2 The “Inferno”
Cantos I. and II.—At break of day on Good Friday, Dante, in his thirty-fifth year, after a night of agonised wanderings, would fain issue from the dark wood into which he has, as it were in slumber, strayed. This tangled forest represents at once his own unworthy life and the corruption of human society; both the “sin of the speaker” (§ 28) and the “state of misery of those living in this life” (§ 15) of the Epistle to Can Grande. He would climb the “mountain of delight” which, for the individual, represents the state of felicity, and, for mankind in general, the goal of civilisation; mystically, it is the mountain of the Lord, to which only the innocent in hands and the clean of heart shall ascend. But he is impeded by a swift and beautiful leopard; terrified by a lion; driven back by a hideous she-wolf. The three beasts are derived from Jeremiah (v. 6), where they stand for the judgments to fall upon the people for their sins; here they symbolise the chief vices that keep man from the felicity for which he is born (Conv. iv. 4): Luxury in its mediaeval sense of Lust, Pride, Avarice or Cupidity in its widest meaning. The comparatively modern interpretation which would see in the beasts the three great Guelf powers that opposed the Empire—the republic of Florence, the royal house of France, the secular power of the Papacy—is now generally discarded.
From this peril Dante is delivered by the spirit of Virgil, who bids him take another way. The power of the wolf will extend until the Veltro or greyhound comes, who will deliver Italy and hunt the wolf back to Hell. The advent of this Deliverer is mysteriously announced (Inf. i. 100-111), and seems to be repeated in other forms at intervals throughout the poem (Purg. xx. 10-15, xxxiii. 37-45; Par. xxvii. 61-63). There can be little doubt that Virgil refers to a future Emperor, who shall re-establish the imperial power and make Roman law obeyed throughout the world, extirpate greed, bring about and preserve universal peace in a restored unity of civilisation. His mission will be the realisation of the ideals of the Monarchia, and will work the salvation of Italy who will be restored to her former leadership among the nations. At the same time, there may possibly be a remoter reference to the second coming of Christ. This double prophecy would have a certain fitness upon the lips of Virgil, who was believed to have sung mystically of the first coming of Christ in the fourth Eclogue (cf. Purg. xxii. 64-73), as well as of the foundation of Rome and her Empire in the Aeneid. It has frequently been supposed that Dante identified the Veltro with some definite person; of the various claimants to this honour Can Grande della Scala is, perhaps, the least improbable. In any case, whatever the nationality of the deliverer, the Empire of Dante’s dream was, in fact as well as name, Roman (cf. Epist. v.).
Human Philosophy can lead man from moral unworthiness and guide him to temporal felicity; there are judgments of God to which human reason can attain. Therefore Virgil will guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory, that he may understand the nature of sin and the need of penance to fill up the void in the moral order; after which a worthier soul will lead him to Paradise and the contemplation of celestial things. Dante’s sense of unworthiness keeps him back, until he learns that Virgil is but the emissary of Beatrice, to whom in turn Lucia (St. Lucy) has been sent to Dante’s aid by a noble Lady in Heaven—evidently the Blessed Virgin Mary, who may not be named in Hell, and who symbolises Divine Mercy, as Lucia does illuminating Grace. Thus encouraged, Dante follows his guide and master upon “the arduous and rugged way.” Aeneas had been vouchsafed his descent to the shades to learn things that were the cause of the foundation of the Empire and the establishment of the Papacy (Inf. ii. 20-27); Dante shall learn things which may prepare men’s hearts for the restoration of the imperial throne, and the cleansing of the papal mantle from the mire of temporal things. St. Paul was caught up into paradise “to bring confirmation to that faith which is the beginning of the way of salvation” (ibid. 29-30); Dante shall follow him to lead men back to the purity of that faith, from which they have wandered.
