The whole poem is divided into three parts, 33 in each part, with preface poems in front, 100. This poem has three lines, rhyming into a string (Aba, BCB, CDC, ...), and the length of each article is roughly equal, and the parts are basically equal. (4720 lines of hell; 4755 lines of purgatory; 4,758 lines in heaven), every movie ends with the word "stelle".
Outline of the whole poem
Dante described himself in the first person when he was 35 years old (halfway through his life) and strayed into a dark forest (symbolizing evil). At the foot of a mountain, three wild animals blocked the way, a female wolf (symbolizing greed), a lion (symbolizing ambition) and a leopard (symbolizing pleasure). Another way of saying it is that they symbolize the Pope, the King of France and the Florentine respectively. When he called for help, the soul of Virgil, an ancient Roman poet, appeared and said to him, "You can't defeat these three beasts. I'll show you another way. " . Lead him through hell and purgatory, then give him to the soul of Dante's unrequited lover Bayar and take him to heaven until he meets God.
In the world he described, hell is a big funnel, with its center in Jerusalem and narrowing from top to bottom. The soul evil it controls is more serious as it goes down to the center of the earth. Satan, the devil, occupies the top of the funnel. They climbed the center of the earth from the devil's tail, and on the other side was purgatory. Purgatory is like a mountain. In the sea on the other side of the earth opposite Jerusalem, the soul repents and washes away its sins here. The mountain is divided into seven layers, symbolizing the seven deadly sins. Every time you go up, you will eliminate evil until you reach the top of the mountain and you can go to heaven. The sky is divided into nine layers, and the higher the soul, the nobler it is until it passes through the ninth layer. Where are the Virgin and all the saved souls? With the permission of the Virgin, we can have a glimpse of the Trinity God.
On the way through hell, purgatory and heaven, Dante talked with the famous souls he met, including some good and bad celebrities in history. He integrated the figures he admired and hated into all parts, and sent the Pope and even some Florentines he hated to hell. Some details are not recorded in the Bible, and he invented them himself, but they are also logical. It also includes many of his views on theological issues and systematically expounds the Christian worldview. purgatory
After a long period of deliberation and conception, Dante began to write the Divine Comedy. It is difficult to determine the exact date of writing the Divine Comedy. According to the textual research of literary historians, it started at around 1307, and hell purgatory was completed at around 13 13. Paradise was written shortly before Dante's death, and lasted for 10 years.
The Divine Comedy takes the form of a unique fantasy journey in medieval literature. Dante takes himself as the protagonist and imagines himself as a living person to go to hades, the kingdom of death. The whole poem is divided into three parts: hell, purgatory and heaven.
The poem tells that Dante was lost in a dark forest at the age of 35 in 1300. He tried his best to find his way out of the maze and came to the foot of a sunny mountain at dawn. This is the light that illuminates the journey. He was climbing to the top of the mountain step by step when three wild animals (leopard, lion and wolf, symbolizing lust, rape and greed respectively) came at him.
Dante shouted for help. At this time, the ancient Roman poet Virgil appeared. He was entrusted by Beatrice to help Dante get out of his way and guide him to hell and? Purgatory.
The shape of hell is like a funnel with a wide top and a narrow bottom, with nine layers. The first floor is a waiting place, where ancient pagans who were born before Christ and could not be baptized wait for God's judgment. In the remaining eight layers, the souls of sinners receive different severe punishments according to the crimes they committed before their death (lust, gluttony, greed, anger, cult belief, rape, fraud and betrayal).
Purgatory (also known as the pure world) is 7 * * *, plus the pure world mountain and the paradise on earth, a total of 9 floors. Those souls who committed crimes before death, but to a lesser extent, have repented. According to the seven deadly sins of mankind (arrogance, jealousy, anger, laziness, greed for money, gluttony and lust), practice and wash here, and then rise to light and heaven layer by layer. In the paradise on earth at the top of Networld, Virgil retired and Beatrice appeared.
Beatrice accused Dante of being lost in the evil forest, hoping that he would repent and let him look at the illusion of church corruption and drink the water of forgetting Sichuan, so as to forget his past mistakes and gain a new life. Later, Beatrice led Dante to heaven. This is the home of happy souls; They are good-doers, devout priests, meritorious persons, philosophers and theologians, martyrs, upright monarchs, monks, Christ and angels. In the heaven above the cloud nine, Dante can see the face of God, but the image of God disappears like a bolt of lightning, so illusion and divine comedy also come to an abrupt end.
