Chapter 75 The First Trumpet of the New Era——Dante and His Divine Comedy

The end of the feudal Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern capitalist era was marked by a great man.This character is the Italian Dante.He is the last poet of the Middle Ages and at the same time the first poet of the new age. - Engels What is "Divine Comedy"?In my opinion, she is a demonstration performance of actively going to hell, seeking herself, and reaching the realm of freedom. —— Can Xue Almost all poets have been inspired by love, and the great Italian poet Dante is an out-and-out "love saint".When Dante was young, he saw a beautiful and charming girl named Beatrice at a banquet.Dante liked her very much, and often found opportunities to visit her after banquets.As he grew older, Dante regarded Beatrice as the object of his spiritual love.This love gave Dante magical powers, and he wrote a series of lyric poems for her.But unfortunately Beatrice married a banker and died prematurely soon after.The poet Dante was deeply saddened by this, and wrote a series of mourning poems.Dante collected the poems written for Beatrice together, linked them together in prose, explained the motivation for writing each poem, and named it "New Life".In the poem, Dante pursues pure love and regards Beatrice as an angel sent by God to save his soul, a deified woman.From then on, Beatrice became a symbolic ideal figure in Dante's works.

Dante was born in a family of declining aristocrats. He liked to read poetry since he was a child. He once studied Latin and ancient literature as a teacher of famous scholars.He particularly admired Virgil, an important poet in ancient Rome, and regarded Virgil as his spiritual mentor.The epic poem "Aeneid" written by Virgil extols the great achievements of the Roman ancestors in founding a country and starting a business, and is considered the best work among the epic poems created by literati.In his youth, Dante also actively participated in the political activities of the city-state, but in the end he was driven out of the city-state and began a life of exile for nearly 20 years.Around 1370, at the most painful time of his life in exile, Dante began the creation of The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece he had been contemplating and conceiving for a long time.

The Italian original meaning of "Divine Comedy" is "divine comedy".Dante originally only named his own work, and later generations added the word "sacred" to express their respect for it.It is named because the work starts from a sad hell and ends in a bright heaven, with a comic element. "Divine Comedy" has a total length of more than 14,000 lines and is divided into three parts: "Purgatory" and "Paradise".There are 33 songs in each part, plus the prelude, a total of 100 songs.The aforementioned Beatrice and the poet Virgil both appeared in The Divine Comedy.

The long poem adopts the unique dream form of medieval literature, describing a dream that Dante had "in the middle of his life".In the dream Dante finds himself lost in a dark forest.At dawn, he came to the foot of a hill, and suddenly three monsters jumped out from the side to block his way.He shouted for help.In a crisis, the ancient Roman poet Virgil appeared in front of him and expressed his willingness to guide him through hell and purgatory to the blissful paradise. Hell is shaped like a big funnel that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, going straight to the center of the earth, and is divided into 9 layers.The souls of sinners are assigned to different levels of hell according to the magnitude of their crimes during their lifetime, and they are subjected to different degrees of torture.When they came to hell, they saw it written on the gate: Here all hesitation must be abandoned, all fear and cowardice must be abandoned.

Walking into the gate, I saw the wind blowing yellow sand, covering the sky and the sun.Those cowards who were alive suffered in the corridors of hell.These souls are neither accepted by God nor accepted by hell.Through the corridor, Dante and Virgil crossed the River Styx in a small boat and came to the first floor of hell.It is also called waiting court.Those ancient pagans who were born before Jesus and did not receive Christian baptism, such as the poets Homer, Horace, Socrates, etc., waited for God's judgment here. The real hell begins on the second level.All that is locked here are the souls in the field of lust.They indulged in carnal desires and abandoned rationality during their lifetimes, such as Cleopatra and others, drifting endlessly in the strong wind, upside down, bumping into cliffs from time to time, crying miserably.At this time, two souls floated towards Dante.They are a couple.After listening to their cries, Dante was so moved that he fainted.

When Dante woke up again, he had reached the third floor of hell.The souls who have committed the crime of greed and violence lie in the stinking mud, letting the wind and rain blow.A demon with three dog heads, tearing them to pieces with its claws.On the fourth floor of hell, Dante saw two teams of ghosts, with heavy objects piled on their chests, insulting and beating each other face to face.They were greedy and profligate during their lifetime.Some of them were priests, bishops and popes who were insatiable.On the fifth floor of hell, the irritable souls who were alive were naked in the mud and black water, fighting with each other with anger on their faces until their skin was broken and their flesh rotted.On the sixth floor of hell, three Nemesis goddesses covered in blood and with green snakes coiled around their heads guarded Dis City.There are many graves in the city, and cultists of various cults wail in the burning graves.

