The theme of Dante’s epic work is the state of souls after death. Consequently, the entire work is subdivided into three parts, each corresponding to one of the three possibilities in the Christian afterlife. In Inferno XX: 1—3, Dante refers to the part of the poem devoted to Hell as “the first song” (“la prima canzon”). Canzone means both “song” in a generic sense but may also refer to a specific poetic genre, a relatively long composition, the rough equivalent of the ode, with a number of stanzas and an envoy. Dante valued the Italian canzone form for its rich poetic possibilities. At the end of Purgatory, in canto XXXIII: 140, he employs another, even more suggestive term for the three major parts of the work—canticle (cantica). If labeling his epic poem a canzone recalls Dante’s origins in his secular lyrics, both the amorous and the moralizing variety, calling it a cantica reminds us of the religious nature of its content, since the term retains the biblical suggestion of Song of Songs (Cantica canticorum in the Vulgate Bible). The two terms Dante employs when referring to his poem also reflect Dante’s intention to synthesize very different literary and philosophical traditions in his epic, blending the secular love lyrics of La Vita Nuova and the tradition of courtly love with the greatest lyric poetry of the Bible.
Besides the terms Dante uses to refer to the three parts of his epic poem (the number of parts suggesting the Holy Trinity), Dante employs the term canto (first mentioned in Inferno XX: 2) for the name he gives to the 100 subdivisions of the three canticles of his poem. Canto suggests both poetry and song and singing in Italian. The cantos in the poem are divided as follows: thirty-four in the Inferno and thirty-three in both Purgatory and Paradise. Dante obviously considers canto I of the Inferno to be a kind of general prologue to the work. Thus the poem may be said to reflect the following numerical structure: I + 33 (Inferno) + 33 (Purgatory) + 33 (Paradise) = 100. Given Dante’s fascination with symbolic numbers, the suggestive quality of this arrangement is certainly intentional.
Dante’s poem contains 14,233 lines of hendecasyllabic verse in terza rima. The length of each canto may vary from between 115 and 160 lines. Hendecasyllabic verse, following Dante’s noble example, became the elevated poetic line of choice in Italian literature, just as the peerless example of Shakespeare’s blank verse of iambic pentameter has privileged that poetic form in English. In general, the most successful English translations of Dante, such as Longfellow‘s, have always been in blank verse, not in rhymed verse. Italian poetry is not scanned by feet but by counting the number of syllables in a line. Since most Italian words are accented on the penultimate syllable, hendecasyllabic verse generally contains eleven syllables with the tenth accented. However, lines of ten syllables or even twelve syllables occur in the poem infrequently but still follow the general rule governing accents: In the first case, the tenth or last syllable is accented, while in the second case, the tenth syllable of a twelve-syllable line retains the accent.
Dante’s great metric invention was terza rima. This incomparable narrative form has stanzas of three lines (tercets) in which the first and third lines rhyme with each other, and the second lines rhyme with the first and third lines of the next tercet. The formula for terza rima may be written as follows: aba bcb cdc d... wxw xyx yzy z. Note that each canto begins with a pair of alternating rhymes but ends on a single line. The rhyme scheme also makes run-on lines (enjambement) infrequent in the poem, since the focus is upon rhymes at the end of lines. English, compared to Italian, is relatively impoverished with rhymes, and this explains in large measure why most attempts to repeat Dante’s terza rima have met with dismal failure in English translations. The Trinitarian association with a rhyme scheme that relentlessly repeats itself in series of threes seems obvious. What is less obvious but probably also intended by Dante is that terza rima helped to protect his manuscripts from changes by scribes (either accidental or intentional) and eventually by proof-readers after the advent of printing. We may not have an autograph manuscript of The Divine Comedy, but even after the passage of six centuries, the text of Dante’s poem that has been established for us today represents an amazingly accurate version of what Dante must have written, thanks in part to the meter the poet invented.
