The meaning of the name "The Divine Comedy"

Interpretation of the meaning of the poem is possible from several perspectives. In a literal sense, this is truly the journey of the soul after death in the other world. But, in addition to the literal, the allegorical understanding of the poem is also legitimate, that is, every event, every detail carries additional meaning.

According to traditional religious beliefs, hell is a place where sinners are found. Suffering due to sins committed in purgatory is intended for those who have the opportunity to be cleansed and saved for a new life. Paradise is the reward for those who live a righteous life. We are talking about the moral assessment of people’s actions: where exactly a person’s soul ends up after death is determined by its earthly life.

So even in the literal interpretation of the poem, the world of people is divided into righteous and sinners. However, in The Divine Comedy we are not talking about individuals, but the insults created by the author symbolize certain principles or phenomena. Thus, the image of Virgil, which accompanies the protagonist on a journey through the circles of hell, is not only an image of the poet Virgil, but embodies the principle of understanding the world, devoid of faith. Dante recognizes the greatness of Virgil, nevertheless depicts him as a resident of hell. Beatrice is not only an image of a beloved woman, but also an allegory of love, saving and all-forgiving.

The allegories in the poem are also ambiguous. For example, the animals that meet on Dante’s path in the dense forest are endowed with traditional meanings for the Middle Ages: the lynx symbolizes treachery, the she-wolf - gluttony, the lion - pride. There is another interpretation of the images depicted by the poet: the lynx is Dante’s political enemies, the lion is the king of France, the she-wolf is the Roman papacy. The meanings of the allegories are layered on top of each other, giving the work additional dimensions.

The unfolding allegory is the journey itself - this is the search for the right spiritual path for a person surrounded by sins, temptations and passions. Choosing a road is a search for the meaning of life. The main action takes place in the soul of the lyrical hero. The entire journey takes place in the mind of the poet. Having learned what ruin is, having gone through the circles of hell, changes occur in the poet’s soul, he rises to the awareness of the most important truths about the world and about himself.

It is in the part that depicts paradise that the main secret of life is revealed, which lies in love. Not only in love for a single and beautiful woman, but in all-consuming and all-forgiving love, love in the broad sense of the word. Love is the driving force, the force that moves the heavenly bodies. Dante leads us to believe that God is love.

Federal Agency for Education

State educational institution

Higher professional education

Kama State Engineering and Economic Academy

Department "RiSo"

Test

in the discipline "History of World Literature"

on the topic of: " Literature of the Renaissance.

Dante Alighieri "The Divine Comedy"

Completed by: student of group 4197c

correspondence department

Nevmatullina R.S.

Checked by: teacher

department "RiSo"

Meshcherina E.V.

Naberezhnye Chelny 2008

Chapter 2. Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy"

2.3 Purgatory

2.5 Dante's Path

Chapter 1. Literature of the Renaissance

The end of medieval civilization in human history is associated with a brilliant period of culture and literature called the Renaissance. This is a much shorter era than antiquity or the Middle Ages. It is of a transitional nature, but it is the cultural achievements of this time that force us to distinguish it as a special stage of the late Middle Ages. The Renaissance gives the history of culture a huge constellation of genuine masters who left behind the greatest creations in both science and art - painting, music, architecture - and literature. Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci, Rabelais and Copernicus, Botticelli and Shakespeare are just a few random names of geniuses of this era, often and rightly called titans.

The intensive flowering of literature during this period is largely associated with a special attitude towards the ancient heritage. Hence the very name of the era, which sets itself the task of recreating, “reviving” cultural ideals and values ​​supposedly lost in the Middle Ages. In fact, the rise of Western European culture does not arise against the background of a previous decline. But in the life of the culture of the late Middle Ages, so much changes that it feels like it belongs to another time and feels dissatisfied with the previous state of the arts and literature. The past seems to the Renaissance man to be the oblivion of the remarkable achievements of antiquity, and he sets about restoring them. This is expressed in the work of writers of this era, and in their very way of life.

