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.