by Michael Haag
VISIONS OF HELL
Not surprisingly, a fair amount is said about hell in Dan Brown’s Inferno, which lends a significant atmosphere of dread to the thriller. The novel makes some pretty big claims, however, concerning Dante’s contribution to the image of hell, not only in medieval times, but still to this day. In a lecture that Robert Langdon gives to the Società Dante Alighieri in Vienna, for example, he tells his audience that ‘Dante’s Inferno created a world of pain and suffering beyond all previous human imagination, and his writing quite literally defined our modern visions of hell.’ And then comes Dan Brown’s trademark kick against the Catholic Church. ‘And believe me,’ Langdon continues in his lecture, ‘the Catholic Church has much to thank Dante for. His Inferno terrified the faithful for centuries, and no doubt tripled church attendance among the fearful.’
But this is not correct. Neither Dante nor the Catholic Church invented hell or fire or other torments. Ancient Egyptian religion, for example, featured the Weighing of the Heart ritual, in which the heart of the dead person was weighed against the feather of Maat. If found wanting, it was immediately devoured by a female demon called Ammut who stood by a lake of fire – or sometimes the heart was thrown directly into the lake. Nor was that the end of it; the devoured soul, or the soul thrown into the fiery lake, remained in restless torment for all time, a state known as the second death. Exactly this image of the fiery lake found its way into early Christianity, appearing in Revelation, where everyone from pagans to Roman emperors is hurled into a lake of burning fire.
In fact Robert Langdon saw a horrific scene of hell, depicting Satan tearing and devouring the souls of dead sinners, in the ceiling mosaic of the Baptistery in Florence. As a professor of religious art and symbology, he should have known that the mosaic was done in the early thirteenth century, about forty years before Dante was born.
The ancient Egyptian Weighing of the Heart ritual; the female demon Ammut, a four-legged beast of destruction, crouches patiently at the right.
There is hell in Islam too; in the Koran it goes under several names, including ‘a fire whose fuel is stones and men’, or simply ‘the fire’, ‘burning’, ‘scorching fire’ and ‘crushing pressure’. So fearsome is the notion of hell in Islam that even its utterance in speech is taken as a dreadful omen.
Hell gets big play in Dan Brown’s Inferno in the way it is used to portray an overpopulated world at some point in the near future, a world that some people are certain will collapse for lack of resources. This is illustrated by Sienna Brooks recalling her traumatic youthful visit to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, which she describes in chapter 79 as ‘passing through the gates of hell’:
Manila had six-hour traffic jams, suffocating pollution, and a horrifying sex trade, whose workers consisted primarily of young children, many of whom had been sold to pimps by parents who took solace in knowing that at least their children would be fed. … All around her, she could see humanity overrun by its primal instinct for survival. When they face desperation … human beings become animals.’
It’s true that the Philippines have a very high growth rate, albeit one that has almost halved in the last few years. Pakistan has a far higher growth rate, as does the whole of the largely Muslim Middle East. Nigeria has the highest growth rate of all; its population is about half Muslim and half Christian, with Catholics representing about a quarter of all Christians, which is to say about an eighth of the country’s total population. Which makes one wonder why the Philippines are singled out for mention in Inferno. And then one remembers: this is one of only two Catholic majority countries in Asia (the other being East Timor). So is it the growth rate that Dan Brown is objecting to, or is it the Catholicism?
It does look that way when you consider the exchange that takes place in chapter 22 of Inferno between Elizabeth Sinskey, director of the World Health Organisation, and Bertrand Zobrist, the cull-minded geneticist. He is accusing the WHO of doing nothing about controlling population, but she objects: ‘Recently we spent millions of dollars sending doctors into Africa to deliver free condoms and educate people about birth control’. To which Zobrist replies, ‘And an even bigger army of Catholic missionaries marched in on your heels and told the Africans that if they used the condoms, they’d all go to hell’.
Even if that were true, Catholics are a minority in Africa, where Islam is the largest religion, and most Christians are Protestants. To hang population growth on armies of condom-damning Catholic missionaries does not make mathematical sense.
Nevertheless, Bertrand Zobrist, the man who wants to thin the human herd, is an optimist. He says that we have learned from Dante that we have to pass through Hell to reach Paradise. There again, Zobrist does not have his facts straight. Dante makes it plain that no one leaves Hell – or rather none but those Old Testament Jews who were carried aloft by Jesus after the crucifixion when he harrowed Hell, and Dante and Virgil themselves, who being poets could get away with almost anything. Otherwise, as Dante makes clear, Hell is not a remedial state; it is utter and eternal damnation. Dan Brown adds to the confusion at the very start of his book when he states as ‘FACT’ that Dante’s underworld is ‘populated by entities known as “shades” – bodiless souls trapped between life and death’. In Dante’s Hell they are not trapped between life and death; they are totally and forever dead.
One other curiosity is worth mentioning about hell in Dan Brown’s Inferno, and that concerns the epigraph, words that are repeated several times throughout the book: ‘The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis’. Although the epigraph offers no source, those words are described in chapter 38 as ‘a famous quote derived from the work of Dante Alighieri’.
