August 2010 Print

Dante’s Inferno: Reading and Commentary

Dr. David Allen White

 

“Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.”

–T.S. Eliot

 

PART 4

There is one aspect of Dante’s life that needs to be kept in mind. It comes up repeatedly in the Divine Comedy. The political situation in Florence at that time was complicated and that situation helps us to understand why the poet was exiled from his own city. The main political divide of the day was between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. This division is manifested throughout Dante’s whole life and in the work itself.

To get some sense of the distinction between the two, the Guelphs believed in some form of constitutional government and generally stood in opposition to the Emperor. The Imperial States, which covered northern Italy at the time, were ruled from Germany/Austria. That remained the case for centuries in that region. At the time, the Emperor had a great deal of power and influence. The vision was one of an authoritarian political system holding Europe together as much as possible. The Guelph party was looking for more regional, or localized, control.

Curiously, they were not seeking to get away from all authority; the Guelphs were very much devoted to the Popes. So the general divide was between those who sided with the Pope versus those who sided with the Emperor. The Guelphs can broadly be defined as a middle-class party, emphasized by a focus on constitutional, localized government, but looking to the Pope for support, trying to shake off some of the imperial burden.

The Ghibellines were a more aristocratic party, loyal to the Emperor, and opposing the growing territorial power of the papacy in terms of politics.

Dante was a Guelph. Yet even inside the Guelph party, there were divisions. To show how complicated the political feuding had become, the Guelphs had become divided into the Blacks and the Whites. The Black Guelphs believed in strong attachment to the Pope, particularly the reigning Boniface VIII, and the White Guelphs, who were at odds with the Pope, thus wanted a looser connection with the papacy. The Black Guelphs had seized control of the city of Florence. Dante and his family belonged to the White Guelph party. The poet had agreed to be part of a delegation that made an embassy to Rome to see Boniface VIII. When they returned to Florence, they found themselves locked out of the city. He was told he was not welcome to return to Florence.

Dante, for a long time, suspected that Pope Boniface VIII had something to do with this. This is why, in the Inferno, Boniface VIII is not highly regarded. Much of this is, as you can see, political intrigue. One can read the Divine Comedy solely in terms of politics and history. These ideas mattered very much to Dante; he was a man of his age with great interest in these questions.

As stated earlier, in the poem Virgil stands for the great good of right reason, and yet, while extremely important, the poem is about much more than reason. There is a moment, when Virgil and the Pilgrim come to the city of Dis, just beyond the fifth circle. At the very end of Canto 8, there is a parody of the city. Now, Dante thought highly of the city; he thought very highly of Florence. He believed the city in some sense represented civilized man and civilized order—the best life had to offer. Since everything in Hell is a parody of how things should be, the parody of the city is a madhouse. Dante comes to the gates:

 

And then at last we entered those deep moats that circled all of this unhappy city whose walls, it seemed to me, were made of iron.

 

. . .

 

I saw more than a thousand fiendish angels perching above the gates enraged, screaming: “Who is the one approaching? Who, without death, dares walk into the kingdom of the dead?” And my wise teacher made some kind of signal announcing he would speak to them in secret. They managed to suppress their great resentment enough to say: “You come, but he must go who thought to walk so boldly through this realm.”

 

. . .

 

I could not hear what he proposed to them, but they did not remain with him for long; I saw them race each other back for home. Our adversaries slammed the heavy gates in my lord’s face, and he stood there outside, then turned toward me and walked back very slowly with eyes downcast, all self-assurance now erased from his forehead—sighing, “Who are these to forbid my entrance to the halls of grief!” He spoke to me: “You need not be disturbed by my vexation, for I shall win the contest, no matter how they plot to keep us out! This insolence of theirs is nothing new; they used it once at a less secret gate which is, and will forever be, unlocked....”

 

This is a reference to when Christ descended and released the souls of the great Old Testament figures from limbo. These same demons tried to keep Christ out. Virgil, of course, doesn’t entirely understand what that was all about, being a classical figure.

