The Inferno

by Dante

  On the local level, late-thirteenth-century northern Italy (Milano, to the north, and Rome, to the south, are barely on Dante’s personal political map; rather we hear, in addition to Florence, of such cities as Genoa, Pisa, Pistoia, Siena, etc.) was in constant turmoil. The two main “parties” were the Guelphs (those essentially allied with the papacy) and the Ghibellines (aligned with the emperor—when there was one to be aligned with—or at least with imperial hopes). But most politics, as they are in our own time, were local. And there, labels did not count so much as family. In Florence the Ghibellines had been defeated and banished in 1266, a year after Dante’s birth, leaving the city entirely Guelph. But that did not betoken an era of unity. The Guelphs themselves were already divided (as they were in many northern cities) in two factions, the “Blacks,” led by the Donati family (into a less powerful branch of which Dante married), and the “Whites,” led by the Cerchi. (It is probably correct to say that the Whites were more devoted to a republican notion of governance, while the Blacks were more authoritarian.) The first impetus toward political division had occurred early in the century, when a young man, member of a Ghibelline family, broke off his engagement and married a Guelph Donati (in Pistoia, not entirely dissimilarly, the roots of division supposedly began in a snowball fight). A member of a White Guelph family, and having married into the most important Black family, Dante was therefore tied to Guelph interests. How then, do we explain his patent allegiance, in the Comedy, to the imperial cause? In 1306 or so he seems to have, rereading the Latin classics, reformulated his own political vision (as is first evident in the fourth and fifth chapters of the last treatise of the Convivio, before which there is not a clear imperialist sentiment to be found in his writing). And so, nominally a Guelph, Dante was far more in accord with Ghibelline ideas, except that, in practice, he found Ghibellines lacking in the religious vision that he personally saw as the foundation of any imperialist program. Politics are everywhere in the poem, which is far from being the purely religious text that some of its readers take it for.

  In his exile, the Commedia (first called the Divina Commedia only in 1555 by a Venetian publisher) became his obsession. For about fifteen years, with few exceptions (a notable one being his treatise, Monarchia, concerning the divine prerogatives of the empire, perhaps composed in 1317), the poem absorbed almost all of his time and energy. Its “motivating idea” is a simple one, outrageously so. In the Easter period of 1300 a thirty-five-year-old Florentine, struggling with failure and apparently spiritual death, is rescued by the shade of the Roman poet Virgil. He, won to the project by the living soul of Beatrice, who descends to hell from her seat in heaven in order to enlist his aid, agrees to lead Dante on a journey through hell and purgatory. Beatrice herself will again descend from heaven to take Dante the rest of the way, through the nine heavenly spheres and into paradise, where angels and souls in bliss gaze, in endless rapture, on God. The entire journey takes nearly precisely one week, Thursday evening to Thursday evening. It begins in fear and trembling on this earth and ends with a joyous vision of the trinitarian God. It is perhaps difficult to imagine how even a Dante could have managed to build so magnificent an edifice out of so improbable a literary idea. The result was a book that began to be talked about, known from parts that seem to have circulated before the whole, even before it was finished (first citations begin to be noted around 1315). By the time he had completed it, shortly before his death, people were eagerly awaiting the publication of Paradiso. And within months of his death (or even before) commentaries upon it began to be produced. It was, in short, an instant “great book,” probably the first of its kind since the last century of the pagan era, when Romans (no less of them than Augustus himself) awaited eagerly the finished text of Virgil’s Aeneid.

  One of the most striking things about the Comedy is the enormous apparatus that has attached itself to it. No secular work in the western tradition has so developed a heritage of line-by-line commentary, one that began in Latin and Italian and that has now entered any number of languages, European, Slavic, and Asian. It is clear that Dante’s work convinced the scholars of his time that this was a poem worthy of the most serious attention, both as a purveyor of the most important ideas of Christianity (e.g., sin, grace, redemption, transcendence) and as a response to the greatest of the Latin poets (Virgil foremost, but also Ovid, Statius, Lucan, and others) and philosophers (Aristotle [in his Arabic/Latin form] and Cicero, primarily). Knowledge of Greek had essentially disappeared from the time of the establishment of Latin Christianity as the dominant religion and culture of the West in the fifth and sixth centuries. The study of the language would only gradually begin again some fifty years after Dante’s death. And thus while Dante knows about Greek philosophy, all he has experienced of it comes from the works (most of Aristotle) and bits and pieces (only one work of Plato’s, the Timaeus, and excerpts of some of the pre-Socratics) that had been translated into Latin. Strangely, for a modern reader, his first commentators pay little or no attention to his close and fairly extensive dealings with the poems of his vernacular predecessors and co-practitioners (Guido Guinizzelli, Arnaut Daniel, Brunetto Latini, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and others). Perhaps the most impressive aspect of these commentaries (and we are speaking of line-by-line analyses, on the model of commentary to the Bible or to a handful of especially respected classical authors, a form essentially denied to modern writers before 1300) is the vast number of them. From the first twenty years after Dante’s death at least ten have survived; by our own time there are hundreds.

