How Violence Unraveled the Qualities of the Characters - Essay Example

How violence unraveled the qualities of the characters in the works of Dante and Homer Introduction In literature, the faith of the middle ages found full expression in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Comedia, which is the odyssey of a soul through hell and purgatory, to celestial paradise where he joins the beatific company of God, the saints and the beloved, the incomparable Beatrice. A great merit of the work is its gallery of diverse characters suffering the punishments corresponding to their sins in the nine circles of the internal abyss. It is a journey from the lowest depths to the heights of heavenly glory. In the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, the protagonist or the tragic hero is a member of royalty, or occupies a noble position, which has admirable personal qualities. He is essentially good, but he, or his ancestors, have broken a moral law – a law of the gods or the state. In the play we see him struggling to avoid the consequences of his transgression but we know that his eventual defeat is inevitable that he cannot avoid the punishment that will come as a consequence of what he has done. Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have their own protagonists and tragic heroes. Some tragedies like the problem plays of Dante and Homer may not end in death but there is a sense of sadness or melancholy or perhaps of futility in the fact that life for the tragic character must go on. If the hero does not die, but those whom he loves or values are destroyed, we still find ourselves with the same kind of emotion which his death would give us. Although literature, Homer’s and Dante’s, leaves us with a sense of loss and tragedy because the hero has shown us how noble and good he is and yet has been destroyed or defeated, we feel a certain kind of satisfaction because he has demonstrated the value of human nature and has shown us how noble and great man can be. We feel proud of such a man as a tragic hero and we feel humbled by the thought that we may not be able to be as heroic as he was. Dante’s Divina Comedia (Divine Comedy) ns become a best seller. Why is this? It may be because most thinking people today are profoundly disturbed by the erosion of values in our mechanistic civilization, and are floundering around in search of the eternal verities of beauty and truth as a stabilizing force in their lives. Dante “has framed all the parts of his enormous perception within a total relationship of values and within a total dramatization of reality”. (Mazzotta, 128) By the power of his personal genius and by the power of his metaphoric language we can translate his particular conceptions into endless revelations of universal truth. The Divine Comedy is not light reading. Dante requires us to discipline ourselves by strict attention, but we are rewarded by a feeling of personal achievement and by the expanding power of our perception. First, we must know a little about the historic Dante. Dante was born in 1265 in Florence of a good but not wealthy family. It was a time when the Church was disputing its historic power with the rising mercantile class. There were two political parties, the Guelfs who favored the Church, and the Ghilbellines who supported the Emperor. You will remember that this factionalism was the cause of dissension between the families of Romeo and Juliet. Dante was loyal to the Church, but he did not believe that the Pope should have temporal power. The showdown came when Dante was a member of the governing council of Florence. His property was confiscated and he was exiled. He never returned to his beloved Florence. The Comedia is the fulfillment of this promise. The poem is divided into three large sections, Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Heaven). Each is pictured as a series of concentric circles. At the beginning when Dante is “lost” in the woods, he meets Virgil, human reason, who offers to guide him through Hell and Purgatory. (Since Virgil is a pagan he cannot enter the realm of Heaven.) (Mazzotta, 132) In the second circle of Hell, Dante encounters the souls of Paolo and Francesca and hears the sad story of their adulterous love. Down through ever narrower circles he meets souls condemned by ever blacker sins until in the lowest circle he find the arch traitors Judas, Brutus and Cassius. AT the very center is Lucifer, traitor to God himself, frozen solid in ice. On Easter Day Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell and behold before them the Mountain of Purgatory. In concentric circles of Purgatory are the souls of those repentant ones who are being disciplined for Heaven by learning humility to overcome pride, zeal to cast out sloth, liberality to replace avarice, and the chastity to burn out lust. On top of the mountain is the Earthly Paradise where dwell all the great souls who died before the coming of Christ. The poet has now reached the state of purification in which he is free to follow his soul’s prompting, knowing that no source of evil remains within it. Here Virgil leaves Dante, who grieves for the loss of his mentor until he beholds Beatrice in the midst of a throng of angels. She sternly rebukes him for departing from the ideals of his youth, and, weeping, he confesses his sins. (Mazzotta, 129) Beatrice, Revelation herself, conducts the poet up through the circles of Heaven and it’s in this section that Dante’s pictorial language becomes sublime. But we are also interested in the changed in his attitude toward Beatrice. When he first meets her, the old earthly attraction is uppermost, but gradually