Dante’s Sins: A Re-Reading of the Divine Comedy — The Paradiso
- Dr. Paul Dumol
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
By Dr. Paul Arvisu Dumol
The Paradiso
In last week’s lecture we confronted Beatrice’s accusations against Dante. She accuses him of two sins, summed up in her phrase “o pargoletta/ o altra novità”—a “green young girl or other novelty” in Mandelbaum’s translation, which we have reduced to (I shudder to say the word, but that’s what he would be accused of today) pedophilia and heresy. What I have called “heresy” Beatrice calls “blasphemy,” and by blasphemy she means coming out with alternatives to the moral order or, to put it crudely, coming out with your own version of right and wrong. These sins, or perhaps more specifically the thinking justifying them, are the dark wood at the start of the Divine Comedy, and it is Virgil who rescues him from it.
I have suggested that Dante’s attempts to escape from the dark wood were precipitated by his re-reading of the Aeneid, Virgil’s masterpiece. A scholar has demonstrated that Dante was re-reading the Aeneid as he was writing the Convivio (the title of his unfinished work immediately preceding the Comedy). No one knows exactly why he abandoned the Convivio, but the frequent guess is that Dante did so to write the Divine Comedy. While meditating on the subject matter of the Convivio, he came upon the girl by the river Arno. So began the brief, tumultuous chapter in his life that would end in serious considerations of suicide as a way to get rid of the body that was the nest of his desire. It is at this point that Virgil enters.
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