Dante’s Commedia, later hailed as a “divine comedy”, is a journey into the hereafter that the poet imagines as his dream. The dead as inhabitants of the afterlife are introduced as images, the origin and meaning of which form the subject in the following.
Dante’s Beyond corresponds to the medieval concept of three locations, which are described in the three books of the work. In the first two books, the Inferno and the Purgatorio, the dead appear as living shadows that still carry their mortal bodies with them as images and voices. In Paradiso they have turned into lights, but they are still waiting to be resurrected in an immortal body. In the three places there is also a different concept of time, in hell an endless time, on the Cleansing Mountain the time of penance, which is measured differently for everyone, and in heaven the expected end of time.
In the first song of the Inferno, which serves as an introduction, the scenario that the poet will develop in his work is presented with the greatest clarity. Before starting his journey, he gets lost “in a dark forest” where wild animals are blocking his way. Suddenly someone appears “who seemed dumb from a long silence”. Dante calls him for a safe conduct, “whoever you are, shadow or real person”. The answer is: “I’m not human, but I was once”.
In ancient times, people lived on in the hereafter as shadows
With that the speaking shadow is introduced. What this suggests about his former life reveals to the poet that Virgil stands before him. He reverently greets the greatest writer of Latin antiquity as his “master” (maestro) and his unattainable “role model” (autore). In Virgil’s Aeneid, in the sixth book, the Trojan Aeneas, the future founder of Rome, descends into the underworld near Naples to ask his father Anchises about the future. While the Cumean Sibyl takes on the accompaniment there, this role now falls to Virgil himself, who only has to leave the leadership of another soul (anima), namely Beatrice, in Paradiso.
Even in the introduction to Dante’s poetic journey to the hereafter, two terms are mentioned that have shaped the concept of the continued life of the dead in two different cultures, “shadow” in ancient times and “soul” in Christian culture.
The living shadow enriched the European imagination with an ancient figure of speech, which with Dante regains its full poetic potential. This figure of speech was Dante’s very own idea, but he puts its explanation in the mouth of the ancient poet Statius. It was a risk to want to see souls in the hereafter who, according to the Christian doctrine of the soul, had become disembodied. Dante’s shadows were not borrowed from theology, but an homage to Virgil’s journey into the hereafter.
He developed the dual strategy of defining such images in analogy with the shadow and in contrast to the body. The double reference to the body is already given in the shadow that we ourselves cast. It can be reduced to the general formula: an image is like a shadow that differs from the body and yet is produced by the body in the light. The sensual perception leads first to the imagination and then to the concept.
Shadows cannot be touched any more than pictures can be hugged
The threshold between body and shadow, as narrow as they go together in sunlight, cannot be crossed any more than the boundary between life and death. With Dante it is not a seduction to transgression, but a result of transcendence. The analogy of image and shadow, in the mimetic relationship to the body, consequently led him in the next step to the ontological difference between shadow and body. Bodies cast their image on the ground in the cast shadow, while the dead cast no shadow just because they are shadows.
In the ancient theory of shadows, shadows cannot be touched any more than images can be embraced. Homer already describes a vain hug that leads to disappointment. When Odysseus tries to embrace his mother’s picture in his arms, it escapes “like a shadow or a dream”. In Virgil’s epic, Aeneas puts his arms around the dead father’s neck, but “the image escapes his hands”. There he sees “disembodied living beings” that confront him “in an empty picture”.
This kind of description can also be found in Dante’s work. In the second song of the Purification Mountain, Dante saw a soul approaching him to “hug him”. When that fails, Dante exclaims: “Oh empty shadows that only exist in sight!” In front of him stands his friend Casella, whom he first recognizes by his voice and who assures him: “Just as I once loved you in the mortal body, I now also love you disembodied.”
In Canto 21, Dante and his guide meet the Roman poet Statius. When Dante introduces him to Virgil, he stops him from hugging him: “Brother, stop, because you are a shadow and you only see a shadow.” Ashamed, Statius confesses that he “forgot our nothingness and was drawn to a shadow as to a solid body”.
The ascending souls are frightened when they notice that Dante is breathing
The contrast in appearance between Dante’s body and the shadows only comes to light in the third song of the Purgatorio, when Dante leaves the dark abyss of hell and steps out into the sunlight at the foot of the Cleansing Mountain. Since the sun was behind him, he casts a shadow on the ground in front of him: “The sunlight was broken in front of my figure”, “because it came to a halt here”. But that did not happen with Virgil.
The next moment the constellation changes when a crowd of souls stares at the shadow cast by Dante on the rocky floor, when Virgil confirms to them “that it is indeed a human body that you see, and that therefore the light of the sun with him on the ground is split “” It is done with the will of God that Dante still has his body here, “on which the light is broken.” This situation will be repeated several times on the mountain.
