THE INFERNO
Dante Alighieri
A critical paper by
Joyce Kessler

Dante in Hell; Dante in Love

As our good biographer has suggested, Dante was in his own private hell when he began to compose his last and major work, The Divine Comedy.   He brought the significant pains of political disillusionment, of personal loss, and of a rootless life of exile to his writing table during the early years of the fourteenth century.  And yet his ambitions for the Comedy show that he had confidence in his unique place in the tradition of epic poetry, if not in the world of Florentine politics.

In a letter to Lord Can Grande della Scala, the Veronese nobleman who was his friend and the provider of his asylum for a good portion of his exiled last years, Dante explained the design of his allegory, and the extent of his ambition for the poem.  This is a narrative of the soul’s progress toward reunion with God after death.   In it, Dante intended to combine the celebration of the praiseworthy with the condemnation of the blameworthy, and in so doing, to produce the argument for the necessity of human virtue.  First, he meant to celebrate his life’s great love, Beatrice Portinari, who became, after her death, the symbol of human philosophy in his mature mind.  Because of her, he meant, also, to celebrate the philosophic tradition as it leads ultimately to an understanding of Divine love and wisdom.  He wished to unify within the poem the Christian theology he so honored with the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy he so respected.  In addition to these ambitions, Dante meant to condemn Florence’s unstable political arena, with its brutal skirmishes and betrayals between the Black and White Guelphs.  In terms of his own doomed role in service of the White Guelphs, writing the poem allowed him to conduct a moral self-examination on the subject of his own political acts, as well.  Finally, he meant to portray God’s love as the power of the world’s creation, and as the reason for the strict avoidance of sin.
Dante’s epic is in one sense a literal design of human error and redemption.  The Comedy’s three books – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso – form a dramatic geography in which Dante follows the course of the human soul as it progresses to its self-determined resting place within its Creator’s embrace.  Each book has essentially the identical structure of thirty-three cantos, although the Inferno has thirty-four because its opening canto stands as the epic’s prologue.  The total number of cantos, then, is 100, the square of 10, which in Dante’s time was thought to be the perfect number.  The three divisions are symbolic of the Holy Trinity, as are all of the triplicate structures in Dante’s design of verse and imagery.   The three divisions have nine major subdivisions (the square of three); Dante encounters three beasts in his attempt to ascend the Mount of Joy; Dante used the terza rima stanza form for the Comedy.  

Dante follows his esteemed guide, the Roman poet,Virgil, through the first two realms.  He descends into Hell, the funnel extending from the earth’s surface to its center.  As he travels downward through the nine circles and their sub-circles, he is witness to souls suffering punishments of increasing severity, and at Hell’s bottom, in the frozen lake, he encounters the fallen angel, Satan.  Dante and Virgil must exit Hell, then, and begin their climb of the mountain that is Purgatorio.  Again, the terrain, an inversion of the funnel in the earth’s interior, is divided into three sections – the ante-Purgatory of the mountain’s lower half, the seven levels of Purgatory itself, where souls work to divest themselves of the seven deadly sins, and at the mountain top, Eden.  In the final book, Dante is reunited with Beatrice, who serves as his ultimate guide through the cosmos as it was understood in his time.  They ascend through the seven planets of medieval astronomy, the circle of fixed stars, and the primum mobile, which moves the other circles, and the circle of Heaven (the Empyrean), making, once more, for a perfect ten.  This last passage in Dante’s journey is his ultimate fulfillment, not just because of the presence of Beatrice, but because he sees with living eyes the spiritual kingdom his soul will inherit if he lives the rest of his life in a state of virtue.

