Dante Alighieri: The good is non-negotiable

It is one of the greatest love stories of all time.

Let’s forget Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde for a moment and focus on two characters who would only find each other after death: Dante Aligheri and his Beatrice. What an arduous journey the former took to achieve this: he descended into hell before he could tackle the hard climb up the mountain of purification – in order to finally meet her, the only and true one, at the entrance to paradise. Where the darkness of Inferno and Purgatorio ends, the light bringer welcomes the traveler. In all her purity, Beatrice leads the hero to the highest, heavenly realms, to the stars and hosts of angels, to the Mother of God, the source of all goodness. One superlative follows the next. And everything is splendor and beauty and vastness. No literary monument to a woman has ever been more monumental than the work called “The Divine Comedy”.

This literary classic is preceded by a hardship that has never been overcome. Because Dante had hardly exchanged a word with the woman he loved during his lifetime and, as he still records in his early modern collection of texts “Vita Nova,” he even came up with other alibi women. They were supposed to disguise his love pain for the young woman who died of the plague at the age of 24. He had to live with the fact that he never confessed his feelings to her. Unfulfilled love could only blossom in writing. But then all the more celebratory! Especially since Dante is granted redemption at the end: “In the form of a rose/ I saw the holy crowd before me.”

But one has to ask: What does such a journey to the afterlife tell us in our secularized world? Certainly these hundred cantos, with their exuberant imagery and their 14,233 verses arranged in terzines, will initially mean far less to today’s readers than to the poet-priest’s contemporaries. The latter may have enjoyed all the grotesque allusions to politicians, businessmen and intellectuals of their era, which the author envisages with the worst punishments in the inferno. In the rampant name-dropping, we encounter pits of sin in the circle of hell, with people forever freezing in the ice, blinded or starving. People complain and suffer in this sphere, which is marked by the reckoning with an Italy that is sinking into decadence. Dante wanted everyone to know about the corrupt elites.

That’s why he wrote his comedy in the vernacular Italian and – after centuries of Latin dominance – ushered in the modern European era. But if you ignore this historical value and all the feints that are quite alien to us today, then there is one message that remains from this magnum opus: comfort. Only when the Florentine began to write about his loss was he able to overcome what had been a traumatic experience for him. He, who had “deviated from the right path in a dark forest (…)” and saw going astray as the beginning of a journey, had to face his own demons in the realm of death, had to feel “the nettle of remorse.” This was the only way he could free himself.

This story of self-emancipation and rescue has continued to encourage artists to rewrite Dante in various ways right up to our time. When it comes to film, we should point out Vincent Ward’s “Behind the Horizon” (1998), a journey to the afterlife in which a man sets out to find his deceased wife and daughter in a beautifully picturesque paradise, which is quite unique in the history of cinema and contains numerous paintings by Van Gogh processed. Contemporary literature has taken up the material with similar admiration, as can be seen in Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s “The Pentecost Miracle” (2016). After scientists have gathered there for a symposium about the Italian poet laureate, the meeting ends with a pathetic ascension. And as far as the theater is concerned, Christopher Rüping’s approach to Dante with his production of »The New Life. Where do we go from here« (2021) captured the feeling of an entire generation, a generation looking for love, a generation looking for hope in the midst of an era of crises and wars. Incidentally, the director particularly transfers the reflection of the plague to the discussion of the mass deaths caused by the corona pandemic. Dante’s comedy and all of his smaller, associated texts have rarely been as explosive and meaningful as they are today.

His monumental work is still seen as therapeutic. It stands out from the dystopias of our day as a phalanx of hope. The gates are pathetically opened to us into a space of truth that was long thought lost. It reveals itself in the rays of the sun, the fire or the singing of the redeemed. Dante shows us that there is a way there, and he encourages us to follow it despite all the difficulties. He may have written about the afterlife, but essentially his expedition also reads as the path of life itself, with all its abysses and setbacks. What keeps him going is longing. How many times in his story did he almost fall off cliffs and end up in the mouth of the three-headed Satan himself. He overcomes the hurdles because he doesn’t give up and because he has a friendly guide at his side: Virgil.

This ancient poet could be described as a real pilot. “And don’t give up, my son, hope,” said Dante’s counterpart. There is a plausible reason why the narrator chose a literary figure as his companion. Books (and therefore their authors) prove to be the best remedy for loneliness. And isn’t the latter the virus of our time? Doesn’t it just contribute to the ennui of late modernity? Dante contrasts this with the principle of unconditional love (one of the most common terms in the text).

Neither Virgil nor Beatrice demand any payment for their company. They, like Dante himself, represent a society of compassionate people. At almost every stop, the author exposes himself to the punished and listens to their stories. Being there, listening, remaining receptive is the triad of this work, which is so close to us despite its pastoral language, which often seems overly complex. Torn between countless fronts within and outside the community, we become aware as we read: There are universal and timeless constants. The good is non-negotiable.

In that for his Library of World Literature The well-known Munich publisher Manesse will be releasing a magnificent new edition of “Dante: The Divine Comedy” on November 6th (new translation, commentary and afterword by Rudolf Georg Adam, 1120 pp., hardcover, 80 €).