I've re-read it one more time. I forget that the journey is not outside of us, but is within us. Dante is not talking about others who are in hell, or purgatory, or Paradise, since we are all exile (out-side of our islands). For each of us the pieces of ourselves are fragmented . Unlike most people, I prefer the Paradise section most of all, each step in paradise shows the different intelligibility that we need to find meaning in what seems to be a meaningless life.

I read Dante for the first time three years ago, then again, a year ago, and then again, last week, and then I reread it this week. In addition, I watched the Yale course, Dante in Translation for the third time last week, while concurrently reading Virgil’s Aeneid, and read Dante’s de Monarachia, and recently I just finished reading the Old Testament and Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplex. Also, about a week ago I listened to the course by Sr. Mary Clement Davlin on the Divine Comedy (I want to note that her course was the best overall resource for me in order to understand The Comedy). There’s a reason why Dante’s worth all this trouble. Simply put, in order to understand the Medieval age and it’s beginning of the end and the start of Humanism one must understand The Comedy, and without understanding history one cannot understand who we are today.

Of all the books ever written there is no stronger evidence for the likelihood that the author is a time traveler from the future than this book if one assumes that the time traveler is forced to explain only within the paradigms of his time period while subtly overturning the given worldview by explaining everything the current generation thought they knew about themselves within their own parameters while laying a foundation for a new way of understanding the world.

Scholasticism is best demolished by a scholastic by using its own language. Dante summarizes Medieval history with his encyclopedic rendering of how the Medieval mind thought of itself as itself allowing for the beginning of the ending of the predomination of scholastic thought while setting the stage for what will soon come to pass while explaining the world in terms of the human rather than the divine by using the divine as a way to bring humans back into the world and thus becoming arguably the first Humanist.

Dante doesn’t mention Maimonides or his Guide for the Perplex, but he does mention Avicenna and Averroes and embraces Aristotle as they both think in Aristotelian terms. Aquinas, who is prominently placed in Paradise, synthesizes Aristotle with Augustine and respects Avicenna so much he just refers to him as the commentator for his ability in explaining Aristotle. (I want to note that Plotinus is not in Dante at least I don’t think he was, but pseudo-Dionisius is, and Aquinas relies heavily on both. I just find that an interesting oversight by Dante. It might not be clear to you, but Augustine synthesizes Plotinus with Cicero giving us his Christianity and Augustine is a major character within Dante).

Aquinas puts reason before faith, Bonaventure will put faith before reason. Each are in paradise as is St. Francis who will marry Lady Poverty so that love, that is the primo mobile, will shake the universe into existence since our will of our will gives us our freedom to choose beyond our nature and forces us to own ourselves and actualize our own authenticity. Those who make no choice are making a choice and will be outside of the Gates of Inferno and must remain in limbo forever and a day.

All of wisdom (according to the Count of Monte Cristo) is contained in these two words: wait and hope. Hope is a verb of the future. It is always an expectation of something to come. The ontological difference between knowledge and faith is hope at least according to Dante. I would like to note that Pandora released all of the evils into the world except for one, namely hope. The Greeks were suspicious of hope and made hope a vice as they would make pride a virtue. Dante makes hope a virtue and pride a vice. Heidegger will shake the foundations of Philosophy in 1927 with his Being and Time and he makes care his foundation for human being, care is another verb of the future.

The ultimate good is a contemplation of the divine and the consideration of justice while in Dante’s Paradise. We live in a world such that the thinking and the doing, the mind and the body, the action and the thought do not ever meet. Hegel will try to reconcile sense certainty with the truth outside of us and often would appeal to Dante in his expositions. Dante knows the problem with contingency and necessity while trying to preserve freewill in the face of human nature and our choices within an uncertain world.

All of this is also within Dante and he’ll tell you through his musical rhetoric and will always tell you what he is trying to tell you but sometimes reveals the reasons slowly. It’s not important to know all the characters he introduces because he’ll tell you why they are in his story but sometimes he doesn’t let you know until the last line of the Canto or sometimes not even until the next Canto. By all means, read the Clive James translation first since he will integrate what others have said in footnotes seamlessly into his translation.

