A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy Quotes

“new to this place when I saw / a mighty one come here, crowned in victory. / He dragged out from among us the shade of our first parent, / and the shade of Abel, his son, and that of Noah,” and so on (Inf. 4.52–56). This is the event that ​you find portrayed on Byzantine icons or in medieval illuminations, in which Christ comes into hell and kicks down the doors, which the devils feebly hold against him. Christ, bursting into hell, grabs the wrists of Adam and Eve and the other patriarchs and energetically pulls them out of limbo. This is the so-called harrowing of hell, which, according to ​Christian tradition, took place on Holy Saturday, before Christ’s own resurrection—the very event that the liturgy is celebrating while Dante walks through this realm.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“Aeneas is indeed, then, a man of devotion (to family, gods, and followers), but his special strength is his ability to resist any kind of mediocre settlement in which he would capitulate and found a city on a site that could provide mere subsistence. What he seeks is to found a city centered on divine revelation again.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“In Virgil’s mysterious prophecy, in which he cryptically refers to the “hound” who will bring justice and righteousness to the world (Inf. 1.97–102), we do get a clearer sense of what the wolf embodies—that is, the avaricious, lustful, and gluttonous appetite that, even though it gets what it wants, cannot but desire more.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“In Dante, though, they also have an allegorical element, as if the greatest punishment of the wicked is not necessarily to receive external chastisement but rather to be left to the desires of their own hearts. Some scholars speculate that the three beasts might represent envy (in the leopard), pride (in the lion), and cupidity (in the wolf).”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“Sometimes these periods of questioning and confusion can extend over days or months. We often call them periods of depression, but it's a kind of spiritual ‘waylessness.’ For so many writers, from classical antiquity to the Brothers Grimm, being lost in the forest is one of the most frightening experiences imaginable, because you don't know if you are making progress. Have you already walked here? Are you going away from your destination? Are you walking in circles? You don't know, if you have no path to guide you. In a similar way, we can sometimes wake in our lives and wonder why we are pursuing the goods we have committed ourselves to. Whatever happened to the big dreams? Those impossibly heroic goals? How did you get stuck in this dark wood?”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“What we find, then, is that Dante’s musical program embodies theological realities. Infernal sinners remain willfully rebellious. In life they broke away from the human community to pursue some good in vicious competition with the rest of the human race. Now, as a community, they fail to achieve concord. Like musical notes that remain independent, their retained individuality is ugly and broken. Repentant sinners in purgatory, on the other hand, now willfully submit their individuality to the community. They learn now what it is like to live as members of a body. And thus they erase their tendencies to erratic individualism, forcing their voices into the unison of the simple plainchant. But with the polyphonic hymns of Paradiso, we have not only concord but also a simultaneous expression of individuality: Dante gives us a vision of heaven as a million-part motet.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy