Hell is reserved for the real hard cases, and there is no reason to waste compassion on them—something Dante the Pilgrim must learn. Even though the principle is not enunciated until the canticle is about to come to a close, the punishments everywhere in Hell reflect the fact that they are either appropriate to the sin or, in some cases, are poetic reflections of the sin itself. The lustful (canto V) are driven by the winds of passion but held in an eternal (and therefore) hellish embrace. Hypocrites (canto XXIII) wear a heavy cloak of lead gilded by gold, just as their hypocrisy was covered by a golden tongue. Suicides who renounced their bodies (canto XIII) now have their bodily shapes torn apart. Flatterers (canto XVIII) who made their way figuratively by ample applications of their tongues to the objects of their flattery are now immersed in human excrement, produced by the same posteriors they so obsequiously kissed to further their nefarious causes. Dante’s graphic depictions of the sins in Hell tell his readers a great deal about the nature of evil, but they also reveal much to us about natures of the characters we encounter in the afterlife. A person’s sins may summarize his or her natures.
Reading the Inferno: A Few Caveats
An encounter with the Inferno (not to mention the rest of the epic) requires serious thought and work. This is a classic for which footnotes are essential, and the bibliography provides a number of works that will assist the reader in understanding this incomparable work. Few works of imaginative literature so richly reward the effort required to read them. In the first place, putting aside the erudition and information that gives the reader a better understanding of the poem, Dante’s Inferno is first and foremost a poem, a work of the imagination of one of the world’s most gifted poets, and not a treatise in theology. It is an adventure story, focusing upon a man named Dante. Thanks to his good connections in Heaven with his former love object, a woman named Beatrice who is now dead but residing in glory in Paradise, Dante receives assistance from above to visit the afterlife in order to escape the dangers to his soul. The character Dante (Dante the Pilgrim), who will eventually become the author of the poem (Dante the Poet), requires a guide. Beatrice sends him the classical poet Virgil, who resides in the Limbo of the virtuous pagans (one of Dante’s most ingenious poetic inventions). These are privileged people who have not received Christian baptism. Normally, such individuals would not be saved, but since so many of the virtuous pagans are great poets Dante admired, Dante arranges things in Hell in such a way that they are saved in spite of the doctrines of the Catholic Church. They have been saved because of the human significance and ideals expressed in their literary works. Through the course of the journey that takes Dante and Virgil through Hell, an entire universe unfolds before our eyes. How best may we interpret this universe?
The first and fundamental thing to remember about the Inferno is that Dante the Pilgrim, the traveler, must not be confused with Dante the Poet. The Poet describes this journey from the vantage point of having completed it and having reached Paradise, while the Pilgrim lacks the knowledge the Poet has acquired. The reader of the poem is thus placed in the same position as the Pilgrim. As the journey progresses, the Pilgrim begins to learn, and it is the Poet’s hope that the reader will learn along with the Pilgrim. There will be moments when the perspective of Pilgrim and Poet will diverge. In most cases when this occurs, the reader will probably initially share the reactions of the Pilgrim. In the nineteenth century, Romantic readers of the Inferno valued Dante above all for the pathos they found in the passages where Dante the Pilgrim expressed his pity for the damned. The Romantic discovery of Dante viewed him as the master of the poetry of sentiment. Accordingly, Romantic readings of the poem made heroic figures out of the lustful Francesca da Rimini (canto V), the heretical Farinata degli Uberti (canto X), and the silver-tongued Ulysses (canto XXVI).
Dante the Pilgrim certainly is impressed by such people and is fascinated by his conversations with them. He swoons out of pity for Francesca because of his own literary beginnings in the poetry of courtly love. As a citizen of Florence, the Pilgrim is quite naturally interested in Farinata, since he saved his native city from destruction. And as a lover of classical literature, Dante the Pilgrim would have given anything to have read Homer’s epic in Greek, and he would never have passed up the opportunity to chat with Ulysses, Homer’s most complex character and, in the Poet’s view, the archetypal evil counselor. Contemporary critics have managed to agree on at least a general piece of advice about reading the Inferno: the judgments of Dante the Pilgrim must be distinguished from those of Dante the Poet. While the Pilgrim may be sentimental and compassionate over souls he encounters, the Poet shares the vantage point of God and the verdict of eternity. The Poet’s condemnation of sin is as relentless and as unforgiving as that of God. Unlike Milton in Paradise Lost, Dante would never have imagined that the ways of God need to be justified to man, and he would never have conceived of a Lucifer that could even mistakenly be taken as an epic hero. Of crucial importance is the moral development of the Pilgrim as the poem unfolds. Eventually, by the time the Pilgrim spies Lucifer, he has begun to share the vantage point of his maker Dante the Poet, who, in turn, shares that of the Divine Creator. This moral development based on the education and experience of the Pilgrim that Dante the Poet hopes will be replicated in the reader represents the major theme of the entire work.