The geography of Hell is intricate and terrible, but reassuringly tripartite.  Each of the three sections of the funnel houses a type of sinner, and these types are derived from a classification of sin that is Dante’s own version of medieval Christian doctrine.  He groups human sins -- the many results of the capitulation to worldliness – into three broad categories in ascending order of egregiousness: from incontinence, on to violence, and finally, to fraud.  As he and Virgil enter the Vestibule of Hell, they encounter first those who would not use their free will to choose a virtuous path – the opportunists.  They then pass over the boundary river of Acheron and enter Limbo, where the Virtuous Pagans, the great ancient poets and philosophers, dwell in honor within the Citadel of Human Reason, despite the fact that they were born “before the age of the Christian mysteries” (37).  Virgil explains to Dante that though they do not suffer Hell’s tortures, they are “lost, … suffering Hell in one affliction only: that without hope we live on in desire” (40-42).  Dante is honored to be among their company, especially when they include him formally in the membership of the highest group of poets, including Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil. 
But this tendency of Dante’s to sympathize with the souls he encounters in the upper levels of Hell is an error, and one that Virgil counsels him from the beginning to renounce.    As his charge ponders the meaning of the words inscribed on the Gate of Hell, Virgil commands, “Here must you put by all division of spirit and gather your soul against all cowardice”(14-15).  But, when Dante interviews Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers of the second circle, he drops to the floor of Hell in a swoon of fellow feeling.  Continuing ever lower in the circles of Incontinence comprising the Upper Hell, he continues to find pathos in and to feel pity for those suffering increasingly grotesque punishments.  The gluttonous, the greedy, the hoarders and wasters, all arouse in him tears and wonder, as well as revulsion.  His fascination begins to shift in circle five, when he meets the soul of Filippo Argenti, one of his political enemies in life.  This figure raises in Dante the indignation that he needs to build into a righteous anger toward all of the souls in Hell: “May you weep and wail to all eternity, for I know you, hell-dog, filthy as you are” (37-38).  Virgil congratulates him for acquiring at last the emotional armor he will need as they enter the City of Dis, the capital of Hell, and descend into the Lower Hell, making their initial approach to Satan.  And another figure appears to set Dante an example of righteous scorn.  The “Messenger from God’s Throne,” the “Angel-presence” who comes to open the Gate of Dis for Dante and Virgil to pass through, strides into Hell on a single mission, acknowledging nothing and no one, beautifully intolerant of the world of sin. (77-102)

The circle immediately within the walls of Dis is the sixth, where the Heretics, those who do violence to God by denying immortality, are punished in the eternal fire of God’s anger.  Dante and Virgil go lower, into the realm of Violence – the River of Blood, the Wood of the Suicides, the Plain of Burning Sand.  In each of the subdivisions, souls who rejected God’s love suffer God’s symbolic retribution.  The Violent Against Neighbors spend eternity in a river of their victims’ boiling blood; the Violent Against Themselves are damned to live as trees, capable of expressing their pain only when their branches are torn by the Harpies assigned to destroy them as they destroyed themselves; the Violent Against God, Nature, and Art find themselves trapped forever in a sterile environment that is a manifestation of the effects of their own will to violence.  Daring to catch a ride with Geryon, the Monster of Fraud, the poets fly over the steep cliff that separates the seventh and eighth circles.  Here, in the Malebolge, they see Simple Fraud in all of its complex forms – Seducers, such as Jason of Golden Fleece fame; Simoniacs, the Church’s shame; Fortune Tellers, whose weeping causes Dante to backslide into sympathetic tears; Thieves, including one of Dante’s former political opponents; and Ulysses and Diomedes, Evil Counselors subsumed in one, great, double-headed flame.  The remaining bolge reveal sights and sinners that put a final end to Dante’s sympathy and fill him (and us) with horror – those who sow discord in the Church, in political life, and in the family; those who falsify nature, people, or the truth; the lawless giants who guard over the pit holding the last rounds of the damned.   In the ninth circle, Cocytus, Dante and Virgil have come to witness the authors of the most extreme sins that humans can commit.  Treachery to family, country, the bonds of hospitality, and those of service are the sins of Compound Fraud, and its various perpetrators (no morphologic punning intended) include Dante’s Florentine peers, like Focaccia; Count Ugolino, at once traitor and victim of Archbishop Ruggieri's treachery; and finally, triple-headed Satan, blaspheming the Trinity, implacably gnawing those treacherous to their masters – Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius – in his three mouths. 
But let’s journey back up, from the bottom of the ninth, to the words cut into the stone gates standing over the Vestibule of Hell:

         THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO THE CITY OF WOES,
THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME YOU ENTER THE POPULATION OF LOSS.

JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER, IN POWER DIVINE,       
WISDOM SUPREME, LOVE PRIMAL. 
NO THINGS WERE BEFORE ME NOT ETERNAL;
ETERNAL I  REMAIN.