 

“You saw the words of death inscribed above it: already passing through, and with no guide, descending, through the circles, down the slope comes one by whom the city will be opened.”

 

In the beginning of Canto 9, an angel descends and blasts open the gates of the infernal city so that Virgil and Dante may go further below. The point is that reason is powerless in the face of the insane demonic power of these furies that keep the gates closed. At this point, Virgil is powerless. He can begin the journey, but he needs divine help at some point. The City of Dis is really a perversion of the City of God. It is a place of total disorder, controlled entirely by demonic souls, filled with rage, passion, and fury.

Most versions of the Inferno come with a chart or diagram of some sort. It is important to understand that the Inferno is divided into three main parts, corresponding to different kinds of sins: sins of concupiscence, violence, and fraud. The sins of fraud are found among the lowest circles. The sins of the flesh, then, come first. I mentioned in the previous article Paolo and Francesca: they are in these first circles for not controlling their fleshly appetites. The circles of violence come in the middle, filled with those who did not control their actions, lashing out against their fellow men. Finally come the sins of fraud. These circles are filled with those who misused their intellect, who abused reason. They corrupted that which defined them as human in order to deceive, instead of using their reason to stand for truth. Dante puts them at the bottom.

You will notice Dante does not categorize according to the standard seven cardinal sins. He invents a different division, even though all seven sins are, of course, found in the Inferno. Dante will return to a more traditional division of the seven deadly sins during the climb up Mount Purgatory; it is how the rings of the mountain are ordered.

Also, it is interesting to note that heretics are outside all three divisions in the Inferno. The heretics have a separate little place all to themselves. After all, heresy is not a sin of the flesh, nor is it a sin against fellow men. It is, in a way, a perversion of the intellect, but in a different way: it is a sin of the intellect in a state of being, in the ideas held. Sins of fraud are intellectual sins used to attack other men, being externalized. This is Dante’s division.

Let me give you an example of the brilliance of his poetic imagination as he gives us a vision of what the sin is about. This is called contrapasso, in which the punishment fits the sin: the sin committed in life is punished in an appropriate fashion. Some examples are clearer than others.

For instance, Canto 25 opens with a grotesque scene: Vanni Fucci makes an obscene gesture to God Himself. He is suddenly attacked by a number of snakes which coil about him so tightly that he can no longer move. He is punished by demons immediately after making the gesture. He flees, only to be chased by a centaur with a fire-breathing dragon on his back. This is grand stuff.

Before we get into the canto itself, it is good to note that, in the century before Dante wrote, there was a huge debate about whether or not one could use the classical authors. It was a very real debate: Should those writers who came before the time of Christ be incorporated into Christian thought and used in it? The battle was obviously won by the defenders of the classical authors; one of the greatest defenders was St. Thomas Aquinas, who not only used Aristotle, but made very clear that Aristotle was a source of wisdom. Thomas pointed out that it would be foolish to close out a great thinker who spoke great truths and who presented them coherently only because he had not yet had the benefit of knowing Christian teaching.

This battle was won in the 13th century. Dante, thus, writing at the beginning of the 14th century, avails himself of the classical tradition. For instance, the very notion of the division of Hell comes partially from Aristotle. More noticeable, perhaps, are all the glorious mythological creatures from Greek and Roman mythology. They show up throughout the Inferno.

Back to Canto 25, after the above, we read the following as demons attack Vanni Fucci:

 

The two heads had already fused to one and features from each flowed and blended into one face where two were lost in one another; two arms of each were four blurred strips of flesh; and thighs with legs, then stomach and the chest sprouted limbs that human eyes have never seen. Each former likeness now was blotted out: both, and neither one it seemed—this picture of deformity. And then it sneaked off slowly. Just as a lizard darting from hedge to hedge, under the stinging lash of the dog-days’ heat, zips across the road, like a flash of lightning, so, rushing toward the two remaining thieves, aiming at their guts, a little serpent, fiery with rage and black as pepper-corn, shot up and sank its teeth in one of them, right where the embryo receives its food, then back it fell and lay stretched out before him.

