Examples Of Mysticism In Dante's Inferno

Woven into a tale that reads like a adventure in travel, Dante’s Inferno was written during a time of great transition, particularly in Western Europe. More laypeople could read and write, thus it allowed for messages to be conveyed more through imagery and metaphor rather than just the speeches of the clergy or nobility. Dante painted a picture for the people of his world and time to better understand how there was more connection between the everyday world they functioned in and the Biblical world long shrouded in mysticism. Dante overlaid his interpretation and explanation of Hell with such detail it was hard to imagine it as anything but a real, physical place one should do all they could to avoid. To that end, Dante gave examples of those condemned to the varying levels due to the corresponding degree of sin committed, thus explaining how one could also avoid such eternal doom.
The path he follows down through the levels also allowed one to get an idea of his personal struggles and strife. It seemed somehow easy for his to commiserate, empathize with, and pit Francesca, likely because he could understand wanting someone so badly

and not, in the social constructs of the time, being able to have them. In Canto IV, line 112, Dante speaks to Virgil about how strong this feeling is, “and when I answered him, ‘Alas!’ I said, ‘Sweet thoughts how many, and what strong desire, these to their sad catastrophe betrayed!” Late Medieval Europe may have progressed much in nearly a millennium, but love was not free for all to pursue, in mind or body.
Much like the Masnavi undertaken by the Persian poet Rumi around the same time (13th century), this was the work of a wrtier that would represent not just his own life and experiences, but be a lasting tribute and representation of his era.

Dante knew he was writing for a larger audience, but also realized his own need for personal discovery. As Christianity took a firmer hold on Europe, many people needed to have something more in their lives to help explain all the information that were expected to take on faith. To that end, Dante provided a bleak, even somewhat harsh view of the underworld and what awaited those should they fail to take their religion seriously. As was the case for others in the Scholastic tradition, poetry and prose also became an outlet for quasi-political statements, such as his reference to the

Simoiacs.
It would be unlikely that Dante would have fathomed his works surviving for another eight hundred years or more, but it seems now that whether he thought he would be an audience unto himself or he had the hope of being read around the world, he wrote what he believed to be the best representation of the truth and the way one should live a pious life to avoid the inferno.