Justified True Belief

(●) The exiled poet who wrote the whole Christian universe as a journey, and gave Italy its language while he was at it. + Imagine a man in his fifties, living on other people’s hospitality in towns he had no reason to love, under a standing sentence to be burned alive if he ever went home. That is the man who wrote the Divine Comedy, a poem in a hundred cantos. A canto is one section of the poem, about a hundred and forty lines, roughly the length of a short chapter, and across those hundred sections a traveller goes down through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and out through the spheres of heaven until he sees God. It is the most ambitious thing any Christian has ever attempted in verse, and he finished it in the last year of his life. Dante belongs on a Christian apologetics shelf for a reason that has nothing to do with him being a good poet. There is a standing objection that Christian doctrine is a set of abstractions with no purchase on how anyone actually lives: the Trinity, grace, providence, the last judgment, all of it filed away in books nobody reads. Dante took the theology of his century, the hardest and most technical work the medieval schools produced, and turned it into a country a reader can walk through and meet people in. Justice becomes a place. Repentance becomes a mountain road with terraces. The love of God becomes the thing that turns the stars. Whatever else that is, it is not abstraction. One fact worth carrying: he wrote it in Italian. Serious books in 1310 were written in Latin, and a poem in the language people bargained in was, by the standards of the day, a strange thing to do with the subject of God. He did it deliberately, argued for it in two other books, and the language he chose is the reason Italians today speak a form of Tuscan.

(●) 1265 AD: Born in Florence, into a family with a little old blood and not much money. + Dante was born in Florence in the late spring of 1265. We can date it that closely because he tells us in the Paradiso that he was born under the sign of Gemini, and in 1265 the sun stood in Gemini from about the middle of May to the middle of June. His father, Alighiero di Bellincione, lent money at interest and left his son a small property and no great name. His mother Bella died while he was a boy, and his father remarried and then died too, so Dante was head of a household before he was twenty. The family were Guelfs. Two words are worth learning here, because nothing in his life makes sense without them. Guelfs backed the papacy; Ghibellines backed the Holy Roman Emperor. In practice, in a city the size of Florence, they were as much feuding clans as political parties, and a boy inherited his side the way he inherited his father’s house. Dante was baptized in the octagonal Baptistery of San Giovanni in the middle of the city, and half a lifetime later, writing in exile about the punishment of corrupt popes, he stopped to call it "my beautiful San Giovanni." He was homesick for it for nineteen years. Around 1285 he married Gemma Donati, to whom his father had betrothed him by notarized contract in 1277, when he was not yet twelve. They had at least three children who lived: Jacopo, Pietro, and a daughter, Antonia. In everything Dante wrote, and he wrote a great deal about love, he never once mentions his wife. Readers have been noticing that for seven hundred years and nobody knows what to make of it.

(●) c. 1274 AD: At nine years old he saw a girl in a crimson dress, and he never got over it. + The story is his own, told in the Vita Nuova, the little book of poems and prose he assembled in his late twenties. He was at the end of his ninth year and she at the beginning of hers, about a year younger, dressed in a subdued crimson, and from that day, he says, love ruled his soul. Boccaccio, telling the story two generations later, sets the meeting at a May feast in her father’s house; Dante himself names no place. Nine years later she greeted him in the street, and he went home and had a dream and wrote a sonnet about it. Her name is Beatrice. A tradition going back to Boccaccio, who was a boy of eight when Dante died, identifies her as Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a Florentine banker, who married a man named Simone dei Bardi and died in June 1290, aged about twenty four. The identification is not certain, but nothing in the record contradicts it, and no better candidate has ever been proposed. What the book itself makes clear is that Dante had probably spoken to her a handful of times in his life, and that her death broke something open in him. Two things came out of it. The first was the Vita Nuova itself, thirty-one poems with a prose commentary explaining what each was for, which is not quite like anything written before it. The second was the vow at the end of that book, which he kept.

