Tweeting Dante

One Hundred Days of Tweets from Dante's Divine Comedy

Donald Carlson

• Editorial: Resource Publications
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666798401
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Poesía religiosa

Seven hundred years after his death, Dante Alighieri's poetry continues to intrigue and move us. Donald Carlson invites us to relive the journey of The Divine Comedy in one hundred excerpts, one from each canto of the poem, that he tweeted over the course of one hundred days in observation of the septicentennial of Dante's death. He accompanies each excerpt with a reflection based on his own experiences of having studied and taught the poem for thirty-plus years. This reimagining of Dante's poem helps to underscore that the journey is not just Dante's, but that it is truly "our life's journey."

Inferno

Day 1 of 100 days of Dante on the 700th anniversary of his death

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,I found myself within a shadowed forest,for I had lost the path that does not stray.

(Inferno 1.1–3)

Where else to begin this journey with Dante than in the middle of things? When I teach this canto to my students, I always highlight that Dante describes his journey as one we all share. It usually doesn’t take much prompting from me for them to recognize that Dante depicts himself here as undergoing a midlife crisis, setting the scene, in his usual roundabout way, somewhere near the beginning of the thirty-fifth year of his life.1 It taxes my resources as a teacher, however, to help them recognize that this is a crisis where the stakes are life and death in the most profound existential sense imaginable. The sense of imminent danger is heightened after Dante believes he has found his way out of his predicament: a mountain that he finds at the end of the path he walks, which will allow him to leave the Dark Forest; however, three vicious animals—a leopard; a lion; and, most deadly of all, a she-wolf, drive him back down into the darkness. Here, Dante encounters the ghost of the poet Virgil, who informs Dante that he will lead the living poet out of the Wood on a detour that will take him around the she-wolf, but that will require him to traverse the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

1. Based on the verse in Psalm 89 of of the Vulgate (Psalm 90 of the Hebrew canon) that states that the days of a man’s life are “three score years and ten,” or in the Latin, “dies nostrorum ipsi septauginta anni” (Psalm 89:10).

Day 2

“What is it then? Why, why do you resist?Why does your heart host so much cowardice?Where are your daring and your openness as long as there are three such blessed women concerned for you within the court of heaven?”

(Inferno 2.121–125)

After getting off to such a promising start when Virgil shows up to rescue Dante in Canto I, why does he suddenly lose his resolve, especially when he really has no other choice as far as extricating himself from the hopelessness of the Dark Wood is concerned? It seems counterintuitive, especially since Virgil, whom Dante reveres, is his rescuer. The story Virgil tells here to restore Dante’s courage is seminal to our understanding of the drama Dante portrays and of Dante’s poetic. It reinforces the sense that grace has intervened to save Dante, something that transcends Virgil’s powers and abilities. After all, if what Virgil possesses of natural excellence could suffice, he himself could have helped Dante evade the She-Wolf in Canto 1 to ascend the Blessed Mountain in order to escape the Dark Wood. But Virgil’s reporting to Dante that “three such blessed women,” meaning the Blessed Virgin, St. Lucy, and Beatrice, have played key roles in Dante’s rescue, underscores Dante’s incarnational, hence sacramental, understanding of the world as he portrays it in his poem. Only in a universe in which the Incarnation has occurred could the mediation of grace by three human persons—four, counting Virgil—have any efficacy. One further thought: St. Lucy’s involvement here in Dante’s rescue usually recalls Dante’s devotion to Lucy as the patron saint of eyesight, since his was notably bad; but we can also understand it as a foreshadowing of how Dante’s eyesight will eventually acquire superhuman strength as he ascends into the higher reaches of Paradiso.

Day 3

Behind that banner trailed so long a file

of people—I should never have believed

that death could have unmade so many souls.

(Inferno 3.55–57)

Dante’s vision of the Uncommitted in the ante-room of the Inferno provides one of the most chilling admonitions to those who read and study the poem today. How many of us have doomed ourselves to unremarkable lives by being either too timid or too self-absorbed to embrace the great causes and to commit ourselves to something beyond our own interests? That’s an especially potent indictment of the world of our time, dominated by a consumerism that promotes an ethic of “Me first.” Perhaps that’s why Eliot was able to borrow Dante’s image of death having undone so many in the opening section of The Waste Land with such potent effect, subtly—or perhaps not so subtly—teasing out the implication of Dante’s imagery that these people never really lived.

Day 4

When I had raised my eyes a little higher,

I saw the master of the men who know,

seated in a philosophic family.

There all look up to him, all do him honor

(Inferno 4.130–133)

In the Citadel of the Virtuous, which Dante places in Limbo, the first circle of the Inferno, he proclaims the presence and eminence of Aristotle among the philosophers who reside there. This is what the salvation that can be found in philosophy looks like to Dante. It is a surprisingly attractive state. The citadel in which those who are so honored reside is ringed by seven moats and has seven gates. I always joke with my students that this is the gated community of Dante’s Inferno, but these gates resonate with the seven liberal arts, which Dante understood to be the foundation of learning. The image that Dante creates here indicates the scope of Divine Justice and mercy. The virtue of these pre- and non-Christian sages and heroes is rewarded to the full extent of its merit. And yet, that merit falls far short of the beatitude afforded through God’s grace. What takes the reader especially by surprise here is Dante’s inclusion of the great Islamic philosophers Averroes and Avicenna, as well as the great warrior and antagonist of the Crusaders, Saladin, among the company so honored.

Day 5

“When we had read how the desired smile

was kissed by one who was so true a lover

this one, who never shall be parted from me,

while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.

. . . that day we read no more.”

(Inferno 5.133–138)

In one of the racier passages of Inferno, Francesca of Rimini reports to Dante about the moment when she a...

Índice

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5
• Day 6
• Day 7
• Day 8
• Day 9
• Day 10
• Day 11
• Day 12
• Day 13
• Day 14
• Day 15
• Day 16
• Day 17
• Day 18
• Day 19
• Day 20
• Day 21
• Day 22
• Day 23
• Day 24
• Day 25
• Day 26
• Day 27
• Day 28
• Day 29
• Day 30
• Day 31
• Day 32
• Day 33
• Day 34
• Day 35
• Day 36
• Day 37
• Day 38
• Day 39
• Day 40
• Day 41
• Day 42
• Day 43
• Day 44
• Day 45
• Day 46
• Day 47
• Day 48
• Day 49
• Day 50
• Day 51
• Day 52
• Day 53
• Day 54
• Day 55
• Day 56
• Day 57
• Day 58
• Day 59
• Day 60
• Day 61
• Day 62
• Day 63
• Day 64
• Day 65
• Day 66
• Day 67
• Day 68
• Day 69
• Day 70
• Day 71
• Day 72
• Day 73
• Day 74
• Day 75
• Day 76
• Day 77
• Day 78
• Day 79
• Day 80
• Day 81
• Day 82
• Day 83
• Day 84
• Day 85
• Day 86
• Day 87
• Day 88
• Day 89
• Day 90
• Day 91
• Day 92
• Day 93
• Day 94
• Day 95
• Day 96
• Day 97
• Day 98
• Day 99
• Day 100
• Postscript
• Works Consulted