>Writes about himself visiting hell>Curiously, all the people he hates and his politcal rivals are in hell>Writes that Plato and Aristotle, people the founders of western thought are amazed and honored to see him and are like "Wow! The amazing Dante I can't believe its you">Aristotle (appearing from the smoke): “Truly, Dante, you are wise beyond all philosophers.”Dante (hands on hips): “Yes, yes, I know. But why are you here, Aristotle?”>Basically standing there wtth his hands on his hips like "Yes its me, hello. Now Why are you here?" x 50 and dishes out judgementThis retard is fucking hilarious
>>24739247Yes?It's supposed to be a comedy.
>>24739338Kek /lit/ is the gift that keeps on giving
Based autist.
>>24739247>Another Dante thread by someone who didn't read the poem and doesn't even know what the contents of the latter 2/3rds of the poem are.At least get basic facts straight. Dante meets more friends and then rivals. Some "rivals" are from rival factions but not contemporaries with Dante and don't have anything to do with him personally (e.g., Farinata, while the other person Dante encounters with the heretics is a friend of a close friend of Dante's). Dante meets his big literary hero, etc. He also meets political enemies among the saved all the time. The whole point of the Inferno is that Dante the Pilgrim is deeply flawed and that the view of God and the cosmos we get it that of the damned.By the time we leave the Shadow of the Earth in the Paradise of the Sun (Wisdom) rivals in life are seated next to one another in perfect harmony and Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas describe their respective orders' founders (Saints Francis and Dominic) with perfect courtesy and piety.Dante just mentions Aristotle. The people who flatter him by letting him stand with them are the poets. But to treat Limbo like a fan service tour actually totally misses the point. The damnation of the virtuous Pagans (and Muslims) is a huge part of Dante's overall point he is making with Virgil (natural wisdom and the Pagan traditions) and his ability to lead Dante to the Earthly Paradise (utopia, but human utopia) but no further. It is a place where the Good is recognized and striven for but never reached, and so a place of "untormented grief." Virgil vanishing from the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is a commentary on Virgil's philosophy itself, because Virgil (with Aeneas going up through the Ivory Gate in Book 6, killing Turnus in thymotic rage at the end of the poem) thinks man can, at best, enter an endless cycle of Inferno and Purgatory. He lacks hope. That's why he and the others are damned. It isn't arbitrary. It seems arbitrary early on because the view of God you get in the Inferno is the view of the damned. But there are saved Pagans later. Dante pointedly puts on of Virgil's pious characters in Paradise to contrast with the poet himself.Also, Dante lived in a time of continual war. Would you expect a book written in Syria today to not focus on war? He was under threat of being burnt alive when he wrote the Commedia and never got to see his kids again after he was put under execution orders unfairly midway through his life and lived in an at time grueling exile.
>>24739350*Is a father of a close friend of Dante's. The whole point there is that the father, an Epicurean, only cares about his son's Earthly life, even though he is in an excellent position to know that death is the best thing that can happen to one... if only they are reconciled to God.Dante cycles through the same topics at higher and higher levels of understanding in the poem, which mimics the spiral pattern he travels in the whole poem. To look at the Pilgrim in the Inferno as "Dante" is to mistake the poets' image of confusion and damnation his character.
>>24739350>taking my shitopost this seriously
>>24739356Dante wasn't just supposed to be burnt alive after the coup, he was within sight of the city when an ally happened to see him and tell him to run away, and he managed to escape detection as the other faction was cleaning up its rivals. They threw the coup while Dante, a senior official, was out negotiating a settlement. He had a very successful political career up to that point and lost it all, along with his friends getting murdered and dispossessed, etc. It's pretty much historical accident that he wasn't publicly tortured and killed instead of writing the poem. So when he wants to write about factionalism, he has good reason.
>>24739350Well said. Reading posts like this make me want to reread the Comedy.
>>24739350Are there any virtuous heretics in the Commedia? Muslims weren't considered to be the adherents of a separate religion at the time but rather were thought of as the followers of a bizarre christian heresy.