Renaissance is a time when science is intensively developing and the secular worldview begins to, to a certain extent, crowd out the religious worldview, or significantly changes it, preparing the church reformation. But the most important thing is the period when a person begins to feel himself and the world around him in a new way, often to answer in a completely different way those questions that have always worried him, or to pose other, complex questions. Medieval asceticism has no place in the new spiritual atmosphere, enjoying the freedom and power of man as an earthly, natural being. From an optimistic conviction in the power of man, his ability to improve, there arises a desire and even a need to correlate the behavior of an individual, his own behavior with a specific example of an “ideal personality”, and a thirst for self-improvement is born. This is how a very important, central movement of this culture was formed in the Western European culture of the Renaissance, which was called “humanism”.

It is especially important that the humanities at this time began to be valued as the most universal, that in the process of forming the spiritual image of the individual, the main importance was attached to “literature”, and not to any other, perhaps more “practical”, branch of knowledge. As the wonderful Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca wrote, it is “through the word that the human face becomes beautiful.”

During the Renaissance, the very way of thinking of a person changes. Not a medieval scholastic debate, but a humanistic dialogue, including different points of view, demonstrating unity and opposition, the complex diversity of truths about the world and man, becomes a way of thinking and a form of communication of people of this time. It is no coincidence that dialogue is one of the popular literary genres of the Renaissance. The flourishing of this genre, like the flourishing of tragedy and comedy, is one of the manifestations of the attention of Renaissance literature to the ancient genre tradition. But the Renaissance also knows new genre formations: the sonnet in poetry, the short story, the essay in prose. Writers of this era do not repeat ancient authors, but on the basis of their artistic experience create, in essence, a different and new world of literary images, plots and problems.

The stylistic appearance of the Renaissance era is novel and original. Although cultural figures of this time initially sought to revive the ancient principle of art as “imitation of nature,” in their creative competition with the ancients they discovered new ways and means of such “imitation,” and later entered into polemics with this principle. In literature, in addition to the stylistic direction that is called “Renaissance classicism” and which aims to create “according to the rules” of ancient authors, “grotesque realism” is also developing, based on the heritage of humorous folk culture. Both the clear, free, figurative and stylistic flexible style of the Renaissance, and - in the later stages of the Renaissance - whimsical, sophisticated, deliberately complicated and emphatically mannered "mannerism". Such stylistic diversity naturally deepens as Renaissance culture evolves from origins to completion.

In the process of historical development, the reality of the late Renaissance became more and more turbulent and restless. Economic and political rivalry between European countries is growing, the religious Reformation movement is expanding, leading increasingly to direct military clashes between Catholics and Protestants. All this makes contemporaries of the Renaissance more keenly feel the utopianism of the optimistic hopes of Renaissance thinkers. It is not for nothing that the word “utopia” itself (it can be translated from Greek as “a place that is nowhere”) was born in the Renaissance - in the title of the famous novel by the English writer Thomas More. A growing sense of the disharmony of life, its inconsistency, an understanding of the difficulties of embodying the ideals of harmony, freedom, and reason in it ultimately leads to a crisis of Renaissance culture. A premonition of this crisis already appears in the works of writers of the late Renaissance.

The development of Renaissance culture proceeds in different countries of Western Europe in different ways.

Renaissance in Italy. It was Italy that was the first country in which the classical culture of the Renaissance arose, which had a great influence on other European countries. The reason for this was both socio-economic factors (the existence of independent, economically powerful city-states, the rapid development of trade at the crossroads between West and East), and national cultural tradition: Italy was historically and geographically especially closely connected with Roman antiquity. The culture of the Renaissance in Italy went through several stages: the early Renaissance of the 14th century. - this is the period of creativity of Petrarch - a scientist, a humanist, but above all in the minds of the general reader, a wonderful lyric poet, and Boccaccio - a poet and famous short story writer. Mature and high Renaissance of the 15th century. - This is primarily the stage of “scientific” humanism, the development of Renaissance philosophy, ethics, and pedagogy. The artistic works created during this period are now best known to specialists, but this is a time of widespread dissemination of the ideas and books of Italian humanists throughout Europe. Late Renaissance - XVI century. - marked by a process of crisis of humanistic ideas. This is a time of awareness of the tragedy of human life, the conflict between a person’s aspirations and abilities and the real difficulties of their implementation, a time of changing styles, and a clear strengthening of manneristic tendencies. Among the most significant works of this time is Ariosto's poem "The Furious Orlando".