  Along with conquering the allegiance of scholars, Dante won the hearts of less-erudite Italians (or, at first, Tuscans) who found in his vast poem the first use of Italian as a literary language in an indisputably major work. Italian poetry, beginning at the time of St. Francis in the early twelfth century, had performed wonders, but it had rarely found a subject that seemed serious enough. Here was a poem that tackled everything: theology, religion, philosophy, politics, the sciences of heaven (astronomy/astrology) and of earth (biology, geology), and, perhaps most of all, the study of human behavior. And it did all these things in a language that everyone could understand, or at least thought he could. It is probably not true to suggest that Dante “invented modern Italian.” What he did do was to deploy Italian as a literary language on a major scale, incorporating the “serious” subjects that had hitherto been reserved to Latin. If the Italian language had been waiting for a voice, Dante gave it that voice. Before him it did not exist in a global form, a complete language fit for all subjects; after him it did. It is probably not because of him that Italian has changed no more between his time and today than English has since Shakespeare’s day. It is, nonetheless, a continuing surprise and reward for contemporary Italians to have so ancient and yet so approachable a father, speaking, at least most of the time, words that they themselves use (and sometimes that he had invented).

  Is Dante an “easy” poet? That depends on what passages we happen to be reading. He can be as simple and straightforward as one’s country neighbor, or as convoluted as the most arcane professor. (Boccaccio, one of his greatest advocates, also shows both proclivities in the prose of the Decameron.) Yet he has always found a welcome from the least schooled of readers, and even from those who could not read at all, but learned the poem by rote. A living Tuscan farmer/poet, Mauro Punzecchi, years ago memorized the poem while he worked his fields and is today able to recite all of it. Who does not envy him his gift?

  Each of us reads his own Commedia, which makes perfect sense, most of the time. It is only when we try to explain “our” poem to someone else that the trouble starts.

  The commentary that accompanies this new translation is, like every one that has preceded it, except the first few, indebted to earlier discussions of this text. And what of that text, as Dante left it? No one has ever seen his autograph version. As a result, the manuscript tradition of the poem is vast and complicated. Nonetheless, and despite all the
difficulties presented by particular textual problems, the result of variant readings in various manuscripts, it must be acknowledged that in the Comedy we have a remarkably stable text, given the facts that we do not possess an autograph and that the condition of the manuscripts is so unyieldingly problematic. However, we do know that Dante left us precisely 14,233 verses arranged in one hundred cantos, all of which contained precisely the number of verses we find in them today in every modern edition. And that is no small thing.

  And so each reader comes to a text that offers some problems of the textual variety; these pale beside problems of interpretation. What we can all agree on is that the work is a wonder to behold. Reading Dante is like listening to Bach. It is unimaginable to think that a human being, so many years ago (or indeed ever), could make such superhuman magic. Yet there it is, beckoning, but also refusing to yield some of its secrets.

  When I considered how I might present this poem in a brief introduction, after years of thinking about it and teaching it and writing about it, I thought of what I myself missed when I started reading Dante. The first was a sense of Dante’s intellectual biography; the second was a set of answers to a series of questions: how does allegory work (i.e., how does this poem “mean”)? What does Virgil represent and why is he the first guide in the poem? How am I supposed to react to the sinners of Inferno, especially those that seem so sympathetic to me? The first subject is too vast for treatment here. My own attempt at an intellectual biography of the poet is available in Italian (Dante Alighieri, Rome, Editalia, 2000; an English version was published by Yale University Press in 2001). The three questions I have tried to answer, both in the “Lectures” found currently in the Princeton Dante Project, and, in shorter form, in an essay I wrote a year ago (“Dante: A Party of One,” First Things 92 [April 1999]: 30–35; the essay on Virgil also has some points in common with my article, “Virgil,” in the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing, New York, Garland, 2000). What follows is another attempt to deal with three important matters facing any first-time reader of the poem, or any reader at all.

  (1) Allegory.

  When I was young I was taught that Dante’s poem was the very essence of allegorical writing. What exactly is allegory? Simply put, it is the interpretive strategy of understanding one thing as meaning not itself but something other. A lady, blindfolded, holding a pair of scales in one hand, is not to be understood as a being with a particular history, but as a timeless entity, an abstraction: justice. If we understand just this much, we are prepared to comprehend how we might read—and how many of his first readers did understand—Dante’s poem as an “allegory.” Virgil is not the Roman poet so much as he is human reason unenlightened by faith; when he acts or speaks in the poem he does so without the historical context supplied by his life or works. And what of the second guide in the poem, Beatrice? She, too, is removed from her historical role in Dante’s life, and is treated as an abstraction, in her case the truths discovered through faith, or perhaps revelation, or theology. And what of the protagonist, Dante himself? That he has a very personal history, of which we hear a good deal, matters not. He is a sort of “Everyman,” and represents the ordinarily appetitive human soul. Please let me explain that I myself think very little of such formulations, but they are found in almost all the early commentators. In a term derived from Cicero, these interpreters thought of allegory as a “continuous metaphor.” The most significant actions performed in the poem, they thought, could best be understood as part of this single, developing metaphor, in which the flawed human soul called “Dante” is gradually educated, first by reason (referred to as “Virgil”), and then by theological certainty (code name “Beatrice”).

