The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighlieri is one of the defining movments in western lilterature. It is a serious moral tale written in Italian (vs. Latin) and is the first serious poetry to be written in this language. It is a comedy (vs. tragedy) because it has a happy ending.
The Divine Comedy three parts: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Most people only read Inferno and that is too bad because Inferno is a description of hell; Paradise is a description of heaven.
In an essay on The Divine Comedy Mortimer Adler argues that “the subjec tof the whole work, taken merely in the literal sense, is the state of souls after death. . . but the subject of it [really] is man, according as, by his deserts and demerits int eh use of his free will, he is justly open to rewards and punishments.”
But The Divine Comendy is more than this. It is also a parody of medieval Italian nobility (similar to what Cervantes does in Don Quixote). In a sense Dante was the C. S. Lewis to his world. He contemporized the Christian salvation message to his world. In that sense, Dante was the penultimate apologist. Like Lewis, and Tolkein, Dante brought Christian motifs and theology back into the marketplace. We need Dantes today!