The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  2. Hell

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

  Che la diritta via era smarrita.

  “Midway on the road of our life I found myself in a dark wood, whose direct way was blurred” and lost.42 Wandering in this darkness, Dante meets Virgil, his “master and guide, from whom alone I took the beautiful style that has brought me honor.”43 Virgil tells him that the only safe exit from the wood is through hell and purgatory; but if Dante will accompany him through these, he will conduct him to the portals of paradise, “where a worthier than I must lead thee”; indeed, he adds, it is at Beatrice’ command that he has come to the poet’s aid.

  They pass through an opening in the earth’s surface to the gates of hell, inscribed with these bitter words:

  Per me si va nella città dolente,

  Per me si va nell’ eterno dolore,

  Per me si va tra la perduta gente.

  Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;

  Fecemi la divina potestate,

  La somma sapienza e il primo amore.

  Dinanzi a me non fur cose create,

  Se non eterne, ed io eterno duro:

  Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate!44

  “Through me one enters the sorrowful city; through me one enters into eternal pain; through me one enters among the lostrace. Justice moved my high Maker; divine power made me, supreme wisdom, and primeval love. Before me were no things created except eternal ones; and I endure eternally. All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”

  Hell is a subterranean funnel, reaching down to the center of the earth. Dante conceives it with a powerful, almost a sadistic, imagination: dark and frightening abysses between gigantic murky rocks; steaming, stinking marshes, torrents, lakes, and streams; storms of rain, snow, hail, and brands of fire; howlirig winds and petrifying cold; tortured bodies, grimacing faces, blood-stilling shrieks and groans. Nearest the top of this infernal funnel are those who were neither good nor bad, and those who were neutral; ignoble irritations punish them; they are bitten by wasps and hornets, gnawed by worms, consumed with envy and remorse. The never neutral Dante scorns them, and makes Virgil say:

  Misericordia e giustizia gli sdegna:

  Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa—45

  “Mercy and justice despise them. We do not speak of them, but look and pass on.” The tourists come to the subterranean river Acheron, and are ferried over by old Charon, serving here since Homer’s days. On the farther shore Dante finds himself in limbo, the first circle of hell, where stay the virtuous but unbaptized, including Virgil and all good heathen, and all good Jews except a few Old Testament heroes whom Christ, visiting limbo, released to heaven. Their only suffering is that they eternally desire a better fate, and know that they will never receive it. There in limbo, honored by all its denizens, are great pagan poets—Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan; they welcome Virgil, and make Dante the sixth of their tribe. Looking still higher, says Dante,

  Vidi il Maestro di color che sanno

  Seder tra filosofica famiglia—

  “I saw the master of those who know, seated amid the philosophic family”—i.e., Aristotle, surrounded by Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Thales, Zeno, Cicero, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Averroës “who made the great commentary.”46 Obviously, if Dante had had his way, all this noble company, including the Saracen infidels, would have graced paradise.

  Virgil now leads him down into the second circle, where carnal sinners are ceaselessly tossed about by furious winds; here Dante sees Paris, Helen, Dido, Semiramis, Cleopatra, Tristan, and Paolo and Francesca. To end a family feud between the Polentas, lords of Ravenna, and the Malatestas, lords of Rimini, the lovely Francesca da Polenta was to wed the brave but deformed Gianciotto Malatesta. The rest of the story is uncertain; a favored version makes Paolo, the handsome brother of Gianciotto, pretend to be the suitor; to him Francesca pledged herself; but on the wedding day she found herself reluctantly marrying Gianciotto. Soon afterward she enjoyed for a moment Paolo’s love; in that moment Gianciotto caught and slew them (c. 1265). Swaying in the wind as a fleshless wraith beside the ghost of her disembodied lover, Francesca da Rimini tells Dante her story:

  Nessun maggior dolore

  Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

  Nella miseria. …

  Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto

  Di Lancelotto, come l’amor lo strinse:

  Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospetto.

  Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse

  Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso:

  Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

  Quando leggemmo il disiato riso

  Esser baciato da cotante amante,

  Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

  La bocea mi baciò tutto tremante.

  Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse:

  Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

  No greater grief than to remember days

  Of joy when misery is at hand…. One day

  For our delight we read of Lancelot,

  How him love thralled. Alone we were, and no

  Suspicion near us. Ofttimes by that reading

  Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue

  Fled from our altered cheek. But at one point

  Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,

  The wishéd smile, so rapturously kissed

  By one so deep in love, then he, who ne’er

  From me shall separate, at once my lips

  All trembling kissed. The book and writer both

  Were love’s purveyors. In its leaves that day

  We read no more.47

  Dante faints with pity at this tale. He wakes to find himself in the third circle of hell, where those who were guilty of gluttony lie in mire under a continuous storm of snow, hail, and dirty water, while Cerberus barks over them and rends them piecemeal with threefold jaws. Virgil and Dante descend into the fourth circle, where Plutus is stationed; here the prodigal and the avaricious meet in conflict, rolling great weights against each other in a Sisyphean war. The poets follow the murky boiling river Styx down into the fifth circle; here those who sinned by wrath are covered with filth, and smite and tear themselves; and those who were sinfully slothful are submerged in the stagnant water of the Stygian lake, whose muddy surface bubbles with their gasps. The wanderers are conveyed across the lake by Phlegyas, and reach in the sixth circle the city of Dis or Lucifer, where heretics are roasted in flaming sepulchers. They descend into the seventh circle; there, under the presidency of the Minotaur, those who committed crimes of violence are perpetually near to drowning in a roaring river of blood; centaurs shoot them with arrows when their heads emerge. In one compartment of this circle are the suicides, including Piero delle Vigne; in another those who committed violence against God or nature or art stand with bare feet on hot sands, while flakes of fire fall upon their heads. Among the sodomites Dante meets his old teacher, Brunetto Latini—a tasteless doom for a guide, philosopher, and friend.

  At the edge of the eighth circle a horrible monster appears, who bears the poets down into the pit of usurers. In the upper gulfs of this circle an ingenious diversity of unending pains falls upon seducers, flatterers, and simoniacs. The latter are fixed head downward in holes; only their legs protrude, and flames lick their feet caressingly. Among the simoniacs is Pope Nicholas III (1277–80), whose evil deeds, along with those of other popes, are bitterly denounced; and by a bold fancy Dante pictures Nicholas as mistaking him for Boniface VIII (d. 1303), whose arrival in hell is expected at any hour.48 Soon, Nicholas predicts, Clement V (d. 1314) will also come. In the fourth gulf of the eighth circle are those who presumed to foretell the future; their heads are fixed face backward on their necks. From a bridge—“Malebolge” —over the fifth gulf they look down upon public peculators, who swim forever in a lake of boiling pitch. Hypocrites
pass continually around the sixth gulf, wearing gilded cloaks of lead. Along the only pathway in that gulf lies Caiaphas, prostrate and crucified, so that all who pass must tread upon his flesh. In the seventh gulf robbers are tormented by venomous snakes; Dante recognizes here several Florentines. From an arch over the eighth gulf he sees flames consuming and reconsuming evil counselors; here is the wily Odysseus. In the ninth gulf scandalmongers and schismatics are torn limb from limb; here is Mohammed, described with appalling ferocity:

  As one I marked, torn from the chin throughout,

  Down to the hinder passage; ‘twixt the legs

  Dangling his entrails hung; the midriff lay

  Open to view; and wretched ventricle

  That turns the englutted aliment to dross.

  Whilst eagerly I fixed on him my gaze,

  He eyed me, with his hands laid his breast bare,

  And cried: “Now mark how I do rip me; lo!

  And is Mohammed mangled. Before me

  Walks Ali weeping; from the chin his face

  Cleft to the forelock; and the others all,

  Whom here thou seest, while they live, did sow

  Scandal and schism, and therefore thus are rent.