Ante-Hell.—It is nightfall on Good Friday when Dante reads the terrible inscription on the infernal portal (Inf. iii. 1-9): “Leave all hope, ye that enter.” The sense of the whole inscription is hard to him, but Virgil gently leads him in. In the dark plain of Ante-Hell, disdained alike by Mercy and by Justice, are those “who lived without blame and without praise,” mingled with the Angels who kept neutral between God and Lucifer. Here the pusillanimous, who, taking no side in the struggle between good and evil, would follow no standard on earth, now rush for all eternity after a banner, “which whirling ran so quickly that it seemed to scorn all pause.” Further on towards the centre, flowing round the mouth of Hell itself, is Acheron; where the souls of the lost assemble, and are conveyed across by Charon in his boat. Unconsciously borne across, Dante with Virgil now stands on the verge of the abyss, hearkening to the gathering thunder of endless wailings.
Structure and Moral Topography of Hell.—Hell is a vast pit or funnel piercing down to the centre of the earth, formed when Lucifer and his Angels were hurled down from Heaven. It lies beneath the inhabited world, whose centre is Jerusalem and Mount Calvary; its base towards the surface, and its apex at the centre. It is divided into nine concentric circles, the lower of which are separated by immense precipices—circles which grow more narrow in circumference, more intense and horrible in suffering, until the last is reached where Lucifer is fixed in the ice at the earth’s centre, at the furthest point from God, buried below Jerusalem, where his power was overthrown on the Cross (cf. Inf. xxxiv. 106-126).
“There are two elements in sin,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas: “the conversion to a perishable good, which is the material element in sin; and the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the formal and completing element of sin.” In Dante’s Purgatory the material element is purged away. In his Hell sin is considered mainly on the side of this formal element, its aversion from the Supreme Good; and its enormity is revealed in the hideousness of its effects. The ethical system of the Inferno, as set forth in Canto xi., combines Aristotle’s threefold division of “dispositions” opposed to mortality into Incontinence, Bestiality, Malice (Ethics vii. 1), with Cicero’s distinction of the two ways by which injury is done as Violence and Fraud (De Officiis i. 13). Dante equates the Aristotelian Bestiality and Malice with the Ciceronian Violence and Fraud respectively. Thus there is the upper Hell of sins proceeding from the irrational part of the soul, divided into five circles. The lower Hell of Bestiality and Malice is the terrible city of Dis, the true kingdom of Lucifer, in which, after the intermediate sixth circle, come three great circles, each divided into a number of sub-divisions, and each separated by a chasm from the one above; the seventh circle of Violence and Bestiality; followed by two circles of Malice—the eighth of simple fraud, and the ninth of treachery. There is some doubt as to how far Dante further equates this division with the seven capital sins recognized by the Church. Although actual deeds are considered in Hell, rather than the sinful propensities which lead to them, it seems plausible to recognise in Incontinence the five lesser capital sins: Luxury, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth (though the treatment of this vice in the Inferno is questionable), and Anger; and to regard the whole of the three circles of the city of Dis as proceeding from and being the visible effects of Envy and Pride, the sins proper to devils according to St. Thomas—seen in their supreme degree in him whose pride made him rebel against his Maker, and whose envy brought death into the world. As an alternative, it may be held that Dante began the Inferno with the intention of basing its ethical system upon the seven capital sins, but abandoned it in favour of a more ample treatment, and that the earlier design has been preserved only in the passage through the upper circles.31
Limbo.—In “the first circle that girds the abyss,” Dante sees in Limbo the unbaptised children and the virtuous heathen; without hope, they live in desire; free from physical torment, they suffer the pain of loss. Here Dante differs from Aquinas, who distinguishes the Limbo of the Fathers from the Limbo of the Infants, and who represents unbaptised children as not grieving at all for the loss of the Beatific Vision, but rather rejoicing in natural perfection and a certain participation of the Divine Goodness. The example of Rhipeus in the Paradiso shows that Dante could have saved any of the ancients whom he chose, without any violence to his creed. “Any one,” says Aquinas, “can prepare himself for having faith through what is in natural reason; whence it is said that, if any one who is born in barbarous nations doth what lieth in him, God will reveal to him what is necessary for salvation, either by internal inspiration or by sending a teacher.” The reception of Dante by the five great classical poets as sixth in their company is his own affirmation of poetical succession; for the first time a poet in modern vernacular has attained equality with the masters of antiquity who “wrote poetry with regulated speech and art” (V. E. ii. 4). With them he enters the noble castle of Fame, from which the light of wisdom shone upon the pagan world; within are all the wise and virtuous spirits of antiquity, even Aristotle, “the master of those who know,” whose philosophical authority is for Dante supreme (Inf. iv. 131). Here, too, are certain moderns that “worshipped not God aright”; the Saladin, and Averroës “who made the great comment.”