Dante never said any such thing. The quote is in fact derived from a remark by President John F Kennedy: ‘Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality’. Kennedy, for his part, was either making it up – he liked to come up with ‘literary’ quotations – or he misremembered what Dante really said in Canto III of the Inferno about the cowards and the opportunists:
Devils at play – one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the classic nineteenth-century edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1861).
This wretched state is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise … who were not rebels, nor faithful to God, but were for themselves. … They have no hope of death, and so abject is their blind life that they are envious of every other lot. The world suffers no report of them to live. Pity and justice despise them. Let us not talk of them.
In other words, they are contemptible. Whatever Dan Brown may suggest, however, they are not in the darkest place in Hell. Instead they are right at the top, just inside the gate, even better off than the virtuous pagans who inhabit Limbo a bit further down.
THE BIG ISSUES
I talked to a lot of scientists who are also concerned about it and I came to understand that overpopulation is the issue to which all of our other environmental issues are tied … things like ozone, where do we get our clean water, starvation, deforestation. These we consider problems. But they’re really symptoms of overpopulation. So overpopulation to me seems like the big issue.
Dan Brown, BBC interview
Bertrand Zobrist fascinates Brown, who wonders whether it’s a madman that he’s created, or a genius. ‘There are moments in the novel, or at least when I was writing it, when I thought, wow, Zobrist may save the world here. Maybe this is how far we have to go to stop this.’
Brown says that he has three watchwords for anyone reading his Inferno. Contrapasso, that is letting the punishment suit the sin; Malthusianism, the notion that the human population can only forever get bigger until it is slashed by disease, famine or war; and Transhumanism, which calls for the manipulation of our own genetic make-up to create posthumans. As discussed in Chapter Nine of this book, Transhumanism
may be a science, or it may have more to do with the cult of self and paranoia – or with the eugenics so beloved of Swedes and Nazis. The word Transhumanism deliberately, and perhaps naively or cynically, harks back to humanism, the great movement that, with its valuing of human curiosity and desire to improve the human lot, lay at the heart of the Renaissance.
Although Dan Brown himself says ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t have an answer’, disavowing any suggestion that he’s actually advocating an extreme solution of questionable science and morality, a great many readers and reviewers of his Inferno have finished the book believing that both Brown and his hero Robert Langdon go along with Bertrand Zobrist in accepting the need for a modern-day plague. Not a Black Death, perhaps, causing physical pain and immediate death, and leaving bodies rotting in the streets, but a plague that has the same end effect, of scything away a third of the human population and of stealing millions of futures.
PART ONE
DANTE AND HIS WORLD
CHAPTER ONE
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence and died in exile in Ravenna in 1321 at about the age of fifty-six. What we know of his life comes from his own writings, principally the Vita Nuova, his autobiography, or psychobiography, of his youth, begun in 1293, and his Divine Comedy. He started to write the Inferno, the first section of the latter, in 1308, although its narrative actually begins as the night before Good Friday 1300.
Dante also had two early biographers. The first was Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), famous as the author of the Decameron, who tracked down people who had memories of Dante or who had stories passed down to them, among them Dante’s own daughter whom Boccaccio met in Ravenna. The second was Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), regarded as the first modern historian, who came on the scene much later but felt that Boccaccio had concentrated too much on the romantic side of Dante – ‘love and sighs and burning tears’ – at the expense of ‘the memorable things’.
Though Dante was very proud of his ancestry, which he said went back to Roman times, there is no evidence that he could trace his family beyond his great-great-grandfather, a knight called Cacciaguida degli Elisei, whom he mentions in Canto XV of his Paradiso, and was born no earlier than 1100. Cacciaguida’s son took the name Alighieri from his mother’s family, and his descendants continued to live in Florence, where Dante was born in 1265 to Alighiero di Bellincione and his wife Bella.
MINOR ARISTOCRACY
The Alighieri were minor aristocracy. They did not rank among the magnati, the magnates, who ruled Florence until a year after Dante’s birth when the Ghibellines, the faction representing the nobles and their allies the Holy Roman Empire, were overthrown and the city became Europe’s first democracy since the Roman republic. The Alighieri family, who supported the Guelfs, the faction allied to the Pope in Rome, owned several small estates in the countryside nearby, but as the rents from their land were not enough to support them, they also relied on commerce and trade. Records show that Dante and his brother made something of a living by buying and selling property, and also busied themselves arranging the necessary loans and negotiating interest and repayments.
Plaque in the Florentine quarter where Dante ‘was born and grew up on the fair stream of the Arno, in the great city’.
In this way the Alighieris, part aristocrats and part merchant family, reflected the character of Florence itself, a city in which the nobility and the merchants lived uncomfortably side by side, each competing for dominance but needing the other. The aristocracy provided the protective military might, the merchants the financial prosperity of the city.
Within Dante’s lifetime the conflicts between factions – aristocracy versus the growing power of the merchant guilds, Ghibellines versus Guelfs, and Blacks versus Whites – brought terrible strife to Florence and would lead to his exile from his beloved city.
