Home Page for English 236, Chapman University

Fall 2008 English 236 at Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. I will post two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam.

A dedicated menu at my Wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 14, Cervantes

Notes on Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605/1615)

First Part, Chapter 1

19-20. The protagonist belongs to the gentility, he is what we might call shabby genteel, and has a great deal of free time on his hands. What he does not have is much money. We find that he has sold some of his land to buy chivalric books—apparently hundreds of them. The books are so filled with airy abstractions that our poor hero goes absolutely insane. What he seems to value most of all is “the promise of unending adventure.” What the author seems to promise is, by means of his fictional frame, absolute veracity in recounting the unending adventures of Don Quixote.

21. Once Don Quixote goes mad, his imagination fills up with everything he has read in the chivalric books. As Dr. Johnson would say, once you admit delusion, it has no certain limitation. And so he must become a knight just like the ones he has read about, pursuing both honor and service to his nation.

22. His first task, therefore, is to clean up the armor of his ancestors, which he does tolerably well except for the helmet. And he names his old horse Rocinante. We are told that he chooses this name because of its noble sonority as well as its quality of reflecting the past. Language indeed is a powerful ally of Don Quixote’s all-distorting imagination.

23. Now that he has a name, armor, and a horse, he must have a lady to serve. So he chooses a peasant girl whom he used to love even though she never knew it. Her name is Aldonza Lorenzo, but he renames her Dulcinea of Toboso.

First Part, Chapter 2

24-25. It is now high time that he set out on his moral crusade. Wherever there is injustice being done, he must combat it. But he has not yet been properly dubbed. But he manages to talk himself into a cheerful and foolish state, offering flourishes of chivalric rhetoric as he rides. At the end of page 25, we find the narrator discussing the comparative source work that he has done to describe things most accurately.

26-27. But he rides all day and becomes tired and hungry. He comes upon a certain tavern and reaches it at nightfall. Greeting him are a couple of prostitutes on their way to Seville and some mule drivers. Don Quixote believes he has arrived at a castle. His strong imagination construes a swineherd’s horn as the signal given by a dwarf that the noble Don Quixote has arrived. His high rhetoric causes laughter in the fair ladies who greet him. The innkeeper comes out and is able to size up the situation more astutely than the prostitutes, and he decides not to provoke this madman.

28-29. Don Quixote takes his first meal, which turns out to be quite a comic affair because he will not remove his helmet and so must receive his meal through it. We see that his imagination is able to knit together every material thing and person around him, every circumstance, into a single harmonious fantasy. And within this fantasy, there is a center of lucidity—he is still troubled about not yet having been declared a proper knight.

First Part, Chapter 3

30-31. When the innkeeper is asked by Don Quixote to do him the honor of dubbing him as a knight, the sly fellow of course accepts, and even presumes to claim that he himself had formerly been of that profession. And he offers Don Quixote sage advice, telling him that he must carry about money and other important provisions.

32-33. Now he must keep a vigil over his armor as part of the ceremony. Misfortune strikes when a couple of the mule drivers staying at the end decide to water their mules and in the process treat Don Quixote’s armor with disregard. He wounds them both rather badly, so the innkeeper decides to get the ceremony out of the way as quickly as possible.

34-35. By now, everyone is going along with Don Quixote’s insanity, with the ladies accepting honorary titles and the innkeeper being so much in haste to get Don Quixote off the property that he skips payment.

First Part, Chapter 4

35-38. Don Quixote’s first adventure consists of correcting what he calls the worst of all possible evils—a wealthy peasant whipping an unruly servant. Don Quixote thinks this episode turns out splendidly, but of course it really doesn’t because the wealthy peasant simply makes the necessary promises and then punishes the servant even worse. Now that Don Quixote’s insanity has been loosed upon the wider world, he begins to lose control of the consequences.

39-41. On his way back home to resupply himself and possibly gain a squire, Don Quixote comes upon some merchants and imperiously demands that they declare Dulcinea of Toboso the most beautiful woman in the world. One of these merchants is a smart aleck, and he treats Don Quixote with much disrespect. Don Quixote charges the man, but Rocinante trips and the knight goes sprawling. When he has fallen, he is badly beaten by a mule driver. Somehow, Don Quixote thinks this is a perfectly appropriate experience for a man of his position.

First Part, Chapter 5

41-43. In fact, he begins to relate the episode to episodes from his chivalric books, in one of which a wounded quester is in need of rescue. But the man who rescues him here is not his uncle the Marquis of Mantua but rather a farmer who recognizes him. All Don Quixote can do is go on reciting his ballad, provoking considerable impatience in the farmer. The man’s name is Pedro Alonso.

43-45. Don Quixote’s house is in an uproar, with everyone standing around trying to make sense of it all. The housekeeper immediately blames the chivalric books. And Don Quixote’s niece agrees. She tells the barber that she blames herself because she had seen Don Quixote carrying on like a madman after reading these books two days straight, but she did nothing. The priest agrees with all of this, especially with the notion that the books themselves should be cast into the flames. This is after all the age of the Spanish Inquisition, which began under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478 and continued for several centuries. Of course, in the next chapter, the priest turns out to be something of a literary critic, so the only books he condemns seem to be the rather badly written ones.

First Part, Chapter 7

53-55. Back home, Don Quixote has really spun out a fantastic account for himself of the beating that he took. In a very moving moment, he looks for the books that have long been his companions, only to find that they have been taken away. The housekeeper and Don Quixote’s niece tell him that either the devil took the books away or some enchanter came and did it. His acquaintances do not know quite how to treat him, and the priest and the barber go back and forth on whether to agree with him or contradict him in his madness.

55-57. At this point, Don Quixote approaches a neighboring farmer named Sancho Panza, and talks the man into becoming his squire. He makes grandiose promises of land and power, which Sancho seems at least partly to buy. In fact, he seems quite impressed with his prospects. Don Quixote scrapes together the necessary funds, and finds himself a nice round shield. The two men ride out together in the evening, and it seems that no one notices they’ve left.

Already we begin to see the dynamic that will develop in subsequent chapters—Sancho is perhaps the best possible companion for Don Quixote because he is open to experience and, not being a learned man, he is in no position to challenge his master on points of chivalry. But there is also a keen element of realism in Sancho that is entirely missing in Don Quixote. Evidence of this is abundant on 57, where Don Quixote promises to make Sancho’s wife a queen, and Sancho gives him the thumbs down on that proposal because his wife, as he explains, is by no means fit for such high office. In the end, Sancho says that he trusts Don Quixote “to give me everything that’s right for me and that I can handle.”

First Part, Chapter 8

58-59. Their first adventure together shows them to be of completely different minds about the shape of reality. They come across 30 or 40 windmills, and Don Quixote immediately takes them for giants and simply cannot hear Sancho’s insistent utterances to the effect that they are in fact windmills. Quixote will do what he calls “unequal combat” with these so-called giants. It is revealing that he says, “I think, and therefore it is true....” We may take this remark somewhat out of context and generalize it to show the quality of Don Quixote’s madness. Whatever he thinks must be the truth. He is assuming or rather asserting the infallibility of the imagination. Well, the windmills break his lance and nearly the back of Rocinante. Don Quixote now understands that the windmills were really windmills, but it makes no difference to him—he simply asserts that a certain wizard has changed the Giants into windmills to deprive him of “the glory of defeating them.”

60-61. Now they go off to Puerto Lapice in search of adventure. Don Quixote recounts how a knight from his chivalric books found a heavy branch to replace the weapon he lost, and says he intends to do something like that as well. Sancho sees that Don Quixote is in some pain and tells him he really ought to complain when something hurts, and Quixote agrees that the chivalric code is indeed silent on the matter. At the moment, Sancho seems to be in good spirits since we are told that as they ride along and he eats and drinks, “he did not consider it work but sheer pleasure to go around seeking adventures, no matter how dangerous they might be.” Sancho does not have much to worry about in the way of rank or fortune, so he is up for just about anything so long as it does not imperil his life, comment about danger notwithstanding. Quixote does not care so much about food, intending instead “to live on sweet memories” (61). Don Quixote informs Sancho that he must not try to help defend his master unless the people they are fighting are not gentlemen. Sancho agrees easily.

61-65. Now they come across a couple of Benedictine friars and a Basque woman on her way to Seville to meet her husband, who is about to sail for the Indies and take up a post of honor. Don Quixote believes that the friars are enchanters who have captured a princess. Again, Sancho tries to talk him out of this nonsense, to no avail. Don Quixote attacks one of the friars, who falls off his mule while the other one gallops away. Sancho begins pulling off the habit of the friar, but the servants are in no mood to allow this, and they began attacking Sancho. Meanwhile, Don Quixote is talking to the lady in her carriage, believing that he has liberated her from evil forces. He promptly gets in what looks to be a deadly fight with one of the lady’s Basque squires. The both of them use pillows for shields, and the fight turns comic.

First Part, Chapter 18 (125 bottom-133)

124-25. Sancho tries to explain to Don Quixote that they had best follow the natural rhythms of life—it is time for the harvest, and he wants to go home. But chivalry, counters Don Quixote, is essentially an artificial alternative. There can be no greater joy, he explains, than to defeat your enemy in battle. Sancho also gets in a dig about class differences—when Don Quixote says he will get hold of a special sword, Sancho says it will only work for him and not for his squire.

126-27. And now comes a thick cloud of dust signaling their next adventure. Don Quixote of course takes the cloud for the dust kicked up by two great armies ready to do battle. It is in fact sheep. Don Quixote spins a romantic tale about a great emperor and a king who hate each other.