All of Kant’s antinomies are laid out within Purgatory within the different Cantos. Hegel’s dialectic approach is too. All of philosophy until Kant and shortly after as modified by Hegel would say that ‘the truth is out there’, Dante is a partial exception to that rule about philosophers who came before Kant. He knows that Leah will act while Rachel must think and that the supreme good is an infinite that the finite will struggle with before fully grasping that certainty remains elusive. Yes, Dante is writing a poem (music with rhetoric) but he definitely lays a foundation for what will be coming, and, oh yeah, one really needs to read Vico’s New Science in order to see some of Dante’s influence, both realize that we exist in a Bayesian world because our memories evolve as our imagination overcomes the now.

One of my favorite sentences from a recent book I read is ‘most Enlightenment thinkers were Pelagians’. You can bet that Dante was too. He makes a point that prayer makes a difference. Augustine would not; Pelagius would. Augustine would say God’s grace is freely given and that there are two separate magisterial that don’t intersect, the City of God and the City of Man; Pelagius would not. Dante does lay this out clumsily in his de Monarachia which makes what he is saying in The Comedy all the more understandable, though he doesn’t acknowledge Pelagius.

Dante would even hint that those from the Ganges, who believe nature is God and God is nature (as he believed the Hindus did, and how Spinoza will later) and those who believe love is all you need as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Bonaventure did, or those who make God outside of the world and not knowable by mortals such as the Saracens are just as worthy as those who believe God came to earth as a man and was more than just an apparition as the heterodox belief of a Roman Emperor who saw the errors of his way. Yes, Dante will place the unbaptized infants and the pagans not in Paradise, but Dante similarly to Pelagius would like to reconsider their status if given a chance. The Venerable Bede is mentioned multiple times in The Comedy, but without a doubt, Bede’s Pelagius is nothing but a heterodoxic villain and Dante knows better than to acknowledge Pelagius as worthy of Paradise.

There is appearance and a reality hidden which can be revealed by art, poetry, music, sculptures, puzzles and seeing with our eyes and hearing with our hearts which remains hidden as we look at everything while seeing nothing and distract ourselves with our idle chatter while we don’t allow ourselves to square the circle because the transcendental deduction (Kant concept) obscures reality. Virgil will scoff at Dante when he vicariously participates in the schadenfreude of watching others bicker while he was in Inferno.

An exile, as Dante was, is not only outside of his own island (ex + ile=island), he is also alienated from themself. The key for me in understanding The Comedy was not to think it is a religious allegory, but more of an allegory about our own life. That clue came to me from Sr. Mary Devlin’s course which I referenced above. Aristotle made pride a virtue while Dante makes it foundational to all of the cardinal sins.

The Comedy is not an easy read. It is a necessary read for understanding Medieval thought and for what will come later. Will Durant made Dante his pivotal character in the ‘Age of Faith’ Volume 4 of ‘Story of Civilization’ for a reason. To understand The Comedy is to understand the Medieval age and what will come after. Oddly, Gibbons’ made Petrarch his final and most important character within his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I know Dante is a mystic. I know he definitely prefers the Franciscans over the Dominicans. He’ll make the most mystic of the mystics St. Bernard the final guide in his journey for a reason, but, even with all of that, I think it’s possible to read The Comedy as our individual journey in this life where we must reconcile the ontological difference with our own transcendental deduction and own our own authenticity.

Dante doesn’t find himself in the middle of his personal journey, he finds himself in the middle of ‘our’ journey. The Comedy is not about others it is about ourselves. Every experience is relevant for the individual. Much of modern-day philosophy is hidden within this book from the first page onward to the last. From the get go, we are shrouded in greed, pride, and jealousy, and a little bit of ourselves is revealed along each step in the book and a whole lot of what is to be revealed latter by brilliant philosophers to come are also within these pages. I’ll end these ramblings by ‘walking away with a trumpet of the arse’ (otherwords: a fart!).

Excepcional obra (aun mejor de lo que la recordaba) y aun más excepcional edición por parte de Acantilado. El hecho de que sea una edición dual, aunque no sepamos ni una palabra de italiano, nos permite darnos cuenta, echando un breve vistazo (el original y la traducción están en la misma página) de la increible musicalidad de los versos de Alighieri.
Mención aparte merecen los breves excursos introductorios a cada uno de los Cantos, algo que hace que la obra sea mucho más comprensible y accesible al lector moderno, al igual que sirven para este efecto la cronología, los esquemas de Infierno, Purgatorio y Paraiso, así como el glosario comentado de términos y nombres sitos al final del libro.
Lo dicho, una maravilla de obra, y una maravilla de edición.

