Dante’s Sins: A Re-Reading of the Divine Comedy — The Inferno
- Dr. Paul Dumol
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol
The Inferno
It is bad form to begin a lecture with an apology, but that is exactly what I will do. This series of lectures on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is not addressed to scholars, but to people who know barely anything about Dante’s work. This is the parameter I have been given. On the other hand, I do not want to repeat what you may easily find on Google, whether about Dante or his Comedy. So I have decided to talk about the Divine Comedy from an unusual point of view—Dante’s sins. The basis for doing this is to be found in the Purgatorio, the second part of Dante’s magnum opus. At the end of Dante’s journey up Mount Purgatory, when Beatrice, Dante’s great love who engineered the whole trip through the otherworld, finally appears to Dante, we do not have the tearful reunion of two lovers; instead, Beatrice accuses Dante of being guilty of quite specific sins—and of not being sorry for them, to boot.
It is, of course, possible to go through the Divine Comedy from a different point of view. One could go through it from the viewpoint of philosophy or theology. I myself believe that Dante’s original purpose was social criticism, but something happened soon after he decided to write it, bringing him to include in it his personal story. Thus, the Divine Comedy is social criticism of the cities and kingdoms of Italy in the fourteenth century and at the same time the story of what, for lack of a better word, we may call Dante’s conversion.
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