Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“A Visitor’s Guide to Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell”

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“Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy is considered an epic masterpiece and a foundational work of the Western canon. We offer this short guide to the nine circles of Hell, as described in Dante’s Inferno.

“First Circle: Limbo
The first circle is home to the unbaptized and virtuous pagans. It’s not Heaven, but as far as Hell goes, it isn’t too bad: It’s the retirement community of the afterlife. Hippocrates and Aristotle will be your neighbors, so any attempt at small talk will probably turn into Big Talk in a hurry. You’ll have television, but all of the channels will be set to CSPAN.

“Second Circle: Lust
The wind-buffeted second circle of Hell is the final destination of the lustful and adulterous — basically anyone controlled by their hormones. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy were among its most famous residents during Dante’s day, but you can expect this place to be full of angsty teenagers and reality television stars by the time you arrive.

“Third Circle: Gluttony
Today’s forecast calls for plenty of icy rain and slush — a ‘wintery mix’ for all eternity. You know those people whose Instagram feeds are full of carefully lit photos of artfully arranged entrees? You’ll probably find them here, plus anyone whose response is ‘I’m kind of a foodie’ when asked where they’d like to go eat.”   —Matt Staggs, “A Visitor’s Guide to Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell,” Penguin Random House, (Reterived on February 16, 2023)

“Love that moves the sun and other stars,” Martin Hoegger

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“In the last verse of The Divine Comedy, Dante defines God as « l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle« , the love that moves the sun and the other stars (Paradise, xxxiii, 145). This means that the stars, the planets, the whole universe are not governed by a blind force, but by a personal will, the Spirit of God, who in Christ revealed himself as Love. This love is the golden thread that links all parts of creation together.”   —Martin Hoegger, “Love that moves the sun and other stars,” Martin Hoegger, Dec 30, 2019 (retrieved March 26, 2024)

“How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem,”First Things Blogpost

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“In 2011, Rod Dreher returns to his hometown in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, after years living elsewhere in pursuit of a (highly successful) journalistic career. Now middle-aged, he hopes to find a more authentic community than he has in big cities and to draw close to the family from which he has been estranged. Instead, he falls into a kind of depression—the combined effect of resurgent stresses within the family, the death of his sister Ruthie from cancer, and the Epstein-Barr ­virus—which causes fatigue, the need for large amounts of sleep, and no little turmoil over how to work his way out of the dark place in which he finds himself.

“He turns for help to the pastor at his local Orthodox church for spiritual counseling, as well as to a Christian psychologist. But as he recounts in this deep and moving memoir, an utterly unanticipated source of ­guidance came to him unbidden. As he is browsing in the poetry section of a bookstore one day, he stumbles onto a translation of Dante ­Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which tells of a pilgrimage from a threatening and dark wood through Hell, Purgatory, and the Heavens to the Beatific ­Vision. For some reason, that medieval ­Florentine poet threw a spiritual lifeline to this modern American writer.

“The title of the book that ­resulted, How Dante Can Save Your Life, may seem exaggerated, in the way of recent books like Alain de ­Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. It is. Dante can’t save you. Only God can. In our postmodern culture, there’s recently been a raft of works that look to tony literary sources for meaning and substance in a world that seems to have obliterated both. But don’t be deceived by superficial resemblances. Dreher’s book is much more deeply rooted in theology—and reality—than are those other efforts.”   —Rod Dreher, “How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem,” First Things, June 2015 (retrieved on March 24, 2024)

“Dante’s Peek”

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“The modern study of historical philology and the discovery of the family tree of Indo-European languages started in the late 18th century. The fuel that took fire from the spark of insight in William Jones’s astonishing paragraph had been gathered over generations, since about 1500, by scattered minds in Europe and South Asia.

“But before that? What did medieval Europeans know or think about their own language map? Latin still was spoken and written in the Church. And the tongues we know as Spanish, Italian, and French were in the air, obviously related to Latin and obviously brethren to one another.

“Dante, in exile about 1300, began a book meant to guide the development of Italian poetics. A language without a literature is a body without a head, and he meant to free his native people from the artistic dominance of Provençal troubadours and Parisian romance-spinners. He sought to winnow the dialects of Italy and discover the ideal medium for a true native Italian literature. (No prize for guessing he would find that ideal in his own Florentine.)

“He dropped it after a few chapters, but what he finished of ‘De vulgari eloquentia‘ contains an explanation in medieval terms of the linguistic map of Europe. It is in the introduction, setting the stage for the argument Dante intends to make.

“Dante begins by stating something obvious to him, and no doubt to his peers, that might seem strange to us. In most of the world around him, he says, there are two languages in the same place. Call them ‘low’ and ‘high,’ or ‘vulgar’ and ‘classical,’ or ‘common’ and ‘learned.’ Dante calls the first ‘vulgar’ or ‘vernacular.'”   —”Dante’s Peek,” Etym Online, May 24, 2020 (retrieved March 21, 2024)

“The Comedy in Quilt”

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“Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso by Dante Alighieri represented in 57 textile panels
A group of Italian quilters of all levels, inspired by the songs and descriptions of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, interpreted and represented a group, a frame, a sky, a scene, a landscape, the pain suffered by the damned … creating a great story made of fabric, threads and colors. The images of these quilts evoke infernal sensations and more; in front of some you can ‘hear’ the screams of the damned, the smell of sulfur and the cries of devils, the expiation of those who have a fleeting memory of life and peace in contemplating divine power and wisdom.
“If in The Divine Comedy the dramatic and lyrical dimensions are expressed through the noble language of poetry, the purpose of the authors was to perceive them and try to translate them through the techniques of Quilt Art.
“Interpreting with fabric a great cornerstone of Italian literature such as Dante is not at all simple or obvious, but it certainly constitutes a great challenge. 26 the Artworks exhibited”   —Redazione, “The Comedy in Quilt,” Arte Morbida, Sep 25, 2021 (retrieved March 21, 2024)

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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