Upper Hell.—Out of Limbo Dante and Virgil descend into the darkness of the second circle, where the carnal sinners are whirled round and round, “through the nether storm-eddying winds.” At its entrance snarls Minos, a type of the sinner’s disordered and terrified conception of Divine Justice. The Virgilian “Mourning Fields” of the martyrs of love are transformed into a region of active torment, and when, in a lull in the storm, Francesca da Rimini pours forth her piteous story in lines of ineffable pathos, the colouring becomes that of Arthurian romance (Inf. v.). Down again through the third circle of putrid rain and snow, where Cerberus (like the other hellish torturers, merely the effect of the sin, and the sinner’s own creation) tortures the gluttonous (Inf. vi.), and the fourth, where Plutus, demon god of wealth, guards the avaricious and prodigal butting at each other for all eternity, Dante is led to the dark waters of Styx, shortly after midnight, as Friday is passing into the early hours of Saturday (Inf. vii. 97-99). The marsh of Styx represents the fifth circle. Fixed in the slime below are souls, made visible only by the bubbles from their sighs: “Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun, carrying heavy fumes within our hearts: now lie we sullen here in the black mire” (Inf. vii. 121-124). These souls are usually identified as the accidiosi, or slothful. The material element in Sloth is lack of charity; the formal element is sadness, the sadness which takes away the spiritual life and withdraws the mind from the Divine Good. Some commentators think that the slothful are placed in the Ante-Hell, and that these sad souls are those guilty of sullen or sulky anger, in contrast to the violent anger of those fiercer spirits who, naked and miry, are rending each other on the surface of the marsh, over which the poets are ferried by Phlegyas, the boatman of Dis, as Charon of Upper Hell. The Florentine, Filippo Argenti, who bandies bitter words with Dante during the passage, connects Anger with Pride (Inf. viii. 46) and with Bestiality (ibid. 62-63). As Anger leads to violence and fraud for the sake of vengeance, so Phlegyas conveys them to the entrance of the city of Dis, glowing red with eternal fire.
The City of Dis.—The gate of the city is defended by fiends, while the Furies appear upon the turrets, girt with greenest hydras and with serpents for hair, calling upon Medusa to come and turn Dante to stone. The Furies are symbols of hopeless remorse, and Medusa of the despair which renders repentance impossible. “A guilty deed is the death of the soul; but to despair is to go down into Hell” (St. Isidore, cf. Virgil’s words to Dante, Inf. ix. 55-57). Virgil can guard Dante from her, but he cannot open the gates; for the city of Dis is the mediaeval counterpart of the Virgilian Tartarus, through which the Sibyl could not lead Aeneas. With the sound of mighty tempest a messenger of Heaven passes the Styx with dry feet, and opens the portal with a little rod; he is a figure drawn from Mercury in the Aeneid (iv.), but here transformed to an Angel, akin to those two terrible beings who summon the dead to rise in Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment.32 Within the gate, round the circuit of the walls and at the same level as the last circle, the sixth circle confines the Heretics and Epicureans in burning tombs. They seem to hold this intermediate position in accordance with the teaching of St. Thomas that Infidelity, if reduced to one of the capital sins, must be regarded as arising from Pride, but may come also from cupidity or some fleshly illusion; and, in a passage in the Convivio (ii. 9), Dante appears to reduce one form of Heresy to bestialitade. Farinata degli Uberti, the Ghibelline hero of Montaperti, heroic even in Hell, rises to address his fellow countryman; and, from the same blazing sepulchre, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, fondly believing that it is height of genius alone that leads Dante thus scathless through this blind prison, seeks vainly to see his own Guido with him. Emperor and Pope should lead man to blessedness; but Frederick II. and Pope Anastasius are buried here with the rest (Inf. x. 119, xi. 8). The horrible stench that rises from the abyss forces Dante to delay his descent; and, in the pause, Virgil explains the moral structure of Hell, equating the Ciceronian with the Aristotelian division of vice (Inf. xi.), as already indicated, and adding a special explanation of how Usury, the breeding of money from money, is a sin against nature, and violence against the Diety.