he changes until his heart is so filled with heavenly love that he forgets her utterly and she smiles. (De Vito, 254) The smile reflects the joy of Infinite Love. In the highest circle Beatrice takes her place beside the Virgin Mary and Saint Bernard stands beside Dante. Then he beholds the Empyrean where God himself abides. Dante is the epitome of the spirit of self – sacrifice, high courage and persistent hope. He urges that we shake ourselves free of lethargy and set love in order by self-discipline. Love and righteousness can and will, by God’s help, prevail. I challenge you to read Inferno. Having gone so far, you will read the rest of The Divine Comedy. There is something here to stimulate every interest. If you like mathematics, you can study the poem for symbolism of numbers. For instance, there are three poems in one, with a dynamic motion from three to one (unity), then ten and one hundred, symbols of perfection. Dante uses terza rima, a three-line stanza of eleven-syllable lines. In the middle part of Dante’s novel is one fourteen-syllable line which is like the keystone of an arch. Virgil has been pointing down; from no on he points up. If you are interested in painting, you can study it from the symbolism of color. If your interest is astronomy and geography, here is the whole Ptolemaic system spelled out for you. If architecture is your interest, you can study the poem’s architectural symmetry. As a historian, you can study Dante’s judgment of the great historical and mythological figures that lived before his time. If you like music and pageantry, the poem is full of it. Everybody sang and danced in the thirteenth century. (De Vito, 271) In the Earthly Paradise and Starry Heaven there are masques, processions, tableaux. And if you are religious, you can study it for Church theology and doctrine. Above all, it is transcendent poetry, yours to appropriate for a living aesthetic experience. When a nation or an ethnic group begins to become conscious of its identity and seeks to perpetuate its ideals through pride in a great hero of its past, epic poetry like Iliad and Odyssey arises. (Graziosi 101) The Iliad and the Odyssey, however, transcend all other epics in literary value and seem to bear the stamp of one great poetic genius, Homer. The Iliad is a double tragedy, as relentless as that of King Lear, in which pride in the form of self-will leads to the inexorable destruction of the protagonists and the antagonists. (Graziosi 98) The gods may be considered personifications of sin and folly and flaws in human nature which precipitate disaster. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is a comedy, fantastic and sparkling, but so true to human nature that we cannot help identifying ourselves with some of its hero’s foibles. (Silk, 5) The Trojan War is immortalized by Homer in two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written about 800 BC. After the destruction of Crete, the Achaeans came to blows with Troy, a city located on the coast of Asia Minor. About 1194 BC, a large Greek expedition led by King Agamemnon of Mycenae, attacked Troy. The Trojans strongly entrenched behind their city walls resisted. The Greek invaders besieged Troy which finally fell in 1184 BC after a ten year siege. (Graziosi 98) The Odyssey is in many ways a relief to the catalogue of violent deaths in the Iliad. It too contains many images of violence but it is often of a different type. There are certainly moments of extreme violence as, for example, Circe turns Odysseus’s unsuspecting men into swine or Polyphemus, the Cyclops, sees through Odysseus’s lie and eats his comrades, two at each meal. (Graziosi 99) But from a contemporary perspective at least, these episodes are easy to dismiss as fantastic, almost of a comic book sensibility, and are much different in kind from images of extreme violence directed by one human being at the other. Conclusion The scenes and events presented in the Inferno as well as Odyssey and Iliad depict violence. Dramatic irony, discovery and reversal have different effects on the audience in tragedy. The ignorance of the tragic character about certain facts makes us pity him because we are aware of the gap between his fault and his fate. We experience fear because we realize that the hero or protagonist is a human being like ourselves in many ways and his misfortune could possibly happen to us as well. Tragedy and violence thus makes us feel deeply, makes us emotional and passionate. It exalts man as an individual, for the protagonist seems heroic as he struggles against great obstacles. Man’s importance is underlined as he faces great odds and suffers punishment out of proportion to his sin or mistake. Usually, a tragedy leaves us with a feeling that the hero’s suffering is, in a way, partly our fault, although the plot and the characters are very far removed from our own world or experiences. De Vito, Anthony. The First Hundred Years of the Dante Society. Princeton University Press, 1982. Graziosi, Barbara. The Invention of Homer . Cambridge, 2002. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the "Divine Comedy". Princeton University Press, 1979 Mueller, Martin. The Iliad. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984. Murray, Gilbert . The Rise of the Greek Epic. 4th. Baltimore and London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Powell, Barry. Homer. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2004. Silk, Michael. Homer:The Iliad. Cambridge University Press, 1987 Thalman, William. Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Greek Epic Poetry. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1984. . Read More