Divine Comedy is a work full of metaphors and symbols, but also full of distinct reality and tendency. Dante told him through Beatrice that his main purpose in writing The Divine Comedy was "to benefit the evil society". That is to say, although the Divine Comedy adopts the unique form of medieval fantasy literature, its meaning and symbol often cause great controversy in interpretation, but its ideological connotation is extremely clear, that is, it reflects reality, inspires people, and lets the world experience tests and get rid of mistakes. Dante lived in a historical period of social change. As a "poet with a strong tendency", he is bent on innovating politics and realizing his ideals and ambitions. However, he painfully saw that his hometown Florence became a victim of division and infighting, and the city was mired in partisan hatred, weak and degenerate day by day: in the years you remember, how many times have you changed laws, coins, officials and customs, and how many times have you changed the members of the municipal government!
And Italy's turbulent reality, the tyranny and incompetence of feudal lords caused endless suffering, which made him even more saddened:
Alas, slave Italy, hotbed of pain, you are a lonely boat without a helmsman in the storm. You are no longer a housewife from other provinces, but you are reduced to prostitution!
Therefore, Dante is more eager than ever to establish a centralized monarchy to restrain and control the rival city-states and feudal princes, to ensure that Italy becomes a unified and prosperous country, and to "achieve stable peace in the century and close the temple of Yano".
At that time, Italy belonged to the Holy Roman Empire in name, but the emperor of the Empire usually came from a German vassal, who only exercised the rule of Italy in name. Dante criticized the emperors Rudolph I and Albert I. Their father and son were only interested in expanding their power in Germany and did not come to Italy to exercise their power, so that Italy was actually in a state of political division and "the garden of the empire was deserted". After profoundly describing the political and social reality at that time, Dante severely exposed and criticized the religious theology that tried to dominate the Christian world and monopolized all cultures in the Middle Ages. He further developed the principle of separation of church and state expounded in Imperialism, and in view of the "Sun and Moon Theory" advocated by medieval theology, he vividly summarized his view of equality between church and state as "Two Suns Theory" in Divine Comedy:
Rome that benefits the world has always had
Two suns, illuminating two roads respectively,
The way of the world, the way of God.
This metaphor vividly shows that political power and religious power are two suns that respectively shine on earthly life and spiritual world, and should be independent, equal and cooperative in division of labor, rather than subordinate and fighting, and should not be integrated. What about now?
Dante infinite regrets ground say:
One sun goes out, the other,
The sword and the cross are in the hands of one person.
Due to the intrusion of religious power into political power, the function of mutual restriction and supervision between them has lost, and the world has suffered greatly from it, even the church has "fallen into a quagmire and defiled its responsibility".
Therefore, Dante expressed extremely strong hatred for the sins of the church's unbridled interference in Italy's internal affairs, undermining the peaceful reunification of the country, and the failures and misdeeds of the church monks in reversing good and evil and committing crimes. He denounced the Pope, bishops and priests for "doing business there day and night in the name of Christ", doing business in the clergy, extortion, extravagance and waste, persecuting Christians, and "putting the world in a miserable situation"; They are addicted to the lewdness of money and "cut off the gift of God everywhere."
Bread for the People sets a "bad example" and leads people to "go astray". Dante pointed out that monks who turned their backs on the teachings of the Bible threw St. Paul and St. Peter out of the clouds, turning the Vatican into "a blood ditch and a pile of garbage", "the temple into a den of beasts, and the vestments into sacks full of evil flour".
Intriguingly, Dante punished greedy popes, bishops and priests on the fourth floor, and put Pope Boniface VIII, who was still alive and suppressed Florence and the regime, created turmoil and division in Italy and attempted to usurp secular power, into the eighth floor of hell, plunged into a deep cave and burned at the stake. Dante severely punished Boniface VIII by torturing political murderers in the Middle Ages, and predicted the prospect that justice would triumph over evil and that the church's interference in the secular situation would end. Dante's desire and emotion express the demand of the new citizen class to get rid of the bondage of medieval church and religious theology.
Dante enthusiastically praised the significance of secular life and thought that secular life has its own value. In The Divine Comedy, he emphasized that man is endowed with "free will", which is "God's greatest proposition" and "God's greatest gift" to mankind. He encouraged the world to unswervingly follow reason in real life:
You come with me (by Virgil, a poet symbolizing reason),
Let people talk about it,
Like a vertical tower,
Let the wind roar,
The top of the tower never moves.