Nel mezzo del cammin del nostra vita/ Mi ritrovai per una universita oscura/ Che la diritta via era smarita// Ahi quant a dir' qual'era.*.. In the middle of my life, I found myself in a snowy waste, -28 F real temperature, not wind chill, driving my pregnant wife to St Joseph's Hospital for the birth of our first child Emily, now a lawyer in Milano. Difficult to say, una cosa dura, but not really... After all, I was in a snowy waste, not Dante's invented Inferno. In order to deliver my child, my wife had to go down fourteen snowy steps, get into a VW Bug with an electrical cord to its oilpan heater, and wait for me to put the car battery from inside the house in under the back seat, to start the motor for the drive down Summit Avenue to the hospital.

Amazing, Dante's invention: there's no hell in the Bible, and in the Latin classics, only a place of a couple visits, by boat steered by Charon. Not a lifetime residence, like Mars.
At the time in Minnesota, I was to be in hell because of a professor's not bothering to read my papers, nor those of the student whom he promoted to a prestigious job, though incapable of fine analytic writing.
This was not Dante's hell, but my own. Hell is a pretend professor, a famous one, who doesn't read student papers. It's not muck or fire or a treacherous stone path, as in Dante. Hell is power bowing to flattery as Kent in Lear points out, and as I experienced by the poor writer's having flattered the vain, pretend professor.
Like Dante, I place my enemies in the Inferno. May they remain nameless, unworthy Dante's immortalizing of his.

But Heaven, Paradiso, is reading Dante with my Chaucer teacher John McNally, he of the rich, fruity voice and the Chaucer recordings, 33 rpm, in the 60s. A former Chicago cop, John McNally was a wonderful Chaucer teacher, who read Dante's Italian with the best.
And by the way, the best English translation of the Inferno is Michael Palma's (Norton). He has not done all three parts, so he's not as well known, but Norton has asked him, so he is doing Purgatorio and Paradiso as I write in 2010. (I met him and his wife at the American Academy, Rome.)

* I memorized the first 30 lines of the poem, maybe 12 of which I recited to my Amherst Coll undergrad thesis Advisor, on 16 & 17 C English prosody. He said, “ well, you’ve got a long way to go!” I also saw, in 1968 Firenze, at the Casa di Dante, the whole Divina Commedia printed on a wall, paper maybe 9 feet by 6, Cantos about 1 foot high, 33 across the 9’, top the Inferno, bottom the Paradiso. Never seems in English what it was there on the wall: a long lyric poem.

Inferno
I first read this book in French, when I was 25, and I immediately was swept away by its poetic force, its classical symmetrical construction and its sharp and benign view on the human condition. Brilliantly composed. Each canto tells the story of several prominent historical persons, set in breathtaking landscapes. Tragedy is all around, sometimes with a comical touch, but almost always compassionate.
The filosofical and theological dimensions are less prominent than in book II and III. I've reread this book in Dutch (both prose and lyrical translation) and in the original Italian. An everlasting treasure.
Purgatorio
Less dramatic than the first book, but in fact more beautiful, because of the perfect balance between poetic force and educative power. Quite exquisite style.
Paradiso
Very different than the other two books through its tremendous power that takes you in an other dimension, every time Dante ascends into a higher 'sphere'. Although this book treats about the everlasting truths, Dante remains very human with his questions and doubts.
Every time I read some of this book, I'm feeling I'm reaching the stars!

Merhaba, ben geldim. Uzun yollar yürüdüm de geldim, Dante ile öte dünyanın sayısız dairesini yürüdüm, yürüye yürüye cehennemin en dışından arafa vardım, günahlarımız bir bir silindi, yolun sonunda cennete vardık. Uzun, çok uzun bir yolculuktu - ama ne yolculuk!

İlahi Komedya'yı burada anlatmak şüphesiz imkansız, bu kitabı genel olarak anlatmak mümkün mü onu da bilmiyorum gerçi. Batı edebiyatının kurucu metinlerinden biri kendisi malum, sayısız kez incelenmiş, sökülmüş yeniden yapılmış, didiklenmiş bir metin. Ben de zaten okuduğum kitaplarda sürekli olarak kendisine verilen referansları artık daha iyi anlamak istediğim için cesaret edip okudum. Buraya bir küçük not düşeyim: mevzubahis 700 sayfalık bir şiir olunca, elbette çeviri meselesi büyük önem kazanıyor. Bizdeki yaygın kabul ödül de almış olan Rekin Teksoy çevirisinden okumak, ben de vaktiyle ona biraz göz gezdirmiştim. Yakın zamanda Alfa'dan çıkan Seçkin Erdi çevirisini tercih etme sebebim hem bu yeni çeviriye bir şans vermek, hem bu çevirinin orijinal İtalyanca metnin 18, 19 ve 20. yüzyıllardan üç ayrı İngilizce çeviriyle kelime kelime karşılaştırılarak hazırlanmış olması, hem de William Blake'in meşhur resimlerinin bu baskıda ilgili bölümlere yerleştirilmiş olması idi. Ben tercihimden memnun kaldım ama tabii Rekin Teksoy çevirisi de başka bir deneyim, farkındayım.

