Dante and Beatrice emerge from the earth’s shadow into a new clarity and brightness in the heaven of the Sun. This is the light by which the wise know God. The poet invites us to join him in celebrating the order we see in the created world, which gives a direct taste of its Creator: […]
‘Brexit’: a word which inspires irrational passion in some, and sadness and loathing in so many of others. “Brexit means Brexit” – really? What is its etymology, its origin? The very word ‘Brexit’ is nothing more than a corny ‘portmanteau’ word, a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined to make a new […]
The souls in the heaven of Venus enjoy spiritual telepathy – wordless communication made possible by their participation in each other’s minds through the all-knowing mind of God. Dante invents new verb forms to convey their ecstatic mingling of identities. Venus is the third and last heaven on which the earth casts a shadow. Here […]
Dante begins Paradiso 2 with a challenge to his readers: This is a parting of the ways, a separation of sheep from goats. The poet divides those who have read him thus far into two groups – “ordinary” readers, whose motivation is worldly curiosity, and readers with a deeper, divinely inspired thirst for knowledge – […]
Here’s how Dante begins his Paradiso – not with himself, as in his previous two canticas, but with God: This third and final phase of Dante’s journey begins in the relative world – the world of more or less, of hierarchy, of the many not the One, of the universe as a separate physical entity. […]
Two streams from the same source flow through the verdant earthly paradise. Dante must get a dunking in both of them before he is ready to ascend to the stars. After his evisceration at the hands of Beatrice, Matilda brings Dante to Lethe, the stream of forgetfulness, which purges him of all his shameful memories: […]
It’s the moment Dante’s been waiting for! He is to meet Beatrice again, after more than 20 years of separation. We might expect a joyous reunion, but that’s not at all what we get. We left Dante relaxing amidst the grass, flowers and trees of the earthly paradise, beside the stream of Lethe. A woman, […]
Reason can only take you so far. At the summit of purgatory Virgil reaches the limits of his knowledge. His task done, he crowns Dante master of himself, ushers him into the earthly paradise and turns for home in limbo. The wall of fire that purges the soul of lust is the final barrier before […]
Bird similes abound throughout the Comedy. I find this one, in which Dante compares himself to a fledgling stork, delightful: Ostensibly, Dante is making a play for our sympathy here by presenting himself as young and eager for knowledge, yet hesitant to ask a question, doubtless out of reverence for the older and wiser Virgil. […]
Except for the good pagan poets found in limbo, Dante places all the poets in his Comedy among the saved, most of them high on the slopes of purgatory. Poets have a high calling in life and this is reflected in their fate after death. Dante is keenly aware of the poet’s mission as prophet: […]
Virgil’s great exposition on love is centrally placed in the Comedy, occupying Cantos 17 and 18 of Purgatorio. With this, Dante signals that love, and the understanding of love, are at the heart of his poetic matter. Doctrinally, the ideas Dante attributes to Virgil are standard-issue medieval philosophy, derived from the teachings of Aristotle and […]
Life’s not a zero-sum game, say the souls on the Terrace of Envy, so don’t live it that way. Dante doesn’t ‘get it’ at first, but Virgil explains. We have just met Guido del Duca, scion of one of the leading families of Romagna, the region next-door to Tuscany, where Dante comes from. Like all […]
The Divine Comedy is primarily a vision. It is the story of how one man, through grace, becomes pure in heart and hence able to see God. During his first night on the mountain, Dante’s damaged inner sight is cleansed and healed in preparation for the work of penitence that awaits him in purgatory proper. […]
Like the penitent souls, the poets cannot climb once the sun has gone down and so must halt for the night. The twilight hour draws from Dante some of his loveliest lines: These lines are recalled every evening at the tomb of Dante in Ravenna, where the bell of the nearby church chimes 13 times […]
The first canto of Purgatorio celebrates our release from the pain and grief of hell. Virgil washes Dante’s face in the morning dew. Dante begins by announcing the change of mood: Boats and ships feature strongly in the Comedy, as symbols of the soul’s journey towards the divine. Here Dante is at the helm, his […]
