The Divine Comedy is a work full of metaphor, symbolism, and distinct reality and tendentiousness. Dante told him through Beatrice's conversation that the main purpose of his writing The Divine Comedy was "to benefit the evil society". That is to say, although the Divine Comedy adopted the unique form of fantasy literature in the Middle Ages, its meaning and symbol often caused a lot of controversy in interpretation, but its ideological connotation was extremely clear, that is, it reflected reality, inspired people, let the world experience tests, get rid of mistakes, and achieve goodness and harmony. Dante lived in the historical period of social change. As a "poet with a strong tendency", he was bent on innovating politics and realizing his ideals and ambitions. However, he painfully saw that his hometown Florence became the victim of division and infighting, and the city was trapped in the hatred of parties, weak and incompetent, and degenerated 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!
The reality of Italy's turmoil and the scene of the feudal lords' tyrannical incompetence made him feel sad:
Alas, Italy as a slave,
A hotbed of pain,
You are a boat without a helmsman in the storm,
You are no longer a housewife in various provinces, but you have fallen into 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 "make the century secure a stable peace and close the temple gate of Yano".
At that time, Italy nominally belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, but the emperor of the Empire usually came from the German vassals and exercised the rule over Italy only in name. Dante attacked the emperor Rudolph I and Albert I, whose father and son were only keen on expanding their power in Germany and did not come to Italy to exercise their power, which actually caused Italy to fall into 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 church that tried to dominate the Christian world and the religious theology that monopolized all the cultures in the Middle Ages. He further developed the principle of separation of church and state expounded in The Theory of 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 The Divine Comedy:
Rome, which benefits the world, has always had two suns, which respectively illuminate two paths, the earthly path and the God path.
This metaphor vividly shows that political power and religious power are two suns that respectively shine on earthly life and spiritual world, and they should be independent, equal and cooperative in division of labor, rather than subordinate and fighting, and they should not be integrated into one. And now?
Dante pointed out with infinite emotion:
One sun put out the other, and
both the sword and the cross were in one person's hand.
As a result of the invasion of the religious power into the political power, the functions of mutual restriction and supervision between the two were lost, and the world suffered from this, and even the church "fell into the quagmire and defiled its responsibilities".
Therefore, Dante expressed extremely strong hatred for the evil of the church's wanton interference in Italy's internal affairs, undermining the country's peace and unity, and all kinds of failures and misdeeds of the church monks, which reversed good and evil and committed crimes. He denounced the Pope, bishops and priests for "doing business there day and night in the name of Christ", doing business in the priesthood, extortion, extravagance and persecution of Christians, and "putting the world in a tragic situation"; They indulge in the obscenity of money and "cut off the bread that God gave to the people everywhere", setting a "bad example" that led the 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 "ditch of blood and a pile of garbage", "the temple into a den of beasts, and the vestments into sacks full of evil flour".
It is intriguing that Dante put greedy popes, bishops and priests on the fourth floor to be punished, and Pope Boniface VIII, who was still alive at that time, suppressed Florence and the regime, created turmoil and division in Italy, and attempted to usurp secular power, predicted that he would be sent to the eighth floor of hell, and his head was planted upside down in a deep cave to be burned. Dante used the torture of political murderers in the Middle Ages to severely punish Boniface VIII, and prophetically declared the prospect that justice would surely triumph over evil and that the church's interference in the secular situation would surely end. Dante's desire and emotion expressed the demand of the emerging civil class to get rid of the shackles of the medieval church and religious theology.
Dante enthusiastically praised the significance of worldly life, believing that it 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 gives mankind "the greatest gift". He encouraged the world to unswervingly follow reason in real life:
You come with me (according to Virgil, a poet symbolizing reason),
Let people talk about it,
Be like a vertical tower,
Regardless of the howling wind, the top of the tower will never move.
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 their spirits, avoid laziness, overcome all difficulties and dangers, and create their own destiny. In Dante's view, sitting on a velvet mat or sleeping in a quilt will not become famous; I can only waste my life.
It is one of Dante's characteristics as the first poet in the new era to praise reason and free will, summon interest in this world and struggle, and pursue the idea of honor. This concept of putting people first and attaching importance to the value of real life is in direct opposition to all the thoughts of belonging to God in the Middle Ages and the afterlife advocated by religious theology.
The Divine Comedy also reveals a new idea of opposing obscurantism in the Middle Ages, advocating culture and respecting knowledge. Dante praised people's talents 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 of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic, who left his family, abandoned his personal happiness and sailed to the ends of the earth to explore under the impetus of curiosity, and pointed out through Odysseus:
You were not born to live like animals,
but to pursue 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 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 self-interest of the emerging civil 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 civil class is full of "arrogance, arrogance and extravagance", and the idyllic quiet life is gone forever, because pride, jealousy and greed are three sparks that make people burn.
Dante is a great poet in the transitional period between the old and the new. The Christian theological concept, the prejudice of medieval thought and the contradictions 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 church as a whole, and even put religious theology above philosophy and faith above reason. For example, he chose Virgil as his guide to visit hell and purgatory, and used metaphor reason and philosophy to guide human beings to know evil, while Beatrice as a guide to visit heaven, which shows that poets are still confined to faith and theology, and only by relying on faith and theology can human beings reach the scholastic philosophical view of perfection.
