Love's ordeal and the Ascent of Purgatory.

When I was an undergraduate, I kept on hearing a constant refrain,

constant refrain in all of my literature classes.

As a matter of fact, in all of the humanities classes,

I kept on hearing about this enigmatic work called Dante's Divine Comedy.

It was only at the end of my undergraduate studies that I actually reached out my hand to open

that great work and to start reading it, to start seeing the great delight and the wonder of this work

which covers a whole pilgrimage from hell to purgatory to heaven.

This great pilgrimage which Dante describes is something which includes almost every branch of his knowledge.

It contains every bit of his literary and artistic skill.

It tells in a delightful way this providential pilgrimage of Dante as he imagines himself lost in a dark

wood making his way through hell with his companion Virgil until he gets to purgatory and then

making an ascent up that mount of purgatory to the kingdom of heaven.

This great work, which is epic, at least in scale, if not particularly, and in its content,

is divided into 33 cantos per part. And each canto is further divided

into stanzas of three lines each, or tersets. This whole trinitarian structure of the divine

comedy lies at its very heart.

And we hear throughout this structure, it's on this structure that Dante hangs his musings.

His musings not only on the afterlife, but also on theology in general, on philosophy, on politics, law, art, and science. My interest in the second

part of this great poem is determined by a perception about teaching the poem. That is, that most of us who have read it, have

usually only encountered the first part. That is the part that's most often taught to high school

students and to undergraduates. And if we look at the inferno in its complexity, we see that it shows us not a complete

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