Seventh Circle.—They descend the precipice into the seventh circle, at the entrance to which the Minotaur, emblem of Violence and Bestiality, gnaws himself in bestial rage, on the top of the ruin formed by the earthquake when the Redeemer entered Hell. Since we are now within the Devil’s city, fiends begin to appear as torturers, but in this seventh circle they take bestial forms, or forms which are half-bestial and half-human. There are three rounds in this circle. In the first, Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood, the violent against others are immersed to varying depths, and tormented by the Centaurs (Inf. xii.). Murderers and tyrants are here; and Benvenuto supposes that the Centaurs are types of their own hireling soldiers, the instruments of their cruelty upon earth. In the second round, the violent against themselves (Inf. xiii.) are punished in the pathless wood of the Harpies; the suicides, imprisoned in trees and preyed upon by these monsters, are regarded as bestial sinners, because, properly speaking, a man cannot hate himself; the destroyers of their own substance, similarly considered, are hunted by black hell-dogs. Yet in this round is one of the noblest souls in the Inferno, Piero della Vigna, still defending the memory of the imperial master who caused his death. Enclosed by the wood is a third round, the burning plain (Inf. xiv.), where the violent against God are subjected to a slow rain of dilated flakes of fire. Capaneus, the typical blasphemer, is tortured even more by his own fury than by the flaming shower. It is in this round that Dante learns what Virgil tells him is the most notable thing he has yet seen in his pilgrimage (Inf. xiv. 88): the infernal rivers are produced by the tears and sins of all human generations since the golden age, and flow from rock to rock down the circles of Hell, back to Lucifer at the earth’s core (ibid. 103, etc.). “The tears extorted from the sinners, the blood shed by tyrants and murderers, all the filth of the sinful world, flow down below by secret conduits, and are then transformed into instruments of torment” (Witte). There are few things in literature more poignant than Dante’s cry of recognition: Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto (Inf. xv. 30), “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” Nor is there, perhaps, anything that gives us a more terrible conception of Dante’s claim to be the “preacher of justice,” than the fearful doom he has inflicted upon “the dear and kind paternal image” of the sage who had taught him how man makes himself eternal, and upon the great Florentine citizens of the past, whose deeds and honoured names he had ever “rehearsed and heard with affection” (Inf. xvi. 58-60). In the last group of this round are the Usurers, “on the utmost limit of that seventh circle,” where violence passes into fraud (Inf. xvii. 43); and it is worthy of note that the poet finds examples of this sin, not among the persecuted Jews, but in the noble houses of Padua and Florence.