  A friend is here behind, who with his sword

  Hacks us thus cruelly, slivering again

  Each of this ream when we have compassed round

  The dismal way; for first our gashes close

  Ere we repass him.”49

  In the tenth gulf of the eighth circle lie forgers, counterfeiters, and alchemists, moaning with varied ailments; a stench of sweat and pus fills the air, and the groans of the sufferers make a terrifying roar.

  At last the poets reach the ninth and lowest circle of hell, which, strange to relate, is a vast well of ice. Here traitors are buried in the ice to their chins; tears of pain freeze into a “crystalline visor” over their faces. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who betrayed Pisa, is here eternally bound to Archbishop Ruggieri, who imprisoned him with his sons and grandsons and allowed them all to starve to death. Now Ugolino’s head lies upon the Archbishop’s, which it chews forever. At nadir, the center of the earth and the very bottom of the narrowing funnel of hell, the giant Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitor in each of three jaws—Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.

  Half the terrors of the medieval soul are gathered into this gory chronicle. As one reads its awful pages the gruesome horror mounts, until at last the cumulative effect is oppressive and overwhelming. Not all the sins and crimes of man from nebula to nebula could match the sadistic fury of this divine revenge. Dante’s conception of hell is the crowning indecency of medieval theology. Classic antiquity had thought of a Hades or Avernus that received all the human dead into a subterranean and indiscriminate darkness; but it had not pictured that Tartarus as a place of torture. Centuries of barbarism, insecurity, and war had to intervene before man could defile his God with attributes of undying vengeance and inexhaustible cruelty.

  With relief we learn at the end that Virgil and Dante have passed through the center of the earth, have inverted the direction of their heads and feet, and are moving upward toward the antipodes. With the time-disdaining swiftness of a dream the two poets traverse in two days the diameter of the earth. They emerge in the southern hemisphere on Easter morning, drink in the light of day, and stand at the foot of the terraced mountain which is purgatory.

  3. Purgatory

  The conception of purgatory is by comparison humane: man may by effort and pain, by hope and vision, cleanse himself of sin and selfishness, and mount step by step to understanding, love, and bliss. So Dante pictures purgatory as a mountainous cone divided into nine levels: an antepurgatory, seven terraces—one for the purgation of each of the Deadly Sins—and, at the summit, the Earthly Paradise. From each level the sinner moves with diminishing pain to a higher level; and at each ascent an angel chants one of the Beatitudes. In the lower stages there are stern punishments for sins shriven and forgiven but not yet atoned for with sufficient penalty; nevertheless, as against hell’s bitter consciousness that suffering will never end, there is here the strengthening certainty that after finite punishment will come an eternity of happiness. A softer mood and a brightening light pervade these cantos, and reveal a Dante learning mildness from his pagan guide.

  Virgil, with daubs of dew, washes from Dante’s face the sweat and grime of hell. The sea surrounding the mountain shimmers under the rising sun, as the sin-darkened soul trembles with joy at the coming of divine grace. Here on the first level, in accord with Thomas’ hope that some good heathen might be saved, Dante encounters Cato of Utica, the stern stiff Stoic who, rather than suffer Caesar’s mercy, killed himself. Here, too, is Manfred, Frederick’s son, who fought a pope but loved poetry. Virgil hurries Dante onward with oft quoted lines:

  Lascia dir le genti;

  Sta come torre ferma che non crolla

  Giammai la cima per soffiar de’ venti—

  “Let the people talk; stand like a firm tower, which never shakes its top for all the blowing of the winds.”50 Virgil is not at home in purgatory; he cannot answer Dante’s questions as readily as in his wonted hell; he feels his lack, and shows at times an irritated wistfulness. He is comforted when they meet Sordello; the poet sons of Mantua fall into each other’s arms, united by the Italian’s affection for the city of his youth. Thereupon Dante breaks out into a bitter apostrophe to his country, summarizing his essay on the need of monarchy:

  Ah, slavish Italy! thou inn of grief!

