Angels-DANTE ALIGHIERI

The Italian poet, philosopher, and theologian Dante Alighieri (1265–
1321), whose epic poems are filled with the ponderings of angelic
hierarchies, was born in Florence to a family of lesser nobility. The
essential facts of his early life are recorded in The New Life (ca. 1293),about his youthful, idealistic love for Beatrice
Portinari.
Dante played an important role in Florentine
civic and political life. He was also a leader
on the imperial side in the struggle between the
Guelfs and the Ghibellines, the partisans of the
pope and the emperor, respectively, who were
fighting for jurisdiction in Italy. When the rival
party splintered into two factions, however, he
decided to support the antipapal policy of the
White Guelfs. After the Blacks took over the
city in 1301, under the wing of Charles de Valois,
Dante was exiled and his life of wandering
from court to court of medieval Italy began.
During his exile, he wrote the Convivio, his
chief work in Italian prose, inspired by the
reading of Cicero and Boethius; the Latin De
vulgari eloquentia, a treatise about the preeminence
of the Italian vernacular and the definition
of the highest form of Italian lyrical poetry,
the Canzone; and the De Monarchia, an
eloquent defense of the imperial principle and
Dante’s most original contribution to philosophical
thought.
The tenor of his times, as well as his own inner anguishes, was
Dante’s primary source of inspiration for his masterpiece, The Divine
Comedy (1472), an allegory of human existence and destiny in the
form of the pilgrimage of the soul after death. Dante himself is the pilgrim
on the visionary journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven,
during a week at Easter in the year 1300 when, at the age of thirtyfive,
he feels lost in the “dark wood” of his own moral confusion. The
Roman poet Virgil, representing secular learning, is his guide through
the depths of Hell and up the “mountain of purgatory,” and Beatrice,
representing the higher divine inspiration, leads him to Heaven and
to the inexpressible divine source of all love, which “moves the sun
and all the stars.”
Dante adopted a punitive hell and added a purgatory for those
who were not cut off from hope. Hell, in Dante’s scheme, corresponding
to the general medieval view of the world, is placed in the interior
of the earth and is portrayed as the place of eternal isolation of the
soul. It consists of nine concentric circles that, from the hemisphere of
the earth and across the river Acheron, progressively diminish in circumference,
forming an inverted cone ending in the center of the earth. In each circle, representing the nature and effects of sin, a distinct
class of sinners undergo a particular torment according to the
nature and gravity of their wrongdoings.
According to Dante’s vision, when Satan fell from Heaven, he
struck the earth at the antipodes of Jerusalem and tore through its substance
as far as the center, where he remains fixed for all time, a threefaced
monster champing at the three archsinners against church and
state, Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. Extreme torture is inflicted
by cold, not heat. Satan’s wings, perpetually beating, send forth an icy
blast that freezes the river Cocytus to a glassy hardness, and in it are
immured the final four grades of sinners.
A hidden path connects the center of the earth to Purgatory, the
place of expiatory purification and preparation for the life of eternal
blessedness. It is imagined as a mountain formed by Lucifer as he fell
from Heaven into the abyss of Hell, and it is antipodal to Jerusalem
and Mount Calvary, in the center of the Southern Hemisphere. After
the ante-purgatory, where are placed the excommunicated and the
belated penitents, and passage through Peter’s gate come seven encircling
terraces, which rise in succession with diminished circuit as they
approach the summit. Each of the cornices corresponds to the seven
deadly sins, from which the soul is purged through the expiatory labor
of climbing the Mountain of Purgatory.
Heaven, in Dante’s view a terrestrial paradise, is reached through
a final wall of flames. Inside are two streams that wash away the
remembrance of sin and strengthen the remembrance of good deeds.
Dante’s Paradise, constructed according to the Ptolemaic system of
cosmography, consists of nine moving heavens concentric with the
earth, the fixed center of the universe, around which they revolve at a
velocity proportional to their distance from the earth. Each heaven is
presided over by one of the angelic orders and exercises its special
influence on human beings and their affairs. The seven lowest are the
heavens of the planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn. The eighth heaven, the sphere of the fixed stars,
is the highest visible region of the celestial world; and the ninth heaven,
the primum mobile, governs the general motion of the heavens
from east to west, and by it all place and time are ultimately measured.
Finally, beyond and outside the heavens, lies the Empyrean, where
there is neither time nor place, but light only, and which is the special
abode of the Deity and the saints.
According to Dante, a hierarchical interdependence exists
between the angels. One order of angels acts upon those below it,
inspiring them to contemplate God; and the lower intelligences
receive illumination from those above, and in turn reflect it, like mir rors, to those below them. Similarly, there is a
hierarchical downward transmission of power
between the heavenly spheres moved by the
angels. Like all other creatures, angels owe their
being to God, to that point of light around
which Dante sees them spinning.
Dante believed that angels are incorporeal
spiritual substances. He asserts that angels are
pure form, and he frequently alleges that they
are immortal and were directly created by God.
Dante’s angels are purely intellectual beings,
lacking all sensation. After all, their primary
purpose is to contemplate God.
Dante is conscious of the angels’ limitations;
they are included, together with human souls,
among the intelligences whose knowledge is less
perfect than God’s. Indeed, just like humans,
they have as part of their nature an appropriate
limitation on the desire to know. In his epic
poem Paradiso (1310) we are told that not even
the seraph with the clearest vision of God could
answer Dante’s question about predestination.
Dante is fascinated by the similarities
between angels and men. He is very conscious of
the affinity between them, as well as their differences. He says that
angelic nature is perfectly intellectual, and so the separated intelligences
contemplate constantly, as opposed to humans, with whom
such contemplation is intermittent. Dante believes that angels possess
in common with men not only intellect but also will, and that this will
is essentially free. The prayer of the penitent proud on the first terrace
of purgatory might seem to suggest that the angels have sacrificed this
will to God, but this does not mean that they are deprived of it.
In Paradiso, Dante puts strong emphasis upon the angels as
sphere-movers, although he does not believe that all the angels are
movers, since there are many who simply spend their time in contemplation.
Nothing is said in Paradiso about how the angels move the
heavens, but Dante discusses this in Convivio, where he says that they
move simply by understanding, and that they touch their spheres, not
corporeally, but through mind power. Dante’s spheres do not merely
move; they, and thus the angels that operate via them, exercise a powerful
influence upon the world.
The final intuitive vision of the divine will in Dante’s poem is the
last step of an itinerary that leads both the author and the reader through a process of conversion, as well as a deep investigation of
human nature