Renaissance in France. Humanistic ideas began to penetrate into France from Italy at the turn of the 14th - 15th centuries. But the Renaissance in France was a natural, internal process. For this country, the ancient heritage was an organic part of its own culture. And yet, French literature acquired Renaissance features only in the second half of the 15th century, when socio-historical conditions for the development of the Renaissance arose. Early Renaissance in France - 70s. XV century - 20s XVI century This was the time of the formation of a new education system in France, the creation of humanistic circles, the publication and study of books by ancient authors. Mature Renaissance - 20-60s. XVI century - the period of creation of the collection of short stories by Margarita Navarskaya “Heptameron” (modeled on “Decameron” by Boccaccio), the publication of the famous novel by Francois Rabelais “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel”. Late Renaissance - end of the 16th century. - this, as in Italy, is the time of the crisis of the Renaissance, the spread of mannerism, but this is also the time of creativity of the wonderful writers of the late Renaissance - the poets P. Ronsard, Waiting Belle, the philosopher and essayist M. Montaigne.

Revival in Germany and the Netherlands. In these countries, the Renaissance is not only distinguished by its later moment of birth than in Italy, but also by its special character: “northern” humanists (as Renaissance figures in countries north of Italy are usually called) are distinguished by a greater interest in religious problems, a desire for direct participation in church reform activities. Printing and the development of the “university reformation” played a very important role in the development of Renaissance culture in these countries. On the other hand, religious discussions and the movement of “Christian humanism” that emerged during these discussions were no less important. Both German literature and the literature of the Netherlands sought to combine satire and edification, journalism and allegorism in their artistic appearance. Both literatures are also united by the figure of the remarkable humanist writer Erasmus of Rotterdam.

"Comedy" is the main fruit of Dante's genius. It is written in terza - a three-line stanza. The plot scheme of the “Comedy” is an afterlife journey, since it was a very popular artistic motif among the classics: Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Virgil and others. The plot of the poem is literally understood - the state of the soul after death; understood allegorically, this is a person who, by virtue of his inherent free will, is subject to justice, rewarding or punishing. If we talk about construction, the poem consists of three cantikas: “Hell”, “Purgatory” and “Paradise”. Each cantika is divided into songs, and each song into terzas. The Comedy is a grand allegory. Above its wonderful, almost incredible design in terms of precise calculation, shines the magic of numbers, originating from the Pythagoreans, reinterpreted by scholastics and mystics. The numbers 3 and 10 are given a special meaning, and the poem presents infinitely varied variations on numerical symbolism. The poem is divided into three parts. Each of them has 33 songs, 99 in total, along with the opening 100; all numbers are multiples of 3 and 10. The stanza is a terza, that is, a three-line verse, in which the first line rhymes with the third, and the second with the first and third lines of the next verse. Each edge ends with the same word - “luminaries”. From the point of view of the initial meaning of the Comedy, conceived as a poetic monument to Beatrice, the central point of the poem should have been the song where Dante first meets the “noble one.” This is the XXX canticle of "Purgatory". The number 30 is simultaneously a multiple of 3 and 10. If you count in a row from the beginning, this song will be the 64th in order; 6 + 4 = 10. There are 63 songs before it; 6 + 3 = 9. The song has 145 verses; 1 + 4 + 5 = 10. It has two central points. The first is when Beatrice, addressing the poet, calls him “Dante” - the only place in the entire poem where the poet put his name. This is verse 55; 5 + 5 = 10. There are 54 verses before it; 5 + 4 = 9. After it there are 90 verses; 9 + 0 = 9. The second place that is equally important for Dante is where Beatrice first calls herself: “Look at me. It’s me, it’s me, Beatrice.” This is verse 73; 7 + 3 = 10. And besides, this is the middle verse of the entire song. There are 72 verses before and after it; 7+2=9. This game of numbers still baffles many commentators who have tried to understand what secret meaning Dante put into it. There is no need to present here various hypotheses of this mystery; it is worth mentioning only the main plot allegory of the poem.