  Since something like this does seem to occur in the course of the poem, we can sense why the formulation has its appeal. The problem is that it shortchanges the entire historical referentiality of the poem. Dante’s life disappears as a subject worthy of attention; Virgil’s texts need not be read or understood as ways to find out what the poem means when it refers to them; Beatrice’s earthly existence as a young woman becomes utterly superfluous, as does her “relationship” (a curiously and precisely wrong word, given its contemporary usage) with Dante. Fourteen centuries ago Isidore of Seville defined allegory as “otherspeech,” in which a speaker or writer said one thing but meant something else by it. Without exploring the limitations that he himself imposed upon that formula, we can merely note that it is frequently used in modern days to explain allegory simply and quickly. If I say “Beatrice” I do not mean her, but what she means. We are back to the lady holding the scales. To use a medieval example, St. Thomas explains (Summa I.i.9) that when the Bible refers to the arm of God (Isaiah 51:9) it does not mean that God has an arm, but that He has operative power. That is, we can discard the literal for its significance, or, in more modern terms, the signifier for the signified. Does this way of reading Dante utterly denature the text we have before us? Perhaps not utterly, but enough so that we should avoid it as much as we can.

  The matter gets more interesting and more complicated because Dante himself wrote about the question of allegory. In his Convivio he distinguishes between allegory as it is understood and practiced by poets (along the lines we have been discussing) and as it is used by theologians in order to understand certain passages in the Bible (a very different procedure that we will examine in a moment). And in Convivio (II.i) he says the “correct” thing: it is his intention, in the explication of his odes, to follow the allegorical procedures of the poets (“since it is my intention here to follow the method of the poets, I shall take the allegorical sense according to the usage of the poets”). There are those who put this remark to the service of the claim that the “allegory of the theologians” thus has nothing to do with Dante’s procedures in the Comedy, either. However, that is exactly what he claims in the letter he wrote to his patron, Cangrande della Scala of Verona. The authenticity of his Epistle to Cangrande, written sometime after Dante had begun writing the Paradiso, and thus probably no earlier than 1316, is one of the most debated of Dantean questions. It is difficult for this writer to be fair to the negative argument, which is so obviously based in a desire to cancel what the epistle says. Whether or not Dante wrote it (and current scholarly opinion is, once again, decidedly in favor), this remarkable document puts forward the disturbing (to use a mild word) idea that Dante’s poem was written with the same keys to meaning as was the Bible. No one had ever said as much about his own work before, and it must be made clear that it is anathema to any sensible person of Dante’s (or any) time. If this were the only occasion on which this most venturesome of writers had said something outrageous, one might want to pay more heed to those who try to remove the text from his canon on the ground that he had no business making such a claim.

  The principal tenet of theological allegory is that it holds certain (but not all) historical events in the Bible as a privileged and limited class of texts. Some historical passages in the Bible possessed four senses. The four senses of the Bible are generally put forth, and especially in the wake of Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae I.i.10), as follows: (1) historical/literal, (2) allegorical, (3) moral or tropological, (4) anagogical. It is helpful to understand that these senses unfurl in a historical continuum. For instance, the historical Moses, leading the Israelites out of captivity, gains his allegorical meaning in Christ, leading humankind out of bondage to the freedom of salvation. His moral (or tropological—these words are used synonymously) sense is present now—whenever “now” occurs—in the soul of the believer who chooses to make his or her “exodus” from sin; while the anagogical sense is found only after the end of time, when those who are saved are understood as having arrived in the New Jerusalem, eternal joy in heaven. To offer a second example, one favored by Dante’s early commentators: Jerusalem was the historical city of Old Testament time; it points to the allegorical Jerusalem in which Jesus was crucified; it is the moral or tropological “city” (whether within a single b
eliever or as the entity formed by the Church Militant now) at any present moment; it is, anagogically, the New Jerusalem, which will exist only at the end of time. As opposed to the literal sense of poet’s allegory, the literal sense of theological allegory is historically true, found only in events narrated in the Bible (e.g., the fall of Adam and Eve, Moses leading the Israelites in the Exodus, the birth of Jesus, the Crucifixion). According to the Epistle to Cangrande and, more importantly, as found in the treatment of subjects in his poem itself (most of which was written before he wrote the epistle, it is important to remember), Dante has adapted the techniques of theological allegory to the making of his poem. Characters and events in it are portrayed in a historical mode and as part of a historical continuum. Adam, Moses, Icarus, Aeneas, Paul, Augustus, Virgil, and Dante are all portrayed as having said things or accomplished deeds that are seen in a historical and meaningful pattern that gives shape to this poem. Their actual historical status does not matter. Dante surely did not believe that Icarus had enjoyed a life on earth beyond that conferred by poets and mythographers. But he treats him, in Inferno XVII, as a possible precursor to himself, should Dante, a latter-day flyer through space, have had a bad end and fallen from the back of Geryon.