Reviews for La Commedia Di Dante Allighieri

The average rating for La Commedia Di Dante Allighieri based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-20 00:00:00 Susan Kissell "You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth." - Niels Bohr I was thinking about Dante the other day and wondering how one could approach him from the angle of a GoodReads review. One of the obvious problems is that he lived a long time ago, and many of the cultural referents have changed. You're constantly having to think "Well, nowadays what he's saying would correspond to THAT". It isn't so bad in Hell, when there is plenty of entertainment to be had in seeing how the different sins are punished, and indulging your schadenfreude. Then Purgatory tells a moral story that's more or less timeless if you go for that sort of thing, but once you arrive in Paradise it starts getting seriously tricky. A lot of the stuff at first sight just seems irrelevant to the 21st century world... all these explanations about the mechanics of Ptolomaic astronomy, and Dante querying the inhabitants of Heaven on obscure theological points. It's notorious that readers most often give up somewhere in the third book. I started wondering if there was any modern-day author one could identify with Dante, and if that might help us connect to his concerns. And in fact, I do have a suggestion that some people will no doubt condemn out of hand as completely heretical: Richard Dawkins. Now of course, I am aware that Dante was deeply immersed in the Christian world-view, and Dawkins is famous for being the world's most outspoken atheist. But it's not quite as crazy as it first may seem. Dante was a Christian to the core of his being, but he was furious with the way the Church was being run; he put several of its leaders, notably Pope Boniface VIII, in Hell. On the other side, I challenge anyone to read "The Ancestor's Tale" to the end, and not, at least for a moment, entertain the idea that Dawkins is in actual fact a deeply religious man. He admits as much himself: as he puts it, it's often not so much that he disagrees with conventionally religious people, more that "they are saying it wrong". Amen to that. As noted, both Dante and Dawkins are extremely unhappy with the way mainstream religion is being organized. The other characteristic that unites them for me is this passionate love for science. One has to remember that, for Dante, Ptolomaic astronomy was state of the art stuff, and the details of the angelic hierarchy were a topic of vital importance; of course he cross-examines the hosts of the blessed to find out more. These days, I imagine he would be trying to get inside information on what happened during the Big Bang before spontaneous symmetry breaking occurred, whether or not the Higgs particle really exists, and how evolution produced human intelligence. For Dante, there didn't seem to be any opposition between religious faith and science - they were part of the same thing. I do wonder what he would have thought if he had been able to learn that many leading religious figures, even in the early 21st century, reject a large part of science as being somehow unreligious. It's wrong to spend your life dispassionately trying to understand God's Universe? I can see him getting quite angry about this, and deciding to rearrange the seating a little down in Hell. I keep thinking that there's a book someone ought to write called "Five Atheists You'll Meet in Heaven". Please let me know when it comes out; I'll buy a copy at once. ************************************** PS I couldn't help wondering what Paradise might have looked like if Dante had been writing today. Obviously we wouldn't have the old geocentric model of the Universe - it would be bang up to date. I think there is now far more material for an ambitious poet to work with than there was in the 14th century. For example, when we get to the Heaven of the Galaxy, I imagine him using this wonderful fact that all the heavy elements are made in supernova explosions. "We are all stardust", as some people like to put it. Then when we get to the Heaven of the Cosmos, we find that the light from the "Let there be light" moment at the beginning of Creation is still around - it's just cooled to 2.7 degrees K, and appears as the cosmic background radiation. But it's not completely uniform, as the quantum fluctuations left over from the period when the Universe was the size of an atomic nucleus are the beginnings of the galaxies created on the second day. Finally, we reach the Heaven of the Multiverse, and find that we are just one of many different universes. It was necessary to create all of them, so that random processes could make sure that a very small number would end up being able to support life. How impious to assume that God would only be able to create one Universe, and have to tweak all the constants Himself!

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-09 00:00:00 ROBERT Murray I once thought I'd write an essay on how long it takes a serious author (of fiction or nonfiction) before he or she inevitably quotes Dante. If I were to write a novel myself (this is a hypothetical grammatical construction!), I'd probably manage about a page before I'd exclaim that I am lost, and middle-aged, and in the middle of a dark forest. I'd try to kill off annoying acquaintances and punish them severely for their lack of admiration for me and my creativity (not to mention my sarcasm and irony!!), and of course I would meet my teenage love and be joined together forever in eternal happiness in the end (or maybe not, come to think of it, I might skip that part!), after spending a life travelling the underworld in the company of the most brilliant author I can think of. Dante fulfilled all his (and my!) dreams with the Divina Commedia, and I envy him his bravery and talent, not to mention his ability to write in that beautiful Italian. However, not all parts of the poem were equally appealing to me. I found myself loving Inferno, liking Purgatorio, and not quite identifying with Paradiso at all. I always wondered why that is, and concluded that humans are much better at depicting hell than heaven, chaos than order, dystopia than utopia. Reason being, in my (not very important) opinion: there's no storyline behind real bliss, and without stories, we are not entirely connected to humanity and its questions anymore. Paradiso is nice, but uninteresting, sort of. "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate" - the ticket to hell: I doubt if there ever was a better advertisement for a rollercoaster adventure! Update in Year One Of Post-Truth Wall Building: I am still lost in that dark forest of middle age, trying to make sense of life, and Dante comes to mind more and more often, in the same way Orwell's 1984 does: it grows more realistic with every day that passes. This morning, "The Wall Of Dis" all of a sudden forced itself upon my thoughts, - the great wall separating Dante's Upper and Lower Hell. Upper Hell is for the Carnal, Gluttonous, Greedy, and Wrathful, whereas the other side of the wall contains the Heretical, Violent, Fraudulent and Treacherous. It just struck me that every wall in the world has created that kind of "mental division". The typical representatives of "upper hell", consumed by the everyday sins of wanting most of everything for themselves without being bothered by others, usually keep their "moral upper hand" by accusing the "other side of the wall" of worse crimes, such as the "wrong religion", violence, and treason. The funny (or sad) thing is that it works both ways. You can turn hell upside down and have the same results: egotistical, narcissistic angry men accuse others of treason and heresy to deflect from their own faults. No wonder Inferno is a timeless classic: after all, Dante based it on his own experience of a divisive, violent political situation.