TGC - Dante's Divine Comedy

Description
In a brilliantly constructed narrative of his imaginary guided pilgrimage through the three realms of the Christian afterlife—hell, purgatory, and heaven—Dante accomplished a literary task of astonishing complexity.

He created an unforgettable gallery of characters.
He poetically explored a host of concerns both universal and particular, timely and timeless.
He tapped the combined riches of the biblical and classical traditions in a synthesis that forever placed Western writers in his debt as they tried to build on his foundation.
James Joyce might have been speaking for those writers when he exclaimed, "Dante is my spiritual food!"

Geographer of the Cosmos, Student of the Soul
The full achievement of the Commedia, however, goes far beyond anything merely "literary."

Dante is a geographer of the cosmos and a student of the soul. His range spans not only the heights of heaven and the depths of hell but also the recesses of the human heart.

As Dante the pilgrim makes his journey, Dante the poet dramatizes and asks us to reflect on fundamental questions:

What is the quality of our moral actions?
How does spiritual transformation come about?
What is the nature of good and evil, virtue and vice, sin and sanctity?
Why is the world so full of strife?
How do we go on when we lose things we love, as Dante—through exile—lost his native Florence?
What role do reading and writing play in human life?
In the seven centuries since the Commedia was written, not one of these questions has lost its force.

Moreover, Dante addresses them in a demanding and innovative Italian verse form called terza rima. His complex arrangement of materials makes the Commedia one of the great virtuoso pieces of world literature.

Poet as Pilgrim, Pilgrim as Poet
Set at Eastertide in the year 1300, the poem begins with Dante, in the middle of his life, feeling trapped in a "dark wood" of error.

Lost and failing, he is rescued by the great Roman poet Virgil and can find his way again only by means of an extraordinary voyage.

He must pass down through the nine rings of hell, up the seven levels of purgatory to the earthly paradise, and up higher still through the nine spheres of heaven to the empyrean realm where God dwells in glory.

Along the way, Dante changes guides. Virgil gives way to Beatrice, a young woman about whom Dante wrote in his early love poetry and who becomes his guide through most of the spheres of paradise.

And Beatrice, in turn, gives way to Bernard of Clairvaux, a Christian mystic who is Dante's guide for the final cantos—the poem's major divisions—of the Paradiso.

Because Dante frames many of his concerns in terms of contemporary personalities and issues, and because so much of the poem consists of direct encounters between Dante and inhabitants of the afterlife, the lectures focus on providing essential background for and analysis of these encounters.

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