When I was younger, Mom once retrieved an old, chunky copy of The Divine Comedy from the bookshelf. It was one of those “classics” which many have heard of but not everyone has read. At the time, my family fell into the category that hadn’t yet read the poem. So, Mom fancied reading it.
As she read the first few pages aloud, I quickly became unsettled at the scenery surrounding the narrator and the damned found in Inferno, the first of three installments to the Comedy. Amid the shrieks and sighs, some of the first condemned souls described in the poem stand naked, relentlessly stung by bees and hornets, blood streaming down their bodies. Kind of a grim picture to take in.
In later years, however, once I read the Comedy in its entirety and from the perspective of a man striving to live well his Catholic faith, I found this poem (over 700 years old) to be vibrant and vivifying and visceral – in the sense that it shows the dark side of human nature and its consequences as well as the brilliant lucidity and grace showered on us by God.
As with any great story that contains an ounce of verity, Dante Alighieri’s Comedia is a story of redemption. It is a fantastic story that taps into that Redemption that was purchased for us by the blood of Jesus Christ. And it weaves itself into and around that same story of salvation.
If you haven’t read The Divine Comedy, I’d recommend it. It’s a poem and an epic, the merits of which are acknowledged both by the faithful and secular critics. It’s also a trove of philosophical wisdom and of fictional encounters with some of Western literature’s oldest heroes – some terrible, others amusing.
All epics must have an equally epic beginning. When we see “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” we know we’re in for a title crawl at the opening of a Star Wars film. In writing his children’s book, J.R.R. Tolkien began: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” and most modern readers, in hearing that one line, can identify the eponymous novel from which it comes.
Likewise, Dante began his story with a significant statement:
Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.
How hard it is to tell what it was like,
this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),
a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it
I must talk about things other than the good.1
Why are the foregoing stanzas so powerful? For several reasons. Dante doesn’t want his work to merely relate to you; he seeks to include you in it. We find ourselves on a quest with him – midway along the journey of our life – striving daily to discover the straight path and follow it to journey’s end.
By this inclusion, the poet pricks his reader’s conscience, reminding us that we are sojourners equal in dignity and that all of us are fallen in nature. This means each of us is called to conversion, to take those steps necessary for living selflessly, to embark on a journey whose end is perhaps unknown but, when taken in faith, promises Paradise and peace.
From his introduction, Dante includes himself as one who has gone astray; he is counted among the lost sheep. He is in need of rescuing. Through various messengers, ultimately instruments of God’s Will, he is aided on his trek through Hell, Purgatory, and beyond…to Heaven to gaze upon God. There he would also see Beatrice, the woman of his dreams and the object of his love. It’s the heavenly intercession of Beatrice that comes to the poet’s aid, helping him almost every step of the way.
Dante’s travels in the life of the hereafter illustrate several aspects of the spiritual life. One is the fact that it takes commitment and work. Another is that to attain the ultimate good, which is intimacy with God and the revelation of who we are in His loving plan (both to be realized fully in Paradise), we must first undergo things other than the good. In other words, God can turn great sin and disobedience, every sorrow and evil, into even greater joy. Such is the tale of The Divine Comedy. It does not end in the starless voids and fears of Hell but in the resplendence of God and His saints who rest in Him.
While Heaven is the goal, in the meantime, Dante has his hands full. He’s not going on an ordinary adventure. He must pass demons, face fears, and suffer pains and humiliations. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that one of the chief sins Dante struggles with is lust. One of the seven deadly sins, lust is a vice that was seared into human nature through the Fall and which today is regularly aroused if not often praised in secular culture.
Dante’s struggles are akin to our struggles, just as his life is caught up with our life. The narrator’s first brush with the issue of lust comes in the Second Circle of Hell, recounted in Canto V in Inferno. This is the place designated for the lustful. Here he meets a couple who were condemned by their lust for each other: Francesca and Paolo. Some scholars refer to the dialogue which ensues as the most famous scene in all the Inferno.
