Dante’s Road Trip: Inferno

T. S. Eliot once noted that “Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third.” It is hard to argue with him. There have been more commentaries written on Dante’s Divine Comedy than on any other book except the Bible. That is one of the things I love about it; it makes no difference how many times you have read it, there are always new things to discover. It is literally impossible to understand all the references and intricacies.

And yet, the whole thing is told in a remarkably simple manner. This is a road trip through the Inferno, Purgatory, and finally Paradise; our faithful narrator, Dante, simply tells us about the things he sees and the conversations he has. Fittingly, the conversations in the Inferno are all about the miserable lives led by miserable people; the conversations in Paradise, however, are all lofty philosophical and theological discussions.

By all accounts, Dante’s Italian is beautiful, an easy-reading colloquial style, done in a remarkable rhyme scheme, all of which is difficult to replicate well in English. There are 100 chapters (called Cantos); 33 for each part, plus an initial Canto to set the whole thing up. Lots of people have tried, and some of them have done an amazing job, trying to keep the rhyme pattern. But, my preferred translation is Robert and Jean Hollander’s. They abandon the attempt to keep the rhyme and instead try to preserve the easy-going nature of Dante’s verse.

We begin to see the artistry of the Divine Comedy at the outset. Dante is lost in a dark wood and meets three beasts before Virgil shows up and tells Dante to follow him. The commentaries are filled with attempts to figure out what the three beasts represent. If you like giant puzzles, you can spend time reading all the notes in whatever version you have. Or, you can decide to just go along for the ride; the story works perfectly well if you see the three beasts, notice they are scary and stop Dante from his journey, and thus make him willing to trust to a guide. In other words, the story of the Divine Comedy is perfectly enjoyable even if you have no idea who all the people are and what all the assorted things represent. You don’t need to look at a single editorial note to enjoy the work. Just imagine you are hearing a guy telling an amazing tale, and don’t sweat the details.

As we get into the Inferno, we, like Dante, are initially overwhelmed with the visceral terrors—Dante faints before even crossing into the Inferno, and then he faints repeatedly in the early cantos. But as Dante (and the reader) go along and the shape of the afterlife comes into focus, his (and our) perspective changes. By the end, he is ripping out the hair of a sinner; he does not show an ounce of sympathy for Ugolino.

The first clue to thinking about the Inferno as a whole comes in the third canto: we find out that the souls are eager to cross into the Inferno (3.124). Why eagerness and not dread? It is a sign that we think about Hell in the wrong way. We imagine Hell as a place of eternal punishment, a place to be avoided. But the souls here are eager to get to their final destination. Why?

Look at the punishments. People generally say that the punishments fit the crimes, but that is missing something important. They are less punishments in our usual way of thinking and more the simple revelation of the nature of the sin. Dante is saying: if you think the punishment sounds bad then you should realize that the sin is exactly like the punishment. The punishments in the Inferno don’t fit the sin—they are the sin.

The first group Dante meets, the neutrals, show the shape of what is to come. In life, the neutrals followed no set path, just running about aimlessly with no internal pricks of conscience— and here they are running around after an aimless, directionless banner pricked only on the outside by wasps and flies. In other words, in death, the souls get to spend eternity doing what they chose to do on earth.

The wrathful are forever fighting in the muck. The people who said there was no afterlife spend eternity in tombs. Murderers are standing in a lake of blood. Diviners want to see into things that cannot normally be seen, so their bodies are unnaturally twisted as they try to see what cannot be seen. And on and on. It is indeed great art…which Dante cleverly pretends comes from God and not Dante himself.

Then as you look at the Inferno compared to Purgatory and Paradise, you notice there is a structural similarity. Each realm has three main parts, which get divided into 7 subparts. Then there are two more levels which are like, but not identical, to the three main parts, so that brings us to nine levels. Finally, there is a 10^th level which is unlike the other nine.

Surprisingly, the internal structure of the Inferno is not from Christian theology. It is straight out of Aristotle. Dante tips this off when he notes that the souls entering the Inferno are those who have “lost the good of the intellect.” It is not just faith that shapes this afterlife; it is also Reason. After all, Virgil, not one of the saints, is Dante’s guide.

In the Inferno, the three divisions are the sins of Incontinence, Violence, and Fraud, ranked in that order of seriousness by Aristotle. Incontinence has four circles (Lust; Gluttony; Avarice and Prodigality; and Anger and Sullenness); Violence is a single circle with three parts; Fraud is two circles (Simple Fraud and Treachery, with the former having ten parts and the latter four parts). That gives seven circles. Then add the circles of Limbo and Heresy, both of which are a lack of belief, the former because of ignorance of the truth, the latter because of denial of the truth; note that these sins do not fit into Aristotle’s structure because they are specifically Christian sins. The 10^th circle, unlike the others is the Neutrals, who neither believed nor didn’t believe.

