The God behind the Divine Comedy
In the mud and cold of Auschwitz, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was approached by an Alsatian Jew, who had never read Dante. Could Levi please explain why people spoke of this medieval poet in the same breath as Homer and Shakespeare, as one of the greatest European spirits?
Levi recited to him the 26th Canto of the It is the passage that describes the encounter with Ulysses. Dante and his guide through hell and purgatory, Virgil, have entered the infernal realms, and climbed down from circle to circle of hell, meeting now the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, now his old tutor everlastingly running on hot sands for the sin of sodomy, here forgers of currency,