>>24739362>It's pretty much historical accident that he wasn't publicly tortured and killed instead of writing the poem.Or divine intervention. That seems to be how he eventually took it. He ceased to be a part of the clique hoping to retake the city by his early 40s and spent the next 30+ years in the spiritual life and becoming one of the most learned men in Europe to perfect his poem.Dante is normally seen as first and foremost a poet for obvious reasons, and because his philosophy is often seen as a derivative synthesis of his sources (Saint Thomas, Saint Augustine, Avicenna, Aristotle, etc.). This is mostly true for his general outlook but it misses that he truly is original on his philosophy of history and avoids deflating our current epoch into a sort of cosmic waiting period for the Judgement. From the Inferno to the end of the Purgatorio we get a view of the *potential* of human history that would foreshadow Kant and Hegel. But Dante doesn't end here and write a "Human Comedy" because he:A. Sees that man is free, and so free to fail. History is not an inevitable march towards providential utopia. B. Historical progress and struggle is infinitely worth striving for because it is ordered to an infinite good, and because man is truly free he is truly free to life others up or tear them down.In a way, he leap frogs Hegel to Solovyov. History is a threshing floor where the good is sewn alongside the bad and the two are proved out.This is why Dante can keep respecting human particularity right up to the climax of the poem, keeping history in focus, whereas similar works like the Conference of the Birds tend to flatten out the redeemed soul in the annihilation of union. By contrast, the engine of Dante's whole story involves man, with God working through the Blessed Virgin, who works through Saint Lucy, who calls Beatrice, who calls Virgil. Eros leads up, but agape also transmits goodness down the great chain of being.
>>24739350Oh huh. This recontextualizes it a lot for me. I'm studying it in uni at the moment and almost none of this is brought up.
>>24739365Yes, in the Paradise of the Sun, which occupied the same place as the circle of heretics in the Inferno, we see figures like Sigier of Brabant, a follower of the Muslim philosopher Averroes, seated next to their more obviously orthodox rivals in life. All the wise dance in a circle with Beatrice, divine revelation, as its center. They all relate to the center from different angles but are all oriented properly. It is ultimately pride that we see in the Inferno that shuts the damned off from communion, whereas in Paradise we see humility. The circle imagery also recalls Dionysius the Areopagite and Boethius' way of speaking about intellectus (unifying grasp of wholes), whereas in Hell all we see is discursive argument (mere ratio) as the damned talk over each other and everyone misunderstands each other.Joachim of Fiore is another example from the Heaven of the Sun. That Heaven is the first "outside the Shadow of the Earth" where the more perfect souls reside. Next we see people involved in the "active life," the martyrs and just, but the top level returns to contemplation with the contemplatives, who are above the wise.
>>24739387Unfortunately, a common response to the disquieting brutality of the Inferno by moderns is just to shrug and say "it was a different time."But pay attention to Canto XX (I think, it's where the diviners are). Dante has just had a break through in attacking the simoniacs, instead of sympathizing with the damned. He sees how they not only hurt themselves, but lead others down as well. The punishment is instructive. They each follow each other down into the fire, each clearing a path for the next.But when he sees the diviners punished Dante the poet makes a rare aside to the reader and asks *us* to justify his grotesque punishments, and asks how we could not weep at such a sight.What is going on here? Why is Dante asking us to justify his own imaginings?Dante surely wants us to take his poem seriously. But it is never intended as a literal description of the afterlife. The punishments are designed to concretize what each sin does to us and others *in this life*. So, Dante's question isn't really, "how can God be so cruel by actively tormenting man," but rather "how can God let man do this to himself?" And we don't get an answer in the Inferno, that requires Dante's entire philosophy of human freedom, theosis, and his philosophy of history. But what he wants us to focus on is that the sinners are doing this to themselves.To that point, it is important to realize that no one in Hell feels sorry or sorry for others. At most, they feel sorry for being punished. They often lie and manipulate (Francesca's allusions suggests she actually seduced Palo but is lying about it for instance). At the climax, the same words will be repeated. Count Ugolino will ask Dante the Pilgrim how he could not weep at his story. But note that Ugolino himself doesn't weep telling the story, and he doesn't weep in the story. He says his heart "turned to stone," and he is silent as his children die before he eats them. That's the life of the damned. They are cut off from all mercy and pity internally.Dante sort of dodges the tough questions of eternal punishment by making the damned all unrepentant, because we could ask: "are they prevented from being so, or do only the wholly mutilated who will never repent end up here?" I take it though that this isn't his focus. He wants to show the Pilgrim the true nature of sin, not justify some particular infernalist eschatology.