Dante’s Hell: Conception Geography, and Its System of Punisbments
Church doctrine in Dante’s time (as today) holds that Hell’s function is to punish for eternity human souls who died in mortal sin without a sincere confession of their faults that expresses repentance for their misdeeds. These miscreants do not qualify for the purifying punishments of Purgatory, where souls who do not die in mortal sin escape eternal damnation and suffer temporary expiation before receiving their blissful reward in Paradise. When Dante began his poem, he was certainly aware of biblical and classical views of the afterlife. In the Sheol of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Hades of classical antiquity, souls after death did not really receive retribution for their earthly sins or particularly attractive rewards for their earthly merits. But the Christian church, affirmed by the theology of such major writers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, conceived of Hell as a place where the good were separated from the evil, and deeds on earth were weighted and judged. Dante’s famous notice over the gate of Hell underlines the eternity of Hell’s punishment (“All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”), but it is also clear from a reading of the entire poem that Dante considers the greatest punishment possible to be not the incredibly original and grotesque physical punishments he invents for his work but, instead, the eternal loss of communion with God that is enjoyed by the blessed.
Dante’s poetic genius partly resides in his many ingenious inventions for the shape and character of Hell. Dante’s Inferno is a hollow cone shaped by the displaced territory after Lucifer’s expulsion from Heaven and fall to Earth. It is situated under Jerusalem and consists of nine concentric circles that grow ever smaller and house more and more evil sinners. Ultimately, Hell ends at Earth’s core, where Lucifer is imprisoned in ice. Contrary to popular opinion, fire and brimstone are not the typical infernal punishments, although they are present. The place is filled with a number of rivers, swamps, deserts, a burning plain, a huge waterfall, a frozen lake, the towers of the City of Dis, and the ditches and bridges of Malebolge (ten sections of a circle shaped like ditches, pouches, or purses). Because the science of Dante’s day followed the Ptolemaic system of the universe in astronomy and Aristotle’s teachings on physics and biology, Dante considered Hell to be in the center of Earth, which in turn was in the center of the universe, with the sun revolving around it. A great chain of being extended from gross matter, animals, and humanity to the nine orders of the angels, and then to God in the Empyrean Heaven. Dante’s Inferno generally reflects traditional medieval thinking on astronomy and science, but the poet is also capable of enriching this tradition with his own ideas to enliven his picture of the Other World.
The most important rule in the Inferno, as well as in Purgatory and Paradise, is that Dante makes the rules. Laws can be broken or twisted to suit his poetic purposes, but they are always his alone. Such inventive details, often created by the author out of whole cloth, provide the reader with a rich, textured world of real individuals and a universe with its own specifically Dantesque regulations and customs. In many respects, Dante’s Inferno is not an unfamiliar place. Its most interesting inhabitants are not classical monsters, mythological figures, or heroes but instead are contemporary Italians, figures from all over the peninsula. It is an all too human world that we all immediately recognize as the one in which we live. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that Hell is other people. Dante would have said: “We have met the damned, and they are we.”
Apart from all of the entertaining and ingenious “house rules” in Hell that Dante invented, one of the great intellectual achievements of Dante’s Inferno as a work of art is its original synthesis of the Christian and the classical worlds in Hell’s organization. For example, the idea of a visit to the Underworld was suggested to Dante by the obvious example of Virgil’s Aenei
d. Since Virgil had been to Hell before, who else would be more qualified to guide an Italian poet who loved Virgil’s epic work on another journey through the same territory? Numerous specific physical punishments in Hell require guardians or bureaucrats (not to mention torturers enjoying their work), just as a prison requires jailors and executioners. Thus Dante employs a wide variety of classical figures to serve in this capacity, including Charon, Minos, and the centaurs. The rivers of Hell are those of classical antiquity (such as Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, and Lethe). Numerous classical figures, such as Alexander the Great, Brutus, Cassius, and Ulysses, appear in the various circles in which they suffer eternal damnation along with Dante’s contemporaries. No more heuristic juxtaposition of ancient and modern, classical and contemporary, will occur in Western literature until the sixteenth-century appearance of The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, two books by Niccolo Machiavelli that effect a similar synthesis by founding a new realistic view of politics upon comparative analyses of ancient Romans and contemporary Italy or Europe.
