Dante's Inferno

“‘Now are you Virgil, that fountain which spreads forth so broad a river of speech?’ I replied with shamefast brow. ‘O honor and light of the other poets, let my long study and great love avail me, that has caused me to search through your volume. You are my master and my author, you alone are he from whom I have taken that pleasing style that has won me honor.’” 

Dante’s worshipful address to Virgil heralds one of literature’s great friendships. Virgil was the poet of Rome, the foundational author of an empire and an Italian hero; he was also a writer Dante loved. Virgil’s Aeneid, the story of the founding of Rome, underpins the Comedy. Dante, like Virgil, is writing the story of a man seeking his home and descending to the underworld on his way to finding it. Virgil embodies many of the Comedy’s most important themes: mentorship, fatherhood, teaching, speech, language, and love.

“There is a noble lady in Heaven, who grieves for this impediment to which I send you, so that she vanquishes high judgment there on high. She called Lucia in her request and said:—Now your faithful one has need of you, and I put him in your hands.—Lucia, enemy of all cruelty, moved and came to the place where I was sitting with the ancient Rachel. She said:—Beatrice, true praise of God, why do you not help him who loved you so, who because of you came forth from the common herd?”

In this passage, Beatrice recounts how Saint Lucia sent her to Virgil, who was sent to Beatrice by the Virgin Mary—a chain of events sometimes called the “relay of grace.” This process of intercession, in which the highest heavenly will filters down through layers of communication, is important in understanding how Dante reads the world. To Dante, Beatrice truly is a messenger—communicating a truth too sublime for human eyes. But the whole world, read rightly, can convey the messages of Heaven.

“THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE GRIEVING CITY, THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW, THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST PEOPLE. JUSTICE MOVED MY HIGH MAKER; DIVINE POWER MADE ME, HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE. BEFORE ME WERE NO THINGS CREATED EXCEPT ETERNAL ONES, AND I ENDURE ETERNAL. ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER.” 

The last line of the thunderous, terrifying inscription over the gates of Hell is well-known. But the rest might cause some confusion for the reader new to Dante—and indeed, they cause confusion for Dante, who quotes the Apostles on Christ’s offering at the Last Supper when he notes that interpreting these words “is hard for me.” Love and justice do not seem to be primary features of Hell. To understand Hell’s logic, one must consider the role that free will plays in love. If humans did not have the choice to turn away from love, love could not exist: Compelled love is not love at all. Hell is therefore a place not of sadistic punishment, but of choice. Those in Hell are in Hell because they turned away from God in choosing to love some mortal object better than they loved Love.

“‘When we read that the yearned-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he, who will never be separated from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it: that day we read there no further.’ While one spirit said this, the other was weeping so that for pity I fainted as if I were dying, and I fell as a dead body falls.”

Francesca’s tale of how she and Paolo fell into the adultery condemning them to the circle of Lust seems both attractive and romantic, but the careful reader notices what is not right about this story. Francesca is not a very careful reader of the story of the go-between Galeotto getting Lancelot and Guinevere together. Paolo and Francesca are too caught up in their smooching to finish reading the book; if they had, they would have discovered this legendary romance indirectly brings about death and destruction. Even more subtly, the careful reader might spot the way Francesca refers to Paolo now is not exactly loving. In this translation, she simply calls him “he,” but in the Italian, it is questi—a rather more dismissive “this one.” Far from a tragic and eternal romance, the relationship between Paolo and Francesca is about what would happen if stuck in Hell with a high school crush forever and ever. Dante’s sympathetic, horrified swoon suggests this particular error of misreading is too close to his own heart for comfort.

“Like frogs before the enemy snake, who scatter themselves through the water until each huddles on the bottom: so saw I more than a thousand shattered souls fleeing before one who was walking across Styx with dry feet. [...] Well did I perceive that he was sent from Heaven, and I turned to my master, who made a sign that I should stand still and bow to him. Ah, how full of disdain he seemed to me! He came to the gate and with a little wand he opened it, for nothing held it.” 

