Dante: The Commedia

Abstract

If we set aside the Bible, and perhaps the Queste, Dante’s Commedia (1307–21) may be called the first great work of Christian fantasy. The Bible is different: the ‘fantastic’ accounts there, whether of the Garden of Eden, the vision of Ezekiel, the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ or the Revelation of St John, are intended to be believed, even while they may also be allegorised. The events surrounding the fall may not, if such an event really occurred, have been those of the myth in Genesis; but that myth was intended as truth, in so far as the Bible was the revealed word of God, and was taken as truth in countless artifacts and writings at least for most of the 2000 years from the life of Christ — as, of course, was every detail of Christ’s life. The vision of the Last Things granted to St John in Revelation may have been tailored to his mortal capacity and remoulded in his own memory, but his imagery has conditioned the way we think of such events: ‘The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John: who bare record of the Word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.’1