“At the halfway point of earthly existence,” on Good Friday of the “Jubilee” year 1300 - this is the fictitious date of the beginning of the wanderings, which allowed Dante to become a prophet, where more, where less than ten years - the poet got lost in a dense forest. There he is attacked by three animals: a panther, a lion and a she-wolf. Virgil saves him from them, sent by Beatrice, who descended from paradise to limbo for this purpose, so Dante fearlessly follows him everywhere. He leads him through the underground funnels of hell to the opposite surface of the globe, where the mountain of purgatory rises, and on the threshold of earthly paradise he hands him over to Beatrice herself. Together with her, the poet ascends through the heavenly spheres higher and higher and, finally, is awarded the sight of the deity. The dense forest is the complications of human life. Animals are his passions: the panther is sensuality, the lion is lust for power or pride, the she-wolf is greed. Virgil, who saves from beasts, is reason. Beatrice - divine science. The meaning of the poem is the moral life of a person: reason saves him from passions, and knowledge of theology gives eternal bliss. On the path to moral rebirth, a person goes through the consciousness of his sinfulness (hell), purification (purgatory) and ascension to bliss (paradise). In the poem, Dante’s fantasy was based on Christian eschatology, so he draws the landscapes of hell and heaven according to the outline, and the landscapes of purgatory are the creation of his own imagination. Dante depicts hell as a huge funnel going to the center of the earth. Hell is divided into nine concentric circles. Purgatory is a mountain surrounded by the sea with seven ledges. In accordance with Catholic teaching about the posthumous destinies of people, Dante depicts hell as a place of punishment for unrepentant sinners. In purgatory there are sinners who managed to repent before death. After purifying tests, they move from purgatory to heaven - the abode of pure souls.

For posterity, “Comedy” is a grandiose synthesis of the feudal-Catholic worldview and an equally grandiose insight into a new culture. Dante's poem is a whole world, and this world lives, this world is real. The extraordinary formal organization of the Comedy is the result of using the experience of both classical poetics and medieval poetics. "Comedy" is, first of all, a very personal work. There is not the slightest objectivity in it. From the first verse, the poet speaks about himself and does not leave the reader without himself for a single moment. In the poem, Dante is the main character, he is a man full of love, hatred and passions. Dante's passion is what makes him close and understandable to people of all times. Describing the other world, Dante talks about nature and people. The most characteristic feature of the remaining images of the Comedy is their drama. Each of the inhabitants of the afterlife has its own drama, which has not yet been overcome. They died long ago, but none of them forgot about the land. Dante's images of sinners are especially vivid. The poet has special sympathy for sinners condemned for sensual love. Grieving over the souls of Paolo and Francesca, Dante says:

"Oh, did anyone know

What bliss and dream, what

She brought them down this path!

Then addressing the silent ones,

Said: “Francesca, your complaint

I listen with tears, compassion.”

Dante's mastery is simplicity and tactility, and thanks to these poetic techniques we are attracted to the “Comedy”.

Dante placed popes and cardinals in hell, among covetous people, deceivers, and traitors. Dante's denunciations of the papacy gave birth to the traditions of anti-clerical satire of the Renaissance, which would become a devastating weapon for humanists in the fight against the authority of the Catholic Church. It is not for nothing that church censorship continually banned certain parts of the Divine Comedy, and to this day, many of its poems arouse the ire of the Vatican.

Also in The Divine Comedy there are glimpses of a new view of ethics and morality. Making his way through the thicket of theological casuistry, Dante moves towards an understanding of the relationship between the ethical and the social. The ponderous scholastic reasoning of the philosophical parts of the poem is now and then illuminated by flashes of bold realistic thought. Dante calls acquisitiveness “greed.” The motive of denouncing greed was heard both in popular satire and in accusatory sermons of the lower clergy. But Dante not only denounces. He tries to comprehend the social meaning and roots of this vice. Dante calls greed “the mother of dishonesty and shame.” Greed brings cruel social disasters: eternal strife, political anarchy, bloody wars. The poet brands the servants of greed and inflicts sophisticated torture on them. Having reflected in his denunciations of “greed” the protest of the poor, disadvantaged people against the acquisitiveness of the powerful, Dante looked deep into this vice and saw in it a sign of his era.

People have not always been slaves to greed, she is the god of modern times, she was born of growing wealth, the thirst for possessing it. She reigns in the papal palace, has built a nest for herself in urban republics, and settled in feudal castles. The image of a skinny she-wolf with a red-hot gaze - a symbol of greed - appears in The Divine Comedy from its first lines and runs like an ominous ghost throughout the poem.

In the allegorical image of the lion, Dante condemns pride, calling it “the accursed pride of Satan,” agreeing with the Christian interpretation of this trait.

“... A lion with his mane raised came out to meet me.

It was as if he stepped on me

From hunger, growling, he became furious

And the very air is frozen with fear.”