128-29. Sancho again tries to talk sense into Don Quixote, but to no avail. Don Quixote’s wild imaginings just become more grandiose by the minute, and he attributes Sancho’s protestations to fear, which can distort our perceptions of reality.

130-33. Don Quixote is wounded by some pebbles thrown by the shepherds when he tries to attack them. Some of his teeth are apparently knocked out, causing him great pain. Both men vomit all over each other, Don Quixote because of the balm that he drank and Sancho because of his disgust. On 131, Sancho “cursed his fate again and resolved in his heart to leave his master and return home...” He is becoming more and more disillusioned. On 132-33, at least for the moment even Don Quixote is more or less reduced to the pain in his jaw—to the physicality he has fought so valiantly to dismiss from his mind.

First Part, Chapter 22 (163-72)

163-67. Don Quixote speaks to a series of five prisoners, Galley slaves being escorted by their keepers. Each has an interesting story to tell, which Quixote comically misunderstands until he is corrected by further information. The prisoners have an imaginative language all their own—they are not literalists, but their language is foreign to the chivalric sensibilities of Don Quixote. But those same sensibilities result in his treating them with greater generosity than they could have imagined possible. He comes close to the magnificent ravings of King Lear in Shakespeare’s play, though not quite that far since the king condemned human society as a system that does little but propagate injustice: the usurer hangs the cozener, etc.

168-69. But the sixth prisoner that he meets is Ginés de Pasamonte, apparently a famous brigand who has even written his own biography. This man is eloquent and fearless, so he and Don Quixote strike up a conversation in the midst of the guards. He professes to be a teller of hard truths to the world, and therefore a rival of the romance texts that Don Quixote himself has been reading.

169-72. Don Quixote issues a rather long demand that the guards must let the prisoners go. His reason is that they have done nothing to the guards themselves; the wrongs they have committed were committed against others. So Don Quixote interprets the scene from the vantage point of a highly personalistic code of honor. A fight ensues, and the prisoners get their liberty, only to turn against their liberators. We might well have expected as much, but of course Don Quixote is stunned, “grief-stricken at seeing himself so injured by the very people for whom he had done so much good.” He simply cannot understand those who return evil for good, who take kindness and turn it into weakness. The chivalric law of reciprocity does not hold water with them. It’s

First Part, Chapter 52 (440 middle—446 top)

440-41. Don Quixote and Sancho happen upon some villagers taking part in a Christianized fertility rite, a procession capped with an image of the Virgin Mary and led by Catholic priests. It seems that the area has been suffering from drought, so the villagers are praying for rain. Anyhow, Don Quixote of course takes the statue of the Virgin for a lady in need of rescue, what with her “tears and melancholy countenance” (441 2/3 down). The procession-goers begin to laugh at the knight, and a fight predictably follows. Just as predictably, Don Quixote is badly injured, this time in the shoulder.

442-43. Sancho is genuinely horrified by this turn of events, in which his master’s deluded imagination has caused him to assault a holy procession and then get himself hurt. At 442 bottom, he covers his master with lamentations and chivalric praise, both because he is distraught and because he probably hopes that will revive the man, which they do. Sancho declares to all that he and Don Quixote will return to their own village, which is nearby, and the priest and their old friend the barber agree that that is the most sensible thing to do.

444-45. The homecoming of the two men is bittersweet, with Sancho’s wife demanding what he has to show for his travels, which isn’t much but empty promises that she doesn’t presume to understand. But Sancho doesn’t seem as disheartened as we might expect. In fact, he seems buoyant, even jaunty, about the whole affair. Don Quixote is received tenderly by his niece, and the priest tells her to take good care of him, making sure he doesn’t escape again, for he is still as deranged as ever: the text says that he “stared at them, his eyes transfixed, and did not understand where he was.” And what of the third set of adventures, now that this second homecoming has been accomplished? The narrator says that at present (1605), he has been entrusted only with a box of Castilian poems celebrating the further exploits of Don Quixote, thanks to the “leaden box” found by a doctor, who himself came upon them “in the ruined foundations of an old hermitage that was being renovated.” A hermitage is a monastery or abbey, so the poetry that the narrator includes at the end of this first book is a survivor in the midst of Spanish modernization. Of course, some ten years later, Cervantes would publish his Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, partly as a response to what he considered the spurious sequels of another writer. But more on that next time.


Second Part, Chapter 71 (919 —24)

919-24. Sancho is clever enough to avoid actually injuring himself in carrying out the sentence upon himself that will supposedly free Dulcinea from her alleged enchantment of many chapters back (Sancho had pulled a scam on Don Quixote in Chapter 13 of Part 2, claiming that a peasant girl is Dulcinea, who ends up fleeing through a field from Sancho and his master.) Don Quixote’s delusions are as grand as ever, as we see on 923-924 top, where he claims that had he only been around when Paris abducted Helen of Sparta, the whole affair of the Trojan War could have been averted. But he’s easily enough fooled by Sancho in this chapter.

Second Part, Chapter 72 (925 —28)

925-28. While they are on their way back home, Don Quixote and Sancho meet one Don Álvaro Tarfe at an inn, and are able to clear up the matter of the Knight of la Mancha’s true identity. The chapter is a joke on Avellaneda’s spurious sequel to the first part of Cervantes’ novel, and he takes care to drive home the fact of the inferiority of everything about the impostor’s sequel. Don Quixote stands here before Don Álvaro, and is not in a madhouse in Toledo; neither has he been a jousting contender in Zaragoza. Sancho’s false penance to release Dulcinea from her enchantment continues and is at last completed, to Don Quixote’s great satisfaction. They part with Don Álvaro, and go their ways to their home village, where Quixote intends to take up a pastoral life since he has suffered his final defeat as a knight at the hands of Samson Carrasco, in the guise of the Knight of the White Moon, back in Chapter 64 of Part 2. It seems that this Salamanca university graduate has long been determined to keep Don Quixote safe, and when he wins his battle against him, he demands that the Don go home and live a peaceful life.

Second Part, Chapter 73 (929 —33)

929-30. Sancho and Don Quixote discuss the appropriateness of taking natural events as signs pertaining to their romantic quest, and Sancho’s commonsensical view wins out: Don Quixote gives the hunters the hare they’ve been chasing. The priest and the bachelor (Samson Carrasco) recognize Don Quixote and Sancho, and welcome them back to their village.

931-32. Don Quixote is more determined than ever to step into his new role (which he thinks temporary) as a pastoral shepherd and singer of amorous verses, in which venture he supposes he will be aided by his companions, whom of course he must rename in the most appropriate way. But his niece and housekeeper are taken aback at this plan, and it turns out that Don Quixote is in no position to argue with them—he has fallen ill, and must be taken to his bed.

Second Part, Chapter 74 (934 —40)

934-40. Don Quixote’s sudden awakening from madness into a penitent lucidity stuns everyone around him. He now realizes the error of his knight-errant ways, and wants to make amends to Sancho, his niece and housekeeper, to the man who wrote that spurious sequel about his exploits (Don Quixote is a peculiarly modern hero in that he’s aware of his own literary reputation—as much a creature of books as of actual adventure), and above all to God. Declaring himself the sworn enemy of Amadis of Gaul—i.e. of chivalric romance tales generally—Don Quixote makes his will and dies of what seems like a combination of melancholia and a fever-inducing illness. This is a conventional way to end a medieval or Renaissance book about an errant soul in search of adventure. The Arthurian romances often have about them an air of fatality—the texts’ Christian authors knew well that they were dealing with a prominent pattern of fallen humanity: self-assertion, vain pursuit of earthly meaning and pleasure, and then, when those hopes are ultimately frustrated or (if achieved) shown to lead only to transitory happiness, the bitter necessity of giving up the quest and retiring from the world. Even Chaucer’s rollicking Canterbury Tales ends with a pious retraction that modern readers often find hard to accept as entirely serious or final. But there’s no reason to think that either Chaucer or Cervantes (or the Arthurian writers) were not serious.

So in this prominent sense, Cervantes and his Don Quixote have come home to the piety demanded of them by their Church: one must, in the end, renounce earthly desire and the vain delusion it liberates into no end of troubles, exchanging the patternings of the world for those of the spirit. But the great power and universal appeal of Don Quixote’s fantasy world is evident from the way those around him treat his return to sanity: Sancho Panza in particular can hardly believe his ears, and in general the family yearns for the old “Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance” that they know has already, even as he awaits death, left them behind.

Week 12, Dante's Inferno

Notes on Dante’s Inferno.

Dante’s Biography

Dante Alighieri lived from 1265-1321. His beloved Florence was a wealthy and powerful city-state. In 286 A.D., the Emperor Diocletian divided the empire into East and West, and then in 323-327, the Emperor of the East, Constantine, accepted Christianity. In 476 AD the western part of the Roman Empire was overrun, and from that time forwards Italy became subject to invasions and disunity. This information helps us understand why Florence, a great center of commerce, was nonetheless wracked by feuding factions. The Ghibellines were generally the feudal and military class allied with the Holy Roman Empire, while the Guelph faction to which Dante’s family belonged were more properly merchants allied with the Popes against the Holy Roman Empire. This second group underwent a split fairly late in its history, with the Black faction being constituted of the nobility who favored the political influence of the Pope, and the White faction (to which Dante’s father belonged) consisting of the bourgeoisie that wanted political independence. Dante served Florence in the office of prior in 1300, and he voted to banish some leaders from among the black and white factions alike, including apparently his own brother-in-law Guido the poet. Next, the black faction conspired with Pope Boniface VIII and some foreigners to oust the white faction. In 1302, Dante was accused of corruption and fined 5000 florins; when he refused to pay, he had to go into exile. He traveled widely afterwards. In 1308, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII brought hope for a political and spiritual renewal, but his expedition failed and he died in 1313. By 1308, Dante had come around to the idea that the pope and the emperor should be powerful but remain in separate spheres. The Protestant Reformation, of course, was a long way in the future, in 1517.

