Dante Alighieri

(1265–1321)



The greatest medieval Italian poet, whose imagery sometimes seems to imply knowledge that was not available in his time.
Dante was a native of Florence but spent much of his life in exile. He composed his principal work, the Divine Comedy (Divine was not part of his own title), early in the fourteenth century. It takes the form of a first-person narrative in three sections, Inferno, Purgatorio,
and Paradiso—Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The poet imagines himself traveling through these three realms of the afterlife, guided first by Virgil, the Roman poet who describes Aeneas’s visit to the Underworld, and later by Beatrice Portinari, whom he once adored and idealized and who is now dead and glorified in Heaven.
In the course of the poem, Dante makes coded political predictions about events in Italy, which are now mainly of academic interest. He praises Joachim of Fiore but does not show how far he agrees with Joachim’s visions of the future. More notable from a prophetic point of view is his handling of certain issues raised by Christian tradition.
The Comedy can be read in several ways—as an allegory of spiritual progress, for instance—but it has a straightforward narrative sense, though it is doubtless not meant to be taken too literally. Dante fits the three realms into the medieval framework of the universe, according to contemporary geography and pre-Copernican astronomy. Earth, as he conceives it, is a sphere (the notion that everybody before Columbus thought it was flat is quite untrue). The known continental masses—Europe, most of Asia, part of Africa—are clustered together in a land hemisphere, with Jerusalem at the center. Earth’s other half is covered by sea, its only land being an island at its own center, the antipodes of Jerusalem, with an immense mountain on it. Rotating around Earth are concentric transparent spheres bearing the planets and stars. This system of subheavens, as they might be called, is millions of miles in diameter. Beyond and in no definable relationship to it, Dante imagines the true Heaven of God and the angels and saints.
At the beginning of the Comedy, he descends with Virgil into a huge, funnel-shaped hollow, which is Hell. After many experiences, the poets pass Earth’s center and return to the surface on the opposite side. They are on the antipodean island near the foot of the mountain, which they climb. Dante’s heavenward ascent begins at the summit, in the company of Beatrice. He soars through the celestial subheavens, in each of them encountering blessed souls for whom that sphere is appropriate, though all have their eternal home in the true Heaven beyond. Finally, he enters this, and is granted a momentary vision of God.
Dante stands alone in presenting a spiritual pilgrimage in terms of a journey through the medieval cosmos. No author had done it before. However, the novelty is greater in some respects than in others. Once the poet had hit on the main idea, the logic was fairly obvious, up to a point. Traditionally, Hell was “down,” so it had to be inside the Earth. Heaven was “above”; Christ ascended to it. That, however, was not the whole story. The Church recognized a transitional region, Purgatory, and Dante had little to guide him in fixing a location for this. What he actually did with it was entirely original and remains puzzling.
Purgatory was the abode of the souls of the dead who were destined for Heaven but not yet ready for it. They carried a load of sin and error and perhaps had only repented at the last moment. Therefore, they had to undergo a process of purifying before they could enter into bliss. Unofficial speculation sometimes made Purgatory virtually a department of Hell, with punishments that were different only because they would end, like a prison sentence. That notion lingers in the grim speech of the Ghost in Hamlet, even after the rejection of Purgatory by Protestantism.
Dante takes a brighter view. If Purgatory is a bridge between Earth and Heaven, and its occupants are on their way even through penitential suffering, it ought to be a happy place. And so he makes it. He places it on the antipodean island at the center of his sea hemisphere; it is none other than the colossal mountain that rises above the island, into the sunshine and tranquility of the upper atmosphere. The Mount is septenary, having