The appearance of the mysterious helper at the gates of Dis demonstrates an important distinction between the classical and Christian worldviews. To the pre-Christian Virgil, the journey through Hell is a journey of heroism, an epic; to Dante, the journey is the journey of every human, and less dependent on individual merit than on the grace of God. Here, Virgil and Dante cannot make it under their own power but must surrender to the mercy of God to continue their journey. Virgil’s anxiety (which manifests, sweetly, in his protectively covering Dante’s eyes when Medusa threatens them at the gates) reflects his incomprehension of the unearned gifts of grace.

“O Tuscan who through the city of fire, alive, walk along speaking so modestly, let it please you to stop in this place. Your speech makes you manifest as a native of that noble fatherland to which perhaps I was too harmful.” 

The arrogant Farinata’s first words to Dante reveal much about his character. Stuck naked in a coffin with an enemy for all eternity, Farinata still pridefully rises from his tomb to speak of how things were back on earth, where he was a very big political deal indeed. He identifies Dante as a Florentine—that is, an inhabitant of a city to which he, Farinata, laid waste (though he also rescued it from total destruction after he conquered it). Even in Hell, when he should be able to see there are more important matters at hand, Farinata focuses on his own fame and on politics.

“I walked thoughtful, and he said: ‘You are thinking perhaps of this landslide, guarded by that bestial anger I just now put out. Now I would have you know that the other time I came here into lower Hell, this cliff had not yet fallen. But certainly, if I remember well, a little before he came who took from Dis the great spoils of the highest circle, on every side this deep, foul valley trembled so that I thought the universe must be feeling love, by which, some believe, the world has often been turned back into chaos: and at that point this ancient cliff, here and elsewhere, was broken down.’” 

Virgil’s explanation of the landslide he and Dante encounter on their descent makes an important point about Hell: It is pre-Christian. The story Virgil tells suggests this landslide occurred after the Crucifixion when, legendarily, an earthquake was meant to have shaken Jerusalem. Tradition had it that Christ, after his execution, descended into Hell and rescued several important Biblical figures from Limbo before the Resurrection. Virgil’s telling of this story, and the presence of Greek and Roman mythological figures in this underworld, make it clear that the advent of Christ altered a pre-existing Hell—and opened the pathway to Heaven.

“As when a green log is burnt at one end, from the other it drips and sputters as air escapes: so from the broken stump came forth words and blood together, and I let the tip fall and stood like one afraid.” 

This gruesome analogy introduces the tormented Pier della Vigna, the tree-imprisoned soul in the forest of the suicides whose branch Dante has just broken. Dante’s images of Hell are often terrifyingly physical and specific: Hell is a place that is all surfaces, all to do with what is brutally and densely material, unrelieved by spiritual light. In the later books of the Comedy, Dante’s imagery begins to lighten and grow more abstract, and, importantly, more self-aware: The poem’s world, in the later cantiche, comes to understand itself as legible art. But none of the denizens of Hell can see through the material to the light beyond; thus, the landscape is full of immediate and fleshly horrors like this agonized, gore-spluttering tree.

“‘If my request were all fulfilled,’ I replied to him, ‘you would not yet be banished from human nature; for in my memory is fixed, and now it weighs on my heart, the dear, kind, paternal image of you when, in the world, from time to time you used to teach me how man makes himself eternal; and how grateful I am for that, as long as I live must be discerned in my language.’” 

Dante’s address to his old teacher Brunetto Latini—now scorched by rains of fire in the burning plains of the sodomites, blasphemers, and usurers—is a sorrowful masterpiece of mixed feelings. Dante realizes the “immortality” Latini sought and taught was a woefully short-sighted one: As Hell amply demonstrates, every human has an immortality a lot more consequential than whether or not one’s book makes it onto Florence’s best-sellers’ list. Latini is not punished so much for homosexuality as for fruitlessness: His too-worldly art, like non-reproductive sex, was not going to produce real life.

