How did he get away with writing the most scathing satire of Christianity ever written?
>>25599710It's a Christian satire, not a satire of Christianity. Idiot.
>>25599724>several popes are burning in hell>greatest philosophers of pagan antiquity are in hell, but in the "nice" area of hell in a castle>hell is the most vivid, memorable, and narratively interesting part of the entire work>"divine justice" is arbitrary and disproportionate>Virgil (pagan reason) gets Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory; Beatrice (the idealized beloved, not a saint or doctor of the Church) takes over for the higher realms>Salvation is achieved less through the sacraments, the institutional Church, or even direct appeal to Christ than through a personalized erotic-intellectual ascent mediated by a dead Florentine girl and a Roman poet>poem ends by declaring that the ultimate vision of God exceeds language and memory. After a hundred cantos of meticulous architecture, the payoff is that the central Christian object cannot be described. An obvious satire of Christianity's elusive paradise that is described passionately, but never representedYou'd have to be a sub-80 IQ-let to not see Dante as cutting Christianity off at the legs and laying the foundations for what would later become the institution of "critiquing the uncritiquable", but he dressed it up as a long, drawn-out love story with a backing of Christianity to win over the common folk. This obviously paved the way for The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, In Praise of Folly, until we get all the way up to The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade.
>>25599901he's satirizing Catholicism, not Christianity
He was a devout, pious Catholic he just criticised the worldly over reach of the papacy and the corruption in the Church.
>>25599901>popes are seen as sinners>pagans not judged as harshly as popes>hell being describable, but heaven not>...>>>>> cutting Christianity off at the legsThese are all very uncontroversial Christian takes, Anon.
>>25599904>>25599913The Church WAS Christianity in 14th Century Italy. Him criticizing Catholicism might as well have been the entirety of the religion itself.
>>25599710It isn't. Try actually reading the entire poem.This:>>25599901Ignores copious evidence going in the other direction and it's worth noting that Dante the modern liberal is a take that only shows up with modern liberals (and only made by them) due to their need to assimilate any bright spot in history to their totalitarian ideology.
>>25599904There was no "Christianity" outside of ecclesiastic institutions, the Roman Church had made damn sure of that over the centuries. You had your pick between the western rite and the eastern rite by the 14th century, but they were not meaningfully different in the context of his criticism. So what is this nebulous, non-ecclesiastic Christianity that you claim existed in the 1300s AD?
>>25599901I don't blame you for this thinking with all the misconceptions on Medieval Europe, but this is literally consistent with what educated Catholic men believed at the time. Educated Catholics at the time viewed themselves as the Continuation of the Roman Empire, rather than just religious fanatics that dismissed anything Non-Christian. There's even a whole thing in Catholicism about "Virtuous pagans." Men who were around in the ancient world, but lived virtuous lives and probably ended up in heaven. Also in Catholicism there is this thing about Anti-Pope, basically illegitimate popes that would probably end up in hell.
>>25599710I can't find a copy of this epub anywhere. Not on Annas or anything.The only good copy I can find is just the Inferno.
>>25599901>>hell is the most vivid, memorable, and narratively interesting part of the entire workSure but you say that like the other two are lacking, they are not.Since we’re in a Dante thread however>Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria.Fucking poignant. Fucking resonating with me right now
>>25600049Best thing to do in my opinion is get a bilingual edition of it for semantic purposes. You’re missing out by not experiencing his terza rima even if you have trouble with Italian let alone an archaic form of it.
>>25599710Schopenhauer wondered this
>>25599931Not really, the Church was still seen as both a spiritual and earthly entity, Dante was on board with the abstract Catholic institutions like clergy, saint veneration, communion etc
>>25599927What about in 1308?
