"Cliff Notes - Dante's Divine Domedy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

certain aliens may have certain amazing powers, or that a
particular planet has different scientific laws than we have on
earth. Science fiction authors use those unusual, supernatural
possibilities as elements of their plots. So, too, Dante uses
the concepts and symbols accepted in his age and his religion as
elements around which to structure his story. You don't have to
believe they are true in order to appreciate how they work in
the poem. Let's examine some of the concepts Dante inherited
from 14th-century Italy's way of thinking.

One feature of Dante's vision of the universe is the concept
of polarities: two extreme opposites, between which people were
pulled. To Dante, many aspects of his world were polar in
nature:

1. There was a power struggle between the Church and State,
represented by the Pope and the German emperor.

2. There was a struggle for intellectual authority between
theology (the study of religion and the Bible) and philosophy
(which included science and mathematics). Dante himself was a
heavy borrower from both sides and quoted such diverse sources
as the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato, or the Christian
thinkers St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

3. Man was considered to fall halfway between the animals
and the angels, and was therefore torn between the brutish and
the angelic sides of his nature.

4. Dante also felt that writing should reflect a balance
between the ideas and the realities of a man's life, so we see
him moving between two different aesthetic approaches in his
poetry: personal realism and symbolism in allegory. Dante also
challenged the accepted practice, which was to write about ideas
in Latin and more mundane matters in the vernacular language
(for him, Italian). He wrote the Comedy in Italian.

Dante's religion told him there were three worlds in the
afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. How does someone go
about describing what no one has ever seen--life after death?
Where are these places and what are they like? To answer these
questions, Dante borrowed from science and, again, the religion
of his day.

For Dante, both the physical and the spiritual worlds were
set up as a hierarchy, leading up to God. Basically, what this
means is that everything starts with God and exists in layers
radiating outwards from Him.

Dante's idea of the physical universe follows the design of