As it is often said Divine Comedy, which tells Dante’s fictional journey from Inferno to Paradiso, is not a poem about the afterlife, but it is for the living, that is to say it is an allegory of human life from the lowest forms to the most virtuous form. In that respect, it can be regarded as the journey of self-realization in the process of searching for the place of human nature in the cosmos. Dante, as the only living soul going through the circles of the Inferno to lead his way to Paradiso, places himself in the center of the poem meaning that this journey is in a way his journey of self-realization. After the loss of his pure earthly love Beatrice, he deviates from the peaceful state he was in and becomes possessed by the desire to know about his position in the cosmos. In such a state, blinded by his desire, he finds himself in a forest that is the start of the journey he was called to, by the same reason that made him lose his sight. In the divine context of the journey Beatrice, a pure soul from the heaven, sent Virgil to guide Dante through the circles of Inferno and the terraces of Purgatorio to lead him to the Divine Love. The loss of the earthly love he found strength in, caused him to rely too much on his intellect, but the transformation of that love to a courtly love guided his way to find answers that he could not reach only with his intellect but by using his intellect as a medium.
Dante encounters suffering souls in the Inferno and Purgatorio for various sins they had committed during their life time. In Inferno, where the static souls condemned to misery for eternally are, Dante faints several times after what he sees. He is in a half sleepy mode all the time and he needs Virgil’s guidance, and protection. Inferno is the place Dante himself also considers the sins he possibly committed up until that time in his life, but he still does not know how to handle his desires. Only after Virgil disappears on the Earthly Paradise and Dante confesses his sin to Beatrice, he gets out that half sleepy state and becomes active. In other words, he is not anymore driven unconsciously to the souls who are suffering, instead he turns his head to look at the light intentionally, meaning that his character went through a change that he is in control of his own actions from now on. What is important for the sake of the analysis on self-realization here is to focus on Dante’s encounter with the sins that he attributes to himself, namely, possession of romantic love, relying on the power of literature, and his obsessive search for truth by means of intellect. Divine comedy is such a masterpiece because Dante uses counter virtues of the sins he believes that he committed to express them in his poem, by applying the rules of poetic justice. Poetic justice is a term derived by Aristotle’s attempts to explain poetry as a medium, which is superior to history in the sense that it shows what should or must occur, rather than merely what does occur. The concept of contrapasso, i.e. that the sin and the punishment itself are essentially the same, plays an important role for Dante, in order to communicate with the reader through his poetic justice. Before proceeding with Dante’s encounter with Ulysses, I would briefly like to mention his first encounter with the punishment that those receive who committed the sin of the possession of romantic love, Francesca and Paolo. That sin is also in a way relates to Dante, because after the death of Beatrice, Dante possessed by his romantic love loses his sight and turns too much to himself forgetting that he is a part of the divine design.
Dante meets Francesca on the second circle of Hell, which is the first circle that the souls endure punishments for their sins. Since the degree of the punishment gets heavier through the inner circles, possession of romantic love is the lightest crime in Dante’s Inferno. The reason for that can be explained by the nature of love. It is impossible to love any other person intentionally, love is the purest form of desire that is not related to any other materialistic gain. That is why it has to happen naturally or it would not be love. It is such a strong feeling that disables the person’s reason in his/her actions. As Francesca puts it:
Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart,
took hold of him because of the fair body
taken from me—how that was done stil wounds me.
Love, that releases no beloved from loving,
took hold of me so strongly through his beauty
that, as you see, it has not left me yet.[1]
It is understood from Francesca’s words that she is still in that state of being blindly in love.
Dante chooses the metaphor of a furious wind to describe this state, into which the lovers are thrown by their passionate feelings. In the moment of love they forget about the outside reality and driven into committing the sin of lustfulness by their desires. All the people Dante meets in that circle, Semiramis, Helen, Paris, Cleopatra, had caused great pain, even to the ones who are closest to them, in that state of blindness. That is why the punishment they endure is in the form of that assailing wind, driving on the spirits with its violence: wheeling and pounding, harassing them.[2] The sinners of the second circle, harassed by that storm are feeling the pain of both their love from inside and the punishment from outside. For Francesca’s case, she is suffering from that hellish hurricane but what is still more painful for her is the longing she feels for her lover. When Dante asks her about her longings she replies “There is no greater sorrow than thinking back upon a happy time in misery…”[3] This sentence is an emphasis on Dante’s first confrontation with his sins, because it also refers to his feelings after he loses Beatrice, physically, until he transforms his love to a medium to grasp the Divine Love.
The reference to the strength of poetry and literature is also important in Francesca’s story. She tells Dante that she fell in love with Paolo while reading Lancelot. As Dante used to write love stories before Divine Comedy, he knows how those stories could be evoking the inner most desires of humans. With Divine Comedy he changes the way that he uses his talent in order to analyze the human nature in a divine context and evoke virtuous behavior for the reader as well as himself. He tells in Canto XXVI:
and more than usual, I curb my talent,
that it not run were virtue does not guide;
so that, if my kind star or something better
has given me that gift, I not abuse it.[4]
In that context, for a better understanding of Dante’s self-realization it will be appropriate now to focus on his confrontation with the sin of possessing knowledge through his encounter with Ulysses.