Dante worked on The Divine Comedy from 1308-21, finishing il Paradiso just before he died. Together, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso constitute a comic epic beginning with an invocation to a Muse and involving a great journey from a state of sadness and sinful perplexity to one of joyful comprehension and an ultimate vision of the Celestial Rose. The poet explains God’s design to us as Christian pilgrims. He is privileged to take this imaginative journey thanks to Beatrice Portinari, whom he met in 1274 and who died in 1290, having already married someone else. Nonetheless, Beatrice remains Dante’s Grace, his muse and a divine intercessor, and his testament to her may be found in the poet’s La Vita Nuova.

Canto 1

The first canto is a prologue to The Divine Comedy as a whole. The setting is allegorical and it relates the poet’s spiritual journey in terms of a physical journey down through hell and up through purgatory and finally ascending the realms of heavenly light. The main types of allegory involve abstract concepts such as virtue, historical and political events, and spiritual states. Allegory involves a translation of one sort of descriptive language to another, and is in essence an extended metaphor.

The dark wood or “selva oscura” of the first canto metaphorically renders the darkness and confusion of the poet’s mid-life. It is nighttime when Inferno begins. (When Purgatorio begins it is dawn, and when Paradiso begins it is midday.) As for the journey metaphor, perhaps Dante echoes the thought of the prophet Isaiah: “in the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of the grave” (Isaiah 38:10). The hill Dante tries to climb may signify the path of virtue, while the sunrays may be a metaphor for grace. The beasts that terrify and discourage him may signify the following: the leopard may equate with lust; the lion with pride; and the female wolf with avarice. The reference to the greyhound, I have read, may signify that an emperor will come to deal with the pope and the neglectful Germans, setting the kingdom of Italy to order again.

So far, what we have been seeing is a dream vision, but it will soon become a narrative when Dante's attempt to climb the hill fails. The setting, we might say, is the “horizon of Dante's soul.” Why does the Pilgrim fail in his attempt? Penitence and hope are necessary for salvation, and he doesn’t yet have those things going in his favor. Dante cannot ascend on his own. Still, his tears of repentance and his understanding that he is lost in the wood leads the blessed above to send Virgil down to help. The act of shedding tears sanctifies the project because it indicates remorse. Without grace as one’s muse, poetry is no more than pagan pride, a journey towards literary fame, not salvation. But at the point wherein he shows remorse and honest confusion, Dante becomes an everyman character rather than just a notoriety-seeking poet. Dante's art must accept and obey the divine will, part of which, as we shall see, entails hell itself. The way down will turn out to be the way up towards salvation for this pilgrim, and his difficult poetic task will involve a conquest of the realms of fire and heavenly light.

Canto 2

This canto demonstrates the poet’s readiness to enter the inferno itself. Dante shows us very quickly that his muse will be Beatrice and that what he seeks is more than the traditional power to make a lasting poetic artifact. Like Virgil’s Aeneas, Dante must go to the underworld to learn the will of the gods; he must accept God’s grand teleological design as it manifests itself in space and time. The difficulty is always to align the individual Christian will with God’s plan. (Milton describes the purpose of Paradise Lost as being “to justify the ways of God to men,” and Dante’s poetic allegory becomes an act of accommodation in which spiritual events are likened earthly ones that we may better understand those spiritual events. In Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael and of course Milton the narrator have this task. Here in the present epic, Dante, with an assist from Virgil, will be our guide on this journey.

What is the key to understanding Beatrice? Perhaps this key is an appreciation for the awful gap between God’s love and earthly love. Beatrice, an eternal spirit, does not at first notice Dante’s plight. St. Mary, St. Lucy, and Rachel make up the chain of command through which the at-first distant Beatrice is bidden to help Dante. It is a delegated task, even though her own affections drive her on as well. Her mind has been on heavenly things, and she has to be reminded of the travails of her admirer down below. Once summoned, she warms to the task and serves as an intermediary for God’s grace interceding on Dante’s behalf. To consider the invocation further, there is a question of authority here. Virgil is important, but Beatrice is the central muse: Dante submits to her immediately. Virgil’s pagan muses Dante invokes to help him craft his poem about a powerful set of memories that he wants to transmit to us fellow pilgrims. Virgil is the pagan guide, the master craftsman of the poetic word, the man of reason, who will help Dante encounter the visible things that he must describe. He offers a speculative, meditative path into experience. But only Mary, Lucy, and Beatrice’s Christian faith can sanctify that experience and let Dante come near heaven. As for Dante’s readiness, with the knowledge imparted by Beatrice, the man’s will is now aligned and ready for the trip, even though this willingness will be tested in cantos to come.

Dante must read this terrifying inscription as something other than a message to dead eyes. It is a challenge to confirm the divine will by means of spiritual interpretation.

Canto 3

The inscription over the gates of hell is carved in stone because the damned cannot read any other way than literally. Dante must read this terrifying inscription, too, but not with the dead eyes of the damned. He at first apparently fears that the message is directly addressed to him, but that is not the case. What he needs is faith, not only interpretive reason. Dante is given the chance to interpret the words faithfully as an admonishment, not something that should fill him with despair. Virgil’s explanation proves invaluable in this regard, in spite of the guide’s pagan sensibilities.

At this point we are in the vestibule of hell, the portion that is outside limbo and then hell proper. The canto’s various rebels are here because they did not act at all, not even badly. What is the scene? See line 22 and following: chaos and incomprehension, cacophony and blindness reign. In life, the people now trapped here failed to go in any firm direction. Their frustration is poetic justice: God’s rewards and punishments manifest an artistic dimension here as elsewhere in Inferno; they are not simply strict in accordance with the old adage “an eye for an eye.” Here we see the dead here regimented, marching in a line under a banner. At line 64, we see them abandoned to follow a loathsome bodily cycle in which tears are transformed into worms. This fate repeats the true meaning of what they did when on earth.

Around line 74, we see that the dead are actually eager to cross the river Acheron. Around line 124, divine justice moves within them, changing their fear into desire. Though they desire against their will and curse the day of their birth, we may presume that this eagerness will continue right on through to the Second Death, when both torment for the wicked and delight for the good will become more intense, body and soul reunited.

What exactly is the Primal Love (il primo amore) mentioned above the gates of hell? For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, it would be that force which moves us towards desired objects. God’s universe is orderly. The damned acted on earth with a perverted will, and turned away from God to pursue unworthy, self-centered objects. Free will requires punishment if moral order is to be maintained, and now the damned experience the “primal love” as justice. God’s works of ethical art are certainly above cheap irony; his poetic justice makes the damned pursue their objects eternally, carrying themselves ever farther from him. Their very movements repeat the nature and pattern of their sins, inflecting the divine impulse imparted by a loving God in accordance with their own perverted will.

As for free will, it should follow the direction that God originally imparted to human willpower: to seek the good and ultimately God as one’s object, but the bad pursue base objects. They betray a moral inertia, a denial of the primal love that first moved all creation. Contrast this with the ever-forward movement of the poem, in which Dante finds out directions by indirections, moving ever forward. The pattern seems to be to see, to interpret, to understand, and to move on quickly. He mustn’t look back, or he (and we) will be caught in a trap of pity or nostalgia for the world and the flesh. Free will is always at work, either driving Christian pilgrims up or down, backwards or forwards. This pilgrimage is repeated by everyone, but once only. Finally, a wind overcomes Dante, and he faints. He has a long way to go in accommodating his earthly understanding to the divine justice of God’s plan.

Canto 4

In this canto, Dante enters the state of Limbo wherein reside a number of worthy pagans: Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan. Here, too, are Plato and Socrates, and others. Dante describes himself as the sixth among the great poets named, but in spite of his evident satisfaction at meeting and conversing with the finest of the pagans, he remains somewhat distant from what they represent. See line 103 and following: the pagans desire God only in the sense that they mourn for a rapprochement they have permanently lost. They are solemn and stoical in the face of necessary unhappiness. Reason makes them accept their fate with dignity. Self-sufficiency is still their state, although they now see its inadequacy. Faith, hope, and charity are needed, not only the other cardinal virtues: justice, temperance, courage, and practical wisdom. The basic contrast here is that between reason and faith. So perhaps Dante doesn’t dwell on his conversation with these great pagan intellects because it wouldn’t be good to call his mind, or our minds, back to pagan ways and thoughts. He satisfies himself as a poet and philosopher in conversation with the greats, but wants to move on rapidly and not dwell on the past. That isn’t a luxury given us in The Divine Comedy. Again, see, understand, move on. At the canto’s end, there’s a long list of names, but no further relation, and as the poet informs us, “my ample theme impels me onward so” (145). Ultimately, human culture without God isn’t sufficient.

Canto 5

At the beginning of the canto, we are told that spirits confess their sins, driven to do so by divine justice. Selfish and base individuals are often treated as types rather than as individuals; they are treated uniformly, not with regard to their eccentric qualities. Here, the lustful are buffeted about. In life, they were passionate and pursued perverse objects, so here in the Inferno, directionality turns against them. Prince Paris of Troy is here along with Helen of Sparta, Cleopatra, Semiramis and others.