For modern readers, murder is surprisingly high up; even in the realm of violence, it is the least serious of the types; violence against God and violence against self are worse than violence against others. Lust is at the highest level in the Inferno proper. The worst sin, the one at the very pit of Hell? Treachery against rightful lords.

Not only is the macrostructure fascinating, the individual levels also are. One of my favorite bits is in Canto 4, the circle of Limbo containing those who never had the opportunity to know about God. Dante meets the Great Poets there: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. When not being a tour guide, Virgil resides in this level, so the other Great Poets come over to chat. Then Dante relates this:

After they conversed a while,
They turned to me with signs of greeting,
And my master smiled at this.

And then they showed me greater honor still,
For they made me one of their company,
So that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom.

Thus we went onward to the light,
Speaking of things that here are best unsaid,
Just as it was fitting to express them there.

Yep. Dante just ranked himself as one of the six greatest poets of all time. Talk about having a high opinion of yourself! But, then, it dawns on the reader…Dante is actually better than the other five great poets. Even more amazing, Dante put himself among the greatest of all time on the basis of…what? His previous work is OK, but not even in the class of Homer and Virgil. The very work in which he asserts his greatness is the work on which his greatness is based. He knew he was writing something extraordinary. And despite the fact that we might want to say he was being a bit too prideful, it is hard to say his opinion of himself was too high. Indeed, by ranking himself with those other poets, he was lowering himself.

Canto Five is a perfect illustration of why there are so many commentaries on the Inferno; it is brilliant. In the circle of lust, Dante meets Francesca, who gives a speech designed to solicit Dante’s (and thus the reader’s) sympathy. She makes a case for why we should feel bad for her. Do we pity her? Remember, she is in the place where the souls have lost the good of the intellect. The whole speech is designed to play on your emotions, not your intellect. Dante falls into her trap; he swoons. Dante, like the reader, has not yet come to understand the nature of the Inferno; he still feels pity for these souls.

Francesca’s speech is a very clever riff on Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine’s job was a teacher of rhetoric; Francesca’s speech is a perfect example of classical rhetoric in both form and substance. Augustine realized the superficiality of classical rhetoric; Francesca embraces it, which proves Augustine’s point. Augustine notes his huge struggle with the sin of lust; Francesca embraces her lustful desires. Augustine’s conversion came when he was reading Paul—the dramatic moment is when puts down the book and reads no further; Francesca, reading a book with her lover, copies Augustine’s line about putting down the book and reading no further, but instead of converting, embraces her lust.

Then there are some incredibly fun parts. Dante and Virgil encounter a locked gate with some fallen angels who refuse to let them pass. So an angel from heaven shows up to help out. The angel comes down into hell with an attitude that this is some tiresome bit of nonsense that he just wants to get over as quickly as possible. Absolutely brilliant. While Dante and the readers are obsessed with all the details of the Inferno, the angel can’t be bothered to even say “Hi” to Dante after making a trip there just to open some doors for him. The angel just trudges in, waves open the gates, yells at the fallen angels, and then strides off.

Then there is the bit where Dante shows sheer audacity by inventing a whole story about Virgil going through the Inferno before, but presenting it as if it is a story all the readers would already know. He also repeatedly has bits which slyly mock Virgil. Dante is subtly asserting that his tale is so much better than Virgil’s. And remember, when Dante wrote this, everyone knew The Aeneid was the best thing ever written.

When we meet Ulysses is the circle of False Counsellors, he tells a tale of a journey he convinced his crew to take, sailing out into the ocean until they came in sight of a great mountain. A great storm then came up and everyone drowns. We find out in Purgatory, that the mountain on the other side of the world is Purgatory, which you have to climb to get to heaven. So, Ulysses, in effect, is counseling his crew to set off on their own, unaided by God, to get to Purgatory and climb to heaven. The whole of the Divine Comedy is an argument that you can’t do that; at the outset, Dante was lost in the dark wood and he tried to climb a hill on his own. He failed. But at the behest of a heavenly soul, Virgil will lead Dante along the proper path, and Dante will then come back to tell us all.

As you travel through the Inferno, the message become quite clear:

Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.
Who is more impious than one who thinks
That God brings passion to his judgement?

The Inferno is reasonable and just. If you don’t want to deal with God, if you want to live your life in sin, then congratulations, you can spend all eternity doing exactly what you wanted to do.

The Inferno ends with a Great Trivia Question: name the three worst sinners in the history of the world, the ones who will be eternally chewed up by one of Satan’s three heads. If you have never read the Inferno, don’t Google the answer. Just read the story. You will be very very glad you did.