Dante and symbolism: numbers, allegories and esoteric readings of the poem

The number three, the four senses of scripture, the Greyhound and the «five hundred, ten and five»: the Divine Comedy read through its symbols.

Few texts have been questioned as closely as the Divine Comedy. Dante Alighieri composed it in exile, starting in the early years of the fourteenth century, and finished it shortly before his death in Ravenna in 1321. The poem itself invites the search for hidden meanings: in the ninth canto of the Inferno the poet addresses those of «sound intellect», asking them to observe the doctrine concealed «beneath the veil of the strange verses».

The four senses of scripture

In the Convivio Dante explains that a text can be read according to four senses: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. This was a method that medieval theology applied to the Bible and that the poet extends to poetry. The Letter to Cangrande della Scala, whose attribution to Dante is however disputed, applies the same scheme to the Comedy, giving as its literal subject the state of souls after death and as its allegorical subject man who, through free will, earns reward or punishment.

From this perspective the dark wood, the three beasts and the hill lit by the sun are not mere settings. They represent moral confusion, the vices that block the path and the goal of salvation. Every character, from Virgil to Beatrice, can also be read as the figure of a faculty of the soul or of a virtue that accompanies the pilgrim.

The architecture of numbers

The structure of the poem is governed by three, the number of the Trinity. There are three canticles, each of thirty-three cantos; with the introductory canto the total reaches one hundred, a number considered perfect. The terza rima with interlocking rhyme, invented by Dante, binds each stanza to the next like the links of a chain. Nine, the square of three, marks the circles of Hell and the heavens of Paradise, and in the Vita nuova it was already linked to the figure of Beatrice.

The final words also follow a precise design: all three canticles end with the word «stars». The last line of the Paradiso names «the love that moves the sun and the other stars», bringing the entire journey back to a single cosmic principle. The pilgrim's path, which began in a wood without light, thus ends in the contemplation of the order that governs the universe.

Enigmatic prophecies

Dante places two deliberately obscure prophecies in the poem. In the first canto Virgil announces the Greyhound, a hunting dog that will drive the she-wolf back into hell; in the thirty-third canto of the Purgatorio Beatrice speaks of «a five hundred, ten and five», a messenger of God destined to slay the harlot and the giant. The Roman numerals DXV have been read as an anagram of DUX, a leader, but the identity of the figure has never been established.

For the Greyhound, commentators from the fourteenth century onwards have proposed Cangrande della Scala, an emperor, a reforming pope or Christ himself at the end of time. The very number of hypotheses shows how well Dante knew how to create open symbols, capable of generating interpretations for centuries without any of them managing to exhaust their meaning.

Modern esoteric readings

In the nineteenth century Gabriele Rossetti, an exile from the Abruzzo living in London and father of the painter Dante Gabriel, argued that Dante belonged to a secret sect hostile to the papacy. In the twentieth century René Guénon published The Esoterism of Dante (1925) and Luigi Valli The Secret Language of Dante and the Fedeli d'Amore (1928), in which the lady loved by the poets of the dolce stil novo became the symbol of an initiatory wisdom.

Academic criticism has largely rejected these theses, considering them lacking in documentary evidence. They nevertheless remain a significant chapter in Dante's reception and show how the Comedy, which truly is built on a rigorous system of symbols, continues to exert a fascination that goes far beyond literary history and draws in philosophers, artists and scholars of the traditions.