(●) 1289 to 1300 AD: He rode in a cavalry charge, joined a guild to become eligible for office, and ended up governing Florence for two months. + On 11 June 1289, at the battle of Campaldino, Florence’s Guelf army broke the Ghibellines of Arezzo, and Leonardo Bruni, working a century later from a letter of Dante’s that is now lost, says he rode there among the feditori, the front rank of mounted skirmishers whose job was to take the first shock. He was twenty four that morning, or within days of it, depending on where in Gemini his birthday fell. Bruni quotes the same letter for the rest of it: that he had felt great fear in that battle and, at the end of it, the greatest joy. That is the only fighting anyone records of him, and it is worth remembering when the Inferno is accused of being bookish: the man had seen what a lance does. Florence had a rule that no one could hold public office who did not belong to a guild, so in 1295 Dante enrolled in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, which is where booksellers were filed. He served on councils, went on at least one embassy, and in June 1300 was elected one of the six priors, the magistrates who governed the city in two-month terms. During his term the city expelled the ringleaders of both factions to cool the streets down, and one of the men exiled was his closest friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti, who caught malaria in exile and died within months. Bruni quotes him writing afterwards that all his troubles took their beginning from that office. The factions by then were no longer Guelf against Ghibelline but Guelf against Guelf. The winning side had split into Blacks, who wanted Florence tied to Pope Boniface VIII, and Whites, who wanted the city to run its own affairs. Dante was a White, and being a White was about to cost him everything.

(●) 1302 AD: Florence convicted him while he was out of the city, and then sentenced him to be burned alive. + In the autumn of 1301 Dante was in Rome, part of an embassy sent to negotiate with Boniface VIII, when Charles of Valois, brother of the king of France, marched into Florence with the pope’s blessing and handed the city to the Blacks. Whites were hunted, houses were burned, and the courts went to work. On 27 January 1302 a tribunal found Dante guilty of graft, extortion in office and opposition to the pope, fined him five thousand florins, banned him from Tuscany for two years, and shut him out of public office for life. He did not come back to answer. On 10 March the sentence was made final in the form the city used for men who would not appear: if he were ever taken within Florentine jurisdiction, he was to be burned alive. He was thirty six. He never saw the city again. In 1315 Florence offered an amnesty, and the terms tell you what it was worth. He could come home if he paid a fine and walked in a penitential procession wearing the cap of a pardoned offender, which meant admitting the charges in front of everyone he had ever known. The offer came to him through a Florentine friend, most likely a churchman, and Dante answered him in a letter. Was this, he asked, the gracious recall of a man who had endured nearly fifteen years of exile? The fifteen years are his own count and generous to itself: thirteen had passed since the tribunal ruled. He would look at the sun and the stars from anywhere, he told his friend, and he would not go back on those terms, and bread would not be lacking. Florence renewed the sentence instead, and extended it to his sons.

(●) c. 1304 to 1313 AD: Homeless and living on other men’s charity, he began three books and abandoned two of them. + The exile years are a map of northern Italian hospitality: Verona under Bartolomeo della Scala, then Bologna, the Casentino valley, the Lunigiana, where a notarized document of 1306 shows him negotiating a peace on behalf of the Malaspina family, and possibly a spell in Paris. He knew exactly what his position was, and he put it in the mouth of his own great-great-grandfather in the Paradiso: you will learn how salt the taste is of another man’s bread, and how hard a road it is going up and down another man’s stairs. He wrote, and he kept stopping. The Convivio, the "Banquet," was to be fifteen books of philosophy in Italian for readers with no Latin, each one a commentary on a poem of his own; he wrote four and stopped. De vulgari eloquentia, in Latin, was to be four books arguing that a living spoken language could carry the highest subjects there are; he wrote a book and a half and stopped in the middle of a sentence. Nobody knows why either was left. The likeliest guess is the plainest one: he had started something better. Then, in 1310, Henry VII of Luxembourg came down into Italy to be crowned emperor, and Dante allowed himself to hope. Here at last was a power above the factions that could end the wars. He wrote open letters, one of them to the Florentines so furious that it is quoted against him to this day, and he wrote the Monarchia to argue the case in full. Henry besieged Florence, failed, and died of fever near Siena in August 1313. The hope died with him, and Dante went back to the poem.