Malebolge.—A yawning abyss, down which the blood-stained Phlegethon dashes with deafening noise, reaches from the seventh to the eighth circle, Malebolge, the realm of Malice. Lured up by the cord which Dante has girt round him and abandons, Geryon, “unclean image of fraud,” a combination of the mythological monster with the apocalyptic Angel of the bottomless pit, bears Dante and Virgil to the place below. Malebolge is divided into ten valleys, with a gulf in the centre. Since they punish Fraud, de l’uom proprio male, “the vice peculiar to man,” the demon tormentors have usually something of the human form (the serpent torturers of the thieves are an exception)—degraded Angels partaking of humanity’s lowest features. Disgusting though many details of this circle may seem to modern taste, they are only terribly realised images of the sins themselves. Panders and seducers (Inf. xviii.), flatterers, simoniacs (xix., Pope Nicholas III.), diviners and sorcerers (xx.), barrators or sellers of justice in public offices (xxi. and xxii.), hypocrites (xxiii.), thieves (xxiv. and xxv.), fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.), sowers of scandal and schism (xxviii.), falsifiers of every kind (xxix. and xxx.)—each class occupies one of the ten valleys of Malebolge, and to each is awarded a special form of punishment representing the crime, observing the contrapasso (Inf. xxviii. 142), the law of retribution. In the meanwhile the sun has risen in the world above, though this makes no difference in Hell where the sun is silent (Inf. xx. 124); it is the morning of Holy Saturday for the Church; the bells have been rung again after the silence of Good Friday, and the Gloria in excelsis sung in anticipation of the morrow’s feast—while Dante is rebuking Pope Nicholas for simony, and hearkening to Guido da Montefeltro’s bitter tale of Pope Boniface’s treachery (Inf. xxvii.). There are few nobler utterances of mediaeval Catholicity than that famous outburst of Dantesque indignation in Canto xix., against the unworthy and simoniacal holders of the papal chair, though restrained by the “reverence for the Great Keys.” In one instance only does Dante seem in personal danger, and, curiously enough, it is in the region of the Barrators (Inf. xxi. and xxii.), with whose sin his ungrateful countrymen had tried to render him infamous; Virgil himself is almost deceived, that is, Dante’s reason is bewildered and his philosophy at fault; but, although hunted as a criminal, not a drop of the boiling pitch lights upon him, nor do the rakes and hooks of the “Evil-claws” as much as graze his skin. Here and there images from external nature relieve the horror: the country shining white with the hoar-frost before the spring (xxiv. 1-15); the fire-flies gleaming below the hill after the long summer day (xxvi. 25-30). The two cantos depicting the fate of the fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.) seem on a different plane from the rest; the sense of increasing degradation in the passage downwards through Malebolge is checked; the story of the last voyage of Ulysses with its spiritual nobility and imaginative splendour, the whole episode of Guido da Montefeltro with its dramatic intensity, are among the greatest creations of poetry. But so repulsive is much of the matter of Malebolge that Dante represents his own moral sense as becoming clouded; in the last valley he listens without disgust, almost with pleasure, to an unsavoury quarrel between the Greek Sinon and the coiner Adam of Brescia (Inf. xxx.), until a sharp rebuke from Virgil restores him to himself: Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia, “for to wish to hear that is a base desire.”
Ninth Circle.—In the centre of Malebolge yawns a huge chasm, like an immense well, where the precipice falls to the ninth and last circle. Like towers round the margin of this pit appear the upper parts of captive Giants, both of Scripture and mythology; Nimrod, Ephialtes, Briareus—the Paladins of the Emperor of Hell defending the last and most secret chamber of his palace. The Giants connect this last circle with Pride (Purg. xii. 28-36), as the mention of Cain does with Envy (Purg. xiv. 133), and Lucifer himself with both Pride and Envy (Inf. vii. 12; Purg. xii. 25; Par. ix. 129, xix. 46, etc.). Treachery is a gigantic version of fraud, by which “is forgotten that love which nature makes, and also that which afterwards is added, giving birth to special trust” (Inf. xi. 61-63); hence the guardians of this circle are monstrosities in magnified human shape. Antaeus (Inf. xxxi.), less guilty, and therefore less fettered than the others, hands Virgil and Dante down into this last circle, where the traitors are eternally consumed in the river Cocytus, which is frozen to a vast dark lake of ice, sloping down to Lucifer. Nowhere else is Dante so utterly pitiless. Hardly can we recognise the man who had fainted with pity at the story of Francesca (Inf. v. 141) in the ruthless inquisitor, who is ready to add to the torture of Bocca degli Abati (inf. xxxii. 97), but will not stretch out his hand to afford a moment’s alleviation to Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi (Inf. xxxiii. 149).