“Always to that truth which has the face of falsehood one should close one’s lips as long as one can, for without any guilt it brings shame; but here I cannot conceal it, and by the notes of this comedy, reader, I swear to you, so may they not fail to find long favor, that I saw, through that thick dark air, a figure come swimming upward, fearful to the most confident heart, as one returns who at times goes down to release an anchor caught on a rock or other thing hidden in the sea, and reaches upward as he draws in his feet.” 

This strange passage begins the sequence of addresses to the audience that marks Dante’s journey through Cocytus—the region of fraud. Dante’s insistence he really saw the outlandish monster Geryon raises the relationship of fiction to falsehood. How dangerously close to lying does Dante's non-literal truth dance? As Dante descends further into Hell, he draws more and more attention to his poem as a poem, a work of fiction that nonetheless aims to communicate truth (or even Truth).

“And that filthy image of fraud came over and beached its head and chest, but did not draw up its tail as far as the bank. Its face was that of a just man, so kindly seemed its outer skin, and the rest of its torso was that of a serpent; it had two paws, hairy to the armpits; it had back and breast and both sides painted with knots and little wheels: with more colors, in weave and embroidery, did never Tartars nor Turks make cloths, nor did Arachne string the loom for such tapestries.”

Geryon’s appearance is loaded with meaning. The guardian of the region of Fraud, he presents a kindly face, but becomes more bestial down from there. His painted hide suggests the attractive ornamentation of lies; the sting in his tail speaks for itself. The drama of the Geryon episode speaks to the gravity of fraud. While a contemporary reader may be surprised to find fraud judged more harshly than violence, Dante has clear philosophical reasons for this arrangement. The capacity to commit fraud is, in his worldview, deeply human: Fraud is an abuse of the God-given intellective powers raising humans above beasts. Geryon’s physical devolution symbolizes Dante’s horror and disgust at treachery, and mirrors the increasing bestiality of the sinners in the lower regions of Hell.

“I saw that I was in the air on every side, and every sight put out save that of the beast. It goes along swimming slowly, slowly; it wheels and descends, but I perceive its motion only by the wind on my face from below. I could already hear at my right hand the torrent making a horrible roar beneath us, and so I lean out my head, looking down. Then I became more afraid of falling, for I saw fires and heard weeping; so that all trembling I huddled back.”

Dante and Virgil descend into the region of fraud on the fearful back of Geryon. This passage is notable for its sheer brilliance of imagination. Dante’s visceral sense of what it would be like to fly—the wind in his face, the fires burning far beneath him—speaks to the imaginative power of a writer whose life predated human flight by some 500 years.

“And he cried out: ‘Are you already standing there, are you already standing there, Boniface? The writing lied to me by several years. Are you so soon sated by the wealth for which you did not fear to marry the lovely lady fraudulently, and then to tear her apart?’” 

Dante often takes serious risks in The Inferno by putting contemporary figures into Hell. Here, in his encounter with the upside-down and fiery-footed Pope Nicholas, he offers an unvarnished insult to his own living nemesis: the corrupt Pope Boniface VIII, whose machinations drove Dante into exile. The project of the Divine Comedy is a serious one; Dante makes no political allowances in his meticulous examination of corruption and sin. His belief in his Church is more powerful than any reflexive respect for its pontiffs.

“They made left face on the bank; but first each had bit his tongue toward their leader, as a salute, and he of his ass had made a trumpet.”

The sinister Malebranche—the demons guarding the tar-pits of the barrators—are also comedic. While the Divine Comedy is a comedy in the classical sense—that is, it ends not in death, but in marriage—it is also wittily humorous. The Malebranches’ flatulent salute juxtaposes their sadism with broad humor—a combination more grotesque than sadism alone would have been.

