By Dante Alighieri
Discussion Prompt by Isaac Fox
Midway upon the path that makes for us a life / I found myself in the midst of a dark wood. / Yes. The true way was lost.1
So begins the pilgrim Dante’s journey down through the paths of Inferno. But so, too, begins our own. The journey of the Comedy is, as it were, in medias res: in the midst of things. We too are those who find ourselves in the midst of life. And, like the pilgrim, it is so often in the course of things that we suddenly find ourselves far from God and the true way that leads to happiness.
Dante’s famous inscription above the gate of Hell resonates with us for a variety of reasons. For many who were forced to read Inferno when we were young, the words “abandon all hope ye who enter here,” likely served less to foreshadow Dante’s journey than as a message of woe to his would-be readers. Of course, we can sympathize with those who find the poem a treacherous climb; as Dorothy Sayers quipped, “fourteen thousand lines are fourteen thousand lines, especially if they are full of Guelfs and Ghibellines and Thomas Aquinas.”2
There is much in Dante that is undoubtedly bewildering to us. We do not, after all, breathe the air of late-Medieval Florence. Yet it does not bewilder because it was written for a more enlightened sort of person: some sort of elite literati spending their days cowled in their cloisters, contending with Popes and Emperors. Dante’s Comedy wasn’t written in the learned Latin of the schools, but the “vulgar” language of the Italian people.3 It was written for all sorts. And it was written for all because, according to the theological world he inhabited (Franciscan, Thomistic, and Augustinian) all are made by the Lord—and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. Like Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Comedy is an extended meditation on Scripture.
Indeed, the poem as a whole takes as its departure the prophetic words of Isaiah 38:
“I said, In the middle of my days I must depart; I am consigned to the gates of Sheol for the rest of my years. . . . For Sheol does not thank you; death does not praise you, those who go down to the pit do not hope for your faithfulness.” (Isaiah 38:10, 18).
Yet, the goal of the poem—so often lost to its readers because the journey of the Comedy is treacherous—is not merely to leave the torments of Hell, but to pass through Hell so that we might be willing and ready to ascend the mountain of the Lord (Ps. 24:3–5), ultimately to dwell in the house of the Lord forever (Isaiah 38:20, Ps. 23:6). For it is this mountain which Dante longs to ascend at the outset of the poem (Inferno I.16). Only he who has clean hands and a pure heart may ascend the mount of purgatory and appear before the face of God in heaven—drawn by that Love which moves the sun and other stars” (Paradiso XXXIII.145).
Dante wants us to abandon false hope in order that we might find it—to see how sin distorts the glory of our humanity in order that we might recover it. The way up is the way down. And, so, we must reckon with the hardness of our hearts before they can be softened.
Awake! Approach now—to the gates of Hell:
Abandon every hope O ye who enter here!
- Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are taken from the Jason M. Baxter translation of Inferno.
- Dorothy L. Sayers, Further papers on Dante (New York NY: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1957), 1.
- This, among many reasons, is why later 16th c. Protestants of the English and German Reformations placed Dante among the likes of other vernacular translators like Wycliffe and Luther.