Francesca and Paolo speak about their love in an almost pagan manner, as if it were something that came upon them at the behest of an external force. This is an error. Like everyone else in this section of the Inferno, they abandoned reason in favor of passion (line 39ff is instructive on this point). Dante is interested in the process whereby the two committed their passionate sin. He shows compassion for them, even as Virgil remains unmoved. The two lovers tell their story quickly because it represents a danger to Dante and his readership. Their sin may be described accurately as that of incontinence, one of the lighter sins which does not involve direct rejection of God but rather a failure to control the movements of one’s will, allowing it to be blown about by unworthy objects. Essentially, as lines 106 and following expound, Paolo and Francesca allowed themselves to be seduced by an Arthurian fable about Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, which fable they accepted on its own terms. As always, the poetic word has a potentially corrupting power, and the Arthurian romances tell of dangerous, illicit passions that cause spiritual agony and drive kingdoms to division; futility besets such romances: strong, heroic characters keep repeating the same mistakes, to their own and others’ ruin.

Canto 6

From lines 7-25, the gluttonous receive their just punishment: they are left in the rain and the stinking, filthy mud, caked in their own excrement. Cerberus seems to be a worm, which seems appropriate to such an insidious place. And around line 64, Dante pities Ciacco, while the latter predicts political turmoil in Florence. Around line 103, Dante asks Virgil what happens to the sinners after they receive their sentence at the second coming. Virgil responds that they become more perfect: soul and body will be reunited and the sinners will be even more perfectly and intensely punished. Their sinful path or state intensifies in the direction away from God that they followed. Everything will become more completely as it was in life: moreover, the terror of the Second Death is transformed into a desire for that death.

Canto 7

From lines 22-31, Dante cannot understand the logic of greed and anger: these errors are a kind of misdirected, irrational activity that denies God’s providence. So now the sinners who made this error are faceless and regimented. All of them seem to be clerics. Around line 76, Dante addresses the concept of Fortune, describing her as God’s executor; Fortuna is neither blind nor random. God’s plan may be inscrutable, but it is rational.

Canto 8

Phlegyas’s story is that because Apollo violated his daughter, the King burned down the god’s temple at Delphi. So his sin is anger, and Apollo punished his pride. As other commentators have said, the two errors are linked in medieval thought.

As for Filippo Argenti, Dante behaves with great anger towards this sinner, which suggests that he is beginning to align his will more firmly with God’s plan. We might refer to Luke 11:23, where Jesus says that people are either for him or against him. Whoever does not gather with him will be scattered. According to Giovanni Boccaccio, this man’s family was responsible for Dante’s exile. But Dante’s anger is not simply a personal matter. Anger may be justified, though the excess of it is a mortal sin—a point that Aquinas makes.

At line 115, Virgil seems to be afraid. This pagan man of reason has courage, justice, temperance, and practical wisdom, but he lacks faith, hope, and charity. In the face of rebel angels who willingly and actively rejected God, divine grace is needed. One cannot reason with such bad angels. By the end of this canto, we are on the edge of an important structural and psychological distinction between incontinence and sins involving willful rejection of God.

Canto 9

This canto dramatizes Christ’s redeeming power over hell. At lines 88-100, a messenger is sent from heaven to assist Virgil and Dante. There is something allegorical perhaps about the meeting, with Virgil representing reason and Dante representing everyman, the Furies equaling a person’s vices, and Medusa despair. In the Harrowing of Hell, Christ demonstrated his power over evil by redeeming certain worthies. Here, Virgil is baffled. In the Aeneid, the Sibyl had said that someone pure of heart could not enter Hades, so her interdiction must be broken. Perhaps Medusa herself (along with the Furies) represents the pagan power that must be crushed. In any case, to move lower in hell, a Christian gesture is required, and the messenger makes that gesture for Dante and Virgil.

Canto 10

This canto is about Florentine corruption and the history of political strife in Dante’s native city. The heretics in burning tombs begin the canto. Epicureans are seen as denying the immortality of the soul; they say that we should eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Or at least that’s the popular interpretation of their doctrine; the doctrine itself is in fact much more sophisticated. There are also typical pagans here, proudly self-reliant.

Farinata, who lived from 1205-64 and favored the Ghibellines, had been involved in Florence’s civil strife, exiling the Guelph party only to be exiled with his own party in 1266. He is a proud man, and romantic critics have seen him as exploding Dante’s ethical universe by his noble and unrepentant bearing, but he shows his breast to signify the seat of pride. He was posthumously condemned in 1283 as an Albigensian heretic who denied the sacrament of the Eucharist. I’ve read that heresy sins against faith, wisdom, and love, and that is what those in this portion of hell have done.

Guido de’ Cavalcanti was a Guelph, and another city father involved in Florentine strife. He is the father of Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s fellow poet and a man whom Dante as Prior voted to exile in 1300. Guido behaves differently than Farinata; he is less noble and less stoic about his fate.

The heretics are nattering negativists who interpret all information that comes their way in the most cynical manner, and they go so far as to make a system of their cynicism. Their self-reliant attitude stands condemned as pride, so they are joined here in the same tomb. By informing them about their progeny and the fortunes of their party, Dante makes things worse for them: their pagan immortality is offended by the information he gives. But around line 79, Farinata, warns Dante of his own White Guelph faction’s exile by a faction extremely favoring Pope Boniface VIII. The damned can see the future, but they cannot see the present, just as in the twilight, one sees distant objects better. But one day time will end, it’s explained, and then all the illuminating power and good of the intellect will shut down for those in hell.

Canto 11

Virgil explains that the bottom three circles of the Inferno consist of the violent and of those who commit fraud, the latter of which is the worst sin. At line 25, Virgil says “fraud is man’s peculiar vice;/God finds it more displeasing—and therefore,/the fraudulent are lower, suffering more.” At line 52 and following, it’s said that the seventh and eighth circles are made up of sinners responsible for “evil in ordinarily conceivable human circumstances: violence, ordinary fraud.” The seventh circle is made up of the violent against themselves, their neighbors, and God. In that circle, the sinners are punished in that order. As for fraud, which is punished in the eighth and ninth circles, the sinners are punished more severely if the fraud they committed involved betrayal of someone who trusted them., as Virgil explains around line 61. Around line 79, Virgil expounds further with reference to Aristotle’s Ethics, which divides people’s dispositions into three fundamental categories: incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality (81-82). Broadly, Dante gets his complex ethical scheme from Aristotle, Cicero, and Thomas Aquinas. Around line 106, Virgil also explains the principle underlying the punishment for usury. This sin involves a violation of nature and art.


The ninth circle consists of those guilty of treachery against those to whom they had special obligations. The devil himself is at the base of hell because he had been favored by God. Brutus, and Cassius were traitors to Julius Caesar. They were traitors to Rome, just as Judas is a traitor against Christ and the Church. All of this is what might be called “bestial malice.” It is beyond the pale, an abuse of special gifts from special hosts. The movement of punishment goes from incontinence to intemperance to bestiality, that is, losing one’s human title willfully: deliberate, even artistic, perversion of a will first set innocently in motion by God.

Canto 12

This section is overseen by the Minotaur and centaurs Chiron and Nessus: creatures who are half human, half animal. As for the Minotaur, he was the son of Pasiphae by a bull; he required young men and maidens to be sacrificed in Crete until Theseus killed him. He was, therefore, the offspring of unnatural lust, or “blind cupidity,” as the text calls it. At line 49, Dante offers his first reaction to this section of lower hell: “blind cupidity and insane anger, / which goad us on so much in our short life, / then steep us in such grief eternally!” He does not interact much with those he sees here in the seventh circle. The moral lesson to be drawn seems to be that the source of violence is cupidity for what is nearest to us. At the end of the canto, Dante comes across greedy tyrants immersed completely in the boiling river of blood. Their lust for gain and land was legendary, but they only conquered those to whom they had no special obligation, so that is why they are in the seventh circle and not even lower. Among such are Alexander the great and Dionysius of Sicily, as we learn at line 106 and following.

Canto 13

In this canto, beginning at line 28, Dante and Virgil come across the suicides and those who squandered their possessions. The first (at line 58) is Pier della Vigna, an assistant to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II who was betrayed by his political enemies, whereupon he committed suicide. Suicide is violence directed towards oneself; it is a casting-off of that which one has been given by God. In Dante’s terms, it amounts to denial of God’s providence. (Judas hanged himself upon a tree, after all.) At lines 93 and following, Pier explains the rationale for the punishment of being trapped in the form of stunted trees: even at the Last Judgment, these suicides will not be allowed to come together as one body and soul; their cast-off bodies will hang on the trees. They tried to flee their bodies, and now body and soul will spend eternity in close, sad proximity in a dark wood were confusion and frustration reign. Such wood imagery is common in the Bible: unproductiveness seems to be the key, as in Jesus’ comment, “Shall figs bring forth thistles?” etc.

Canto 14

At line 61 and following, Virgil rebukes the blasphemer Capaneus, who, while storming ancient Thebes, defied Jove to save it and was struck down by a thunderbolt. As for the Old Man of Crete from lines 106-18, see Daniel 2:32-33, which recounts Nebuchadnezzar’s dream . Some critics have said that we should red the passage as an allegory of the Old Adam, the effects of original sin. The golden head might signify free will, the silver limbs reason corrupted by error, and the bronze part as will undermined by malice. Iron might stand for the irascible appetite subjected to passion, and the tears, of course, as suffering for sins; they trickle down to serve as hell’s transportation channels. (Ovid’s Metamorphoses uses the same basic materials to figure forth the decline of human civilization from a golden age to one of brass, where violence and sin reign.) The statue faces Rome, which may mean that Dante is reminding us about the medieval west’s failure to invest sufficient power in a temporal ruler as opposed to the popes of the day.