Dante's description of the heroic achievements of Odysseus' voyage and exploration is one of the most dazzling poems in The Divine Comedy, and Odysseus' words calling the world to pursue virtue and knowledge have also become wisdom words. On the other hand, Dante also showed the weakness of reason through Virgil's mouth: "Whoever wants to see through the infinite fantasy with our weak reason is really stupid or crazy." The tragic experience of Paul and Francesca, the spoony lovers, described in The Divine Comedy, was so sad and touching that Dante was so miserable that he fainted because of their crying. Countless 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 put the young lovers in hell for punishment as sinners who are greedy for sex. He also placed St. Fang Ji, the ancestor of asceticism, in a glorious heaven. The contradiction between Dante's rejection of medieval asceticism and the old ethical code and his recognition to a certain extent is fully reflected here.
Dante was also often ambivalent in his attitude towards feudal monarchs. He once condemned with indignation that there is no clean land in Italy, and "all cities in Italy are full of tyrants". In The Divine Comedy, he castigated the crimes of Charles I, king of Naples and Sicily, and Philip IV, king 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, thinking that only this emperor was the "helmsman" who could make the Italian "lone boat" drifting in the storm set the right course and go downstream, and reserved a glorious position for his forecast in The Divine Comedy Paradise. This is precisely under the specific historical conditions. A reflection of the weakness and compromise of the weak citizen class. In order to resist the arbitrary church, the original humanists had to seek the support and protection of the royal power.
The Divine Comedy is a work that has reached a high artistic level. Dante's description of hell, purgatory and heaven is inspired and influenced by classical literature, especially medieval fantasy literature, such as Virgil's description of the hero's journey to the underworld guided by a wizard in Aeneas, and the medieval writer Da Verona's Ode to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Barbilon's Poems on Hell and Della Liva's Three Books all describe that sinful souls are punished in hell and that heaven is bright and happy. However, The Divine Comedy is not as crude, vulgar and illusory as the medieval literary works. With rich imagination, profound theology, philosophical accomplishment and novel ideas, the poet designed a strict structure and clear levels for the three realms. He divided hell, purgatory and heaven into nine layers, which contained profound moral meanings. He used different colors when describing different realms. Hell is the realm of punishing sins, with a melancholy and gloomy tone; Purgatory is the realm of repentance and hope, and the color turns to be calm and quiet; Heaven is the realm of perfection and beauty, shrouded in splendor and splendor. Multi-level and multi-tone image description expresses the poet's incisive and abstract philosophical and theological views, and endows these realms with great authenticity, strangeness without subtlety, subtlety and depth, making people feel as if they were there.
The Divine Comedy is a colorful and vivid figure gallery. As the master of this epic, Dante's hard-working character and rich and complex spiritual world are portrayed in the most subtle and full way. Virgil and Beatrice, two guides, although symbolic and moral, still have their own distinct personalities. Virgil is a mentor, and in his care and teaching of Dante, he shows his father-like kindness and kindness. Beatrice, a lover, showed a gentle and solemn character like a mother in her help and encouragement to the poet. Dante is good at drawing the outline of characters' appearance and personality in dramatic scenes and actions with extremely accurate and concise language. In the tragic atmosphere of grief, the poet described the faithful character of the lovers Paul and Francesca, and in the gloomy and resentful situation, the poet sketched the greedy and deceitful character of Pope Bonifaciu VIII. All kinds of thrilling and magical scenes in The Divine Comedy, all kinds of monsters and ghosts in hell, such as the three-headed evil dog that devours ghosts, the monster bird with a human face flying over the forest of suicides, the king of hell with three different faces and three pairs of enormous wings, and the nemesis covered in blood and with a green snake on her head, are vividly and vividly outlined in Dante's pen. They are not only highly realistic artistic images, but also highlight the atmosphere of various specific environments in hell.
Dante often likes to use extremely popular metaphors from daily life and nature when he writes about people and landscapes, resulting in 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. Described as a thin ghost, his eyes are deep in the absence of god, like a pair of rings with jewels falling off. Under the whipping of the devil Caron, the ghost jumped into the boat on the border of hell from the shore, like leaves falling one by one in autumn.
The Divine Comedy has 33 songs in hell, 33 songs in purgatory and 33 songs in heaven, and the overture of a long poem is ***1 songs, totaling 14,233 lines. The structure of these three realms is also unusually symmetrical and rigorous, with 9 layers of * * *. The last line of each song uses the word "stars" as rhyme, echoing each other. This precise structure and symmetrical layout are based on the mysterious and symbolic significance of numbers 3 and 1 to medieval culture.
The prosodic form of Divine Comedy is a kind of metrical three-rhyme sentence popular in folk poetry, that is, the third line is one syllable, alternating rhymes, and it runs through the whole poem. This also shows the poet's profound language skills and mature skills in using rhythm. Dante abandoned Latin, which was used to literary works in the Middle Ages, and wrote The Divine Comedy with colloquialism, which played an important role in promoting the unification of Italian national language and enriching Italian literary language.
All these indicate that Dante got rid of the fetters of the 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 real life and social and political changes in various fields in Italy during the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times through the description of hundreds of various types of characters encountered by the poet during his fantasy tour, and reveals the new idea of humanism in the new era. The Divine Comedy gives an artistic exposition and summary of medieval politics, philosophy, science, theology, poetry, painting and culture. Therefore, it not only reached the advanced level of the times in terms of ideology and artistry, but also was an epoch-making milestone, and it was an encyclopedic masterpiece reflecting the social life and imparting knowledge.
The Divine Comedy was originally called Comedy, and Boccaccio gave this work a title of "sacred" in Dante Biography to show his reverence for the poet. Later versions were titled "Holy Comedy". The Chinese translation is commonly called Divine Comedy.