In the circle of the lustful, Dante’s guide – the pagan poet Virgil – points out to him some of history’s famed romantics such as Helen, Achilles, Paris, and “Cleopatra, who loved men’s lusting.” Then he comes upon Francesca and her partner whom she will not mention by name (this is Paolo), a man of bitter weeping whom she appears to loathe. Francesca’s personality is typically analyzed as trying to manipulate Dante, attempting to win him over to her side with remorse for her judgment. As she relates to the Pilgrim:
Love, quick to kindle in the gentle heart,
seized this one for the beauty of my body,
torn from me, (How it happened still offends me!)
Love, that excuses no one loved from loving,
seized me so strongly with delight in him
that, as you see, he never leaves my side.2
Francesca’s point is that her emotions – her desire – carried her away; she had relatively little choice in the matter. When “love” beckons, one must follow its inclinations. In so many words, the woman is proselytizing a romanticization of eros to the point of sensuality – a desire more so for sexual delight than the delight of the other’s presence. In fact, the presence of her significant other in the circle of the lustful is part of the retribution for her sin. She doesn’t delight in Paolo’s presence anymore because the only aspect that held their relationship together on Earth – sexual gratification – has no place in Hell. Part of their mutual damnation is their togetherness, an eternal reminder to one another of their lust and their poor life choices.
Francesca doesn’t stop there but reveals more of her tale of woe and self-pity. At a certain point, Dante the Pilgrim is so overwhelmed by sorrow and sympathy at this revelation, that he swoons and falls unconscious. Why? We can make several assumptions, but the two provided here suggest something about Dante’s character.
First, we could assume that it’s sheer sympathy that knocks him out cold. If so, however, this means there’s a reason Dante would sympathize with Francesca and Paolo. Perhaps, it’s because he too suffers from the sin of lust. Second, we could assume that his empathy manifests itself as pity for the lustful couple and that this further morphs into self-pity. Self-pity and fear of the punishment that might await him in eternity if he does not break lustful habits. Taken in hand with later developments in the Comedy, it would make sense that this foreshadows Dante’s struggle with lust.
Further along on our journey, we witness Dante confront the lustful of Purgatory who make up the occupants of the last of the seven terraces in the ascent toward Heaven. Here the Pilgrim is brought to an impasse. He can only go on if he permits himself to be cleansed by fire and (later) by water. The flames instill dread in Dante’s heart, and he avoids it because of the pain he must endure. Yet, this is how any soul will get to Heaven, that is, through God’s cleaning it. Like the others on the terrace of the lustful, it appears Dante himself – who is no shade but a man of flesh and blood – has to be cleansed of this specific vice. Passing through a wall of fire, he continues upward.
Soon he meets Beatrice his beloved, who shall guide him on the rest of the journey. At first he is glad, but he quickly finds himself the target of Beatrice’s upbraiding. She reproaches the poet’s predominant fixation on her bodily form, whereas he should have been more attentive to her spirit and to heavenly things besides:
You never saw in Nature or in Art
a beauty like the beauty of my form,
which clothed me once and now is turned to dust;
and if that perfect beauty disappeared
when I departed from the world, how could
another mortal object lure your love?
When you first felt deception’s arrow sting,
you should have rushed to rise and follow me,
as soon as I lost my deceptive flesh.
No pretty girl or any other brief
attraction should have weighed down your wings,
and left you waiting for another blow.3
Finally, being reconciled after showing remorse for his past actions and being cleansed by water, Dante accompanies Beatrice into Heaven. Dante has traveled through the whole spectrum of potential for the human person and for creation: from the most heinous and wretched in the circles of Hell, to those who, in glorified form, praise God unceasingly in Paradise.
Dante had to be cleansed of his sins, particularly those of a lustful nature, before he could come into intimate communion with God. This is true not only of our final destination but also as regards our reception of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist during our earthly pilgrimage. In short, before eternity takes us, we have manifold opportunities for conversion. To change our ways with God’s grace, to avoid sin and turn away from it, is what God wants from us.
Once Dante attains Heaven, he sees a number of saints: apostles of old and the founders of religious orders among them. There is also a significant portion of the third and final volume, Paradise, in which the Pilgrim is instructed by St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writings influenced Dante quite a bit in real life.