Canto 15

Around lines 55 onwards, Dante encounters his old mento Brunetto Latini, also an exile but one who returned to Florence and exercised much influence. He was a theologian, judge, poet, and rhetorician who insisted that the best rhetoric was that joined together with wisdom. I’ve read that Latini was an important political model for Dante, a rhetorician who put his skills at the service of his city-state. His sin is sodomy, whether literally or in some more shadowy sense. Well, it’s an odd moment: the pupil comes across his old instructor. What has he to teach Dante? Well, partly to preserve his honor by staying clear of factions and struggles with places like Fiesole. Dante’s pre-response is, “I stand prepared for Fortune, come what may” (93), and it’s obvious that he has much regard for Latini and his ideals: “you taught me how man makes himself eternal” (85).

Canto 16

This section details with an encounter with certain Florentines. I’ve read that these men were vital 13 th-century members of the Guelph faction favoring civic independence, and rhetoricians like Dante, who needs to leave them behind since he no longer accepts such close links with his countrymen. As for Dante’s concrete descriptive powers, notice the similes around 22 likening earthly things and infernal things. This is an important skill, one that John Milton did well to learn partly from Dante. At lines 64-78, Dante’s anger shows with regard to Florentine corruption.

Canto 17

This is a transitional portion of the text as we are transported down to the level of fraud. At lines 52-73, usurers are punished. They speak very little, concentrating instead intently upon their purses as if they were expecting something magical to happen, something like alchemy. This sin of usury is indeed considered a form of unnatural creation. The heraldic displays on the purses perhaps show excessive concern for petty dynastic matters. From lines 7-28, the monster Geryon used to feed his flock with people he had killed treacherously until Hercules killed him. As Dante travels lower in the Inferno, he will need this kind of untrustworthy “public transportation.” Notice Dante’s fear at the intentions of this fraudulent symbol. Is he going to play a trick on Virgil and Dante? Then he vanishes.

Canto 18

Structurally, the commentaries say, this canto offers a parody of Plato’s counter-circles of the same (outer) and different (inner). The cherubim stand for contemplation and the Seraphim for love; together they communicate God’s first motion to the heavenly bodies. How do we experience God? Franciscans say by means of the charitable will; followers of Aquinas and the Dominicans say intellectual comprehension is key. Dante’s Paradiso deals mainly with this second way. Jason’s sins on earth were destructive and repetitive, though here in the Inferno he puts up a good front.

Canto 19

Dante mentions three Popes: Nicolas III, Boniface VIII, and Clementine V. Apparently, these men dishonored the Church. Dante’s reaction telescopes his progress through the Inferno: he has gone from a shy pilgrim to a prophetic reformer. In Paradise, St. Peter commands Dante to denounce papal corruption—see Canto 27. The donation made by Emperor Constantine to Sylvester I bore many consequences. As for the sin of simony, see Acts 8:9-20, where Simon Magus tried to buy from St. Peter and the Apostle John the gift of imparting the Holy Spirit to the faithful. Similarly, the bad popes purchase and sell sacred orders for selfish gain. The reference around line 109 is to Rome, sometimes called the Whore of Babylon. The church is figured as a bride forced to create illegitimate children, so to speak. The notion is that Constantine’s good intentions produced awful results: he had no right to give what the Church had no right to accept.

Canto 20

Lines 1-30 discuss divination. First they discuss the general art of divination, then the ancient prophetic speakers like Teiresias and others such as Amphiarus, Manto, and Aruns. From lines 58-99, Virgil exhibits unusual presence: he alters his story about the founding of Mantua from the narrative he offered in The Aeneid. His text did not tell the truth there, so here Dante makes Virgil tell the truth here. Virgil rebukes Dante’s pity for the sinners around 25; only the condemned or the dead show any pity here. It is necessary as always that Dante conform his own will to the divine plan. Dante is always aware that texts can lie—he himself is a prophetic figure of sorts who tells us about future things.

Canto 21

Around 46 and following, there is a comic atmosphere that highlights the absurd and the vulgar. The devils seem almost like master chefs here, sticking their prongs in the sinners who emerge from the broth. They even threaten Virgil around 70. Dante is accused of barratry, which is hard to take seriously.

Around 106, one of the Devils tells them the place they seek is down the road a piece; he tries to mislead Virgil and Dante with a precise account of the bridge’s ruin. We shall soon find out that the bridge is no more. Around 127, Dante would prefer to be alone—he does not like the company in this location. It is Virgil who seems rather naïve at this point, not Dante.

Cantos (21-23) offer less moral pronouncement and heavy theology than usual. Benedetto Croce saw The Divine Comedy as a series of brilliant vignettes, and these three cantos make that view sound reasonable within limits. The current Canto may be the main attempt to cut the pilgrims off from salvation by means of obscene, cacophonous chatter and deceit. It seems that barratry is almost inescapable on earth. How does one escape it as a barrier to salvation? A good question would be, how can the text be both serious and comical? To understand this point, we must relate it to the epic’s task as a whole: from a Christian perspective, tragedy might be considered impossible.

Canto 22

Dante is interested in the story of Navarro. Around 97, this man takes advantage of Dante’s curiosity to escape from the Devils who torment him. Around 133, another devil is spoiling for a fight, and anyone will do, so he and yet a third devil become stuck in the mire. The demons in this Canto are like pterodactyls, raucous and competitive. Like the sinners they torment, they are always jockeying for place.

Dante and Virgil are of course both poets who relate fictions. Dante claims for his poetry truth on a higher, spiritual level. He backs up his imaginative scenes with history and invectives against contemporary practices. See what he had said in Canto 16, lines 124-128 about lying. The devils are themselves from fictional sources, so they dramatize the pagan quality of poetry, limited only by the Christian narrator’s restraint. See James 3:6 about speech. He says that the human tongue “inflameth the wheel of our nativity, being set on fire by hell.” Consider also the tower of Babel as a word-monument defying and deferring God’s silence.

Canto 23

Around line 28, Virgil and Dante come to one decision, think alike about how to escape Malebranche. Around 34, the devils go in pursuit of Dante and Virgil, who have been tricked. There is no path along any bridge to the next pouch. So they scramble down an embankment. Virgil’s pagan courage comes in handy at this point, and the devils cannot pursue them beyond the fifth ditch.

Around 61, the hypocrites wear cloaks of lead. They sought advantage while promising to live holy lives. Now the conscience they wore so lightly in life weighs them down unbearably and literally here in the Inferno. God’s poetic justice makes their escapism serve as the basis for a grotesquely literal punishment.

At 109, we meet Caiaphas, who advocated realpolitik and suggested an expedient bargain to trade Christ for peace with the Romans. So here he suffers a blasphemous parody of the crucifixion, in which Christ suffered for all. This is Dante’s pre-Machiavellian condemnation of Machiavellianism. Finally, around 133, one of the friars informs Virgil that the malebranche had lied about that bridge, angering the great poet.

Canto 24

Around 31, Virgil and Dante must make their steep descent alone. Around 46, Virgil admonishes Dante that the poem’s progress is hard going. They must ascend from the ditch where the Devils tried to trap them in order to make their way down words.

At line 97 and following, Vanni Fucci is seized by a serpent and turns to dust; he relives his death without hope for resurrection or salvation. This church robber saw the church as a mere collection of worldly ornaments. Around 144, he predicts that the White Guelph faction will be kicked out of Florence; this will come true in 1301, so Dante must reconcile himself to a long period of exile. I have read that part of the significance of the Phoenix motif refers to the cities of Florence and Pistoia. They will continue to rise and fall according to political events. So in this way, the earthly political struggle is for nothing. Even so, Dante must go on with his own poem, achieving fame so that his readers can follow his path to salvation. He will be a better kind of Phoenix than his own city and, of course, the sinner to whom he has been speaking in this canto. We must have the knowledge of evil that he has promised to give us with much labor since salvation requires an active effort.

Canto 25

Vanni Fucci makes obscene gestures at God at the outset of this section, but the main thing that happens in this canto is the stunning metamorphosis of several sinners, which Dante describes in detail from line 46 onwards. the centaur Cacus (15) appeared in Virgil’s Aeneid; here he is trying to punish Vanni. I have read that he is in this section because he is not simply violent but also fraudulent in that he stole some cattle from Hercules.

Canto 26

Here we find a diatribe against Florence. And Ulysses (Odysseus) suffers because of the Trojan horse trick he played. Ulysses never went home in this version, so Dante is rewriting the Homeric text. Ulysses talks his remaining crew into sailing into the sunset and pursuing knowledge and earthly experience above all else. There are limits to what human experience can do for us in Dante’s Christian scheme, and this Greek is apparently a good emblem for those limitations.

Canto 27

Guido da Montefeltro was a Ghibelline who tried to become an honest friar, but was seduced into crooked statecraft once again by none other than Pope Boniface VIII (pope from 1294-1303), who used him to get at his enemies, even promising him advance absolution for his crimes. Even St. Peter can’t save this fox-like political villain from the clutches of the devil who comes to snatch him away after his death, as Guido tells it.

Cantos 28-29

Here in the Eighth Circle Dante encounters scandal-mongers and schismatics, among them the troubadour poet Bertran de Born and the Prophet Muhammad and his nephew Ali. (It’s doubtful that Dante knew much about Islam, and his perfunctory treatment of the Prophet seems a function of the bad relations between the West and Islam at the time, which was, of course, that of the Crusades.) In Canto 29, Dante and Virgil reach the Tenth Pouch of the Eighth Circle, where they come upon falsifiers of metals—alchemists foremost among them.