Condemning the pride of Satan, Dante, nevertheless, accepts the proud self-awareness of man. Thus, the god-fighter Capaneus evokes Dante’s sympathy:

“Who is this tall guy, lying there gloomily,

Disdaining the fire burning from everywhere.

Even the rain, I see, does not soften him.

And he, realizing that I was marveling at a miracle,

His pride, he answered shouting:

“As I lived, so will I be in death!”

Such attention and sympathy for pride marks a new approach to the individual, his emancipation from the spiritual tyranny of the church. The proud spirit of the ball is inherent in all the great artists of the Renaissance and Dante himself in the first place.

But not only betrayal, greed, deceit, sinfulness and ruin are affected by “Comedy”, but also love, because the poem is dedicated to Beatrice. Her image lives in “Comedy” as a bright memory of the great, only love, of its purity and inspiring power. In this image, the poet embodied his quest for truth and moral perfection.

The Comedy is also called a kind of chronicle of Italian life. The history of Italy appears in The Divine Comedy, first of all, as the history of the political life of the poet’s homeland, in deeply dramatic pictures of the struggle of warring parties, camps, groups and in the stunning human tragedies generated by this struggle. From song to song, the tragic scroll of Italian history unfolds in the poem: urban communes in the fire of civil wars; the age-old enmity of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, traced back to its very origins; the whole history of the Florentine feud between “whites” and “blacks” from the moment of its inception until the day when the poet became a homeless exile... Fiery, indignant passion bursts uncontrollably from every line. The poet brought to the kingdom of shadows everything that burned him in life - love for Italy, irreconcilable hatred for political opponents, contempt for those who doomed his homeland to shame and ruin. The poem evokes a tragic image of Italy, seen through the eyes of a wanderer who traveled all over its land, scorched by the fire of bloody wars:

Italy, slave, hearth of sorrows,

In a great storm, a ship without a helm,

Not the lady of nations, but a tavern!

And you can’t live without war

Yours are alive, and they are bickering,

Surrounded by one wall and a ditch.

You, unfortunate one, should look back.

To your shores and cities:

Where are peaceful abodes to be found?

(“Purgatory”, canto VI)

And yet there is interest in the person; to his position in nature and society; understanding his spiritual impulses, recognizing and justifying them is the main thing in the Comedy. Dante's judgments about man are free from intolerance, dogmatism, and one-sided scholastic thinking. The poet did not come from dogma, but from life, and his person is not an abstraction, not a scheme, as was the case with medieval writers, but a living personality, complex and contradictory. His sinner can be righteous at the same time. There are many such “righteous sinners” in The Divine Comedy, and these are the most vivid, most humane images of the poem. They embodied a broad, truly humane view of people - the view of a poet who holds everything human dear, who knows how to admire the strength and freedom of the individual, the inquisitiveness of the human mind, who understands the thirst for earthly joy and the torment of earthly love.

Composition

"The Divine Comedy" is recognized as the pinnacle of the work of the most famous Italian poet, the founder of Italian literature Dante Alighieri. The poet's contemporaries among ordinary people even believed that he had compiled a real guide to the other world, but in fact, the content of the poem is not limited to just the artistic embodiment of mystical ideas about life after death. The content of this work can be interpreted from different sides: both literally (the lyrical hero’s own depiction of the journey through the other world), and allegorically, as well as morally and ethically.

According to traditional religious understanding, Hell is a place for punishing hopeless sinners. Purgatory is for those who still have the opportunity to be saved, while Paradise is the reward for a righteous life. We are talking about a certain moral assessment of actions: exactly where a person ends up is determined by his earthly life:

Here each soul undergoes its own trial:
She said, heard and went to the pit.

So, even the literal aspect already divides people into good and bad. But in Dante's "Divine Comedy" we are mostly not talking about specific persons; the images depicted in the poem at the same time symbolize certain principles or phenomena. The image of Virgil, which accompanies the lyrical hero in hell, is not only (and not so much) the image of a specific person, but the embodiment of the principles of knowledge of a world devoid of faith. Dante recognizes him as his teacher, but Virgil must remain in hell. It is no coincidence that, as salvation, he is invited to wait for the arrival of Beatrice - not just a woman, but an allegory of love, and according to some interpretations - faith, or even theosophy.
The allegories in the work are also not unambiguous, for example, the animals that block the poet’s path in the dark forest are represented according to traditional interpretations of symbols: leopard - deceit, lion - cruelty, she-wolf - gluttony, lust, but there is another interpretation: leopard - Dante’s political enemies, the lion is the king of France, the she-wolf is the Roman papacy. The meanings of the allegories are layered on top of each other, revealing the content as if in an additional dimension.