Dediğim gibi, anlatmak çok zor; hissetmek, deneyimlemek lazım bu metni. Homeros, Vergilius ve Ovidius'un metinleri kadar büyük ve onlara sırtını yaslayarak yükselen bir şiir bu. Özellikle Cehennem'in dokuz dairesini dolaşırken ortaya koyduğu siyasi alegoriler, yedi ölümcül günahın izinde Araf'ı gezerken sunduğu evrensel perspektif, Cennet bölümünde Papalık makamına yaptığı eleştirilerin hepsi zamanının çok ötesinde, çok şaşırtıcı, çok büyüleyici.

Bir de tabii ünlü Beatrice ile -özellikle Cennet bölümünde- yakından tanışmak ve Dante'nin herbiri birbirinden lezzetli kelimeleriyle hemhal olmak pek tarifsiz bir deneyimdi. Anlatıp duruyorum ama sözcük bu işte aslında: tarifsiz. Kendini hazır hisseden her okurun yolu buraya çıksın dilerim.

Bu uzun yolculuğun sonundaki vaziyetimi de yine Dante tariflesin madem: "Ölmedim, ama diri de değilim." :)

La Divina Comedia es un libro asombroso. Bien es sabido que nos cuenta la historia de un viaje en un trasmundo fantástico: primero un descenso al abismo del Infierno, luego un ascenso por la montaña del Purgatorio, para terminar con la visión beatífica de los círculos concéntricos del Paraíso. He tratado de leer este libro al pie de la letra, sin preocuparme demasiado de los muchos significados alegóricos o de las innumerables interpretaciones que hay de ello.

Estas tres regiones metafísicas se presentan como gigantescos paisajes o arquitecturas, por donde Dante y sus guías (primero Virgilio, luego Beatriz) descubren fascinantes galerías de retratos. Allí se mezclan visiones de la Antigüedad (Homero, Platón, Cesar, etc.), figuras del Cristianismo medieval (San Francisco de Asís, Santo Tomas de Aquino, San Buenaventura, etc.), así como los mismos coetáneos de Dante.

El Infierno, donde Dante se encuentra al principio “por haberse apartado del camino recto”, se presenta primero como una serie de nueve fosas o círculos, cada vez mas profundos, donde se encuentran representados cada pecado: la incontinencia, la bestialidad, la malicia, la herejía… Primero se encuentra con grandes poetas, como Homero, que no pudo conocer a Cristo, y a personajes entrañables como Francisca. Pero según va bajando por los círculos de esas extrañas cuevas, Dante divisa a ejércitos que caminan al son de las trompetas que son los culos de los diablos, a reptiles que agarran a sus víctimas para incorporárselas, a huracanes sobre los ríos que recorren las profundidades del Infierno, a almas torturadas que van con los intestinos colgando (Mahoma). (Es muy probable que artistas como el Bosco se hayan inspirado de algunas de estas terribles imágenes.) Digo “almas”, sin embargo, ¡todas estas visiones son sumamente corpóreas! Finalmente, después de cruzarse con Ulises, se descubre la figura de Lucifer que, en una eterna pesadilla, se come a Judas, a Bruto y a Casio, los traidores de Cristo y de Cesar (vale subrayar que el acercamiento de estas dos figuras no deja de sorprenderme).

Finalmente, salen “para volver a ver las estrellas” y emprenden la ascensión el monte del Purgatorio y cuando mas ascienden hacia las estrellas, mas ligeros caminan. Descubren esculturas que representan episodios históricos, como la caída de Troya. Discurren sobre temas de filosofía moral y política, como la necesidad del libre albedrío, la responsabilidad, el amor, la edad de oro de la humanidad, la decadencia de la Iglesia. Contemplan el árbol del Paraíso, despojado de sus hojas. Aquí finalmente, Virgilio abandona a Dante y lo deja en manos de la sublime Beatriz.

