According to some scholars, March 25, 1300 marks the beginning of Dante's journey through the afterlife as described in the Divine Comedy. Dante may have chosen this date for both symbolic and historical reasons.
In Christian tradition, March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation, the day the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. A date therefore charged with symbolic weight: the passage from darkness into the light of Truth. It coincides with the spring equinox, a universal symbol of rebirth, and with 1300, the year of the first Catholic Jubilee.
The Divine Comedy remains the greatest literary work ever written. It deserves to be rediscovered, reread, and explored in depth: beyond its overwhelming beauty, it conceals teachings essential to the evolution of the human spirit.
René Guénon read the three canticles as an initiatory journey, dense with esoteric symbolism. Dante himself invites us to seek the hidden truth beneath his verses: "O you who have sound intellects, behold the teaching that lies hidden beneath the veil of these strange verses."
And everything begins precisely there: in the realization that one has lost the way. The dark wood is a state of moral confusion, a condition in which the values that lead back to the straight path have been forgotten. The path toward the refinement of one's inner life. Toward the light.
To honor this date, here are five of the Supreme Poet's most beautiful quotations.
Let us take his teachings seriously and bring them into our lives. Rather than following anyone who commands visibility, let us choose as our guides those who have made the elevation of the spirit their true mission.
“Consider your origins: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge”
With these words, Ulysses urges his companions to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the outermost boundary of the known world. It is one of the most celebrated passages in Dante, because it holds within it an exalted vision of man: the idea that existence is not exhausted by mere survival or the satisfaction of immediate needs, but carries within itself a tension toward something higher.
On one side stands knowledge, which broadens the gaze and frees man from the inertia of ignorance. On the other stands virtue, which gives inner form to that search and prevents the desire to know from becoming blind conquest, transgression as an end in itself.
The seed Ulysses speaks of is a direction inscribed in human nature itself, a calling to refuse reduction to the purely instinctive dimension.
Every time we devote ourselves to the search for truth and the refinement of the self, each of us crosses our own Pillars of Hercules. Because the boundary of the known world, in the end, so often coincides with the boundary each of us encounters within.
“Come after me, and let people talk: stand like a firm tower that never shakes its top for the blowing of winds”
Virgil urges Dante to follow him without heeding the judgment of others, with the steadiness of a tower that stands firm while the winds blow around it.
Whoever carries an objective within knows that the noise of the world is the first obstacle to cross. Opinions, judgments, the voices that discourage: these belong to the outside, and to the outside they must be left.
The tower stands because its roots go deep, into what the wind cannot reach. To remain firm in one's purpose is already, in itself, a form of progress.
“If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port”
Brunetto Latini, Dante's master, entrusts him here with one of the most luminous and powerful images in the entire poem: the idea that each of us carries a deep direction to which we must remain faithful. And that fulfillment is born not from chance, but from coherence with that inner calling.
Brunetto's vision is confined to the horizons hell imposes on him, yet his words retain an undiminished universal force. They speak to those who hesitate, to those who fear losing their way, to those who slow their step because doubt, at times, weighs more than effort.
Doubt, in itself, is not an enemy. It is a question that compels us to go deeper. It becomes dangerous only when it hardens, when it no longer opens toward inquiry but arrests it, when it ceases to be an exercise of thought and becomes an erosion of the will.
To follow one's star, then, is not blind surrender to instinct. It is inner discipline. It is the quiet perseverance of those who keep moving in the direction they recognize as true, even when the world offers no confirmation and results are slow to arrive.
And that glorious port has nothing to do with what we commonly call success. It is not necessarily approval, visibility, or outward triumph. Sometimes the most glorious port is invisible to others: it is the place where, after much wandering, one finally arrives at oneself.
“Light is given to you for good and for evil”
We are in Purgatory, where Marco Lombardo responds to one of Dante's great questions: where does the evil that men commit come from? Many, he observes, attribute everything to the heavens, to fate, to the influence of higher powers. But his answer breaks through this ancient alibi, one that remains just as current today: man has been given the light, the faculty of discernment, the capacity to recognize good and evil, and therefore to choose.
Evil is not a sentence written elsewhere, nor a fatality. It is the fruit of free will, of liberty distorted in its use, of a reason that abdicates or bends.
There is a great fashion today for following the heart unconditionally: emotions, feelings, inner impulse. And there is nothing wrong with this, in itself. But when feeling claims to replace discernment, we regress.
The light of the intellect is what must orient even the choices of the heart. Because not every impulse is truth, and not everything one feels leads toward the good.
“The Love that moves the sun and the other stars”
Thus ends the Divine Comedy: with a vision that belongs only to those who have completed the journey, who have purified the soul to the point of seeing what remains hidden from most.
We can spend our whole lives questioning the meaning of things, the logic that governs the universe. But in the end, the one true answer is divine Love: the source from which everything emanates, the principle that directs everything.
It is He who moves the sun and the other stars.
It is He whom we must seek.
Rona
♥
“but now my desire and will were turned,
like a wheel that is moved evenly,
by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
Dante Alighieri