(●) c. 1308 to 1321 AD: He built the Divine Comedy, an entire universe fitted into a hundred cantos, and set the journey in Holy Week. + The Inferno was circulating by about 1314, the Purgatorio not long after, and the Paradiso was finished in the last year of his life. He called the whole thing simply the Commedia, a comedy, meaning only that it starts badly and ends well and is written in the language people speak. The word "Divine" came from his admirers: Boccaccio used it in praise within two generations, and it reached a printed title page in 1555. The architecture is deliberate to the last brick. The poem falls into three great divisions, called canticles, of thirty three cantos each, with one extra canto at the front to open the whole thing and make the number round: a hundred exactly. Every line is in terza rima, a form he seems to have invented, in which three-line stanzas interlock by rhyme, aba bcb cdc, so that the middle rhyme of each stanza opens the next. Nothing can be lifted out without tearing what sits on either side of it. Three is the number of the Trinity, and its square, nine, is the number that had followed Beatrice through his life. He set the journey in the spring of 1300, in Holy Week, during the first great papal jubilee, the year of pardon that had filled Rome with pilgrims. That date is doing work, and it is worth taking slowly. For one thing, it puts the pilgrim in the year Dante himself was a prior and still had a city, and it lets the dead prophesy an exile the poet had already lived through. For another, it lays the descent into hell and the climb back out to the light across the three days between Good Friday and Easter morning. Those are the days the church remembers a going down into death and a rising, and Dante has sent a living man walking through them. The rest of that week goes to the mountain and the spheres.

(●) 1321 AD: He died at Ravenna on the way back from an embassy, and Florence has been asking for the bones ever since. + His last years were his steadiest. Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna, gave him a house, work, and students. His sons Jacopo and Pietro were with him, and his daughter Antonia was in Ravenna too; a document of 1371 names a Sister Beatrice, daughter of Dante, in a convent there, and she is generally taken to be Antonia under her name in religion. In the summer of 1321 Guido sent him to Venice on an embassy to head off a war. Coming home through the marshes of the Po delta he caught a fever, malaria by the usual account, and he died on the night of 13 to 14 September, aged fifty six. They buried him beside the Franciscan church in Ravenna. Boccaccio preserves a story about the ending. The last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso could not be found, and the family searched for months; then Dante appeared to his son Jacopo in a dream, dressed in white, and pointed at a wall in his old bedroom. Behind a hanging mat was a small niche, and in the niche were the missing pages, mildewed and whole. It is a lovely story and there is no way to confirm it. Florence changed its mind about him, slowly and then completely, and asked Ravenna for the body. Ravenna has never given it up. When a papal order finally granted the request in 1519, the Florentine delegation opened the sarcophagus and found it empty: Franciscan friars had quietly removed the bones through a hole in the wall. They stayed hidden until a workman broke into a walled-up doorway in 1865 and found a wooden chest with Dante’s name on it. There is a handsome empty tomb waiting for him in Florence, in the church of Santa Croce, and it has been empty since it was built.