Al entrar en el Paraíso, asevera Dante: “Ahora, lector, permanece tranquilo en tu asiento, meditando acerca de las cosas que aquí solamente se bosquejan, si quieres que te causen mayor deleite antes que tedio”. Esa apuesta es difícil de mantener, ya que Dante se mete en discursos teológicos de índole escolástico (sobre las virtudes teologales) con varios de sus interlocutores y trata, balbuceando y con suma dificultad, de traducir visiones que, se supone, son del orden de lo inefable. Sin embargo, algunas imágenes pastoriles, en las que se complace Dante en varias ocasiones, son de destacar. El viaje se acaba con la visión de la Rosa Celeste, las jerarquías angélicas y el centro infinitamente luminoso de la Trinidad divina, la luz pura y florecida de Empíreo.

Acaba Dante rindiéndose con estas conmovedoras palabras: “ahora es preciso que mi poema desista de seguir cantando la belleza de mi Dama, como hace todo artista que llega al ultimo esfuerzo de su arte.” El esfuerzo también es del lector: aún tardaré algún tiempo en digerir semejante gira celestial…

04/25/22

Well, for the second time, my journey is over. When I first read The Divine Comedy nearly nine years ago, I viewed the great poem primarily as an academic exercise, Dante's effort to collate the sum total of earthly and heavenly knowledge into a single Epic of Existence. Now that I'm closer to the age Dante was when he wrote it (a deeply humbling thought), I can see more clearly how intensely personal this project was for him; how it reflects, at the christening of his personal maturity, Dante's spiritual need to burst free from his own insularity, to find a truer Self than the chimera he had fastened in adolescence and young manhood by rushing out of himself and into everyone else - men, beasts, angels, poets, kings, saints, friends, popes, heroes, and the Holy Trinity. He could no longer live in the ego-self to which he clung with such tenacity in his youth. He had to lose his soul in heaven and hell in order to find it; to reveal himself to himself through the medium of Love, given and received in one immanent and transcendent mystery.

Did he find what he was looking for? Perhaps that answer waits for a later stage of our life's journey.









07/18/2013

Dante's Divine Comedy is one of the classics of western literature for a reason. It represents, in many respects, the intellectual summation of the high middle ages. It is riddled with symbols and allegory, frequent references to classical history and mythology, and sports, particularly in Paradiso, an impressively deep exploration of theological questions and the nature of divinity and divine love. The extent to which contemporary political questions figure prominently in the narrative was surprising to me. Dante holds nothing back in indicting the church for straying from its official mission and for the corruption of its leaders - perhaps most famously in a humorous meeting between Dante and Pope Nicholas III in Hell - as well as the decadence that gripped his native Florence.

There is an unfortunate tendency in American high schools and universities to introduce students to Dante by simply showing them excerpts from Inferno and saying, "look, here's what people in the middle ages thought Hell was like!" In reality, The Divine Comedy is so much more than that. It is, in turns, a theological treatise, a political manifesto, a primer on medieval astronomy and cosmology, and, of course, an epic poem intended to carry on the tradition of Homer and Virgil. It deserves to be read and reread by students of western civilization.

First read more than 50 years ago. A classic contribution to Western Civilization. Dante's introduction of terza rima influenced other great poets of the early Renaissance. However, you shouldn't explore his Hell without a map and a program. The Inferno is populated with many individuals involved in the politics of the time and place, Dante's contemporaries including foes, acquaintances, and a few friends. So you better know your Ghibellines from your Guelphs and your Black Guelphs from your White. Moreover, there are allusions galore to Greek and Roman mythology and history which makes sense, since Virgil acts as the narrator's spiritual and physical guide through the Underworld.

2020 re-read review (B&N Collectible Edition)
Just a few thoughts to add to my previous review:

First of all, it felt more like a period piece this time - so many references to historical figures that I had never heard of which made it hard for me to follow.

Dante’s vision of the hereafter is very imaginative. It’s impressive that so much of this is still a part of today’s culture. I hear references to The Divine Comedy in movies, tv, other books, etc. While I read it this time, I found a Wikipedia list of cultural references in the Divine Comedy. The scope of this is simply amazing.

It takes a lot of time and patience to get through this and there’s no way I could get through it without Cliffsnotes and other guides (Digital Dante website was great, btw).