Canto 30

Master Adam has dropsy, the disease traditionally associated with avarice and luxury. He cannot even quench his thirst. But he is also a sinner against the body politic because he falsified Florentine coinage—he was a counterfeiter. Unlike the waters of baptism, the water that afflicts him does not purify. Master Adam is the “Old Adam” mentioned by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans 5:12. Sinon is also here because of a societal offense; he brought down the city of Troy with his lies about that famous horse. Fraud is a social offense; the medieval individual is part of and defined by the broader society.

Canto 31

Dante’s aim is to belittle evil, but perhaps that is in itself inadequate. Evil requires interpretation. Vision is dangerous, and faith seems to come by hearing. The atmosphere is significant in this section. The passageway farther down is an interlude—silent and broken only by the sound of trumpets, as well as by the unintelligible babbling of Nimrod. The canto begins with Dante’s mention of an optical illusion which emphasizes the difficulty of adequately describing the worst places in hell. But the effort pays off, and Dante is able to strip away the grandeur of evil, showing it to be almost comic in its stupidity and absurdity. Dante humanizes his Giants, demythologizes them, makes them measurable. See lines 22, 67, 130. Dante certainly confronts the problem of linguistic inadequacy, but on the whole his attitude is one of confidence with regard to that matter.

Canto 32

At lines 1-14, the language theme occurs—how is it possible to find language to describe sinners who tore apart their families and their communities? The individuals mentioned killed kindred and fellow citizens. Dante offers to remember them, thinking that this will be a positive thing, but they don’t want to be remembered at all. Rhetoric cannot help them.

Around lines 88-110, Dante fights with Bocca degli Abati. This man switched sides and turned against the Guelph faction, which led to a massacre at the battle of Montaperti in 1260. Dante threatens him with exposure after he refuses to confess his identity. Finally, he exposes yet another traitor—the pattern we see here is one of endless recrimination.

Around lines 124 and following, we hear about Ugolino, a notorious count from the city of Pisa. He devoured his own children while imprisoned by Archbishop Ruggieri. The ninth circle consists of those who betray family, party, and community, guests and benefactors. These acts sunder all bonds between human beings. But how does the poet represent or imitate such violent self destructiveness? Refer to Amphion’s gentle rhetoric in founding Thebes. That kind of speech builds community, but here Dante is concerned with the disintegration of language and society.

Canto 33

The protagonist ate his own children, just as he devoured his fellow citizens of Pisa. These are interconnected acts of savagery, and now he devours a cleric next to him. Ugolino kept switching sides and made a deal with the Archbishop whose head he now chews on in the Inferno. The Archbishop in turn betrayed him and put him in a tower to starve. So he has gone from betrayal of his party to betrayal of his own family, feasting upon his dead children. The story of devouring one’s own progeny is an ancient one, with its roots in the tale of Atreus’s House and the story of Procne, Philomel, and Tereus.

Around lines 151 and following, Dante plays the role of prophet, condemning the sins of Pisa and Genoa. In addition Branca Doria has been translated down to hell already, even though he is still alive. The point of this seems to be to emphasize the immediacy of Dante’s message that hellfire is real. This is a common technique in sermons.

Canto 34

Here Dante completes his task by making Satan absurd, an isolated, immobile body devoid of soul, and engaged in the punishment of others by way of dead repetition. The point driven home is that sin isolates one from self, kindred, and community, and above all from God. Treachery is a sin of the greatest consequence because it fundamentally violates the social order, and here in Judecca, the base of the Inferno, we come upon Cassius, Judas, and Brutus, all three of whom betrayed a master who trusted and honored them. Here at the end of the first part of Dante’s Divina Commedia, the way down becomes the way up: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” Dante and his guide Virgil, who will be with him until Canto 30 of il Purgatorio, exit hell and are able once again to view the stars.

Week 10, The King James Bible

Notes on Genesis.

Genesis 1-3: The Beginning, the Fall

How powerful the spoken word is in the scriptures! God ‘‘speaks’’ the world into existence, and apparently without any need for raw materials with which to create. His words are acts—no separation between the two, as there is for us. God is somewhat anthropomorphized in Genesis—at times, he sounds like a powerful patriarch who takes issue with the beings he has created. He does not like it when his creatures try to rival him—eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can only lead to eating from the tree of life, and then Adam and Eve might “be as we are.” God begins to regret that he has made the world at all, so sinful are the human beings he made in his image—this is odd in light of later Christian doctrine that God is omniscient and omnipotent; how could such a perfect and transcendent deity “regret” anything? But the Hebrew Bible writers are dealing with God in a dramatic fashion—they have Milton’s task of making pure transcendence and inscrutability talk to us in ways that we can appreciate. What kind of answers or explanations does Genesis give to the huge questions it raises? Well, they are sometimes provocative, and always majestic. Adam and Eve are told to “be fruitful and multiply” (57), and the creation should contain all that it can—”plenitude” and diversity are two great laws of the universe. But why should that be the case? Why should there be something rather than nothing, light instead of darkness, sound and not silence? There really are no answers to such questions—God has simply bid that it should be so, according to Genesis.
The text says that God has made Adam in his image, and there are two overlapping stories of humanity’s creation, it seems: the fuller one in Genesis 2 (pp. 57-58) explains that God first makes Adam from the dust (the name Adam is derived from the Hebrew word for “red clay,” as scholars point out) by breathing life into him. Then God puts Adam to sleep and creates Eve from one of his ribs, to serve (along with the rest of the creation) as a fitting companion for him. A law of hierarchy, as yet gentle enough, binds all creatures from the beginning. God has made mankind in his image, but since he is perfection itself, anything he creates must be less perfect than he is. Apparently to reinforce this principle for Adam and Eve, God plants the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and next to this tree he plants the Tree of Life. The first couple have dominion over everything around them, but not over these two trees. This is simply an interdiction—God does not explain to Adam and Eve why he has made such an interdiction, except to tell them that they will “die” if they disobey. How are we to gloss this act on God’s part? Perhaps we may extrapolate by supposing that God is something like the greatest of romantic poets: the creation is his perpetual poem, and natural process is his “expression.” He has generously given Adam and Eve a chance to help advance the beauty and dignity of his work—they are to tend his garden and take pleasure in the work they do as a way of worshiping him. If, as seems reasonable, they are to draw nearer to the perfect being who has made them in his image, their ascent must be gradual, not sudden. They must not try to usurp God’s place in the hierarchy of the universe by seeking to attain forbidden knowledge. (Incidentally, the text doesn’t say that God has interdicted them from eating of the Tree of Life, though I think it must be implied based on what he says on page 59.) But the serpent, that slippery character “more subtil than any beast of the field” (58), tempts Eve, convincing her that God’s motive is jealousy and stinginess: eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, he says, and “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” This imputation that God is withholding something good from her simply to preserve his own prerogatives, to maintain a distinction between himself and his creation, is very powerful. The text explains that Eve succumbs to the fruit’s apparent deliciousness and its supposed wisdom-giving properties, and completes the Fall by giving Adam some as well. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with innocent curiosity, but that isn’t what Eve shows at the moment of choice: her desire to learn is obviously not accompanied by respect and wonder—it is fundamentally selfish and envious, and flows from what one of my former professors in Renaissance literature calls (in reference to Milton’s retelling of Genesis) a “sense of injured merit” not unlike that of Milton’s Satan himself.

The immediate effect of the fall is described somewhat enigmatically: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (58). As I understand this passage, what was previously the innocent principle of generation—the means whereby all creatures would “be fruitful and multiply,” has become for Adam and Eve something shameful, something to be covered up. Their pride has caused them, in effect, to take God’s generosity for selfishness, and now they construe sexuality the same way, since their understanding has become deranged and darkened. Their being seems shamefully “carnal” to them now, and spirit is no longer at peace with matter and its principle of physical generation. From this point forwards, as God’s stern pronouncements in Genesis 3 make clear, Adam and Eve’s relationship to each other, to their fellow creatures, to the earth itself, and to God will involve difficulty and sorrow: Adam will labor to bring forth his sustenance from an alien, harsh land, and he will “rule over” Eve, who will give birth in pain. And of course, to borrow a line from Milton, they have brought “death into the world.” No longer will they converse pleasantly with God or labor joyfully in his garden amongst their fellow creatures. The laws of life now (as subsequent books in the Bible show) are fearful obedience, painful effort in the face of necessity, cruelty, dishonesty, envy, and misunderstanding with regard to one’s fellows, and dispersion over the earth’s surface: alienation, distortion, derangement.

Genesis 4: The First Murder.

Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but the pattern of sin, which follows an arc of pride, envy, and selfishness, begins with Cain and Abel, their offspring. God doesn’t accept Cain’s offering, presumably because Cain didn’t make it in the right spirit—it makes sense to suppose he offered his gift to God only because he had to, not because he wanted to. As the Bhagavad-Gita later says, one must “act in the spirit of worship” and not be obsessed with getting something from one’s action. Cain hasn’t acted in this selfless or charitable spirit. Then, envious of his brother’s favor with God, Cain kills him without warning and impudently responds to God’s outraged questioning, “am I my brother’s keeper?” As a consequence of his deed, Cain will feel still more deeply than Adam and Eve a sense of alienation from his fellow beings and from the land: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (60). But as a consolation to Cain, who fears that now he will be marked for death as an outlaw, God preserves his life by declaring that “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Apparently, then, one human being may not use the wrongs done by another to justify further wrongdoing. As God’s phrase from Deuteronomy goes, “ To me belongeth vengeance and recompence” (32:35).

Genesis 6-9: The Flood.