A second important consideration concerns the vexing issue of allegory in medieval poetry. Dante constantly insists that what he saw in a journey through the afterlife was true. As Charles S. Singleton, one of Dante’s greatest American interpreters never tired of emphasizing, the key fiction of The Divine Comedy is that the poem is true. Dante wants his readers to believe that what they see, feel, and hear in his poem did actually occur. The work is not just an intellectual pastime for an exiled intellectual. Medieval literature is often described as a literature of allegory. In an allegorical reading of the Inferno, the reader would constantly be forced to identify characters with abstract ideas: Dante is Everyman, Virgil is Human Reason, and so forth. Everything in the poem would thus become a vast and impersonal puzzle. The reader’s function would involve identifying what each of the characters stood for and observing the relationships and interplay among them. The result would be a lifting of the veil of allegory and a revealing or uncovering of the secret meaning underneath. That concealed meaning would of necessity involve an even more abstract kind of idea: love, death, evil, sin, heresy, treachery, and so forth.
However, such allegorical abstractions are simply not what Dante’s great poem is all about. To understand Dante’s position on allegory and historical truth, it is first necessary to understand that serious medieval thinkers (theologians, philosophers—not poets) considered poetry to be a fiction that did not tell the truth. Quite rightly, allegorical poems that used characters to represent abstract qualities could not be literally true and were considered “fables” in the pejorative sense. Dante wanted his reader—including serious thinkers—to consider his poem to be a true account of an actual journey. Even if the reader willfully suspends his or her disbelief in the reality of the poem’s action and believes that this fantastical journey actually took place, a traditional allegorical poem would simply not serve his purposes. For it would place more emphasis on the abstract ideas contained in the poem than on the characters themselves.
The method that Dante employed in his work, and one that he suggests in a late letter to Cangrande della Scala, is quite different from the traditional allegory typical of works such as The Romance of the Rose or Pilgrim’s Progress. Contrary to the allegory of the poets, Dante accepted at least in part what was known as the allegory of the theologians. This involved bearing in mind four possible senses of a text: the historical or literal; the allegorical; the moral or tropological ; and the anagogical. Such a method derived from reading holy scriptures, particularly the relationship between the historical and the allegorical senses. For example, in most Christian services regardless of the denomination, the rit
ual requires a reading of a passage from the Old Testament followed by, or juxtaposed to, a reading of a passage from the New Testament. In most cases, the Old Testament text prefigures or anticipates that of the New Testament, which fulfills or explains elements of the Old Testament. The classic example of how these four senses operate may be taken from the event that Dante himself refers to in Purgatory II: 46—47. There, an angelic boatman (the counterpart to the infernal Charon) delivers souls to the shore of Purgatory. As the souls arrive, they sing in Latin the words from the Vulgate “in exitu Israel de Ae gypto” (“When Israel out of Egypt came,” a biblical citation from Psalm 114). What are we to make of this moment in the poem? According to the four senses of the allegory of the theologians, we can read the passage in various ways. The event celebrated by the souls about to undergo purgation points us to the Exodus of the Hebrews led by Moses. This event was and is historically and literally true. However, leading the Hebrews out of captivity may be explained allegorically as a prefiguration of Christ’s redemption of lost souls, bringing mankind out of bondage to sin. In a real sense, then, Christ fulfills Moses and Moses prefigures or foreshadows Christ. This kind of figural interpretation is common to Christian thought. It explains why Job’s suffering might be compared to Christ’s passion, why Jonah’s three days in the whale’s belly was frequently compared to Christ’s resurrection three days after the Crucifixion, and why Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac could be viewed as a prefiguration of God’s sacrifice of His son, Jesus. In the case of Jonah, Christ even refers to the story in the Bible, Matthew 12: 40, as a prefiguration of what will happen to him, and in the Gospels Christ consciously seeks to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament.
Such a “figural” realism, as the literary historian Erich Auerbach has labeled it, makes sense from a Christian point of view, and it is one kind of meaning that Dante certainly understood and employed on occasion in his poem, when another medieval poet might have employed traditional allegory. Another interesting example of this kind of figural realism may be demonstrated by an analysis of why Dante places Cato of Utica, a suicide and a pagan who died before the birth of Christ, in canto I of Purgatory rather than either in canto XIII of Inferno, the spot reserved for suicides, or in the Limbo of the Virtuous Pagans. Applying the principles of figural realism, Auerbach has argued persuasively that Cato fulfills in the afterlife his historical identity on earth: Once the embodiment of love for political freedom, he now constitutes a figural symbol for the freedom of the immortal soul. Dante’s counterintuitive treatments of such pagans as Virgil or Cato point us to the final “house rule” of his poem. Our poet does not concern himself overly much with consistency. He makes the rules to fit his poetic design, not to satisfy logicians, philosophers, theologians, historians, or politicians. Thus it comes as no surprise that Dante damns a pope (Boniface VIII) even before his death. Such is a perfectly logical act of poetic invention (or perhaps revelation) in a Hell created to follow Dante’s own fantasy.
