Dante: Beauty as a Journey

Dante's Divine Comedy leads a pilgrim through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It is a work of moral imagination as well as a monument of European literature.

The poem gathers classical epic, Christian theology and the political life of medieval Italy into the voice of one traveller. Virgil guides the early journey; Beatrice later becomes a guide toward a different order of understanding.

Beauty is not simply decoration in this world. The traveller must learn to distinguish attractive appearances from rightly ordered love. What he sees changes as his attention changes.

The use of the vernacular gives philosophical and theological questions an unusually immediate human voice. A vast cosmology remains connected to particular faces, places and remembered encounters.

The final movement reaches the limits of speech. Dante's ending does not claim that language can contain everything; it makes poetry an approach to what exceeds it.

His final image of the love that moves the sun and the other stars joins beauty to order, motion and desire. In this museum, literature belongs beside the painted vault and the sounding organ because all three can enlarge the world we inhabit.