Noah earns God’s remembrance because of his goodness, and is spared from general destruction in the Flood. In Genesis 9, God sets his “bow in the cloud,” he says, as a “token of a covenant between me and the earth” (63). The covenant amounts to a promise that God will never again destroy the earth by flood. Why does he make this concession? Well, in Genesis 8 God had accepted Noah’s burnt offerings and decided that since “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (pg. 62), there is no point in destroying such wayward children altogether. To me, it seems as if we are to understand from this declaration that God finds it appropriate to be merciful with human weakness, and to show pity for the world that weakness has deranged—the covenant, after all, is not only for human beings; it is for “every living creature of all flesh” (63). But there is genuine sternness in these chapters of Genesis, too: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man” (62). Then, too, God’s description in Genesis 9 of what “dominion” over the animals means is revealing: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.” Evidently, within the limits prescribed by God, there is to be much harshness, much strict justice between man and man, and men will rule the animal kingdom by fear and brute force.

Genesis 11: The Origin of Languages.

In this chapter, human beings again try to rival God; they obey their own desires and set themselves up as proprietors of a divided or rival empire, as evidenced by the building of the Tower of Babel. Here, God discerns that the best way to punish such impiousness is to “confound” the builders’ speech, making it impossible for them to join easily in such nefarious enterprises as raising a building almost to the heavens. The Tower is the first skyscraper. An already self-limited human capacity for learning and understanding will be further limited by the diversification of signifying systems and by physical dispersal across the earth. As the Bible stresses again and again, human language is a fallen instrument, and, in the language of King James I’s day, human combination is apt to be taken as “murmuring against the king”: society breeds an arrogant presumption of self-sufficiency and autonomy far beyond what simple exercise of free will dictates.

Genesis 22: Abraham and Isaac.

God puts Abraham’s faith to the test in this chapter, requiring him to offering his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice. On the one hand, Genesis 22 reinforces the painful lesson that after the fall, everything is forfeit to God and man can find security in little or nothing: Abraham must be willing to sacrifice even his own son to prove his faith in the Lord. But again, because Abraham is willing to act—because he acts in the right spirit, however troubling the command is to him—he finds mercy in God’s sight. What has not been withheld will be returned manyfold: God promises Abraham, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed…” (64). It’s easy to see why Christian tradition has read this chapter typologically, with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his “lamb,” serving as a prefiguration of God’s willingness to send “his only begotten son” to atone for mankind’s sins.

Genesis 25, 27: Jacob and Esau.

It seems that God’s providential design justifies considerable “trickery,” as we might call it, amongst the descendants of Adam and Eve: the human order of things must be rearranged sometimes to suit God’s plan. If God requires it, the youngest son must use deceit to take on the powers of the eldest son. Jacob (his mother Rebekah’s favorite) tricks his elder brother Esau into giving up his birthright for some “red pottage” (65). And what Esau has, as the text puts the case, “despised,” Jacob will now secure by tricking old father Isaac (son of Abraham) into bestowing the blessing of the first-born upon him. The plan comes off well, and the blessing, which involves exercising dominion over brethren and even nations, is duly given. This blessing, once given, cannot be retracted, so we can understand Isaac’s feelings about what has happened. But to Esau, too, Isaac offers comfort: he will serve his younger brother, but the servitude will not last forever. In Genesis, Jacob and Esau are reconciled. Jacob’s twelve sons (Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issachar, Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, Zebulun) will become the twelve tribes of Israel, while Esau’s descendants are said to be the founders of the Kingdom of Edom, a kingdom with which, later on, Kings Saul and then David will clash. See Wikipedia’s entry on the Twelve Tribes and the Edomites. Jacob himself has much service to do—he ends up serving Laban for fourteen years to gain the hand of Rachel, and six years for his stock of cattle. He is renamed “ Israel” after wrestling with an angel in Genesis 32, and is of course the father of Joseph, hero of our next selection.

Genesis 37, 39-46: The Story of Joseph.

Joseph is Jacob/Israel’s son by Rachel, and is possessed not only of a “coat of many colors” given to him by his now elderly father but also the gift of prophetic dreams and the interpretation thereof. One of those dreams gets him in dire trouble with his brothers, since in it, Joseph says, “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me” (pg. 67, Genesis 37). Only Reuben’s fearful counsel keeps them from killing him outright, and they sell him to the Ishmaelites, who in turn bring him to Egypt , where Pharaoh’s servant Potiphar buys him. Joseph’s powers of interpretation result in his being rescued from the prison where he was sent thanks to the scheming of Potiphar’s wife (whose sexual advances he refused), and Pharaoh is so impressed with Joseph that he makes him all but a co-ruler. As almost always seems to be the case, a gift that places someone in close contact with the divine comes at great risk and cost: insight must be “paid for,” so to speak. When Joseph’s brethren are sent by their father to seek out some wheat (“corn”) during years of famine, the now powerful dweller in Egypt first pays them back for their cruel treatment of him, but then reconciles with them, showing remarkable generosity and inviting them all, along with the youngest son Benjamin and old Israel (Jacob) to come to Egypt and live there. Israel has been promised by God that his children will constitute “a great nation,” and with this faith he enters Egypt. He will live and die there, and so will Joseph. The departure from Egypt and from the clutches of Pharaoh, of course, will only occur when Moses comes to maturity; the story of Moses is told in Exodus.

Notes on Exodus

Moses. His strength from obscurity and peril. Pitied by an Egyptian. But also his limitations—the need to get the people to shoulder their own burdens in accordance with laws.

The Children of Israel. They need almost continual reassurance by means of heavenly signs and material benefits. When things go badly, they question Moses to the point of exasperation. These “murmurers” must be given guidance so that they may shoulder their own share of responsibility and live with piety and regularity. Ritual and law will be vital to them.

Pharaoh . The very pattern of a wicked, hard-hearted, selfish ruler. Excessive cruelty, dishonest. He doesn’t observe the wider patterns of things or pay attention to the true significance of signs and wonders. He keeps resetting to the “default” settings of fallen humanity. He is a figure of frustration, his autonomy mocked. Pharaoh is a bit-part actor in a pageant scripted by God, with Moses taking the part of the unlikely leading man.

God. Demands recognition and loyalty. He is processively on display in the first part of Exodus, using Pharaoh’s depravity to reveal his own power. Once the miracles have been done, he gives laws—patterns by which the Israelites may govern themselves and respect him.

Chapters 1-2. Moses’ birth and development into a courageous young champion of oppressed Israel.these first couple of chapters show the simplicity and strength of Moses. He is born in perilous circumstances and his birth is something of a secret; God seems to like agents of that kind. He is born to a son of the house of Levi to a daughter of that same house, and he must be spirited away to avoid the fate prepared for him and other Israelite children by the Egyptian king, who has become worried about how strong the Israelites are becoming in Egypt. Note the parallel to Jesus’s birth-circumstances. Moses grows up to be a courageous young man, and is rewarded for standing up to certain shepherds who tried to interfere with the daughters of a local priest when they were drawing water from a well. The reward is the daughter or rather a daughter of this priest. When the first mentioned King of Egypt dies, God remembers “his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”

Chapters 3-6. In the third chapter, God calls upon Moses to take up his role as leader: an angel of the Lord appears to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.” God announces that he has heard the suffering of his people in Egypt and that he will deliver them. Moses is given to understand that he is the one chosen to help God, and at first expresses uncertainty. In Chapter 4, Verse 14, God provides his famous answer: “I am that I am.” Moses is told to say to the Egyptian king that he wants to go out and sacrifice to his own God. God points out that he is quite certain the King will not allow this, so he will help the King along, so to speak, by demonstrating his great power. The people of Israel will triumph over the Egyptians who have kept them in bondage for more than four centuries. In the fourth chapter, Moses is still dubious about his central role in all this, so God calls forth his magic in the form of Moses’s rod. He also points out that Aaron, Moses’s brother and a priest, will serve as his assistant and will speak eloquently for Moses. The elders are informed of the plan God has set forth, to which they agree. In the fifth chapter, Moses tells the King that his people must go into the desert and sacrifice to Jehovah, but the King is scornful and tells them to get back to work, and he lays even greater burdens upon them. The chief people among the Israelites begin to complain to Moses, and in turn, Moses complains to God directly: “Neither hast thou delivered thy people at all.” In the sixth chapter, when frustration ensues, God gives a firm promise rooted in previous assurances to the Chosen People: “ye shall know that I am the Lord your God.”

Chapters 7-10. God strikes Egypt with several plagues, but each time Pharaoh takes back his reluctant promises to let Israel go and sacrifice to their god. In the seventh chapter, Moses goes back to the Pharaoh, and again there is a test of wills: Aaron casts down the his staff, and it becomes a serpent; when the Egyptian priests do the same, Aaron’s serpent devours theirs. The Pharaoh is warned as he is bathing that he must either “Let my people go,” or the river will turn to blood. When he fails to listen, that is exactly what happens, and the fish die, and the water becomes undrinkable. This blight continues for seven days. In the eighth chapter, further plagues follow: frogs, lice, flies. The Pharaoh at first promises to let the Israelites go, but the pattern of pride and deception continues when he hardens his heart against mercy. In the ninth chapter, Egypt suffers still more plagues: a terrible cattle disease hailstones. God announces his determination that “my name may be declared throughout all the earth.” Only the children of Israel do not suffer from these plagues. At the end of the chapter, the Pharaoh almost seems to understand that he has done wrong, but as usual this insight dies upon his tongue. In the 10 th chapter, still more plagues: locusts ravage the land, and darkness for three days terrifies the people. But again, there is light and health for the Israelites in the midst of sorrow. The Pharaoh emphatically wishes the Israelites gone once and for all, and tells them to depart his kingdom, though he will only allow this under further compulsion.

