Readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy recognize that below the surface narrative lie layers of meaning—from political commentary to theology to the experience of a moral journey. Yet, they are often subtly aware that there is even more in play than they quite perceive, and many times that awareness centers around a certain number that keeps showing up, or a pattern they’ve noticed within the numbers. Three beasts, nine circles, thirty-three cantos—they seem so important, and almost familiar, yet their meaning eludes us. Although the reader may not understand the purpose of such symbolic connections, they recognize that Dante is softly whispering in their ears.
The brilliant mind of Dante placed both overt and subtle references to symbolic numbers throughout the Comedy, the problem with our recognizing them is that Dante wrote for an audience that lived many hundreds of years ago. When modern readers experience the Comedy, they approach it with a contemporary interpretive lens, which obscures or completely misses references that a 14th century reader would have readily grasped. In order to truly understand the depth of symbolic references that Dante provides, we must educate ourselves on the recognized meanings of particular numbers—but even more than that, we must recognize the philosophical and scriptural origins of these meanings. Our goal is to systematically build understanding by exploring the history of numerology, its adoption by Christianity, and then look at how Dante uses numerical symbolism to deepen the meaning of both the structure of his realms, but also how he applies symbolic numbers to persons.
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