The journey itself is an expanded allegory - this is the search for the right path for the human soul, surrounded by sins, temptations and passion. Search for the meaning of life. The main action generally takes place precisely in the soul of the lyrical hero. Having learned what evil is, having gone through the circles of Hell, he changes, rises to the understanding of the most important truths about the world and about himself:

My wings were very weak;
But the brightness of the radiance has come here,
And the power of mind and will increased.

It is in the part dedicated to Paradise (the least complete from an artistic point of view) that the main value is determined: love. Not only the love that the lyrical hero was looking for at the beginning of his journey, but love in the broader sense of the word, “Love that leads the sun and stars in the sky.” Even the Gospel states that God is love, but for long historical periods church leaders tried not to focus on this aspect.

During the Middle Ages, when the poem was created, this conclusion was very bold, and it is difficult to disagree with it: it is love that is the main value.

Other works on this work

Compositional structure of Dante's poem "The Divine Comedy"

"The Divine Comedy" by Dante written at the beginning of the 14th century. It combined the achievements of philosophical, religious, artistic thought of the Middle Ages and a new look at man, his uniqueness and unlimited possibilities.

The author himself called his poem a “comedy,” for in medieval poetics every work with a sad beginning and a happy ending was called a comedy. But the epithet “Divine” was added in 1360 by Giovanni Boccaccio, the poet’s first biographer.

The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said that to read the Comedy you should stock up on “a pair of shoes with nails.” So he warned the reader about how much mental strength must be expended in order to follow Dante into the other world and comprehend the meaning of the poem.

Dante's image is based on the Universe, in the center of which is a motionless ball - the Earth. Dante supplemented the Universe with three regions: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise. Hell is a funnel in the Northern Hemisphere, reaching to the center of the Earth and arose from the fall of Lucifer. A part of the land pushed to the surface of the earth in the Southern Hemisphere formed Mount Purgatory, and the earthly Paradise is located slightly above the “cut off” peak of Purgatory.

The composition of the poem is striking in its grandeur and at the same time harmony. "Comedy" consists of three large parts. The number three has a mystical meaning for the poet. This, first of all, embodies the idea of ​​the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Spirit. One can also recall fairy tales where there are three brothers, where the heroes find themselves at the crossroads of three roads and where they have to pass three tests.

Each part of the poem consists of 33 songs written in three-line stanzas. And, including the additional introductory song “Hell”, their number is 100. To find yourself in Heaven, you need to go down and go through the nine circles of Hell, where sinners are. On the gates of hell there is a terrible inscription: “Abandon hope, all who enter here.” In the first circle, the souls of unbaptized infants languish, as well as famous pagans: Greek poets, philosophers. The lower we go, the more terrible the punishment of sinners. At the very bottom, in the icy lake, Lucifer holds three traitors in his mouth: Judas, who betrayed Jesus Christ, Brutus and Cassius, who killed Julius Caesar. Having gone through all the circles of Hell, Purgatory and the nine shining heavens of Paradise, where the righteous are placed depending on their merits, Dante finds himself in the abode of God - the empyrean.

The symbolism of numbers is hidden not only in the composition of the poem, but also in the story itself. The poet has three guides in the other world: Virgil, who symbolizes earthly wisdom, Beatrice - heavenly wisdom, and the medieval philosopher - Bernard of Clairvaux. Dante meets three animals at the beginning of his journey: a lion (symbol of lust for power), a panther (lust), a she-wolf (pride).

Despite the fact that the work was written in the genre of vision, contemporaries were sure that the poet had really visited the other world. The reliability of this fact did not raise the slightest doubt among the medieval reader.

Dante himself proposed interpreting the poem “from four different positions.” The first is literal, i.e. the text is perceived and understood as it is written. The second is allegorical, when the text must be compared with events in the outside world. The third is moral, when the text is perceived as a description of the experiences and passions of the human soul. The third is mystical, because the author’s goal is to present the reader’s soul, distract him from sin and attract him to God.