 

These weird exchanges go on for the rest of the Canto. In one instance, they even exchange forms. What does this all mean? We are here in the canto of the thieves. These creatures who paid no attention to others’ property are now punished by losing their very selves in Hell. Since they couldn’t distinguish between mine and thine, they are transformed into serpents who have neither “me” nor “thee.” In this demonic realm, they keep shifting. They can’t even call their personalities or even their forms their own. That is the absolutely appropriate punishment for the thieves.

Another example of a brilliant contrapasso: in Canto 28, the Pilgrim meets the Provencal poet, Bertrand de Born. De Born was a great poet from whom Dante learned much about writing poetry. In the ninth bolge, the bolges being little pockets for special sinners, Dante encounters this poet he admired. The ninth bolge contains the souls of those who sowed scandal and schism so here we also find Mohammed who walks around with his guts spilled out. Bertram de Born had encouraged Prince Henry, son of Henry II, to rebel against his father. His act was a dis-joining not just of father and son, but of a legitimate ruler and his heir. The heir would supplant his father before the proper time. To advise the prince to supplant his father was to promote the removal of the “head” of the state; hence, Bertrand de Born wanders through Hell with his head cut off, carrying it in his own hand. It is a perfect punishment to fit the sin, grisly but memorable.

Dante creates perfectly logical yet grotesque punishments like these throughout the Inferno. It must be said: one reason the Inferno is the most often read of the three parts is because we love hideous pictures of horror. Something about it is sickly appealing. You will find standard opinion stating that the Inferno is very exciting, the Purgatorio is okay, and the Paradiso is boring. If anything this reaction tells us more about our own fallen nature; we respond to the grotesque in a very direct way.

Dorothy Sayers said those people who only read the Inferno, and get bored in the early part of the Purgatorio, then stop, are like people going to visit a great city like Paris and only spending a few days in the sewers, drains, and underground passageways, never rising up to see the streets, let alone the glorious monuments above the city. To only read the Inferno is like only visiting the Paris sewers and then exclaiming that one has visited Paris.

The Inferno is supposed to be dramatic, horrifying, and unnerving. If you are reading it with a clear understanding of punishment for sin, you will find it neither pleasant nor attractive. Look at the end of Canto 30, which considers the deceivers. This comes after the thieves. Two souls are screaming at each other towards the end of the canto. One, Master Adamo, was a counterfeiter, someone who deceived through false currency. The other is Sinon the Greek, he who went inside Troy and lied so that the Trojan Horse could be brought in. These two begin to shout at one another:

 

“My words were false—so were the coins you made,” said Sinon, “and I am here for one false act but you for more than my fiend in hell!” “The horse, recall the horse, you falsifier,” the bloated paunch was quick to answer back, “may it burn your guts that all the world remembers!” “May your guts burn with thirst that cracks your tongue,” the Greek said, “may they burn with rotting humors that swell your hedge of a paunch to block your eyes!” And then the money-man: “So there you go, your evil mouth pours out its filth as usual; for if I thirst, and humors swell me up, you burn more, and your head is fit to split, and it wouldn’t take much coaxing to convince you to lap the mirror of Narcissus dry!” Now we get Dante the Pilgrim: I was listening, all absorbed in this debate, There he is; he’s drawn into the scene. When the master said to me: “Keep right on looking, a little more, and I shall lose my patience.”

 

This is a glorious moment. Dante the Pilgrim is absorbed by the horrors in Hell. Virgil is the voice of reason.

 

I heard the note of anger in his voice and turned to him: I was so full of shame that it still haunts my memory today.