What He Taught

(T1) A face you loved on an ordinary street can be the beginning of the road to God. + Everyone knows what it is to be caught by a person’s face. Most religious teaching, when it notices this at all, treats it as a distraction to be managed. Dante built his life’s work on the opposite claim: the beauty you saw was really there, it was God’s before it was hers, and if you follow it honestly rather than grabbing at it, it goes up. Look at what Beatrice actually does in the poem. She is not the goal. She comes down to the edge of hell to send Virgil to fetch a man who is lost in a wood; she meets him at the top of the mountain and puts him through a confession that leaves him unable to speak; she teaches him theology through nine heavens; and then, near the end, she takes her seat and hands him over to Bernard of Clairvaux for the last stretch, and he looks up and sees her smiling at him from very far away, and she never speaks to him again. She is a means, and the poem is unembarrassed about saying so. The English writer Charles Williams gave this a name in the 1940s: the Way of Affirmation of Images, the road to God that runs through created things loved rightly, as against the Way of Negation, which climbs by stripping images away. Both roads are old and both are Christian; the second is the road of the desert monks and the mystics, and Dante honours it. What he adds is the insistence that the first road is real, and that a particular woman glimpsed in a particular city can be the door. He also knows exactly what the danger is. The very first thing Beatrice does when she finally appears to him is accuse him: he had gone after lesser goods when she died, followed images that promised what they could not give, and he weeps until he faints. Affirming images is not the same as indulging them, and Dante spends a canto and a half making sure the reader cannot confuse the two.

(Q) "Wherefore if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman." + Source: Dante, Vita Nuova XLII, the closing section (Dante Gabriel Rossetti translation, 1861). The last sentence of his first book, written in his late twenties, a few years after Beatrice’s death. He says a vision has shown him he should stop writing about her until he can do it worthily. Roughly twenty five years later he finished the Paradiso, and the promise had been kept about as thoroughly as a promise can be (T1).

(T2) Hell was built by power, wisdom and love, and the gate says so before anyone goes in. + The hardest thing to say about Christianity is that some people are finally lost, and Dante does not soften it. What he does instead is put the doctrine’s own reasoning on the gate, in the first thing the traveller reads. The inscription names three makers: divine Omnipotence, the highest Wisdom, and the primal Love. Anyone in 1310 would have recognized those as the three Persons of the Trinity, named by the attributes traditionally assigned to Father, Son and Spirit. So hell is not what happens when God’s love runs out. On Dante’s account it is what that same love builds when it is refused, because a love that respects a creature enough to let it choose has to let the choice stand. The mechanism of the place is worth learning under its old name: contrapasso, roughly "suffering the counterpart." The punishment is not something extra bolted onto the sin. It is the sin with the disguises taken off. Lovers who let passion carry them wherever it liked are carried forever on a black wind. Flatterers, who dealt in filth to get on, stand in it. Those who split communities are split themselves. Nothing has been added, and that is the point: the damned in the Inferno still want the thing that damned them, still argue their case, still blame Florence or fortune or a woman. Not one of them asks to leave. The honest objection is that this can look like cruelty made beautiful, especially where Dante names people who were alive when he wrote, and that charge is a fair one that his own record has to answer. Inside the poem, though, Dante makes the pilgrim’s own pity for the damned into a fault he has to be taught out of, which is not the move of a man enjoying himself.

(Q) "Justice incited my sublime Creator; Created me divine Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and the primal Love." + Source: Dante, Inferno III, 4–6 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, 1867). The middle three lines of the nine carved over the gate of hell. They open "Through me the way is to the city dolent" and close with the line everyone knows: "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" Longfellow keeps the word order of the Italian, so the sense of lines 5 and 6 is that divine Omnipotence, the highest Wisdom and the primal Love are the three that made the gate (T2).

(T3) Every sin is love aimed at the wrong thing, or love gone slack, or love gone greedy. + Halfway up the mountain of purgatory, at the centre of the hundred cantos, everything stops for a lecture. Night has fallen and no one can climb in the dark, so the pilgrim sits down on a ledge and asks his guide a question, and the answer he gets is the key to the whole poem. Nothing that exists, Virgil tells him, is without love. Not God, not the least creature. Love is simply the pull of a thing toward what it takes to be its good, and it is running in everything all the time. So evil cannot be some separate substance opposed to love. It has to be love itself going wrong, and there are only three ways for that to happen. Love can want harm for a neighbour, which gives pride, envy and wrath. Love can want the right thing without much energy, which gives sloth. Or love can want genuinely good things too much and out of order, which gives avarice, gluttony and lust. That is the mountain: seven terraces, in that sequence, and the pilgrim climbs through all of them. The idea is Augustine’s before it is Dante’s. Augustine called it the ordo amoris, the order of loves: a rightly ordered soul is not one that has stopped desiring but one whose desires are in proportion, loving greater things more and lesser things less. Dante’s achievement was to make it a place you can walk through. This is the part of his work that a reader today is likeliest to need. If sin is a list of forbidden acts, then holiness is mostly abstention, and the Christian life becomes a matter of not doing things. If sin is love bent out of shape, then the same energy that ruins a person is the energy that saves them, redirected; and heaven is not the end of desire but desire finally pointed home. That is why the man who wrote hell’s gate could also write that "God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 John 4:16) without changing the subject.

