Shallow Thoughts on “The Divine Comedy”

I’ll talk more about the process in my next “Accomplishments Update” post — there are a number of interesting things to say about my thought processes in that one — but suffice it to say I ended up setting time aside to read some of the classic works that I’d had lying around for a while, including the complete works of Lovecraft that I was reading about five or six years ago and the complete works of Shakespeare that I bought at the same time, but I thought I’d start with trying to get through “The Divine Comedy”, especially since I was reminded of it while reading the “Heroes in Hell” series.  Now, the problem that I had always had with it was that it was poetry, and I’m not a huge fan of poetry, and also find it hard to follow a narrative in poetry.  So I had tried reading it once, didn’t care for the stanza structure, and stopped reading it.  I was determined this time to get through it, and succeeded.

I actually found it to be fairly easy to get through.  The structure, at least in the translation, was less poetic than it could have been, and so it didn’t trigger my issues with poetry.  However, given its nature in order to really get the most out of it I would have had to pay far more attention to it than I did, because there are a lot of weighty ideas in it and a lot of things that you need to know or read the notes about to really get.  I was reading it to get through and get the sense of it, but it’s a work that it would be better to study and reference instead of just read for the heck of it (which was not the case for “War and Peace”, for example).  Still, it flowed well enough that I did enjoy reading it and didn’t struggle with it much at all.

However, one of the big problems it has is that Dante focuses far too much on people he knew in Italy.  This is understandable and is likely his intent (he seems to be making some political points with the work, especially given the notes).  However, it means that it doesn’t really have the staying power that it could have had given the universal — at least for Christians — elements of Heaven and Hell that it is exploring.  The work stops far too often for Dante to interrogate and reference people that would be known to Italians which would probably appeal to his audience but who are mostly unknowns to a modern audience, and he often seems to give a bit of a short shrift to more famous people like Caesar.  We don’t really get any real feelings for finding out that some of those people are in Hell or in Purgatory or what level of Heaven they’re in because we have no idea who they are, while people who know them would be interested in finding out where they ended up.

As such, I think I enjoyed Purgatorio the best.  Inferno spends too much time identifying these people and coming up with ironic punishments for them, but people ending up in Purgatory is far less something to feel schadenfreude about and so more time needs to be spent explaining why they ended up there and what that means for the nature of humans and of sin itself.  Paradiso has similar ideas, but Heaven is good no matter what, and good people end up there no matter what, so there are far less philosophical issues to be explored and so it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around why it all matters.  Purgatorio is closer to what most people will experience and yet raises philosophical issues that it is interesting to address.

Still, all of them work in their own way, and were interesting enough and easy enough to get through that I wasn’t bored or annoyed reading it.  I probably should read it more carefully at some point, but I have no idea when I’d get the time to do that.