The most counterintuitive aspect of Dante’s Inferno is that the seven deadly sins of lust, gluttony, avarice/prodigality, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride—the obvious scheme for organizing the punishment for the sins of damnation—serve not to organize the physical layout of Hell but that of Purgatory, whose structure directly embodies these traditional seven deadly sins. The shape of the Mountain of Purgatory, however, resembles a reverse image of the shape of Hell. Instead of a hollow cone becoming narrower and narrower, the image of Purgatory is that of a mountain with seven terraces, each devoted to one of the traditional sins. In Paradise, Dante employs the nine angelic orders to organize the geography of Heaven into different regions leading up to the Empyrean. He also associates these different realms with planetary bodies as well as with the classical virtues (prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance) and the three Christian virtues (faith, hope, and charity).
In the organization of Hell, Dante recognizes the seven deadly sins as well as the “golden rule” and punishes these infractions severely, but he structures the sins and punishments with an eye to classical notions of human failings, taking his ideas primarily from Aristotle with suggestions from Cicero. As a result, his system of punishment provides the greatest and most original synthesis of classical tradition and Christian thinking. Even though the system of punishments and the corresponding geographical structure of Hell are outlined at length by Virgil in canto XI of the Inferno, it has always confused readers of the poem and has been argued over by scholars for centuries. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are thirty-four cantos and three main divisions of sin, themselves subdivided into subcategories over nine circles.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle spoke of Incontinence, Malice, and insane Bestiality. Dante follows these concepts to some extent, for in the first circles of Hell, he punishes sins of Incontinence that result from immoderate impulses. Here is the structure of the first part of Dante’s Hell:• The Beginning of the Journey (the Dark Wood, Virgil’s Arrival, cantos I and II)
• Antechamber or Vestibule (neutral angels and the lukewarm, canto III)
• First circle, Limbo (the virtuous pagans, canto IV)
Sins of Incontinence:• Second circle (lust, canto V)
• Third circle (gluttony, canto VI)
• Fourth circle (avarice and prodigality, canto VII)
• Fifth circle (anger and sloth, cantos VII and VIII)
The first circle (Limbo) and the sixth circle (heresy) are more difficult to associate with sins of Incontinence than are the other traditional deadly sins in circles two through five, because they have an intellectual and willful aspect. The sixth circle (rebel angels and heresy, cantos VIII, IX, X, and XI) lies within the walls of the City of Dis, and this break in the geography of Hell also marks the transition from the less grievous sins of weak impulses, such as lust, to the more dreadful sins dominated by willful malice to do harm to others, a deliberate misuse of reason, a gift from God to humans. Notice that Dante, in contrast to prudish religious thinkers, does not consider lust to be a very serious sin. Lust is important enough to send someone under its domination to Hell but is not a sin about which the poet is obsessed. Anything but a puritan or a religious fundamentalist, Dante realizes that betraying a friend is far more serious than giving in to one’s sensual desires, because it breaks one of the essential bonds between men.
Sins of Malice, divided into two subcategories in the seventh circle and the eighth circle, involve either force or violence and fraud. In the seventh circle (violence), this category of sin is broken down into three subcategories, each of which breaks the admonition of Christ to love God, one’s neighbor, and oneself:• Violence against others, such as murderers or warmongers (canto XII)
• Violence against oneself, such as suicides (canto XIII)
• Violence against God, nature, and art, such as blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers (cantos XIV, XV, XVI, and XVII)
Simple and complex fraud or treachery are punished in the eighth and ninth circles. In the eighth circle of Malebolge, Dante presents ten subcategories of simple fraud, each punished in a different bolgia (which translates as “ditch,” “purse,” or “pouch”).• First Bolgia: panderers and seducers (canto XVIII)
• Second Bolgia: flatterers (canto XVIII)
• Third Bolgia: simonists (canto XIX)
• Fourth Bolgia: fortune-tellers and soothsayers (canto XX)
• Fifth Bolgia: grafters and barrators (canto XXI and XXII)
• Sixth Bolgia: hypocrites (canto XXIII)
• Seventh Bolgia: thieves (canto XXIV and XXV)
• Eighth Bolgia: evil counselors (canto XXVI and XXVII)
• Ninth Bolgia: sowers of discord (canto XXVIII)
• Tenth Bolgia: falsifiers and alchemists (canto XXIX); evil impersonators, counterfeiters, and false witnesses (canto XXX)
The ninth circle of complex fraud or treachery in a region called Cocytus (canto XXXI) contains four divisions and displays sins that break the most essential human ties—familial, political, and social:• Caina (treachery against relatives, canto XXXII)
• Antenora (treachery against party, city, or country, canto XXXIII)
• Ptolomea (treachery against guests, canto XXIII)
• Judecca (treachery against lords and benefactors, canto XXXIV)
The relationship between the sins Dante describes in Hell and two of Aristotle’s moral categories—Incontinence and Malice—seems clear enough. Nonetheless, many of Dante’s critics have raised questions over the third category of insane Bestiality. Most refer this third Aristotelian category to all sins of violence, but a few relate the category specifically to complex fraud in the ninth circle.