Aquinas’ theology and philosophy are often discussed, so much so that the biographical and miraculous details of the saint’s life are often neglected. The “Dumb Ox,” whose body of work was well regarded by Dante, suffered in his early days with temptation to lust.
Upon entering the Dominican Order, Thomas was met with backlash from his family. His brothers subjected him to harsh antics to dissuade him from his religious vocation. These culminated in imprisoning their own sibling and then, as a last resort, they put a seductress in his chamber hoping it would make him break his vow of chastity. But quite the opposite happened. In a rush of inspired virtue, Thomas clutched a lighted stick from the fire and with it forced the woman out of his room.
Thomas Aquinas abruptly followed this with a prayer for deliverance, specifically from the temptation to lust. According to tradition, angels – perhaps not unlike Dante’s Angel of Chastity from Purgatory – came and wrapped around the saint’s waist a cord of chastity. From that day on, Thomas Aquinas no longer suffered from sins or temptations of lust.
In recent months, I’ve had the pleasure of joining the Angelic Warfare Confraternity, a group based around a devotion inspired by the cord gifted to Aquinas. Whether you or someone you know struggles with lust, our parish priest said, it is a powerful devotion, the graces of which you can offer for yourself or offer for someone else. The Confraternity highlights this inspiring story of St. Thomas, focuses on daily prayers for purity, and requires that we too don a sign of victory over lust. Most moderns, however, don’t wear the cord but a holy medal instead.
Dante’s fictitious journey through the afterlife suggests something that was embodied in the miraculous life of Thomas Aquinas: that lust is a temptation that, with God’s grace, we can avoid here on Earth before we reach Heaven. Unlike the others in Purgatory, the Pilgrim possesses a corporeal existence during his travels. He feels the flames upon his flesh, and not in his soul only, as he passes through the wall of purifying fire. This suggests that through God’s action, men and women before death can be purified of their sins and strengthened by grace. We receive just such gifts when we go to Confession and partake of the other grace-filled Sacraments. Similarly, via divine intervention, Thomas was gifted the cord of chastity, thereby being freed from even the temptation to lust.
As human beings, our sexuality is something inherent to who we are. It is a beautiful thing, but it can be harmful when misused or abused. We warp sexuality when we think that our most valuable attribute is sex appeal; we’re selling ourselves short. We forget the presence of the soul, which animates the body and makes each person uniquely themselves, full of life and the potential for love.
We also warp our sexuality when we perceive relationships through the lens of self-gratification (entailing lust, or at least love of use) rather than through charity, through self-abandonment for the sake of the other’s wellbeing. But, as Beatrice alludes to in speaking with the Pilgrim in Purgatory, one does a great disservice when he reduces someone to their body alone, neglecting the everlasting dignity of their soul.
In our modern world, a place where an increasingly prurient culture reveals itself, Dante’s Divine Comedy offers a refreshing perspective on the vice of lust and its opposite, the virtue of chastity – which leads to pure and genuine love. This great poem gives us examples of those who struggle with sexual sins, varying from Francesca to Dante himself, showing us that it impacts men and women alike. But the Comedy also shows us something better; it shows us that fearless love conquers selfish lust. In this fashion, Dante shows us some things that aren’t good at all in order to direct us to that greatest Good: He Who is “the Love that moves the sun” and all the luminosities of Heaven.
1Dante Alighieri, Canto I, The Divine Comedy – Volume 1: Inferno (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 67.
2Dante Alighieri, Canto V, The Divine Comedy – Volume 1: Inferno (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 112.
3Dante Alighieri, Canto XXXI, The Divine Comedy – Volume 2: Purgatory (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 331-332.
John Tuttle
John Tuttle is a Catholic journalist, blogger, and photographer. He has written for Prehistoric Times, Culture Wars Magazine, Those Catholic Men, Catholic Insight, Inside Over, Ancient Origins, Love They Nerd, We Got This Covered, Cultured Vultures, and elsewhere. He can be reached at jptuttleb9@gmail.com.