seven terraces encircling it at different levels, with connecting stairways. Each terrace has a presiding angel and corresponds to one of the principal sins—pride, envy, and so forth. Souls bearing the stain of these sins live on the terraces assigned, where they endure cleansing pain and endure it gladly as they progress toward release. Dante and Virgil climb from level to level, conversing with the inhabitants. At the top, surprisingly, is the Earthly Paradise where Adam and Eve first dwelled—in biblical terms, the Garden of Eden. From here, Dante’s ascent with Beatrice through the celestial subheavens takes him into a world of dazzling light, where the blessed souls meet him.
His Mount Purgatory is unique in literature. So is his location of the Earthly Paradise at the summit. Christians before him had speculated about it and reached no conclusion. The Bible speaks of “a garden in Eden in the east” and of “the garden of God” on “the holy mountain of God.” It was agreed to be high up, partly because, according to Genesis, four great rivers flowed from it over distances of thousands of miles, but no one knew where it was: perhaps in a remote part of Asia, cut off by natural barriers. Dante’s conception of it, his placing it on a mountain at the antipodes of Jerusalem, his identification of the mountain with Purgatory, and his upward celestial linkage—all this is not only original but, what is more remarkable in a committedly Christian author, antiscriptural.
The Earthly Paradise on top of the mount is not “a garden in Eden in the east.” It is a woodland, and it is not in Eden because there is no Eden, no country around it. Nor is it in the east: the mount’s location on the spherical Earth makes it westward as much as eastward. The rivers mentioned in Genesis could not flow from his Paradise because they could not cross the sea, and Dante does not explain how Adam and Eve could have done it either, to make their way to the Middle East and people it with their descendants.
He judges that he can express what he wants like this much better than he could by using biblical imagery, and that is fair enough. But the break with Scripture and tradition is so defiant as to hint that there may have been a prototype, something relevant and vivid thrusting its way into Dante’s mind. Commentators have offered guesses about mountains that figure in Islamic legends, but none of these are adequate models, and Dante’s hostility to Islam makes a Muslim influence unlikely even if he was aware of the legends.
Nevertheless, a prototype exists. The problem is not to find it, but to resolve the paradox of Dante’s apparently knowing of it, when the first Europeans who did know of it lived centuries later. Although this is not exactly prophecy, it is akin. The prototype is a mountain that figures in Hindu mythology and in Buddhist derivatives. The Hindu name is Meru; the Buddhist is Sumeru.
Meru is at Earth’s center: admittedly, the center of a disk-Earth, but it is central as Mount Purgatory is central. It is incalculably high. In one way or another (accounts vary), it is septenary like Mount Purgatory: it has seven faces or levels or is on an island surrounded by seven concentric rings of land and water. It has encircling terraces like Mount Purgatory, one above another, and it is paradisal like Mount Purgatory. Divine and semidivine beings frequent it, like Dante’s angels. On it are “the gardens of the gods” and beautiful woods, and the summit is a dwelling place and assembly place of deities. Meru is associated with a purifying spiritual ascent, not only into a happy region on its heights but into the heavens beyond. Above, where the holiest and most perfected of humans go, the Supreme Being Vishnu has his abode, in light so intense that the gods themselves are dazzled.
So far as Meru has any geography, it is in a remote north beyond the Himalayas. A legendary king, on a final pilgrimage with his wife and brothers, comes within sight of the mountain, but they die without reaching it.

Since the real Meru or Sumeru is beyond mortal access, temple builders have made models or representations of it, focusing a little of its numinousness. The most interesting in relation to Dante, heightening the paradox of his apparent knowledge, is Borobudur in Java, a Buddhist pyramid dating from about a.d. 800.
Borobudur has terraces going all round it, one above another. The walls alongside some of these are full of sculptured reliefs, more than 1,400 in all, illustrating stories from Buddhist tradition. Those on the lower levels have themes of evil and warning. Above are scenes of greater and greater good. A complete pilgrimage is an ascent from material to spiritual being. The pilgrim walks all around, meditating on the reliefs, then climbs a stairway to the next level, and so on upward. After seven circuits, two more correspond to the mountain’s summit paradise. The apex of the structure is a huge bell-shaped stupa, or shrine, representing the goal of the quest, nirvana, or liberation.
To all appearances, Dante’s Mount Purgatory is a Christianization of the mythical Asian mountain, using hints from its analogue at Borobudur. He has echoes even in details. As the Indian travelers die within sight of an unreachable Meru, so, in the Inferno, Dante portrays Ulysses undertaking a last voyage that brings him within sight of the mount, but his ship sinks before he reaches it. The poet imagines himself not only climbing stairs from terrace to terrace but seeing bas-reliefs of biblical and legendary subjects for moral reflection. The ascent, as at Borobudur and mythically on Meru, is a spiritual progress, and it culminates in a paradisal realm at the top. The celestial region above could—if one cared to press the point—be a Christian elaboration of Vishnu’s dwelling place above Meru. As the gods are dazzled by the light, so Dante is when he ascends toward his own Supreme Being.
There is no reason why Dante should not have adopted and adapted the Asian mountain and derived some of the plan of Purgatory from its model at Borobudur… given the knowledge. If there were a book that could have supplied him with information on these topics, modern commentators would certainly acknowledge it as a major source, the inspiration of his extraordinary break with Scripture and tradition. The difficulty is that no such book existed or could have existed. Medieval Europeans knew little of India and nothing of its mythology. The Hindu sacred texts were in Sanskrit, a language undiscovered and untranslated. Western acquaintance with the culture of India did not seriously begin until long after Dante. Travelers’ tales of Java could have reached him, but Borobudur would not have figured in them. Not very long after it was built, it fell into disuse and decay and became overgrown with vegetation. The advance of Islam through Indonesia extinguished it as a Buddhist monument. It was rediscovered at last in poor condition and was not studied or restored until recent years.
Hence, while Dante is not exactly prophesying, he seems to be doing something like it. On the one hand, it looks as if he was aware of these things, even in some detail. On the other, there is no way he could have been in the normal course of events. It is as if some kind of transtemporal contact occurred, by which knowledge in the mind of a person centuries after him—let us say, an orientalist—entered his own. By itself, the paradox might be dismissed as a curiosity. But another great Christian poet, John Milton, breaks with Scripture and tradition more radically than Dante does and, in doing so, gives the same appearance of tapping knowledge nonexistent in Europe until centuries later.