Chapters 11-12. God brings down his “one plague more”: the killing of the firstborn of all living things in Egypt. He warns Moses, who, in the 11 th chapter, prepares Israel’s households for this ordeal. They are to follow certain ritual prescriptions, eating unleavened bread for seven days and so forth, and, most importantly, killing a lamb whose blood above their doors will warn God not to strike their firstborn. The Egyptians’ first born all die, and Israel spoils the people and departs Egypt, driven out by the distraught Pharaoh in no uncertain terms.

Chapters 13-14. God prescribes the Passover commemoration in the 13 th chapter, and makes Moses lead the people through the Red Sea’s wilderness rather than directly. The reason for this is that he wants them to avoid the Philistines who are at war, lest the Israelites lose heart and decide to return to Egypt. In the 14 th chapter, the people complain, but God commands Moses to raise his staff and part the Red Sea. When Pharaoh’s army tries to follow the people of Israel through the path that has been opened, God overturns their chariots and destroys them utterly. This is the culmination of the great pageant of God’s triumph. He has demonstrated his infinite power over a prideful King who would set himself up as a rival order autonomous from God. This king followed no law but his own wicked heart.

Chapters 15-17. Celebration gives way to complaint in the desert since there is no water to drink. But God makes a pact with the children of Israel that if they will follow his ways, his laws, he will provide. And he does—they come to a place where they find “twelve wells of water.” In the 16 th chapter, God continues to assist them, providing manna, which he will continue to do for the Israelites’ forty years of wandering. The people do not exactly followed God’s orders to the letter in gathering and eating this heavenly food, and he expresses his disappointment in them. In the 17 th chapter, the Israelites are again complaining about water, so God instructs Moses to strike a rock, which will then gush water. Next, Amalek and his army are defeated by Joshua while Moses, with some assistance, keeps his arms raised to ensure an Israelite victory. The message is clear: Israel will be remembered, but its enemies obliterated.

Chapter 18. Moses’s father-in-law Jethro comes to him and rejoices, accepting God. When he sees Moses trying to be the sole judge among his people, he advises him that a little delegation goes a long way: let able judges deal with the smaller cases, while Moses should settle only the major ones. There must be division of powers and responsibilities—one man alone cannot do everything.

Chapters 19-20. The Israelites enter the Sinai Desert. Moses is made to understand that he must prepare his people for the great event to come: the descent of God from the sky down to Mount Sinai. The people must remain within boundaries set for them, at the base of the mountain. Only Moses and Aaron will meet with God directly on the mountain. God delivers the Ten Commandments, after which the thundering awesomess of God makes the people afraid, and they ask Moses to speak to them rather than allow God to speak to them. The Commandments are as follows:

1. No other gods must be worshiped.

2. No graven images of God or of anything in heaven or beneath the earth.

3. No taking God’s name in vain.

4. No working on the Sabbath.

5. Parents must be honored.

6. No killing.

7. No adultery.

8. No stealing.

9. No lying, i.e. “bearing false witness.”

10. No coveting others’ goods, loved ones, or servants: avoid greed and envy.

The very fact that these things must be explicitly forbidden tells us that people had become very bad indeed; this strict governance is part of the deal to contain the effects of the Fall. It is both part of the punishment God laid out in Genesis, and a consolation: live by His laws and honor Him, and in turn you will be honored by the Lord; that’s the promise. And we notice that magnificent as Moses is, the Commandments are aimed at each person in the tribes of Israel. Moses is not all powerful; he is not Pharaoh (who keeps up that pretense of omnipotence).

Final things—much of the rest of the chapter consists in building the sacred Ark of the Covenant to house the remnants of God’s miracles employed in his rescue of Israel from Egyptian bondage. This ark will go before them, protected by God as they wander in the desert for forty years. Also Moses’ breaking of the original Tablets with the Ten Commandments because the people are disobeying, and then God renews the Tablets.

Notes on Job.

From the outset, we are told that Job is a “perfect and upright” man, yet God will use this good man to demonstrate to a scoffing Satan the perfection of his order and the loving obedience of his servants. (Satan is not the devil of the New Testament; rather, he is an accusing or adversarial angel amongst God’s council; see the Wikipedia entry on Satan.) Satan sees a fine chance to show that God is mistaken: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” he asks, meaning evidently that Job only obeys and loves God because as yet he has no reason to do otherwise. He has a good, rich life—what is there to be afraid of? Satan’s claim is that once Job suffers a genuine setback in his fortunes, he will hold God in contempt and curse him to his face. But Job responds eloquently to both the first phase (loss of kindred and goods) and the second phase (loss of bodily soundness) of his trial. Satan has lost his wager, but the text has much more to do than prove Satan’s incorrectness.

Job’s wife tempts him to “curse God and die,” and his friends, after keeping a seven-day vigil with him, beset him with additional foolish advice. In essence, their counsel follows from the notion that one’s earthly fortunes can be linked directly to the morality or immorality of one’s conduct. In other words, life is a matter of reward and punishment, and nothing else. How does Job process what has happened to him? He prays for death, the great leveler of men and silencer of troubles. This “death” doesn’t seem to entail an afterlife; Job simply wishes to cease existing altogether, and thereby to find peace. He knows in his heart that he is not guilty of what his accusers say he is: “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.” He never took his good fortune for granted or puffed himself up with pride on account of it. He is not a self-aggrandizer, a miser, or anything of the sort. So far as he is able to discern, he has been genuinely righteous and has never ceased to praise God for his blessings, and he won’t be so hypocritical as to pretend that he understands why he is suffering now. (The knowledge of God’s wager is denied to him—it is known only to us, the readers. But of course, the notion of a wager that causes such suffering is hardly a sufficient justification by any reasonable human standards. We would not easily pardon another human being if he or she did to us what God has allowed Satan to do to Job.)

Eliphaz picks up on Job’s refusal to accept the charge of iniquity, and urges him to embrace his troubles as the “correction” necessary to purify him. But Job again prays for death instead, pointing out that Eliphaz’s logic is a “pit” into which he will not fall. There is no correspondence between earthly prosperity and moral rectitude, and his own anguished soul tells him that such explanations are brutally insufficient and cruel.

Because Job’s “days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope” (82 top), he will not keep silent. He will take this one brief chance to voice his anguish and uncertainty. His complaint is not petty: Job demands to know why an infinitely magnificent and powerful God would bother raining trouble and confusion down on a poor servant like Job. What is the point of such contention between God and man? Contention implies the acknowledgment of a relationship, however unequal. We notice, too, that on these pages Job pleads neither perfection nor the virtue of patience: “If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse…. If I say, I will forget my complaint … I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent” (83). His one need is that God should enter into a conversation with him, should declare himself and explain why he has done such things to a mere mortal: “I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me” (83.10).

Job insists on attending to the problem of his relationship with a divinity with whom he can find no commensurateness, no manner of accommodation or understanding. This “desire to reason with God” (85.13) does not stem from stupidity or arrogance. To his friends he says, “I have understanding as well as you” (85.12). He understands the basis of their explanation, and he knows that God will do as God wills. But by this point in the text, Job’s conversation is turned away from his friends and towards God, to whom again he addresses questions such as “why do you insist on troubling me? what have I done?” His desire is that God should declare himself and enter into dialog with him. Job’s spiritual turmoil (caused by suffering and by uncertainty about the great question, “Why?”) is intolerable, so the dialog for which he asks is a necessity for him.
Job searches his heart—has he in fact done something wrong, or even something right in the wrong spirit? No, he is unable to accuse himself honestly. With one further plea that God will “remember” him and speak with him, “The words of Job are ended” (89). He will not accuse God of unrighteousness or curse him, but neither will he condemn himself. At last, God declares himself from what me may presume is the perfect calm within the chaos of a deafening whirlwind, telling Job, “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me” (89.38). What follows is more a series of clarifying questions than a full conversation.

All of the questions God poses declare and demonstrate his own sublimity. It is from such language that William Blake probably borrowed when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!” Like Krishna in The Bhagavad-Gita, the God of the Hebrews deigns to “put on his terrors” for a time. He made Leviathan (on whose subsequent career see Revelations) and Behemoth, and he is behind the tremendous power of all natural processes on earth and all celestial forces in heaven. This “Unmoved Mover,” as Christian theologians (following Aristotle’s older terminology) will call him, seems annoyed with Job, who “darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge” (89.38).

Job’s best response is to say, “Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” He has seen God, at least to some penultimate degree, and the vision leads him to declare, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (92.42). Divine and human understanding are not commensurate: apparently, that is what dialog with God teaches us. But “that” turns out to be enough: Job prays for his misguided friends, and God decides to reward him and restore him to great wealth and status. Job’s soul-searching and then his conversation with God have demonstrated a necessary spiritual process: the man may not have been able to understand God fully, but nobody can do that anyhow. He has at least refrained from presuming or cursing, and his questions are not hypocritical or timid, but honest. It seems that God appreciates Job’s honest questioning. Ultimately, the text seems to identify a need for mystery and wonder, and for prayer, as the essence of religiosity. The system of reward and punishment one can find elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures ( Deuteronomy, for example) seems less important than these things. On the whole, Job promotes the principle of a divine order than transcends anything possible to conceive in human terms, not the principle of a divine order that somehow corresponds with human ways of understanding order. The great value of the first-mentioned principle, of course, is that it draws humanity out of itself, and sets it on a course towards greater spiritual effort and understanding; it preaches self-transcendence, and perhaps even something like what in Eastern philosophy (Hinduism and Buddhism in particular) we might call “creative self-annihilation.” There is some difference to be noted, in that Job’s offering up of his old self restores him to an even more rooted sense of personhood, so to speak. With regard to the Eastern texts it might be more correct to suppose that the annihilation of self is meant to rid us permanently of such notions as “personhood” altogether.