We are out of hell, but still close to the centre of the earth and it is still dark. Through the blackness, Dante can hear the trickling of a stream: The hidden passage that connects Inferno and Purgatorio is one of Dante’s masterstrokes, entirely his own invention. It conveys the idea that there is, after […]
In the final canto of the Inferno Dante must confront Satan, where he lies trapped in ice at the centre of the material world and the universe. The deepest part of hell, the ninth circle, is Cocytus, a frozen lake shrouded in thick fog and blasted by icy winds. It is fitting that this place […]
Ulysses is the greatest of the Inferno’s tragic heroes. Dante’s invented story of his last voyage is about leaders who lie. We are among the false councillors, in the eighth ditch of the Malebolge in Circle 8, the first circle of the fraudulent, close to the lowest depths of hell. These gifted people, often […]
There are moments in the Comedy when Dante burns with righteous anger. One of them is his encounter with the simoniac popes. Strictly defined, simony is the buying or selling of spiritual gifts, offices or artefacts. A form of corruption, it’s named after Simon Magus, a first-century sorcerer who is said to have asked the […]
In any sane context the car crash that is Conservative education policy would be enough to bring down a government by itself. The schools bill before Parliament has been so savaged in the House of Lords that ministers have stripped out 18 of the key clauses, leaving it bereft of its original purpose, yet doing […]
On burning sands, under a soft rain of flames, Dante meets his former mentor, Brunetto Latini. His “sin” is homosexuality, according to the dictates of formal religion. But what does Dante think? We are in the circle of the violent against God, nature and art. The naked souls here, whose baked features are caked with […]
The government’s trashing of arts education will do great harm to the UK’s ‘soft power’. But as Tom Scott explains, the damage will go deeper than that. A few days ago, I was at a meeting of University and College Union (UCU) delegates from around the country. Hearing from other delegates about the swathe of […]
Suicide is the ultimate form of self-harm. In Inferno 13, Dante invents a new language of pain and despair to evoke the tortured minds of those who choose this ending. At the start of the canto we return to the landscape of the poem’s prologue, finding ourselves, again, in a pathless wood – not coincidentally, […]
It was probably due to World War Two and the British servicemen returning from Italy that interest in Italian food began to take off in the UK… as immortalised by Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers. As regards pasta, in the 1950s one had to shop at International Stores or J Sainsbury to buy macaroni and […]
Among the carnal sinners in the second circle of hell, we meet Paolo and Francesca. Of all the stories in the Inferno, theirs is perhaps the one that most invites our empathy: the seventh of Simon Chater’s dips into Dante. Dante’s scene-setting is a powerful example of contrapasso – the idea that the punishment should […]
In this latest dip into Dante, Simon Chater introduces us to the neutrals and explains why there is indeed a special place in hell for the apathetic. No sooner are the poets through the gate than the full force of hell hits Dante: I so admire this passage! In a few deft strokes Dante evokes […]
“Carrero Blanco was blown up two streets away,” Isabel, my señora, mentioned casually on a chilly Madrid afternoon in December 1983 as we sat in her luxurious flat on Calle Hermosilla. “Have you heard of him? Ten years ago today, ETA blew up his car in Claudio Coello and it flew right over a church. […]
Led by Virgil, Dante sets out on his journey. At the entrance to hell he sees these words inscribed over a dark gateway: The famous line here is the last, wryly quoted today in many a workplace and home. The absence of hope is the defining feature of hell, as anyone stuck in a dead-end […]
The pandemic The ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ (TEFL) sector has for decades played a vibrant cultural and economic role across the UK, not just in the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) area. The spring and, especially, the summer seasons, used to see large numbers of foreign students arrive to study English, make new […]
Cultural osmosis For many decades, visits, homestays and courses abroad in the country of the ‘target language’ have been considered essential to the study of a foreign language, both for UK young people going abroad and for young EU nationals coming to the UK. Indeed, this is nothing new: human beings have always travelled, mixed […]