There are four concentric rings in this ninth circle, increasing in pain as they diminish in circumference. In Caina (Inf. xxxii. 58), the treacherous murderers of their kindred are chattering with their teeth like storks. In Antenora (88), traitors to country or party are still more deeply frozen into the ice. Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelfs to the Ghibellines at Montaperti, is side by side with Buoso da Duera, who, five years later, betrayed the Ghibellines to the lieutenant of Charles of Anjou. Frozen into one hole, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca is gnawing the head of Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa; and the terror and pity of Dante’s lines have made the tale of the dying agonies of the old noble and his children perhaps the most famous episode in the Commedia. The terrible imprecation against Pisa adapts Lucan’s curse upon Egypt after the murder of Pompey to the different geographical conditions of the Tuscan city.33 In Tolomea (Inf. xxxiii. 124), those who slew treacherously, under mask of hospitality, have only their faces showing above the ice, their tears frozen into a crystalline mask; on earth their bodies ofttimes still seem to live, tenanted by a demon until their time is full, while the soul has already gone down into the ice. In Giudecca (xxxiv. 117) are souls of traitors to their lords and benefactors: “Already I was there (and with fear I put it into verse) where the souls were all covered, and shone through like straw in glass. Some are lying; some stand upright, this on its head, and that upon its soles; another, like a bow, bends face to feet” (Inf. xxxiv. 10-15); silent and immovable, in agonised and everlasting adoration in the court of the Emperor of the dolorious kingdom, who, gigantic and hideous, “from mid-breast stood forth out of the ice.” The most radiant of God’s Angels has become the source of evil, the symbol of sin’s hideousness. His three faces, red, yellow-white, black, are an infernal parody of the Power, Wisdom, Love of the Blessed Trinity. Under each face are two huge bat-like wings, whose helpless flappings freeze all the lake of Cocytus. Tormented by his teeth and claws are the three arch-traitors: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed the Divine Founder of the Church; Brutus and Cassius, who murdered the imperial founder of the Empire. The condemnation of the two latter is an instance of how, while accepting the testimony of his sources as to facts, Dante preserves independence of judgment concerning their moral value; in Lucan’s Pharsalia, Brutus and Cassius are the destined avengers of right, the champions of Roman liberty, Brutus bearing the character with which we are familiar in Shakespeare.
Out of the Depths.—It is the night of Easter Eve in our world (Inf. xxxiv. 68) when the poets leave the accursed place. Virgil carries Dante like a child, for man will readily submit himself to the guidance of reason and philosophy when once the nature of sin has been thoroughly comprehended. Down by Lucifer’s shaggy sides, they pass the centre of the universe (lines 76-81, 106-117). Virgil turns with Dante completely round (conversion from sin), so that they find themselves in a chasm left at Lucifer’s fall, below the opposite hemisphere to that which man inhabits. But here it is morning (lines 96, 105, 118), the morning of Easter Eve of the southern hemisphere, which is twelve hours behind the time of its antipodes.34 Through this space, opposite to “the tomb of Beelzebub,” a rivulet descends, bringing the memory of sin that has been purged in Purgatory back to Lucifer. By a strange and arduous way, typical of the persevering struggle out of vice, Dante with his guide mounts upwards to the clear air; and, on the shores of Purgatory in the southern hemisphere, they “issued forth to rebehold the stars.”
Like the Redeemer of mankind, Dante has been dead and buried part of three days, and it is not yet daybreak on Easter Sunday, “in the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week.”