Dante expects his reader to keep in mind the location of each circle, the sin punished there, the specific description of the punishment, the sinners encountered in that area, and which canto contains this particular material. But sorting out this complicated material with its mass of detail may disorient a first reader of the Inferno. The inevitable question on a Dante examination—to discuss in detail the organization of sin and its punishment in the Inferno—has created hellish nightmares for generations of students. Perhaps Dante’s ingenuity and graphic fantasy failed only to invent an appropriate place in Hell and a suitable punishment for two subcategories of his future readers: teachers who ask this devilish question and students who fail to answer it properly.
The general rule regulating the actual physical punishments in Hell, as opposed to their geographical location or their moral hierarchy from less to more serious, is called contrapasso. Finally defined relatively late in the Inferno (canto XXVIII: 142), contrapasso is a variation on the Old Testament’s lex talionis (law of retaliation of retribution). Longfellow translates contrapasso quite neatly as “counterpoise.” Dante’s Italian term comes from the Latin translation of a Greek word found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and discussed extensively by Saint Thoma
s Aquinas in his commentary on the Aristotelian passage. The original Greek word meant “retaliation,” clearly relating it to the lex talionis of the Old Testament, the proverbial “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Many readers of The Divine Comedy are puzzled by what they find to be a lack of compassion in this first canticle of the work, since nothing seems more foreign to the moral teachings of Christ than the righteous indignation of a progressively less compassionate Pilgrim as he meets sinners and comes to damn them as his understanding of the nature of sin matures. But the reader must never forget that the souls in Hell have died in mortal sin and have had ample opportunity to seek and obtain forgiveness and, in the worst-case scenario, to expiate their evil deeds in Purgatory.
What we may call the “house rules” of Hell are among Dante’s most genial poetic inventions. The afterlife was never so minutely or so creatively described in the Bible or in classical writings as it is in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The Inferno contains any number of special laws that Dante devised for certain groups of sinners. For example, his invention of a vestibule to Hell for the neutral angels and lukewarm humans who never took sides or clear decisions in matters of ethical and political significance while alive has no real precedent. In like manner, his generous salvation of the virtuous pagans, especially classical poets he loved, would probably find few supporters among the theologians. The fanciful idea that certain particularly grievous sinners could have their souls condemned to Hell before their bodies died and that their bodies could be inhabited temporarily by a devil—in effect, being an empty shell on earth while the soul was being tortured in Hell—is a splendid invention hard to match. Medieval man told time by the stars, but in Hell there is no starlight. Yet Virgil manages to tell time in the dark. Damned souls in Dante’s universe have the power to see the distant and near future but not the present. While they may be capable of giving Dante prophecies about his future, they have no idea what is happening in the present. On the Final Judgment Day, time will end and they will lose the consciousness of anything other than their sin and their eternal punishment. God’s goodness prohibits the blessed in Heaven from feeling compassion or pity for the damned, since such a sentiment would diminish their bliss in Paradise. Hence the damned have only one hope in Hell—that Dante the Pilgrim will report favorable things of them in the world of the living. Earthly fame (as opposed to immortality in Paradise) is their one desire. Conversely, true accounts of their sinfulness reported back to the living by Dante the Pilgrim represent their worst fears. But at the Last Judgment, time will dissolve and this hope, too, will be lost. Many physical “laws” of Hell seem strange. Dante has physical weight and is not a shade like Virgil. Yet Virgil can pick him up bodily. Nor do Virgil and Dante feel the punishments as they pass through them, although the intensity of Dante’s reaction to the sins he observes may also tell us something about the sins the poet feels are most typical of his own life and about the sins he most hates.
The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4