Term Paper on "Compare Dante and Boccaccio With Respect to Their Depiction of the Nature of Reality"

Term Paper 11 pages (3122 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Boccaccio and Dante

Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio were each major Italian literary figures with considerable influence both in Italy and in other Western countries. They lived about a century apart, Dante in the thirteenth century, Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Both derived much of their view of the world and its relation to the next world from their Catholic faith, a faith to which Dante more clearly adhered but which also infuses the works of Boccaccio. Dante is the more overtly spiritual of the two, seeking the world through a religious prism and considering the nature of reality always to reflect an immediate and direct connection to God and the doctrine of the Church. Boccaccio often sees the Church and its clergy through a somewhat different prism, a more secular view that recognizes the sins of the clergy and the way those sins are manifested. Dante has the same ardor as many of Boccaccio's characters, but it is muted and expressed in the courtly love tradition, while Boccaccio's characters are more ribald and earthy. The two writers express differing views of the world in their works, with Dante seemingly more serious in the main, seeing a terrifying combination of dark and light, evil and good, coloring every action and every person. Boccaccio sees the world in a lighter way, with good and evil clashing in more comic ways, with more concern for the processes and functions of being human than for the need to be spiritual.

Dante does have a relationship with nature and the real world, of course, though it is often expressed in darker terms. Nature first appears in the Inferno in terms of the dark and dismal wood through which the poet is traveling, and here nature is equated with the course of life. This is so because the wood reflects the state of this man's life at this particular time. A leafy, green, and growing wood would be the sort of natural setting in which he might find himself when he was young and filled with hope. Now, he is older and losing some of his faith, and thus the wood is as dark and dismal as his own inner mood. It is in this wood that Dante meets Virgil, and Virgil serves several purposes in Dante's Divine Comedy. He acts as guide to Dante on his trip through the Inferno. He is a poetic touchstone, an idol to Dante, and his poetry serves as an inspiration for Dante's own work. In the developing relationship between these two figures as they pass through the Inferno, Dante finds a different sort of guidance, a means to understand his spiritual journey towards salvation. Key to an understanding of the nature of this journey and of the generosity of Virgil in serving this purpose is the fact that salvation is denied to Virgil because he was a pagan, though he holds a special place in the afterworld because of his poetic power and the beauty of his soul. Virgil stands as an icon to Dante not only because of the power of his poetry but also because his most powerful work -- The Aeneid -- depicts the founding of Dante's beloved Rome, an act he also wishes to celebrate. Virgil thus mixes the urban and nature, for he is encountered in a natural setting while he represents the city of Rome to Dante.

Dante has a clear need for spiritual guidance in the First Canto -- he has reached the midpoint of his life and has found himself in a dark wood, symbolic of the mental state in which he finds himself, enclosed on all sides by darkness and uncertainty. He is questioning himself and his spirituality. He is indeed as lost in life as he is on the path where he finds himself wandering first through the wood and then into a dismal valley. The dark wood is the dark wood of Error, and on the other side of that wood Dante meets Virgil, seeing him at first from a distance and fearing him as a stranger in an unfriendly place. When he discovers who this man is, he expresses his admiration:

You are my teacher, my author.

Only from you have I drawn out the fine style I am acclaimed for (Dante 6).

In some ways, Dante sees the world of Virgil as more real than his own.

Nature is here shown as demonic, and this is apparent in the different animals Dante encounters -- the panther, the lion, the wolf. There is a sense here that Dante is out of touch with the world of nature and that he now sees it as terribly threatening. He is especially intimidated by the lion and the wolf:

Head high, ravenous with hunger so great the air throbbed with it, it seemed the lion advanced against me; and a wolf whose lean carcase looked to incorporate all cravings.

She's made many people's lives mean (Dante 4-5).

Throughout the poem, the urban dwellers who are being punished find themselves in natural settings among rocks, cliffs, fiery waterways, and the like. They have been separated from the world they knew and are punished in this very different setting, a setting overseen by creatures not unlike the lean and hungry wolf.

Dante shows many of his contemporaries who were actually alive in his time as if they have passed to the other side and are not found in Hades, in Purgatory, or in Heaven, depending on Dante's view of them and their lives. His judgments are based largely on political considerations of the time, and he places his enemies in different rings in Hades and shows what their punishments will be for the ills they have caused in the real world. For Dante, reality always has a spiritual connection so that actions in this world have consequences in the next, consequences that are real, often harsh, and certain. In this regard, Dante acts out the deeper meaning of the accepted theology of the time and does so in an epic format, linking the spiritual journey of the individual with the epic journey of an ancient hero.

In Canto III, the travelers enter Hades, and the first thing that greets them is the inscription warning travelers of what is to come. Passing through these gates is a momentous event in the spiritual development of Dante, and at the key moment Virgil takes his hand and guides him through, telling Dante of his need for courage. Virgil's guidance is important, for Dante might indeed turn and flee from the terrible darkness and the noise into which they walk. Dante here encounters for the first time the way hell is structured, with the different locations for souls of different degrees of guilt, and the levels are carved out of rock and have a stronger relationship to nature than does the urban world from which Dante and most of the sufferers have come. The first group of souls passed consists of those uncommitted souls whom neither heaven nor hell will have, and their lamentations at being abandoned on this side of the river is the source of all the noise through which the travelers pass. The fear felt by Dante is strong at this point, and this contrasts sharply with his behavior later as he gains in courage until he can face Satan himself with relative equanimity. He gains courage as he follows Virgil, and he gains it from Virgil and from the latter's example as the two make this journey. His spiritual journey is itself a reflection of nature and of the need to look through the trappings of civilization to the reality of the human soul.

The real distinction in the medieval world is not between the urban and the rural but between this world, the world of nature, and the next world, the world of the spirit. A later age would emphasize how God could be found in nature because He had created it. In the medieval world, though, the natural world is often seen more as a distraction than as a road to God. Some writers would look not to nature for evidence of God but would rather look inward, into his heart, and this is not unlike the way Dante portrays nature as reflecting the inner turmoil of the soul rather than as having its own spiritual existence that the human being then seeks to find.

Alighieri Dante adheres to the Italian, Christian view of women, a spiritual view touched by sentiment and by the elevation of women to a high place. Beatrice is the ideal woman who is held in highest esteem by Dante. This attitude derives directly from Italian poetry in which the beloved woman was deified and became the symbol of all that is considered high and beautiful. The poet of the time did not mean this as a mere compliment, for his mind saw her really to be so. Of course, Dante expresses this style of… READ MORE

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