With all of that said, The Divine Comedy is one of the all time best classics to me - this B&N leather bound collectible version is wondrous throughout.


2018 review (Audiobook from my local library)

Dante Alighieri completed The Divine Comedy in 1320, nearly 700 years ago, and it still holds up today. His depictions throughout the poem are really amazing. The Divine Comedy conveys the story of the poet Dante's theological journey, and for me as a reader it gave a thorough argument for the reasoning behind Christianity and faith in God.

I especially enjoyed Paradiso, where Dante provides his definition of faith "faith is the substance of things hoped for...", and how he was tested on the points of faith, hope, and love by St. Peter, St. James, and St. John, respectively. The imagery and the breadth of Dante's journey is moving and unforgettable.

There were portions where I had trouble following. This version (which I assume is similar to others) had so many "thou's", "didst's", and it seemed like every verb ended in "ith", that it became hard to follow, but my enjoyment of the overall the themes and the florid, beautiful writing outweighed any difficulty I had in comprehending it. I highly recommend this epic classic!

Matt

رحلة العمر...

رحلة ملحمية متخيلة عبر الجحيم والمطهر والفردوس، كتبها أحد أكبر الشعراء العالميين، فأنتج لنا قصة خالدة عن الايمان والحب، تتحدث عن الدين والفلسفة والتعليم والسياسة ومواضيع أخرى، واستحق بقائه على عرش الكتب الخالدة.

ترجمة رائعة لكاظم جهاد.

the afterlife sounds fucking exhausting

El "Infierno" es más verosímil que la vida diaria; el "Purgatorio" aburre como una alusión a la existencia. El "Paraíso" es ilegible e inverosímil, como cualquier alarde de felicidad. La trilogía de Dante es el ejemplo vivo de la incapacidad del hombre de soportar la redención sin aburrimiento y la mayor rehabilitación del diablo concebida alguna vez por un cristiano.

Emil Cioran, Extravíos, Madrid, Hermida Editores, 2018

El purgatorio de Dante sólo puede ascenderse de día, pues durante la noche la voluntad humana se diluye ensombrecida por el brillo de las estrellas, y de su infierno sólo se puede huir trepando por las piernas del diablo, aún a riesgo de sucumbir a sus encantos para siempre. Sólo por esas dos enseñanzas, bien merece la pena seguir los pasos de Virgilio. El paraíso, en cambio, es un lugar bostezable, teórico, excesivamente Ptolomeico, lo que en sí mismo va en detrimento de su posible existencia. Dante se pone a hablarnos de esferas, como si se creyera un Aristóteles renacentista, como si estuviese murmurando en el sueño pesado al que da paso el Loracepam. Bien despierto, ojiplático, refiere el purgatorio y el infierno, y vaya si ambos resultan creíbles y electrizantes; pero en el cielo no cabe más que silencio, conjetura, tedio, pues se encuentra tan sólo en un lugar recóndito de la mente, un lugar hasta donde las ilusiones, por suerte, no lograrán nunca llevarnos del todo. No hay imágenes, nada que pueda tocarse, es un mero cebo cognitivo.

Lo fundamental de esta obra es que después de una larga noche en los tiempos, llamada Edad Media, resurgen la naturaleza y el hombre como protagonistas, y no Dios. Dios está ahí, presente, pero nunca nos habla más que a través de las voces de sus criaturas. Se funden lo pagano y lo ortodoxo y ambos tienen un mismo gran valor, que es el de haber sido ideados por nuestra culpa y nuestra fe, desde el principio; la vida no es más que un purgatorio y cielo e infierno son meras alegorías de la culpa y la esperanza.

Dante asciende en busca de Beatriz y no de Dios, sabiendo eso no queda mucho que decir. Es todo un hereje. Si las virtudes de un clásico son la pervivencia y la universalidad, La divina comedia lo es con mayúsculas. Ningún avance científico ni diferencia religiosa o cultural podrá hacer que dejemos de temer ese drama subterráneo tan creíblemente bosquejado, tan repleto de pasiones irredentas y experiencias horríficas, ni por supuesto, que dejemos de sentir como nuestra esa tierra angosta y escarpada del purgatorio, donde el vértigo de dar el siguiente paso es lo único importante, lo que nos mantiene despiertos; donde parece que si nos detenemos una vez ya no llegaremos nunca. Este es uno de esos libros de los que uno no debería desprenderse jamás; a los que conviene regresar de vez en cuando para encontrarse.