(Q) "Neither Creator nor a creature ever, Son," he began, "was destitute of love Natural or spiritual; and thou knowest it." + Source: Dante, Purgatorio XVII, 91–93 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, 1867). Virgil begins his answer on the fourth terrace, in the dark. "Natural" love is the built-in pull of a thing toward what suits it, the way a stone falls; "spiritual" love, which Dante here calls the love of the mind, is the kind that chooses, and therefore the kind that can be blamed. Everything that follows in the Purgatorio is worked out from this distinction (T3).

(T4) A human being has two ends, so a human being needs two authorities, and neither one appoints the other. + The great political quarrel of Dante’s century was about who was over whom. In 1302, the year Florence sentenced him, Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Unam sanctam (a bull is a formal papal letter, named for the lead seal, the bulla, that closed it), which claimed that both swords, the spiritual and the temporal, belong to the church, and that kings wield theirs at the church’s direction. The temporal sword is the ordinary business of governing, the taxes and courts and armies that belong to this passing world, as against the spiritual work of the church, and the quarrel was over who finally held the handle of it. Dante had watched what that claim did to his city at close range, and he wrote three books against it. His argument in the Monarchia starts from human nature rather than from politics. A person is a soul and a body, made for a happiness that can be had in this life and for a blessedness that cannot. Two ends, reached by different roads: the first by philosophy and the moral virtues anyone can practise, the second by revelation and the theological virtues that come as gifts. Two roads need two guides. So the emperor governs the temporal end and the pope leads to the eternal one, and, Dante insists, the emperor holds his authority from God directly and not by the pope’s licence. It is worth being clear about what he is not saying, because he is easy to conscript. He is not a secularist and he is not proposing that public life be run as though God were absent. The Monarchia ends by saying the emperor should still honour the pope as a firstborn son honours his father. What Dante is arguing is narrower and more durable: that ordinary government has a real competence of its own, given by God, which the church is not equipped to run and should not try to. Most Christians now hold some version of that. Within a generation of his death it was inflammatory enough to get the book publicly burned.

(Q) "Wherefore a twofold directive agent was necessary to man, in accordance with the twofold end; the Supreme Pontiff to lead the human race to life eternal by means of revelation, and the Emperor to guide it to temporal well-being by means of philosophic instruction." + Source: Dante, Monarchia III, 16 (Aurelia Henry translation, 1904). From the last chapter of the last book, where the whole argument comes to a point. "Directive agent" is Henry’s rendering of a phrase meaning something like a guide or steersman. Dante has just said that the two ends are like two conclusions a man has to reach by two different sets of means (T4).

(T5) The end of a human life is to see God, and the sight does not overwhelm the will but tunes it. + Think of the moment when something that had baffled you for weeks finally comes clear, and you cannot afterwards reconstruct what it was like not to see it. Dante’s last canto is a man trying to describe that, at a scale where language stops working, and saying so honestly. He compares his memory of the vision to snow melting in the sun, and to a prophecy written on light leaves that the wind scatters before anyone can gather them and read it through. The technical name for what he is describing is the beatific vision: the direct sight of God himself, promised to the redeemed, as distinct from knowing about God at second hand. Scripture puts it plainly twice. "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12), and, of the city at the end of things, "They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads" (Revelation 22:4). Dante is not inventing a doctrine; he is trying to write what the doctrine would feel like from the inside. Three things in his account repay attention. First, he insists the failure is his and not the vision’s: what is lost is his ability to remember and report, not anything lacking in what he saw. Second, one image gathers the whole poem: deep in the light he sees everything that is scattered through the universe like loose leaves bound together into a single volume by love. All the separate things finally make one book. Third, and least expected, the last thing that happens to him is not knowledge but motion. His desire and his will are turned, evenly, like a wheel that runs true, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars. He is not rewarded at the end. He is finished, in the sense a piece of work is finished, and set turning right.