The poem warmly praises the heroes with great ideals and strong will in history, and hopes that the world will follow their example, cheer up, avoid laziness, overcome all difficulties and obstacles and create their own destiny. In Dante's view, sitting on a velvet cushion or sleeping in a quilt will not be famous; I can only waste my life.
It is one of the characteristics of Dante as the first poet in the new period to praise reason and free will, summon interest and struggle in the world and pursue the concept of honor. This concept of putting people first and attaching importance to the value of real life is in direct opposition to the idea that everything in the Middle Ages belongs to God and the afterlife advocated by religious theology.
The Divine Comedy also reveals new ideas of opposing obscurantism in the Middle Ages, advocating culture and respecting knowledge. Dante praised people's talent and wisdom, especially for the classical culture rejected and denied by the church. In his poems, he regards Homer as "the king of poets", Aristotle as "the master of philosophers" and Virgil as "the sea of wisdom". He enthusiastically eulogized the story that Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic, left his family, abandoned his personal happiness and sailed to the ends of the earth to explore, and pointed out through Odysseus:
You weren't born to live like an animal,
But for the pursuit of virtue and knowledge.
The social and political changes and spiritual and moral conditions in the historical period of Italy's transition from the Middle Ages to the modern society have also been truly and widely described in the Divine Comedy. What is commendable is that Dante has a clear and profound understanding of the egoism of the emerging citizen class, the pursuit of money, the usury of usurers and the evil of the emerging capitalist relationship, and severely condemns it. He pointed out that the nouveau riche of the citizen class is full of "arrogance, arrogance and luxury", and the idyllic quiet life is gone forever, because pride, jealousy and greed are the three sparks that make people burn.
Dante is a great poet in the transitional period between the old and the new. The theological concept of Christianity, the prejudice of medieval thought and the contradiction of world outlook are also shown in the Divine Comedy.
The Divine Comedy is full of enthusiastic praise for this life, but Dante regards this life as a preparation for eternal life in the afterlife. He exposed the failures and misdeeds of the church and monks, but he did not oppose religious theology and the whole church, and even put religious theology above philosophy and faith above reason. For example, he chose Virgil as his guide in the fantasy journey of hell and purgatory, and used reason and philosophy to guide human beings to know evil, while Beatrice as his guide in the journey of heaven, which shows that the poet is still limited to faith and theology above reason and philosophy, and only by relying on faith and theology can human beings reach the perfect view of scholasticism.
Dante's description of the heroic achievements of Odysseus' voyage exploration is one of the most dazzling poems in The Divine Comedy. Odysseus's words calling on the world to pursue virtue and knowledge have also become words of wisdom. On the other hand, Dante also showed the weakness of reason through Virgil's mouth: "Anyone who wants to see through infinite fantasy with our weak reason is really stupid or crazy." The tragic experiences of infatuated lovers Paul and Francesca described in The Divine Comedy were so sad and touching that Dante was so painful that he fainted because of their crying. Numerous painters, poets and musicians in later generations have created many excellent works of art based on this story. However, according to the moral standards of the Middle Ages, Dante took the young lovers as greedy sinners and put them in hell for punishment. He also placed San Jifang Valley, the originator of asceticism, in a glorious paradise. The contradiction between Dante's rejection of medieval asceticism and old ethics and his recognition to a certain extent is fully reflected here.
Dante's attitude towards feudal monarchs was often contradictory. He once condemned with indignation that there is no clean land in Italy and that "all cities in Italy are tyrants". In The Divine Comedy, he severely reprimanded the crimes of King Charles I of Naples and Sicily and King Philip IV of France. But in Dante's political ideal, the emperor is regarded as the savior to save Italy in danger. He often mentioned henry vii in The Divine Comedy, and thought that only this emperor was the "helmsman" who could set the correct course and go down the river for the Italian "boat alone" drifting in the storm, which reserved a glorious position for his prediction in The Divine Comedy Paradise. This is precisely under the specific historical conditions. The reflection of weakness and compromise of the disadvantaged citizen class. In order to resist the tyranny of the church, the original humanists had to seek the support and protection of the royal power.
