Sandro Botticelli’s beautiful rendition of INFERNO (mid 1480s)

Let’s look back over Cantos I - IV of INFERNO.

I'll talk about some of the architectural details, some ways that the reading of COMEDY may be more complex than you might imagine, and the reason Limbo is so strange in Dante's masterwork (it’s all about love).

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The segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:05] A plot summary of the first four cantos of INFERNO.

[05:17] The architecture of those first four cantos, mostly about antinomies (or oppositions).

[09:17] A look back at the (uneasy?) relationship between allegory and realism (for lack of better words) in the first four cantos.

[15:19] Four reasons why COMEDY supports so many disparate, even contradictory interpretations.

[21:01] Our poet, Dante, constantly moves the fence of his understanding. Why? Because of Beatrice. Love always moves the fence.

FOR MORE STUDY

Three interpretive issues:

I talked a bit about the lost-found dynamic in the first four cantos: lost in a dark wood, found by Virgil; lost in self-doubt, found in heavenly rhetoric; lost in the chaos of the neutrals and Charon, found in Limbo with the green grass and flowing water. Why is this dynamic of lost and found so much a part of who we are? Yes, there’s the Christian answer of “lost in sin and found in redemption.” But this lost-found dynamic predates the New Testament; it’s even found in Homeric poetry. It seems fundamental to being human. Is it about our senses, about the barrage of information they take in and the way we lose more than we process neurologically on a minute-by-minute basis (we lose more than we find on a minute by minute basis)? Is it about our unsettled lives, the ways we move through the world from one spot to another? Is it about our fractured relationship with nature, the way we’ve tried to divorce ourselves from the ecological truth of who we are? (There’s no full answer here; it’s fascinating to sit back and consider one fundamental dynamic for how we humans make meaning.)
INFERNO, Cantos II and IV are in dialogue: in heaven with Beatrice among the saints, in Limbo with Homer among the thinkers. But that implicit parallelism gets close to being heretical. It’s dodgy even to suggest that the Virgin might be in rhetorical dialogue with Homer. Yet Dante seems to pull off this parallelism with panache. How does he make that happen? Is it the poetry’s style? The polish? The way the words are used? (If you’re looking at a facing page translation, you might want to notice which Florentine words get rhymed in the key bits of each canto.) Is it the vibe: the hush of heaven v. the (quiet) bustle of Limbo? Think more about these parallelisms and also think about the ways our poet mitigates any theological charges that might be made against him.
The anagogical interpretation of a work is the toughest for a modern reader to understand. It’s also perhaps the most important for a medieval reader. Although Dante didn’t know Homer’s poetry, it’s fairly fairly easy to guess one way he’d have interpreted THE ODYSSEY: the soul’s journey home via the wilds of this world, past witches and whirlpools (think “sexual temptations” and “intellectual debates”), with a host of suitors (think “obstacles”) blocking the soul’s final reunion with the body (at least, in medieval misogynistic readings, so Penelope would be interpreted). Always keep in mind the first line of COMEDY: “in the middle of the journey of our life.” Our pilgrim is intended to represent us. And while he is on a specific, even personal journey across the universe, he’s also on a quest for maturation, spiritual enlightenment, and for home (or at least the ways the soul can find home). As you read COMEDY, try to think what each canto might mean in terms of the soul’s progress. How could you read these first four cantos anagogically?

22. An Interpolated Episode: A Look Back At The First Four Cantos of INFERNO