(Q) "But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars." + Source: Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 143–145 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, 1867). The last three lines of the poem, following the admission that "Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy." Each of the three canticles ends on the word "stars," and this is the last of them. The subject of the sentence arrives last: it is the Love that is doing the turning (T5).

(Q) "But ne’ertheless, all falsehood laid aside, Make manifest thy vision utterly, And let them scratch wherever is the itch." + Source: Dante, Paradiso XVII, 127–129 (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation, 1867). In the heaven of Mars the pilgrim meets his own great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, who has just told him he will be exiled, and who now answers the obvious worry: if the poem names powerful men, who will read it? Publish it all anyway, Cacciaguida says; the ones it stings will be the ones who needed stinging, and the next lines add that though the words may taste bitter, they will feed whoever digests them. Dante did as he was told, and the consequences of that decision are the story of the next seven hundred years.

What Christian Readers Made of Him

(†) Ordinary Italians read him before the scholars did, and the language he chose became a country’s own. + The Comedy was a popular book almost immediately, in a century when books were copied by hand and popularity was expensive. Something like eight hundred manuscript copies survive from before 1500, more than for almost any other work in a European vernacular from those centuries. A vernacular is simply the language people actually speak at home and in the market, as against the Latin of the schools and the church, and copying eight hundred of anything by hand is a good measure of how badly people wanted it. Franco Sacchetti tells a story, seventy years after the fact, of Dante coming on a blacksmith who was mangling his lines over the anvil. Commentaries started within a decade of his death, and two of the earliest were written by his own sons, Jacopo and Pietro, who had watched the thing being made. Then Florence, the city that had sentenced him to the fire, funded a public lectureship on the poem, and in October 1373 gave it to Giovanni Boccaccio, who stood up in a church and read the Inferno aloud to whoever came in off the street. The long consequence was linguistic. Italy in 1300 was a peninsula of dialects with Latin over the top of them, and no one language a Milanese and a Neapolitan both owned. Dante argued in De vulgari eloquentia that the spoken tongue is the nobler of the two, because everyone has it, because it came first, and because it is natural rather than learned. Then he proved the case by writing the highest subject there is in it. Five and a half centuries later, when Italy unified and needed a national language, the form of Tuscan that his poem had made prestigious was the obvious choice.

(†) The church took the poem to its heart and put the political book on the fire. + The Comedy was read as devotion and as theology, and it did a job nothing else was doing. The great intellectual achievement of the thirteenth century was scholastic theology, above all Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, and almost nobody outside the schools was ever going to open it. Dante carried its substance to people who could not read Latin, and he did it without simplifying it into mush. Aquinas himself appears in the poem, in the sphere of the sun, and the courtesy of the scene is characteristic: it is the Dominican Aquinas who tells the life of Francis, founder of the Franciscans, and the Franciscan Bonaventure who tells the life of Dominic, each order praising the other’s founder. The Monarchia was treated very differently. Around 1329 Cardinal Bertrando del Poggetto had the book publicly burned at Bologna and, by one account, wanted Dante’s bones dug up and burned with it. He was a papal legate, which is to say one of the pope’s personal representatives, sent out to a region carrying the pope’s own authority, so the burning was not one churchman’s temper. The book went onto the Index of Prohibited Books, the church’s official list of what Catholics were forbidden to read, in the sixteenth century, and it stayed there until 1881. The account was settled emphatically in the end. Benedict XV wrote an encyclical, a letter circulated to the whole church, for the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death (In praeclara summorum, 1921), Paul VI an apostolic letter for the seven-hundredth of his birth (Altissimi cantus, 1965), and Francis another for the seven-hundredth of his death (Candor lucis aeternae, 2021). Protestants had found their own use for him long before that: the Lutheran historian Matthias Flacius Illyricus listed Dante in his Catalogus testium veritatis of 1556, a roll of witnesses who had told the truth about the church before Luther was born, and what earned him the place was the Monarchia and its argument that the pope does not stand over the emperor. For the second edition of 1562 Flacius put passages of the poem into Latin as well, among them the simoniac popes stuffed head-down in the rock of Inferno XIX. Simony is the buying and selling of church office, and it is named for the Simon of Acts 8 who watched the apostles give the Holy Spirit and offered them money for the trick.