* * *
Dante’s mother dreams of his birth
* * *
According to Boccaccio, who collected the story – perhaps from Dante’s daughter – Dante’s mother Bella had a dream during her pregnancy about the child to whom she was soon to give birth. Bella dreamed that she was lying in a green meadow under a lofty laurel tree by a clear stream when she gave birth to a son who grew into a shepherd, feeding himself only on the berries from the laurel tree and the waters of the stream. He strove with all his power to have the leaves of the laurel tree whose fruit had nourished him, but he seemed to fall, and when he rose again he was no longer a man but had become a peacock.
The laurel symbolises immortality, and its leaves have traditionally been used to crown men of great achievement, heroes and athletes and poets; it also symbolises hidden knowledge. In classical and Christian tradition the peacock likewise symbolises the cycle of the sun and therefore immortality, while its tail symbolises the starry sky. Peacocks were also used in medieval art as signs of eternal bliss and of the beatific vision of the soul when it comes face to face with God, while in esoteric tradition peacocks symbolise wholeness – a fitting symbol for Dante, whose life would attempt to straddle a divided world and whose greatest yearning was for wholeness.
Neither Bella nor anyone else understood the meaning of the dream, but soon after, when she gave birth to a son, she named him Dante, meaning Giver. And, in due course, he proved worthy of the name; Boccaccio observed that by writing in the vernacular, in the Tuscan dialect of common Italian rather than in Latin, he opened the way for the return of the Muses and brought dead poetry back to life, so that ‘he could not rightly have borne any other name but Dante’.
* * *
THE MAKING OF A POET
Dante’s mother died in 1270, when he was only five. His father, who soon remarried, arranged for the boy to be educated in the liberal arts, studying history and philosophy, mathematics and classical literature. When Dante’s father died in 1280, Brunetto Latini became Dante’s guardian and responsible for his education. A considerable philosopher and rhetorician, Latini knew both how to speak well and how to write well, and served in many high positions in the government of Florence. Dante would write Latini into his Inferno at Canto XV, saying that by teaching Dante how to write, ‘You taught me how man makes himself immortal’. For all that, Latini is in the third ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, where the sinners of violence against nature go: Latini is a homosexual and the Church condemns him as a sodomite to the burning plain beneath the forever falling fiery rain. But Dante feels differently: if it were up to him, ‘you had not yet been banished from humanity’. Under Latini’s guidance, Dante’s education advanced, and he further developed his close knowledge of the Latin poets, among them Ovid, Horace and especially Virgil.
For all the seriousness of his studies, however, Dante never cut himself off from the world; he moved easily about Florence with friends his own age. For Boccaccio it is almost inconceivable that young men could be interested in women other than carnally, and yet, he admits, Dante’s was a chaste love. Leonardo Bruni agrees: ‘He consorted in his youth with amorous swains, and was himself too engaged in the passion, not by way of lustfulness but in gentleness of heart.’ Soon he was composing his first sonnets, and in 1284 he joined the group of poets known as the Fedeli d’Amore, the Faithful Followers of Love. These poets have been described as rare spirits trying to introduce nobility to life – retaining something of the chivalry associated with the overturned aristocracy of Florence, the courtly poetry of France and the songs of the troubadours. But they began, as it were, with raw material. Their aim was to turn their experiences with women into erotic and mystical poetry.
MARRIAGE AND LOVE
Families were the building blocks of political and economic relationships in Florentine society, and arranged marriages at a very young age were common. In about 1277, when Dante was still only eleven, his father arranged an advantageous marriage to Gemma Donati, daughter of Manetto Donati, who as a member of the powerful Donati family would bring with her a dowry. He married he
r eight years later, in 1285, when he was twenty; they had three sons, Jacopo, Pietro and Giovanni, and a daughter called Antonia. Boccaccio did not think much of the marriage, writing: ‘We may think what miseries these rooms hide, which from outside are reputed places of delight to those without eyes which can pierce through walls’. But then Boccaccio did not approve of any marriage, especially as he himself had been bound by a marriage contract at the age of one, and as he admits he had no idea whether Dante’s was a happy marriage or not. But Boccaccio does say that once Dante was exiled from Florence he would never go where Gemma was, nor would he allow her to come to him. And we also know that Dante never once mentioned his wife’s name in anything he wrote. Even before Dante’s marriage to Gemma was arranged, however, he had fallen in love with Beatrice Portinari. Dante was nine, she was eight; the occasion was a May Day party at her father’s house nearby. Beatrice became the love of his life; his poetry was devoted to her. She too was spoken for in an arranged marriage, and Dante hardly ever did more than gain glimpses of her from afar, but when she died at the age of twenty-four he was devastated.
Gustave Doré’s portrait of Dante Alighieri wearing the laurel crown.
In a later prose work, the Convivio, Dante wrote that the young are overcome by supor, an astonishment of the mind, when they encounter something that brings awareness of great and wonderful things. The consequence of supor is a sense of reverence and a desire to know more, and that is what happened to Dante upon first seeing his Florentine girl. For the rest of his life, all his work, one way or another, served to augment that worship and increase that knowledge.