The ascending souls are frightened when they notice that Dante is breathing and cast a shadow, revealing himself to be an intruder. In the group of voluptuous people he is asked why “you can make a wall against the sun out of yourself”. They whisper to each other: “That one doesn’t seem to have a fictional body”, with which they make a statement about themselves. The drop shadow has become the distinguishing feature of the solid body that the souls have lost.
Dante now wants to find out why the gourmets, who as souls do not need any food, are emaciated and seem to be starving. Virgil initially evades and is then ready to reveal the origin of the shadow body. He asks the poet Statius to unroll the cosmic panorama in which the shadow body also has its place. Statius proceeds in three steps. First, according to Aristotle, he recapitulates the origin of the body in human procreation. Then he follows the scholasticism of theologians in God’s creation of an immortal soul. When expressed in the life of the body, it unites divine and human qualities.
The miracle of the creation of an image in which the soul lives on in the hereafter
In a third step, Statius, i.e. Dante, is on his own when he describes the creation of the shadow body. If the soul detaches itself from the body in death, however, it retains the creative power that it had previously possessed in the body. In a first comparison of nature, the poet refers to the creation of the rainbow by sunlight in rain-soaked air. Likewise, in the hereafter, the surrounding air envelope develops into a form in which the remaining soul can express itself “on its own”.
In a second comparison of nature, we are reminded of the flame that must follow fire everywhere. Similarly, follow the spirit into its new form: “This is why we call them shadows”. But there is one major difference in the bold comparison. While the soul in this world expresses itself in its body, in the next world it can only do so in a shadow of its own. This is how it happens, says the shadow, “that we talk, that we have to laugh and weep”, which the traveler on the mountain of purification is aware of I was able to convince myself. It is such affects “by which the shadow is formed”.
In this widely interpreted text, Dante takes a risk. It is the miracle of the creation of an image in which the soul lives on in the hereafter. As Etienne Gilson has shown, there was no place for shadows to exist in the theological universe. These are the creatures of a poet who translates Virgil’s model into a Christian context.
In the third book, Dante takes on a new risk for which his previous storytelling skills were insufficient. The ascent into the planetary spheres of Paradiso represented a task that could no longer be mastered with the shadow painting of the second book. The question of the image arises again here. Since the souls left the shadow body behind, they have changed into lights that only carry the shadow in themselves in contradiction. Your shadow has dissolved into light.
Dante describes what “nobody has described”
The traveler who still lives in his body has literally lost the ground under his feet. The souls move weightlessly and as fast as light through the ether. Dante speaks of “living lights” that reflect the divine light like innumerable mirrors: “I saw a thousand souls rushing to us”.
One of them, like all the others “nested” in its own envelope of light, approached him to talk to him. When the poet asks her who she is, she shines “in a brighter glow” that shows her joy at the question. Other images tie in with the nocturnal “constellation” of stars. The “beautiful picture”, which in the nineteenth song depicts an eagle with outstretched wings, is a group picture in which every soul shines like a ruby. That is why the eagle can speak with several voices. Dante now describes what “no one has yet described and what even the most daring fantasia cannot imagine”.
The vision of God creates the light that souls radiate. But have they already reached their final state here? Solomon takes on the answer in the fourteenth song. “Our garment of light will remain and shine even brighter when one day the flesh gloriously and sanctified joins our persona again to a living wholeness”. The return of souls to their immortal bodies is a bold thought on its own, but it was imposed on Dante by the Christian religion. But Dante regains his freedom as a poet when he adds that souls feel “longing for their dead bodies”.
People responded to an existential threat early on by trading the face of the image for the facelessness of death. Through death they were entangled in the mystery of an absence to which images owe their oldest meaning. Their presence in the world responds to a definitive absence. In the myths of the cult of the dead, the dead returned once more to a place where the living awaited them with a picture. The ontological meaning of the pictures was tied to death because only here does the appearance of the picture attract a new being.
Dante’s journey to the hereafter is based on an image theory based on the difference between image and body. He differentiates between image and body in the double sense that bodies are not images, while images have no bodies. Mortal bodies cast cast shadows, but not the souls that continue to live in the shadow body. Since shadow bodies could not be anything other than pictures, they excluded any confusion with living bodies. Only Dante’s dreaming self was able to cross the border between life and death. The reference to death, from an anthropological point of view the birth of human pictorial practice, also leads Dante to the poetic images of a journey into the hereafter that has become world literature.
Hans Belting is an art historian. A detailed description of the topic appears in the volume “Evidenzen des Jenseits”, edited by Dominik Perler and Friederike Wilke, in Wallstein Verlag.