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Like all books that deserve to be called great, Dante's Commedia or The Divine Comedy exists in the imagination past the scope of any one reader. It is an ever-expanding creation, reaching beyond each generation on to the next, endlessly. Why this is cannot be fully explained except by reading the book itself.
Conceived in the first years of the 14th Century by a political exile from the Republic of Florence as a cautionary journey through the three realms of the Catholic afterlife (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise), the Commedia's force does not depend either on the Catholic theology that, interwoven with the mythologies of Greece and Rome, provides the poem's scaffolding, or on the political circumstances that furnish it with flesh-and-blood characters (though as we draw further away from Dante's time, the theological intricacies as well as the historical figures require annotations in order to find our way around the poem's geography).
Although, from the very first line, the poem presents itself as an allegory ("In the middle of the road of life I found myself in a dark wood"), the allegorical tone is quickly dropped and everything, beginning with the wood itself ("wild and rough and mighty"), becomes at once tangible, immediate, real. What Dante feels, we feel: the fear and bewilderment as he is led by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory up to the Earthly Paradise; the pity for the witnessed suffering of the punished souls; the childlike curiosity about those he meets and the need to speak to them as fellow human beings; the impossible, driving, redemptive love for the ever-disappearing Beatrice.
None of this is abstract or vague. When the great Roman poet Virgil explains to Dante that the souls of great men, born before the coming of Christ, are kept away from God's presence in spite of not having sinned, and adds,"I myself am one of them," Dante feels a terrible sorrow and, as if to show that this fate does not demean the author of The Aeneid in his eyes, addresses Virgil as "my lord and master." When Homer and other great poets of antiquity welcome Virgil back, calling him "the highest poet," and then turn to greet Dante as well, Virgil smiles, as if amused that this Florentine upstart should be treated as a member of their august company. When Dante meets one of his ancestors, Cacciaguida, in Paradise and, full of pride in his lineage, addresses him with a formal voi instead of the common tu, Beatrice warningly sniggers at his vanity.
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Even when considering vast metaphysical complexities, Dante manages to convey their abstruse sense with powerfully simple images: a book, a sheet of paper, a wheel. Explaining his vision of the oneness of God's creation, he depicts it as "bound by love in a single volume/All that throughout the universe is scattered." Describing the punishment of thieves who, in the looking-glass universe of sin and retribution, are condemned to losing everything, even their own human form, Dante compares their staggered transformations, in which one shape cannot be distinguished from the next, to "the brownish colour" that "edged on by fire/Across the paper's rim/Though not black as yet is white no more."
And finally, at the very end of his voyage, in some of the most beautiful lines ever written, Dante tells us what it is like to find oneself in the divine presence itself: "Here the highest fantasy lost its power/But already my will and desire were turning/Like a wheel that is gently pushed/By love that moves the sun and the other stars."
Dante called his poem simply the Commedia because it has a happy ending (Dante reaches the presence of God and repents of his sinful life); his readers, two and a half centuries later, granted the book the epithet divina, meaning both "god-inspired" and "of unique excellence."
But the Commedia is divina also in another sense: Its narrative is all-embracing and omniscient. Magically, as Dante leads us through his journey, he is able to divide himself both into the singular and the many, to speak for the lost and questioning poet and also for the hosts of the damned and the saved, to show himself ignorant of the truth and to lend voice to the wise souls to whom enlightenment has been granted.
Magically, too, as he advances in his chronicle, Dante seems increasingly aware of his own gifts, and that "Minerva blows my sails, Apollo steers me" toward the all-embracing vision. Astonishingly, the reader agrees. Out of mere words, Dante was able to build a universe in which everything, past, present and future, has for us, his fellow travellers, its poetic mirror.
Alberto Manguel's 2007 Massey Lectures have been collected in the book "The City of Words."
