Practice question · True or false
The Commedia’s numerical scheme — three canticles of thirty-three cantos, plus one — is deliberate rather than incidental.
Hints
- Consider whether 100 and 3 have meanings Dante would have recognised.
- Three is the Trinity and ten is completeness; a hundred is ten squared.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Three is the number of the Trinity, ten of completeness, and a hundred is ten squared. Dante builds the theology into the structure so that the poem’s shape asserts its argument independently of its content.
Practise Dante’s Divine Comedy: an Architecture of the Afterlife
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More questions on Dante’s Divine Comedy: an Architecture of the Afterlife
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