I wonder if Dante was satisfied when he finished this. With neither progenitor nor offspring, this work certainly has earned its place in the pantheon of world literature. No work before or since can compare to it in ambition as far as I am concerned. it is not simply that Dante set out to explain the mysteries of the afterlife; evidently that would have been to easy for his taste. Rather he set out to do that backward and in heels, so to speak, in a hobbling meter of his own device, and with a radial symmetry that would impress even with today's ability to go back and adjust things after the fact. This would have been a herculean task for any, but he did the thing, and then topped it off with riveting narration, indelible characters, and a cosmic imagination so profound that many today take it to be gospel fact. The orders and ranks of angels, for example, are taken as metaphysical fact in some circles, when in fact this is something of Dante's pure invention.
Dante's trip through hell is the most widely known, of course, and I had even committed passages from it to memory decades ago. Naturally, the gruesome and inventive punishments there tend to capture the memory, and who among us has not found ourselves "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita"? Even those who have not yet reached the "mezzo" can relate.
Familiar though I was with the Inferno, I had never touched the other two books in the Commedia before finally setting myself to it this year. Fully aware of the book's import and influence, it seemed insulting to read it in English, and I set out to do it backward and in heels--in Middle Italian. Refusal to do things the easy way is a point Dante and I have in common. Like Dante, I set my nose to the belt sander, and did it. I wonder if, like me, Dante also felt dissatisfied with the result.
The Commedia is a masterpiece; of that there is no doubt. It's a fractal mosaic of words and ideas, as awe-inspiring in its geometry as in its language. But that was the easy part. Dante eats words and shits terza rima. What he set out to do, however, was not merrely to write a glorious labyrinth of epic poetry. He set his sights no lower than to solve the mysteries of existence, and resolve the fundamental contradictions at the heart of the religion that shaped his entire life. His decision to make himself the sojourner in the story makes it obvious that it's an allegory of the doubts he wrestled with in life, but it would be a mistake to stop there. The journey of the character Dante parallels that of the believer Dante, to be sure, but there is a third journey here: that of the author. The Commedia is not an explication of the conclusions that bolstered his faith; it bears the marks of a thought in progress, the conclusion of which was unsure at the outset.
And the conclusion of those three journeys, the believer, the writer, and the character, might possibly have been less definitive that they would have wanted. After all of that, after a literary, if not literal, trip to hell and back, the answer to the question, "How can all of this that I believe and have been taught possibly be true?" turns out to have been, "None of your business. It is for God to know and understand. It is for you to believe and follow." The character was satisfied. He even pretended that it was an actual answer. Maybe the believer in Dante was also content to leave it there. But how could the writer have been? How could a mind that would bother to ask the question have been satisfied with that answer? One who set out to prove by logic and theology that God is indeed just and good . . . surely he saw how thoroughly he failed at that task. And the reader--this reader, who wore Dante like a robe while reading, and eagerly awaited the ultimate answer in the ultimate sphere, some truth buried in the cornices of this towering masterpiece--how could he feel otherwise?
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