The seventh floor of hell is divided into three rings, and three types of rapists are tortured.In the first ring, the tyrant is boiled in a lake of boiling blood.In the second ring, those who commit suicide due to lack of faith are punished to be turned into trees full of cancerous tumors.In the third ring, those who insult God and usurpers are tortured between the rain of fire and the hot sand.Eyes gushed from the fountain of distress.A small stream flows near the desert.The two poets followed the brook until they reached the abyss into which the stream was fed.Virgil summons a monster with a human face and a snake body, which symbolizes the deceiver.On its back poets fly down to the abyss.This is the eighth floor of hell - the evil ditch.This layer of hell is divided into ten trenches.All kinds of fraudsters, such as seducers, flatterers, fortune tellers, corrupt officials, hypocrites, thieves, etc., were subjected to various tortures.In the third ditch, the popes who bought and sold priests, such as the recently deceased Pope Nicholas III and the then reigning Pope Minnefas VIII, were buried alive in the crevices of the rocks, with only their burning legs exposed. and feet.

The ninth floor of hell is a frozen lake, and traitors and traitors are frozen in the lake.In the center of the icy lake is the demon Satan, who has three faces, with Judas who betrayed Jesus biting in his front mouth, and Karutu and Cassio who murdered Caesar in his left and right mouths. After visiting the bottom of hell, Dante and Virgil step out of the fetid air to the island of Purgatory, filled with pure air.In Paradise on top of the hill, Virgil retreats.A procession guards a triumphal carriage symbolizing the Church.Pulling the chariot is a monster that is half eagle and half lion, symbolizing Jesus.A group of women symbolizing various virtues, singing and dancing, surrounded an elegant woman.She is Beatrice, whom Dante admired when he was young, and she came to guide him through heaven in person.

Dante then traveled to the Empyrean.In the Ninth Heaven, Dante was allowed to behold the divine essence and hear the chorus of angels.She then led him to Heaven, and from this height, and with her vision, he could witness the joy of angels and souls enjoying their heavenly bliss.He was so dazzled and fascinated by the sight that he did not realize that Beatrice had left him.When he woke up, he found an old man beside him.The old man told him that Beatrice had returned to her throne.He also told Dante that if he wanted to see more visions in heaven, he must pray to the Virgin Mary with the old man.Dante accepts this gift, contemplates the glory of God, and for a moment glimpses the greatest of mysteries, the Trinity and the union of man and God.

The great value of "Divine Comedy" lies in its extremely broad historical picture, reflecting the real life in Italy during the transition period from the Middle Ages to modern times and the social and political changes in various fields, showing the brilliance of humanism for the independence of personality.Not only that, "Divine Comedy" also artistically expounds and summarizes the fields of medieval politics, philosophy, science, theology, poetics, and painting. Dante uses his rich imagination to set three stages for the afterlife.Looking back on his life, he put the people he hated and hated in hell, and the people he respected and loved in heaven.Regardless of whether his evaluation is appropriate or not, Dante's purpose is to separate the good from the evil, the beautiful from the ugly, and not vent his personal anger. This is something we must be clear about.The world he imagined was a world where the spirit was sublimated to the lofty gods, and it was also the best state that people could think of at that time.The use of symbolic metaphors and allusions is also one of the characteristics of his works, which is also an obstacle to understanding it, because we do not have sufficient Western cultural background.We can read some notes on this aspect, but when we read "Divine Comedy", we should focus on grasping its poetic sentiment.

With rich imagination and novel ideas, "Divine Comedy" designed a strict structure and clear layers for hell, purgatory, and heaven, making them have a three-dimensional effect.Different realms, the poet endows it with different colors.Hell is the place where sins are punished, with miserable and gloomy colors; Purgatory is the place of repentance and hope, with calm and tranquil colors; heaven is the highest state of perfection and beauty, with brilliant and bright colors. The greatest achievement of The Divine Comedy is language.Dante moved away from Latin, which was favored in medieval literature, and wrote in Italian colloquialism, using trirhymes based on a metric popular in folk poetry.This has played an important role in promoting the unity and enrichment of the Italian national language and refining the Italian literary language.These achievements show that: Dante got rid of the traditional fetters of medieval literature, and tried to use new art forms to express the ideological content of the times. Dante is known as "the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of the new era".His work "Divine Comedy" has reached the advanced level of the times in terms of thought and art, and opened up the way for the development of literature in the Renaissance era.It has always been hailed as "the epic of the Middle Ages" and had a profound influence on the later world literature and art.Boccaccio admired it so much that he added the word "sacred" before the work.Many poets, painters, and musicians in later generations drew their creative nourishment from the "Divine Comedy", and many people, inspired by the charm of the artistic image of "Divine Comedy", created outstanding works. For example, Balzac's "Human Comedy" imitated "Divine Comedy" The form of Goethe's "Faust" is even more wonderful.In addition, Dante's "Divine Comedy" also directly contributed to the formation of the Italian national language.