 

This whole scene reminds one of modern talk shows. If you have any doubt that great literature addresses the contemporary world, this is proof. Talk shows today simply involve bringing together two people who disagree, letting them shout at and insult each other, and the audience tunes in to be entertained by the rancor, by the grotesque souls spewing venom at one another. There is nothing to be gained from an argument like this; it is not rational debate. This is not a way to spend precious time.

Notice how Canto 30 ends. We get a strange simile from Dante the Poet:

 

Like one asleep who dreams himself in trouble and in his dream he wishes he were dreaming, longing for that which is, as if were not, just so I found myself: unable to speak, longing to beg for pardon and already begging for pardon, not knowing that I did. “Less shame than yours would wash away a fault greater than yours has been,” my master said, “and so forget about it, do not be sad. If ever again you should meet up with men engaging in this kind of futile wrangling, remember I am always at your side; to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!”

 

You can quote this next time someone tells you about a talk show. Dante is timeless. He is showing us something of our fallen nature. But reason is always at our side to help us break free from the attraction of these kinds of conversations. It is a kind of spell that transfixes a man of greater intellect and soul than we possess—it attracts even the great Dante.

As Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil approach the very pit of hell, three giants guard the way. They have to be moved past before the two hit the very bottom of Hell; the three giants are named Nimrod, Ephialtes and Anteas. Each one of them has a different character; if you will, each represents a characteristic that leads to the very center of Hell. Nimrod is a braggart who just spouts idiocy, he speaks nonsense syllables, all language gone and thus all reason gone, for the two are inextricably bound together. He has his immense strength but that is all he possesses. Ephialtes is just senseless rage, lashing out at everything, destroying everything. And finally, Anteas is just brainless vanity. In a curious way, in the three giants you get things that sadly characterize any hell-ish time or all hell-ish disorder: total nonsense, the abandonment of reason, nihilism (nothing matters, just destroy, destroy, destroy), and, finally, triviality, constant meaningless obsession with the self, with silly meaningless little details. Should I wear three ear rings through my nose or four? Should I get another hole drilled in my lip? Should I have my hands tattooed? Absolute triviality. And, triviality somehow connected with the self is meaningless. They’re giants, they’re massive, but they’re immobile. They’re not going anywhere. They’re part of that frozen world of hell that exists below them. You slide past them cautiously for they can destroy you in an instant. They are destructive forces but they are stupid. They’re brainless. They are small in nature if large in form. It is an astonishing scene.

At the very bottom of the Inferno, as we sink into the lowest circle, the center of Hell, we encounter Satan. Satan is frozen in ice. There is plenty of fire and heat in Hell, of course, but the center is cold, frozen, and dead. There is no warmth. It is the pit of Hell, devoid of love. If charity is burning love, the center of Hell is ice.

The first image we get of Satan from a distance is of his great bat wings. They keep flapping up and down mechanistically. He has three faces on one head, a grotesque hideous parody of the Trinity. We see him chewing on souls. Satan is immobile save for his wings and mouth, the wings moving mechanically, the mouth grinding pitilessly. There is nothing “human” about him.

There are three souls in the lowest pit of Hell: Brutus and Cassius from the classical world, men who betrayed an Emperor, their just leader, and murdered him. And, of course, there is Judas, who betrayed God Himself. Dante here implies that we have obligations to both God and Empire; one does not betray either.

Dante the Pilgrim has made the complete journey and has encountered all the sins that man may commit, and thus, as he is a man, all the sins that he might commit. He has learned through his journey and now with Virgil still at his side climbs out of Hell, preparing for the second stage of his long pilgrimage that will take him up Mount Purgatory and point the way to Paradise.

 

(To be continued.)

 

 

Dr. David Allen White taught World Literature at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, for the better part of three decades. He gave many seminars at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, including one on which this article is based. He is the author of The Mouth of the Lion and The Horn of the Unicorn. All quotes from The Divine Comedy are taken from Mark Musa’s translation, published by Penguin Books. Illustrations by Gustave Doré.