>>24739400I always thought it was a cool idea that the bottom of hell is a frozen wasteland. Like yeah fire and brimstone is the stereotypical hell but an Antarctica-like environment would suit its emotional tone far better, I think.
>>24739247>I've already depicted you as the Basedjak and me as the Chad
>>24739404Yeah, it's also neat that on the view of medieval cosmology this makes the universe Satanocentric, with Satan at its center and God at its furthest fringes. All matter tends towards Satan. But "matter" here is Aristotleian, so it isn't just corporeal, but also potency itself. The damned are frozen because sheer potency cannot actualize itself. Augustine has this notion of sin as the soul curving inwards on itself, and I actually think a black hole is a really great analogy here. No light can escape because it is wholly inward. Milton's Satan and the way he refers everything to himself and makes himself the measure of everything is a great example here. Satan speaks constantly in similes that relate the world to him; God never uses a single simile.But, what we discover late in the poem is that the entire cosmos is, in fact, contained in a single dimensionless point, the "mind of God." So whereas it first looks like Satan is at the center, to which all things are drawn, and God on the outside, what we get at the end is an image of a candle spreading light out into a surrounding mist. Hell is the outmost area of light, where the last light lapses into sheer nothingness.Pic related is quite good on this. It's very dense but it's worth getting on Anna's or something just for the introduction because it shows how radically different the metaphysics of Dante's era is to our own. We live with the metaphysics of the Reformation, which was originally a self conscious rejection of the old model. It's generally seen as "scientific"today, but its origins are theological. It's basically a rejection of the Analogia Entis and final causality due to this (to my mind strange) fear that if God gives anything a nature and proper end it will somehow limit God's freedom (and this is also why Calvin is so skeptical of human freedom, the univocity of being makes freedom zero sum so that if man has any then God loses some).
>>24739400Wow. Thanks anon. 7 weeks of studying the Inferno, and you've taught me more about the poem in an hour. State of modern education lol.Yeah, that really explains a lot. Half of the course is us scratching our heads at the seeming contradictions between Dante's choices of saved vs damned, getting caught up in the minutiae of his imagery and symbolism, influences, florentine politics, etc. I'm actually a little ahead of everyone else I think, I've read the Aeneid and Boethius' Consolation and everyone else hasn't, but I've still been struggling to understand a lot of the choices Dante makes, I think mostly because the course itself is being very aloof when it judges the damned, plus the typical modern outlook that we have to sympathise with everyone regardless of what they've done. Take Francesca's story for instance, it was brought up that Francesca was justifying herself, but the focus was the nature of the sin, the implication of the book being the instigator, and it was only lightly suggested that Francesca might be in denial and justifying herself. It's not completely useless of course, we're going over a lot of the poem's allusions and depth of Dante's language and style that I probably wouldn't have realised were I studying on my own, but I feel like the fundamental meaning of the poem, especially as you describe it, has been brushed over and we're missing the forest for the trees.
>>24739430Good post
>>24739247Imagine writing self insert fanfiction and it being so good that the entire world is forced to take it seriously. Shakespeare wishes he had half of Dante's powerlevel.
>>24739617Shakespeare is a different kind of writer, and in many aspects far superior to Dante. His poetical style is more complex, more metaphorical and its constantly making language commit violence against itself, that is: making language wake up from the stupor of daily and workmanlike use. Dante is far more simple: mostly he puts direct and simple language into verse form, and when he uses imagery is mostly simile, and the similes he uses are usually used to make us “see” better what he is describing.Then there’s the fact that the number of different characters and styles of language and points of view and philosophies of life in Shakespeare is far greater than what we find in Dante. Of course, Dante is mostly writing a single work, putting all he has into a single story, and although he has different characters he doesn’t have the time to develop them with so much detail as Shakespeare does over the course of almost 40 plays.One can like Dante better or Shakespeare better, but in the end, even if they are both poets, they are very different kind of poets, not only on their use of poetic language, but also on the genre they are working and on their goals in life and art.
>>24739807Ok chatgpt
>>24739841Oh, you always say that.