Returning to the four senses of a text, the third and fourth senses—the moral, or tropological, and the anagogical sense—always seem more ambiguous. If we take our example from Exodus, the moral sense would refer to the soul of the individual Christian seeking an “exodus” from a life of sin in the present. The anagogical sense would refer to the end of time after the Last Judgment when the saved believe they will arrive in the Promised Land—for Christians, this is Heaven and not the land of Israel. Frankly, Dante infrequently concerns himself with the third and fourth sense of a text, for he is most fascinated by suggesting ways in which historical events, ideas, or characters may suggest (foreshadow, prefigure) other interesting events, ideas, or characters.
The best advice to the reader of The Divine Comedy in general and to the Inferno in particular is to pay attention to the literal sense of the poem. The greatest poetry in Dante resides in the literal sense of the work, its graphic descriptions of the sinners, their characters, and their punishments. In like manner, the greatest and most satisfying intellectual achievement of the poem comes from the reader’s understanding (and not necessarily agreement with) Dante’s complex view of morality, or the sinful world that God’s punishment is designed to correct. In most cases, a concrete appreciation of the small details of his poem will almost always lead to surprising but satisfying discoveries about the universe Dante’s poetry has created.
We read the classics because they offer us different perspectives on timeless questions. Very few people today who encounter The Divine Comedy, even Catholics, accept most of Dante’s assumptions about the universe. We have gone from the Ptolemaic universe Dante understood through the Newtonian universe that overturned the classical and medieval world views and into the Einsteinian universe of black holes and relativity. In religion, we have experienced the complete schism of a single Christian church after the Reformation into many different Christian churches, and while Western society is clearly more secular in spirit than was the Florence of Dante’s day, other non-Christian cultures seem to be returning to a religious fundamentalism not seen in the West for centuries. The confusing politics involving the petty squabbles of Guelf and Ghibelline have long since vanished and have been submerged since Dante’s day by various kinds of political systems, most of which are far worse than those he experienced. Perhaps Dante might recognize a similarity between the nascent capitalism of medieval Florence and our own contemporary multinational economic system. Both produced inordinate and unexpected quantities of wealth, although neither ever arrived at a fully equitable means of distributing it, and both economic systems have suffered periodical and frequent cyclical waves of boom and bust that sometimes threaten the lives and fortunes of those who depend on them. Dante would not have been surprised by the many religious, social, political, scientific, intellectual, or economic changes that have taken place since his times. He would only have been surprised if the characters that inhabit his Inferno seem dated, almost denizens of another planet. But, of course, Dante’s characters are all too contemporary. It would not be difficult to compile a list of our acquaintances or colleagues and to place them in the appropriate places in Hell. More difficult, perhaps, would be a similar assignment of those we know to appropriate places in Purgatory or Paradise.
What explains our contemporary fascination with Dante is his attitude toward his characters. As members of a liberal, diverse, and tolerant culture typical of twenty-first-century democracies, at least in our ideals we tend to see everything and everyone from a variety of positive perspectives. We are asked to respect those with whom we disagree. The French maxim says it all—tout comprendre, c‘est tout pardoner (to understand all is to forgive all). Dante stands entirely outside such a “civilized,” politically correct perspective. For him, understanding does not imply justification, and Dante is the most judgmental of all poets. He believes that civilization involves understanding, an act of the intellect, but for Dante understanding leads inevitably to evaluation, judgment, and the assumption of a moral position based on very simple but immutable ethical and religious precepts. No situational ethics, no “I’m OK, you’re OK,” no automatic and naive acceptances of every point of view, no matter how ill founded. His energy derives from moral indignation—indignation about the corruption of the Church, about the corruption of Florence and most Italian or European cities, about the weakness of the Holy Roman Empire, and about the general wretched state of humanity. But his genius is based on something even more precious and more unusual—his love for truth and his ability to express it in timeless poetic form.
PETER BONDANELLA is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at Indiana University and a past President of the American Association for Italian Studies. His publications include a number of translations of Italian classics (Boccaccio, Cellini, Machiavelli, Vasari), books on Italian Renaissance literature (Machiavelli, Guicciardini) and Italian cinema (postwar Italian cinema, Fel lini, Rossellini), and a dictionary of Italian literature. At present
, he is completing a book entitled Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos, a history of how Italian Americans have been depicted in American cinema.
“MAP OF HELL”
Canto I: Dante astray in the Dusky Wood
CANTO I
The Inferno (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 5