(Return to the Unit 10 Home Page)

Unit 10 Study Guide

Dante's The Divine Comedy represents the culmination of the medieval world view and remains its most expressive literary manifestation, or, as your text's editor observes, "the foundational text for the European literary imagination." It is one of the world's most important pieces of literature, not just because of its theme--the relationship between the Creation and the Creator--but because of its astounding orchestration of both the beatific sublime that embraces the unity of all that is as well as the squalid sordidness of a humanity at war against itself, its own spirit, even its very own faith and hope.

The story of The Divine Comedy follows the character of "Dante" in search of security and a return to the "right path" of life.  Escorted by Virgil, the Roman poet and author of The Aeneid, the Roman epic poem, Dante follows his literary mentor, now a guide through the underworld of hell, through the realms of purgatory, and upward to the gates of heaven.  There, Dante follows the lead of his lost earthly love, Beatrice, who escorts him to the Blessed Virgin mary and to the very presence of God.

Readings

Read the Introduction to Dante Alighieri, pp. 1293 - 1302

Read the selections from Dante's The Divine Comedy,
pp. 1303 - 1429

Study Questions

1) How many cantos inform each of the three arenas: "the Inferno," " the Purgatorio," and "the Paradiso"?  What is the significance of the parallelism?

2) Why has Dante selected Virgil as his guide through "the Inferno"? Why has Virgil himself been assigned a place among the damned?

3) What is Dante's final destination?  Why must he travel through the eternal arenas to achieve his objective?

4) What is ironic about the fate and condition of Satan? 

5) Explain the beatific vision that Dante achieves in the Paradiso.  What is the highest insight revealed in the presence and being of God?

Key Concepts

The European Medieval World View
Dominated by doctrines of the Christian Church, medieval Europeans struggled for survival in a physical world on which the prophesies of Biblical warfare would be waged in the universal battle between good and evil, with the souls of humankind held suspended in the balance.  Heaven stretched physically upward into the legions of the sky, through the star field of the universe and beyond to the very seat of the throne of God surrounded in the beatific, transforming light.  Below loomed the jaws of a physical hell, so horrific in its torments as to defy description except through the visions of the mystics, a stench-field suffocating and nauseating series of chambers where at its frozen pit, Satan sits locked in ice, slobbering over the heads of the sinners that he holds in his mouth.  Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, like no other work before or after, describes in the most chilling as well as the most ecstatic details of these ecclesiastical arenas, the features of each that had always before only loomed in the darkest shadows of the medieval mind.
 
This page was last modified on January 17, 2006,
and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey A. Grimes.