Describe a literary reflection on the book, "The Divine Comedy" Vol 1: Inferno by Mark Musa from a christian perspective.  reflecting how the work engages the three aspects of goodness truth and beauty and how the work might show how goodness truth and beauty are absent or lacking in the world that the work portrays.

 

The Divine Comedy is an epic poem on a vast scale, told by Dante himself in first-person point of view. The Divine Comedy is also an allegory, a work in which characters, objects, and events have figurative as well as literal meanings. For example, in The Divine Comedy, Virgil symbolizes human reason, and Beatrice stands for faith and supernatural truth.

And this is a dream, a vision, seen and now retold by the Individual. The Divine Comedy begins as it ends with this lone Individual recounting a dream and its ultimate departure. A vision he has seen. The I has seen. It is for the reader to judge its 'truth'. Dante does not insist. Above him at the end of the valley in the vision there is already a gleam of light on the hills. But he has been standing at the brink of Hell, the 'pass....that no living person ever left'. He is in the wasteland at the edge of the Inferno.

Over the empty ground he begins to walk. He commences the rhythm of the moving feet, physical and poetic, mental and spiritual. The first and most important number symbol in Dante's Inferno is the number three. This number comes from the narrative poem in several ways. The first way Dante uses the number three is through the three beasts in the prologue of the story. The leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf stand in the character Dante's way. He had been attempting to leave a forest to reach the summit of the mountain (a metaphor for heaven) when the three beasts stop him, forcing him to turn back and travel through Hell.

The next use of the number three is the three-headed monstrous dog named Cerberus. This dog originated in antiquity making an appearance in Virgil's Aeneid. Virgil is a character in the story who guides Dante through Hell. Additionally, Satan has three faces. Each of the different faces has a different color.

Mark Louis Musa  was a translator and scholar of Italian literature.  We know that empathy, appreciation of beauty, love and knowledge exist. We handle them every day. But do we know what drives the mind to seek the good, the beautiful, the beloved, the true? And even if we fully understood the mechanics of our biology and history that create drives towards these things, don't we still know that for the individual, for you and I, these things have a special status. We choose the empathetic and compassionate, loyalty and respect over their denials. We choose beauty from what is around us, yet we feel it chooses us. We choose love and yet we know we are chosen also. We find knowledge and in the end through a complex process accord it belief. Is it not still true that the good, the beautiful, the beloved and the true, are both within us and beyond us, both demand recognition and demand belief? If so then Dante's call is to us, and is contemporary, and is beyond his own time. And his problems and agonies, his personal quest and his recognition of his beliefs are also ours, and still alive and demanding of us.

Dante's Commedia is a place where experience is tested, through assay, through example, through observation, through interrogation, through memory and repetition, through recognition and acceptance. And from that grand revelation, that giant glass, Dante believes that truth which must encompass love, goodness and beauty will emerges to the reader's eye. His Commedia is the gift of his belief. The plot of The Divine Comedy is simple: a man, generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake an ultra mundane journey, which leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.