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.  (1-7)
Dante is nonplused on reading this inscription, and when Virgil explains that it means he must relinquish fear and cowardice, the true significance of the Gate’s words is still lost on him.  The first tercet of the inscription instills dread in the younger poet, and he misses the redemptive gist of the second one.  Sacred justice, Divine wisdom and power, and, most important, “love primal” caused the erection of Hell’s gate.  That is, it is not only God’s omnipotence and intellect that makes His retribution eternal, but it is also His Divine love for his creation that causes him to conceive an eternal place in the spiritual kingdom for those who have refused to renounce their sins, and thereby, have chosen to reject His love.  Despite their free choice of worldliness over Godliness, they are with Him for eternity, even if their souls are lost.  The redemptive power of God’s primordial love, of which at the journey’s outset, Dante seems unaware, is the “good news” that cheers Virgil as they descend.  In fact, it is Beatrice’s purpose, in arranging for Dante’s journey, to instruct him in that love and wisdom so that he can find his way out of the dark wood of human error, and chart a more virtuous course through the rest of his life.  And yet it is also Dante’s love of humanity, his sympathetic nature, that causes him, in the first circles, to divide his will from God’s, and to embrace the suffering, if not the sinning, of many of the souls of Upper Hell. 

His visit with Paolo and Francesca illustrates this contradiction well.  This is Dante’s first swoon in Hell, and it is caused, presumably, by the awful symbolism of the lovers’ punishment – to be blown every which way by harsh and chaotic winds for eternity.  In my own reading of the canto, his loss of consciousness is more a reaction to Francesca’s recitation of the way her first and last tryst with her brother-in-law came about:

         Love, which in gentle hearts is quickly born,
Seized him for my fair body – which, in a fierce
Manner that still torments my soul, was torn
Untimely away from me. Love, which absolves
None who are loved from loving, made my heart burn   
With joy so strong that as you see it cleaves
Still to him, here…  (89-95)

Love, the human version of the power that moved God’s creation, lead these souls into a sin of Incontinence: they allowed their love to be driven by their passion for one another, as the blasts of eternal wind now drive them.  The wife and the brother of Giovanni Malatesta commit adultery, are discovered by him, and are dispatched to the circle of Hell that befits them. This logic of Divine justice should not present a problem for a man willing to descend into Hell in pursuit of the lessons of virtue, and yet he faints at hearing their story.  He seems, in fact, to want to torture himself with the details of their first kiss:

                   … but tell me, in the hours
Of sweetest sighing, how and in what shape
Or manner did Love first show you those desires
So hemmed by doubt? …  (104-107)

Francesca obliges him by telling of their reading together the French romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, and of their own passionate capitulation to that beautiful portrayal of desire.  She tells Dante that the book played the same role for them that the go-between character of Gallehault in the original played for its principals – that of panderer.  This delicate seduction of lovers by literature is suggestive, both to our poet, and to us.

         Why was Dante compelled by their lustful act?  What is the “first root” of his attraction to Paolo and Francesca?  Why does he place them at such a high level in the Upper Hell?  Of what value is human love to Dante?  What does he mean by placing such absolute standards of human love in Francesca’s “longed-for” mouth? Can a book be a panderer?  Is Dante’s book guilty of such a sin?  What of the serene relationship Dante worked out in the Vita Nuova between love and reason?  And what of God’s primal love, even of the damned?  What does love mean in the Inferno?

         All of these queries are best pursued by the group.  There is an enticing possibility of linkage between human and Divine love alluded to in the fifth canto, one which recurs throughout the Comedy.  As Dante descends in his journey, he must put his natural love of humanity behind him, and as he enters the realms of wrath, this becomes easy for him.  Natural sympathy gives way seamlessly to natural antipathy.  And yet the impulse that leads to virtue can only be that of human love: how else to approach the love of God that will ensure the virtuous life?  At the bottom of the pit, Dante is revolted, confused, and anything but in love.  In learning to hate sin, he has learned to hate.  How will he find the emotional tenor needed to go on through Purgatory to meet the love of his life and mind, who will guide him through a vision of God’s perfect love?