

The gate of hell has these words inscribed:

Justice incited my sublime Creator;
Divine Omnipotence created me,
The highest Wisdom and primal Love.

Dante the wayfarer finds this difficult to understand. We, too, find it difficult to relate hell to justice and primal love. One cannot comprehend this until one has completed the journey through Purgatorio and Paradiso. For only upon seeing things from the perspective of heaven can one begin to understand the images seen in Inferno. Indeed, the best preparation for reading the Divine Comedy is to have read it before.

Of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy, Inferno is certainly the most vivid to our imagination with all of its fearsome imagery.

Purgatorio is the most humane, for here we see souls most near to the human state. They are suffering, but happy. Pains they have, but these pains bear fruit. It is not endless, useless suffering, but expiation which brings the souls step by step closer to God.

Sins are caused by defects in love. Dante divides the seven deadly sins into three groups. The first group is perverted love. In this group we find the most serious sins of pride, envy, and anger, which involve love for things which ought not to be loved. In the next level is sloth, which is inadequate love. And finally the sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust, which are sins of excessive love. Purgatorio rectifies love by teaching souls to love the right things in the proper degree.

We view purgatory somewhat fearfully as a region of painful punishment to be avoided as much as possible through indulgences and the like. There are two aspects of purgatory: one is punishment and the other is purgation. Dante emphasizes purgation, which is achieved in part by suffering, but also by instruction. The souls in Purgatorio have before them examples from the life of Mary, and the saints, and from history. They learn to help each other, and, in contrast to the souls in hell, they form a community. Thus, in Purgatorio we see souls in progress, who still have the capacity to love.

All of the canticles are in some way about love. In Inferno we see love totally rejected. In Purgatorio we see deficiencies of love corrected. In Paradiso we see love fulfilled and perfected by the Source of all love.

In Paradiso Dante the author is faced with a difficult problem. How does one express the ineffable? He does it by blending philosophy and theology, interspersed with passages of sublime poetic beauty. It is the height of aesthetic achievement. Dante begins Paradiso with these verses:

The glory of Him who moveth everything
Doth penetrate the universe and shine
In one part more and in another less.

Within that heaven which most His light receives
Was I, and things beheld which to repeat
Nor knows, nor can, who from above descends;

Because in drawing near to its desire
Our intellect engulfs itself so far,
That after it the memory cannot go.

Truly whatever of the holy realm
I had the power to treasure in my mind
Shall now become the subject of my song.

And what a song he sings! As he is drawn up into heaven with Beatrice he wonders how he can rise up away from the earth. Beatrice, taking pity on his lack of understanding, explains that things naturally seek their true place, and man's place is with God. His hindrances having been removed, the wonder would be if Dante did not fly towards heaven.

Every canto brings a further topic for meditation. In the last canto of Paradiso Dante addresses the Blessed Virgin with words of great poetic beauty:

Thou Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son
Humble and high beyond all other creatures,
The limit fixed of the eternal counsel,
Thou art the one who such nobility
To human nature gave, that its Creator
Did not disdain to make Himself its creature.

One could write a book about the Blessed Virgin and not say more than Dante said in six lines. The Paradiso abounds with such treasure.

What we experience in Paradiso is a little bit of heaven. If we can derive such satisfaction from the beauty expressed in a few short lines, think what it would be like in heaven where the Divine Poet utters but a word and everything, all the beauty of all creation, every electron and exploding star and everything in between, every love poem from young men to their sweethearts, every act of courage and chivalry by soldiers, every act of charity to the destitute, every doctor laboring to cure disease, every mountain and every explorer defying the icy wind to see the world from its peak, every teacher bringing the light of understanding to a student and every student pondering over books to learn what those before him have to teach, every prayer by every saint, every father going to work in the morning, every mother cuddling her child, every child's first step, and every sacrifice done out of love, including the sacrifice of that Poet's only Son on Calvary, everything comes into being with that word.

Part II: Dante and Catholic education

To be sure, the Divine Comedy is more meaningful to a middle aged person than to a teenager. By the time we reach our middle age most of us have taken a trip through the dark forest and know whereof Dante speaks. Nevertheless, a course in Dante's Divine Comedy should be an integral part of Catholic education for young people. If we haven't been given even a superficial exposure to it we are not as likely to return to it later in life when we can not only read it profitably, but experience it as well.

A second reason it should be a part of our education is that it is a wonderful vehicle for transmitting the doctrines of our faith. Dante took a great deal from St. Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, those who find it too difficult to read the Summa Theologica will find in Dante a good substitute. For here in the Divine Comedy we see the teachings of St. Thomas not only expounded upon, but also illustrated with the most powerful imagery.

The third reason is somewhat more secular and argues more generally that the Divine Comedy should be part of all liberal education. Dante was one of the most learned men of his time. Apart from its religious aspect, the Divine Comedy can stand on its own as a great literary achievement. Dante's scholarship was profound. Here in the Divine Comedy we find Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aristotle, Augustine, the Sacred Scriptures, and Aquinas. We find philosophy, theology, history, and astronomy. We see all of this integrally woven in the structure of a poetic narrative. Studying the Divine Comedy gives us insight into Christian culture and the classical culture from which it grew. In short, we have a literary link bringing us back to the origins of Western Civilization.

A fourth reason is derived from aesthetics, which is an essential part of the education of any civilized person. Belloc once wrote that truth, beauty, and goodness are so interrelated that they cannot be separated. Each leads to the other. Destroy one and you destroy all of them. These are the foundation for civilization, for no society can survive without them. Dante provides a model for poetic beauty. It is important for students to have before them examples of great beauty so that they can distinguish between the beautiful, the mediocre, and the ugly. Once they have read Dante they will not be easily satisfied with the second and third rate expressions of self indulgence which pass for art nowadays. n