  Vessel without a pilot in loud storm!

  Lady no longer of fair provinces,

  But brothel-house impure! This gentle spirit,

  Even from the pleasant sound of his dear land

  Was prompt to greet a fellow citizen

  With such glad cheer; while now thy living ones

  In thee abide not without war; and one

  Malicious gnaws another; ay, of those

  Whom the same wall and the same moat contain.

  Seek, wretched one, around thy seacoasts wide,

  Then homeward to thy bosom turn, and mark

  If any part of thee sweet peace enjoy.

  What boots it that for thee Justinian [Roman law revived]

  The bridle mend if empty be the saddle [without a king]? …

  Ah, people, that devoted still should be

  And in the saddle let thy Caesar sit,

  If well thou markedst that which God commands!51

  And as if to point his fondness for kings that can hold a steady rein, he tells how Sordello guides them, at the base of the purgatorial mount, to a lovely sunny valley, flower-strewn and fragrant, where dwell the Emperor Rudolf, King Ottokar of Bohemia, Peter III of Aragon, Henry II of England, Philip III of France.

  Conducted by Lucia (symbolizing the light of God’s grace), Dante and Virgil are admitted by an angel to the first terrace of purgatory. Here the proud are punished by carrying on their bent backs each a massive stone; while reliefs on wall and pavement picture famous deeds of humility, and the dire results of pride. On the second terrace the envious, clad in sackcloth, have their eyes repeatedly sewn up with iron threads. On the third terrace anger, on the fourth sloth, on the fifth avarice, endure their appropriate penalties. Here Pope Hadrian V, once covetous of wealth, does penance peacefully, calm in the surety of ultimate salvation. In one of the many delightful episodes that brighten the Purgatorio, the Roman poet Statius appears, and greets the travelers with such joy as seldom moves a poet meeting another poet on the earth. Together the three mount to the sixth terrace, where the sin of gluttony is cleansed; trees dangle sweet-smelling fruit before the penitents, but withdraw them when hands reach out to grasp, while voices in the air recount historic feats of temperance. On the seventh and last terrace are those who sinned by incontinence, but were shriven before death; they are gently singed a
nd purified by flames. Dante has a poet’s sympathy for sins of the flesh, above all when committed by persons of artistic temperament, and therefore especially sensitive, imaginative, and precipitous. Here is Guido Guinizelli; Dante hails him as pater in litteris, and thanks him for “sweet songs which, as long as our language lasts, will make us love the very ink that traced them.”52

  An angel guides them through fire, by the last ascent, into the Earthly Paradise. Here Virgil bids him farewell:

  My ken

  No farther reaches. I with skill and art

  Thus far have drawn thee. Now thy pleasure take

  For guide…. Lo! the sun that darts

  His beam upon thy forehead, lo! the herb, The arborets and flowers, which of itself

  This land pours forth profuse. Till those bright eyes [of Beatrice]

  With gladness come, which, weeping, made me haste

  To succor thee, thou mayst or seat thee down,

  Or wander where thou wilt. Expect no more

  Sanction of warning voice or sign from me.

  Free of thine own arbitrament to choose,

  Discreet, judicious … I invest thee then

  With crown and miter, sovereign o’er thyself.53

  Virgil and Statius now behind instead of before him, Dante wanders through the woods and fields, and along the streams, of the Earthly Paradise, breathing the pleasant odor of its pure air, hearing from the trees the songs of “feathered choristers” chanting prime. A lady culling flowers stops her singing to explain to him why this fair country is deserted: it was once the Garden of Eden, but man’s disobedience exiled him and mankind from its innocent delights. To this forfeited Paradise Beatrice descends from heaven, clothed in such blinding radiance that Dante can only feel her presence but not see it.