Dante sets forth the Catholic beliefs as to the nature of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

The Divine Comedy is at once a vision of the other world, an allegory of Christian life, a spiritual autobiography, and an encyclopedic embodiment of the knowledge of its day. “The style is remarkable for its pregnant conciseness and its range of modulation, now epical in intonation, now moving with the freedom of familiar speech and conversation, now rising in exquisite flights of lyrical ecstasy.” The Divine Comedy: A Great Epic Dante gives us numerous similes and images drawn from external Nature: phenomena of earth and sky, the play of light, the flight and song of birds. The poem is an impassioned and imaginative summary of what was highest in the thought and aspirations of the Middle Ages.

Dante is led by the soul of the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, through Hell and Purgatory and then is led by the spirit of Beatrice through the regions of Paradise.

The epic describes Dante’s imaginary journey through all the three division of the invisible world of spirits. It is a world of perfect felicity where the sinners go after they have suffered, repented and have been purified. The Inferno is a description of Hell the Purgatorio is a description of Purgatory where the souls of the sinners, after punishment in Hell, experience keen feelings of remorse and repentance and are purged of their sins while Paradiso is a description of a world of beauty, light, and song, where Dante meets Beatrice, the girl with whom he had been in love but whom he could not marry. The Divine Comedy: Its Three Partsĭante’s epic is divided into three parts – the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso.

It is an expression of the suffering, of the devotion and hard work, of sincerity and truthfulness, of intensity of vision, and of the moral profundity and intellectual greatness of its author. He calls it “divine song”, “the transcendental, mystic song”, “the voice of ten silent centuries” the “Christian epic” which makes articulate the soul, the moral nature, of the middle ages. In Lecture III of his Heroes and Hero-worship, Carlyle is all praises for it. Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of the most remarkable poems that have come down to us from the middle ages.

The divine comedy