Divine Comedy is a work that has reached a high artistic level. Dante's description of hell, purgatory and heaven was inspired and influenced by classical literature, especially medieval fantasy literature. For example, Virgil described the hero's journey to the underworld under the guidance of a wizard in Aeneas, and three books by medieval writer Da Villon, Ba Bilong's Poems of Hell and Della Liva described that evil souls were punished in hell and heaven was bright and happy. However, The Divine Comedy is not as rough, vulgar and illusory as the literary works in the Middle Ages. With rich imagination, profound theology, philosophical accomplishment and novel ideas, the poet designed a strict structure and clear levels for these three realms. He divided hell, purgatory and heaven into nine layers, which contained profound moral implications. He used different colors when describing different realms. Hell is the realm of punishing evil and promoting good, with a gloomy tone; Purgatory is the realm of repentance and hope, and the color turns to calm and tranquility; Heaven is a state of perfection and beauty, shrouded in splendor and magnificence. Multi-level and multi-tone image description expresses the poet's incisive and abstract philosophical and theological views, endowing these realms with great authenticity and strangeness without being subtle, subtle and profound, making people immersive.
Divine Comedy is a colorful and vivid character gallery. As a master of this epic, Dante's hard-working character and rich and complex spiritual world are portrayed as the most subtle and full. Virgil and Beatrice, two guides, although symbolic and moral, still have distinct personalities. Virgil is a mentor, and in his care and teaching of Dante, he shows fatherly kindness and kindness. Beatrice is a lover. With the help and encouragement of the poet, she shows a gentle and solemn character like a mother. Dante is good at using extremely accurate and concise language to outline the appearance and personality of characters in dramatic scenes and actions. In a sad and tragic atmosphere, the poet described the loyal characters of the lovers Paul and Francesca. In the gloomy and resentful situation, the poet outlined the greedy and cunning character of Pope Boniface VIII. There are all kinds of thrilling magic scenes in the Divine Comedy, and there are all kinds of monsters in hell, such as Yan Bailuo, a three-headed evil dog that devours ghosts, a strange bird with a human face flying over the suicide forest, the king of hell with three different faces and three pairs of huge wings, and the nemesis covered in blood and with a green snake on her head. In Dante's works, only a few strokes are vivid and vivid. They are not only highly realistic artistic images, but also highlight the atmosphere of various specific environments in hell.
When Dante describes people and scenery, he often likes to use extremely popular metaphors from daily life and nature, which produces extremely unusual artistic effects. For example, ghosts in hell meet strange visitors Virgil and Dante and stare at them in surprise, just like a blind tailor staring at the eye of a needle. It is described as a thin ghost with deep eyes, like a pair of rings with jewels falling off. Under the lash of the demon Caron, the ghost jumped into the ship on the border of hell from the shore, like falling leaves in autumn.
The divine comedy contains 33 songs of hell, 33 songs of purgatory and 33 songs of heaven. Plus a long poem overture, *** 100, a total of 14233 lines. The structure of these three realms is also extremely symmetrical and rigorous, with 9 layers of * * *. The last line of each song rhymes with the word "star", echoing each other. This precise structure and symmetrical layout are based on the contribution of the numbers 3 and 10 to medieval culture.
Some of them are mysterious and symbolic.
The prosodic form of Divine Comedy is a popular metrical three-rhyme sentence in folk poetry, that is, the third behavior is one syllable, which rhymes alternately and runs through the whole poem in a chain cycle. This also shows the poet's profound language skills and mature skills in using rhythm. Dante abandoned the Latin used in medieval literary works and wrote Divine Comedy in colloquial style, which played an important role in promoting the unification of Italian national language and enriching Italian literary language.
All these show that Dante got rid of the fetters of medieval literary tradition and tried to express the ideological content of the new era with new artistic forms, which made Dante the first national poet in Italy.
The great historical value of Divine Comedy lies in that it reflects the changes in real life and social and political fields in Italy during the transition period from the Middle Ages to modern times through the descriptions of hundreds of various characters encountered by the poet in his fantasy journey, and reveals the new concept of the new era-the dawn of humanism. Divine Comedy gives an artistic exposition and summary of politics, philosophy, science, theology, poetry, painting and culture in the Middle Ages. Therefore, it not only reached the advanced level of the times in thought and art, but also was an epoch-making milestone and an encyclopedic masterpiece reflecting social life and imparting knowledge.
The Divine Comedy was originally called Comedy, and Boccaccio named this work "Sacred" in Dante's Biography to show his reverence for the poet. The later version was named "Holy Comedy". Chinese translation is usually called divine comedy.