Boccaccio and Dante Alighieri and

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 poetry fully elsewhere in his love poetry and other works dedicated to celebrating Beatrice and his love for her.

In The Inferno, Beatrice is more the goal to which the poet aspires as he passes through Hades, and later through Purgatorio before reaching Beatrice in the ideal Paradise. Many of the elements of courtly love, which Dante expresses elsewhere with reference to his beloved Beatrice, are evident in this epic work as well.

For example, Beatrice and the Virgin Mary are the two women who send Virgil to guide the poet through the Inferno, and this also adds luster to Virgil as a spiritual guide as Dante adheres to the Italian, Christian view of women, a school 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. She is his symbol of all that is high and beautiful, and her selection of Virgil does him credit.

Virgil is to be his guide through the Inferno and through Purgatory, after which Beatrice shall lead him. Virgil represents human reason, but Beatrice represents something more -- divine love. Beatrice has been elevated to the right hand of the Virgin Mary in Dante's eyes. When Dante reaches the middle of life and first becomes lost in the wood, he is attacked by the She-Wolf of Incontinence. This is the other side of woman, the base side.

Women are either angels or whores, meaning women who do not follow the straight and narrow path and who lack the spark of divine love that animates Beatrice. One of the reasons for the lowly place given women in the Christian scheme of things was Eve's role in the Fall, and Dante had an interesting view of this which differed from the church. It was held by the church of the time that all human beings were born in sin because of the Fall.

As a result, it was held that all who died without the sacrament of baptism would be punished in Hades by eternal fire, even babies who died in their mother's womb. Dante repudiated this view, creating his own idea defined by the view that the human being, having been separated from God by the disobedience of the first man, would be restored to harmony with the Divine goodness from the moment when it was decreed that the Son of God should descend to earth to restore this harmony.

Still, there is some doubt, and Dante is suffering from that doubt when he becomes lost in the wood. Virgil is both an overt guide and a spiritual mentor for Dante, and he serves these purposes on their journey through hell. He does this because Beatrice has sent him, and this fact alone makes him an elevated personage in the eyes of Dante. Dante is predisposed to accept Virgil in any case because Virgil has been his poetic inspiration.

He is now Dante's spiritual inspiration as well, explaining the meaning of the different levels of hell in a way that bolsters Dante's courage and also warns him of the dangers of straying from the path to salvation. Dante relates his dreams, his perceptions, and his experiences to Beatrice. Everything in his life is filtered through the love he feels for Beatrice, and this continues after her death.

Not even death can alter the dedication of the lover to his beloved, and indeed death may merely be a further opportunity to prove the reality and depth of that love by sustaining it through it can now never be consummated. Dante reunites with-Beatrice in Purgatorio. Beatrice is the goal in The Divine Comedy in that she introduces Virgil as guide and then waits in Paradise for Dante to complete his journey.

Purgatorio represents neither the profane love of Hades nor the divine love of Paradise but something in between, something more human. In these cantos, Dante argues that there are two kinds of love, the instinctive love of animals, and the rational love of human beings. Another way of dividing love is between instinctual love and chosen love, with the first being a natural process and the second being prone to error. Virgil and Dante rest and talk about love in Canto 17.

As part of this discussion, Virgil outlines the design of Purgatory, of what is to come. Virgil explains that all actions, both good and evil, derive from some form of love. Love may also take a form that aims to hurt others, and this refers to pride, envy, and wrath, or the sins found on the first three terraces. Love directed toward a worthy end but with insufficient zeal is called sloth, and this is punished on the Fourth Terrace.

The three upper terraces punish sinners who had too great a love for earthly objects. When the two poets stop to rest, Dante asks Virgil what sin is punished in this place, and Virgil answers that excessive love of the things of this world is the sin. He makes it clear that he is not criticizing love itself but how love is used.

Boccaccio tells a variety of stories in The Decameron, stories which in the main are more realistic in literary terms even when they are on fabulous subjects because Boccaccio presents human beings as they are and not filtered through a religious vision. Many of his characters are clergy members meaning priests, monks, nuns, and the like, but always they are human beings first. Indeed, they often behave more as human beings than as religious figures.

Dante followed the lead of the classical epic, and Boccaccio follows a variety of different story forms from his time and earlier in the dozens of stories he includes in The Decameron so that his expression of reality covers a much broader swath of human behavior, human relationships, and story types. The form of the book itself suggests a multiplicity, which is different than the way Dante.