Dante
On what basis can or should we treat a text a canonical? Discuss with reference to two texts
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The treatment of a text considered canonical can take many individual forms, particularly when it is appraised as life-enhancing. A canonical text reaches thoughts and ideas that the reader might never have imagined. It should possess a value that makes it meaningful to our understanding of what it means to be human, while remaining accessible to the modern reader. For a contemporary reader, Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two works of immense structural and narrative complexity that take the reader on a journey into another world. They rank as canonical texts and can be treated as such.
A canonical story must possess structure, contrasts, and literary devices that help to develop and inform its major themes and motifs. One of Dante’s major concerns was political conflict. He lived through the political turmoil of Italy, and the reader can see how he uses these circumstances in his epic poem to condemn political figures by placing them throughout the circles of Hell. He gives them what he considers to be their just retribution. The poem speaks for Dante, allowing him to transform contemporary political events into poetic subject matter. His belief that Church and state should exist as separate powers on Earth is expressed through a courageous and highly personal political vision. For good measure, he also incorporates ancient literary figures, referring to classical writers and poets such as Homer, Ovid, and Virgil.
Dante’s poem is an overarching allegory. It explores its themes through dozens, even hundreds, of symbols, with one of its most important ideas being the punishment of sinners. Inferno is canonical because of the quality and scope of the poem, which creates and explores something far more substantial than the particular characters and places it describes. We find in Dante a fundamental idea: the creation of an imaginative correspondence between a soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment it receives in the afterlife. Dante’s complexity creates an entire universe.
This new universe is a crucial characteristic of Dante’s imagery. Dante took some of his ideas from another epic, The Odyssey, and established a relationship with Homer’s famous travel narrative. To put the matter simply, Dante thrusts before us a worldview and a sense of cultural completeness. As we move through the work, we find the universe arranged from the presence of God down to Earth and then into increasingly confined circles, stage by stage, towards the depths of sin.
Dante makes us experience the exploration of complex questions about individual and social purpose. The poem concerns a system of belief, the relationship between past traditions and future prospects, and the major events that help define a culture and its path towards Christian understanding. Dante presents a remarkable complexity of ideas. The aesthetic unity and breadth of the epic bring before us a comprehensive picture of an entire culture in a way that an ordinary narrative, no matter how exciting, cannot.
Dante’s subject matter makes the reader recognise the moral implications of abandoning an understanding of the world and the heavens that is loaded with spiritual meaning. The enormous scale of the poem is coupled with the clarity and variety of its immediate details. The dramatic quality of human conversation is placed alongside sections of theological doctrine, while the emotional tone constantly shifts between humour, terror, disgust, anger, and fear. There is also a constant sense of movement, up and down and around, all coordinated by the developing awareness of the pilgrim narrator, who must make emotional and conceptual sense of everything he encounters. Inferno is therefore a truly canonical work.
Milton was a rebel because he identified with the revolutionary cause, and his masterpiece, also of epic proportions, is concerned with rebellion and its consequences. As a Puritan, Milton’s political and religious convictions were often opposed to royal authority. Paradise Lost explains an entire theology. It is concerned with the coming of sin into the world through the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan after his defeat in Heaven. If Milton has attempted to “justify the ways of God to men,” then our questions about humanity’s relationship with God are addressed through the poem’s theological framework.
The success of Milton’s explanation, of course, depends on whether the reader accepts the Christian worldview, and even whether the reader accepts Milton’s particular form of Christian individualism. Like Dante, Milton creates his own universe. The world is not simply the Earth; it is the entire universe within Milton’s imagined cosmos.
Milton’s achievement and the poem’s canonical status must also be considered in relation to its subject matter and its position within the epic tradition. Milton introduces the central theme of the entire poem and presents us with Satan and the fallen angels. He also makes it clear that the reader is encountering an epic poem. In order to place himself within the canonical epic tradition of The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Milton employs devices such as the invocation, epic similes, and catalogues. These are used heavily in the first two books to establish the credentials of Paradise Lost as an epic.
Paradise Lost begins with Milton’s prose summary, “The Argument.” He uses the word “argument” in the sense of “subject matter” rather than the modern meaning of a verbal clash. The prose summary tells the reader the story and can therefore be used as a reference point. In the poem, the reader encounters one of its central characters, Satan. Milton encourages the reader to consider whether Satan is a hero or a villain.
It is obvious from the first book that Satan possesses qualities that many readers admire. He is a fearless leader, eloquent, inspiring, resourceful, and even sympathetic to the suffering of his followers. Is he portrayed with these virtues because Milton wants to demonstrate how easily we can be deceived by heroic qualities? Has the reader ever found themselves attracted to people who ultimately proved harmful to them? It is unfortunately easy to identify with Satan when the reader first encounters him in the imaginary landscape of Hell.
Milton makes this experience accessible to the modern reader. All readers have experienced anger, bitterness, and a desire for revenge after a confrontation with authority. These may be small-scale personal grievances, but the emotions can still be intense. Satan’s grievances, however, result from his conflict with God and therefore have universal consequences. He wants to strike back at God for casting him into a dark and desolate place, and he intends to do so by bringing others down with him.
Like Dante, Milton was trained within the strictest academic education that his age could provide. The sources of Paradise Lost reflect Milton’s enormous range of reading. The story of Adam and Eve and the temptation comes from the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. The vast majority of the poem’s allusions and references are to the Bible and to Greek and Latin classics. There are also references to Arthurian legend, Italian epics, and earlier English literature, especially the work of Spenser, the author of the moral epic The Faerie Queene. This immense catalogue of literary, religious, and cultural references contributes to the depth and complexity expected of a canonical text.
The reader could argue that Milton and Dante emerged from similar intellectual traditions. Milton drew some ideas from Dante, but each poet created a powerful epic that responded to the political, religious, and cultural circumstances of his own time. Their poems remain relevant because they continue to raise questions about politics, morality, religion, rebellion, sin, human nature, and our relationship with the divine. Their continuing ability to challenge and engage readers helps to establish them as enduring canonical texts.
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