(†) English-speaking Christians rediscovered him in the nineteenth century, and he has sat near the centre of Christian imagination since. + Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began translating Dante seriously after his wife died in a fire, working at the poem line by line as a way of getting through the evenings, and published the whole thing in 1867. He read the drafts aloud to a circle of friends who met to check him, James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton among them, and the group has been called the Dante Club ever since. The translation is stiff in places, and it is still among the most quoted in English, because it is literal, complete, and free. In the twentieth century the debt was mostly owed by writers. T. S. Eliot said flatly, in his 1929 essay on the poet, that Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them and there is no third. Charles Williams wrote The Figure of Beatrice in 1943 to argue that Dante’s treatment of a particular loved person was a whole theology of images (T1). Dorothy L. Sayers, who had spent her life writing detective novels and defending Christian doctrine as the most interesting thing available, learned enough Italian in middle age to translate the Inferno and the Purgatorio, died with the Paradiso unfinished, and left notes that are still the best doorway in English for a reader who has neither Italian nor theology; Barbara Reynolds completed the work in 1962. For apologetics the use is specific and it has not aged. The complaint that Christian doctrine is abstract, that it is a set of propositions with nothing at stake in any actual life, is hard to keep saying once someone has spent a week inside a poem where doctrine is a country with weather in it, and where the people the traveller meets are recognisable enough to be frightening.

(†) Where his own record will not bear the weight: the named damned, the letters to Florence, and a Limbo he furnished himself. + Three things in Dante’s own work are worth holding him to, and they come from the poem and the letters rather than from anything later readers did with them. - He assigned real people to hell by name. Popes, neighbours, political enemies, a few of them still alive when he wrote. Boniface VIII is not yet dead in the poem’s fictional year of 1300, so Dante has a damned pope prophesy his arrival, which is a way of pronouncing sentence in advance on a man who had years left to repent. Scripture is not ambiguous about this. "Judge not, that you be not judged" (Matthew 7:1). "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls" (Romans 14:4). Dante has a case, and it should be heard: the work is a vision and not a verdict, he puts himself on the terrace of pride and expects to serve time there, and he fills heaven with surprises that no one could have predicted, including two pagans, the emperor Trajan and a minor Trojan named Ripheus out of the Aeneid. But he named the names, his readers took him at his word, and the fear that hangs over the Inferno works partly because they did. - The letter to the Florentines. In March 1311, urging Henry VII to come and break the city, Dante wrote an open letter addressed to the most wicked Florentines within the walls, telling them their walls would fall and their liberty was a delusion. It is a document of real hatred, written by the same man who was building the terrace of wrath, and no amount of admiring the poem makes it something else. - Limbo. In Inferno IV he furnishes a whole region of the afterlife: a green place, lit and quiet, where virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants live with no torment except a longing that will never be satisfied. That was a common theological opinion in his century and it was never a defined doctrine of the church, and Scripture describes nothing of the kind. Dante presents it with exactly the confidence he brings to everything else, and a reader is owed the distinction between the parts of his afterlife that are revealed and the parts that are furnished. None of this would have surprised him much. The pilgrim in his own poem spends three canticles being corrected, and is told at the outset that the road runs through his own faults rather than around them.