Dante encounters Ulysses in the seventh pouch of the eight circle of Inferno being punished for the sin of spiritual theft. Ulysses and Diomedes, burning with fire as a fireball approach him and Virgil speaks to them asking one of them to tell how he died. Ulysses starts telling the story of his last journey after he sailed away from Circe, how his fondness for his son or his love for Penelope was not able to defeat in him the longing that he had to gain experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men. His intention is to reach what is beyond the seen, as he tells to his comrades:
‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that stil is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
You were not made to live your lives as brutes
But to be followers of worth and knowledge.’[5]
After seeing a very high and dark mountain, the sea closes over Ulysses and his comrades. Ulysses was punished by facing his death just like in the story of Babel Tower that was build to reach heaven and the builders of the tower were punished by being sent to different parts of the world and given different languages in order not to be able to communicate with each other and give up their trial to reach heaven by physical means.
Ulysses’ story shows great similarity with Dante’s story on the basis of their search what is beyond the sun. Before Beatrice calls him for his transcendental journey, Dante was in such a similar state to Ulysses that he was trying to understand the place of the human in the cosmos by means of his intellect, that is to say producing thoughts and theories according to what he sees on earth. He confesses to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise: “Mere appereances turned me aside with their false loveliness, as soon as I had lost your countenance.”[6] As Ulysses tries to go beyond the sun with the belief of driving his ship always to the west he will reach the unpeopled place, Dante uses his talent in poetry to see what is beyond his reach. He repetitiously uses the metaphor of poetry in his poem as the ship of the sailor—cantos I and VIII of Purgatorio—to indicate the voyage of the pilgrim soul towards God in Divine Comedy. In that respect, Dante directing his ship towards God with Divine Comedy, differs from the Pagan Ulysses, who is unaware that his aspiration to reach the forbidden ground is in a way challenging the Divine Law.
Dante’s whole journey is fictionalized with a strong reliance on the Christian Theology, that is to say Christian teaching defines human nature as a body that will expire at some point and the souls that found form in that bodies will be judged according to the life they led on earth to find a place in the infinite kingdom of God. The important ingredient in that teaching is the use of human intellect, in other words humans are free to choose whatever action to take on earth, but that intellect is only a medium to grasp the beauties of afterlife because a final understanding of the meaning of existence is a kind of knowledge that only God has. In that respect, human existence finds its completeness only by reaching the Divine Love as Dante puts it with Beatrice’s words:
“The greatest gift the magnanimity
of God, as He created, gave, the gift
most suited to His goodness, gift that He
most prizes, was the freedom of the will;
those beings that have intellect – all these
and none but these – received and do receive
this gift: thus you may draw, as consequence,
the high worth of a vow, when what is pledged
with your consent encounters God’s consent;
for when a pact is drawn between a man
and God, then through free will, a man gives up
what I have called his treasure, his free will…”[7]
In that sense, Ulysses’ journey to reach beyond the sun without such knowledge of God based on Christian Theology proves to be a futile impulse in Dante’s poem. Dante considers Ulysses’ aspiration as a noble one because his journey aims to understand the meaning of human life, but because he does not have a notion of God he fails in his mission. Ulysses does not know when to surrender his free will to God and pushes the limits of human possibility insistently. In the end Ulysses and his men perish in a whirlpool after seeing a dark image of Mount Purgatory from a distance but even before reaching it, since Mount Purgatory is off limits to Pagans. In that respect, it is possible to follow how similar Dante’s and Ulysses’ journey start and differ in the end with the last lines of Divine Comedy:
As the geometer intently seeks
to square the circle, but he cannot reach,
through thought on thought, the principle he needs,
so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see
the way in which our human effigy
suited the circle and found place in it –
and my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.
Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
Desire and will were moved already – like
A wheel revolving uniformly – by
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.[8]
To conclude, Francesca’s and Ulysses’ stories are the two prominent parts of Dante’s poem in order to analyze his journey as the journey of his self realization in a divine context. Dante aiming to understand the cause of his existence bases his search on Christian teachings and acknowledges his possessions to purify his soul from the marks of the sins he committed by using the power of his poem. Francesca and Ulysses are the two figures that he chooses to express his confrontation with the sins of possession of love and knowledge. Francesca serves as a medium for him to express his longing for Beatrice and acknowledge the consequences of that longing. Ulysses’ story is a metaphor for his struggle to place human life on a broader context and find answers that he lacks. Dante places both characters in Inferno because the former ignores the greatness of Divine Love and the latter lacks the knowledge on the existence of a divine design. The pilgrim Dante witnesses their suffering and comes to realize the meaning of his existence in the divine design by means of the beautiful poetic design of Dante the poet.