“He had not finished giving this advice, when I saw them coming, with outstretched wings, not far away, intent on seizing us. My leader seized me quickly, like a mother who is awakened by the noise and sees the flames burning close by, who takes up her son and flees, caring more for him than for herself, not stopping even to put on her shift: and down from the neck of the hard bank, he gave himself supine to the sloping rock that encloses the near side of the next pocket.” 

Virgil’s concern for Dante here manifests in a moment of comical sweetness. As Virgil scoops up Dante and hotfoots it out of danger, Dante thinks of a woman whose concern for her child outweighs her concern about being seen naked, and thus casts Virgil, who has so far been a respected advisor and father figure, as motherly, too. Virgil makes a truly excellent parent, self-sacrificing and dedicated to the greater good of his “child”; Dante is learning more than intellective virtues from him.

“‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our sense that remains do not deny the experience, following the sun, of the world without people. Consider your sowing: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.’ My companions I made so sharp for the voyage, with this little oration, that after it I could hardly have held them back [...]” 

Ulysses’s famous speech to his doomed sailors at first seems straightforwardly inspirational. But his sweet tongue is leading his crew straight to doom. Ulysses’s sin here is double: He is using his gifts of eloquence to mislead—accounting for his presence in the region of fraud—and is transgressing by trying to go not only beyond his own limits, but beyond the limits of humankind itself. It is worth noting that for the sake of his absurd dream, he is abandoning the wife and child to whom he so long strove to return. Knowing one’s limits, Dante suggests, is a fundamental part of being human, and of being in right relation to God and to other humans.

“I surely saw, and it seems I still see, a torso without a head walking like the others of the sorry flock; and his severed head he was holding up by the hair, dangling it from his hand like a lantern; and the head was gazing at us, saying: ‘Oh me!’ [...] When he was directly at the foot of the bridge, he raised his arm far up, head and all, to bring his words close to us, which were: ‘Now see my wretched punishment, you who go still breathing to view the dead [...] I made father and son revolt against each other [...] Because I divided person so joined, I carry my brain divided, alas, from its origin which is in this trunk. Thus you observe in me the counter-suffering.’” 

Bertrand de Born gives the reader a useful blanket term for the ironic punishments of Hell: the contrapasso, here translated as “counter-suffering.” The contrapasso is not actually so “counter,” though it certainly comes as an unpleasant surprise to the damned. Rather than opposing what they wanted, it reveals the truth of the thing the damned souls wanted more than they wanted God. In this illustrative instance, the schismatic Bertrand is not only punished for ripping asunder a father from his son by personally being ripped apart. He is also holding his own head as a lantern, following the paltry light of his own diseased judgment.

“His face seemed as long and broad as the pine cone of Saint Peter in Rome, and to that proportion were his other bones; so that the bank, which was his apron from the waist down, left so much of him exposed above it that to reach his mane three Frisians would have boasted idly, for I saw thirty great spans down from the place where the mantle is clasped. ‘Raphèl maì amècche zabì almì,’ the fierce mouth began to shout, for no gentler psalms befitted it.”

Dante’s measurements of the giants are comically precise: These legendary figures can be measured in terms of well-known buildings and monuments, the way one might compare a whale to a school bus. By giving solid points of reference for the giants, Dante prepares his vision of Satan, who can be measured in reference to the giants’ vastness. These beings are terrible, but they are also purely physical: that is, limited, finite. Nimrod’s garbled language reflects his rejection of what is human; without the power of speech, he is just a massive animal.

“[I]t is no task to take in jest, that of describing the bottom of the universe, nor one for a tongue that calls mommy or daddy. But let those ladies aid my verse who helped Amphion enclose Thebes, so that the word may not be different from the fact.” 

Dante’s invocation of the Muses in Cocytus gestures to the role of pre-Christian philosophy and belief in Dante’s worldview. As Virgil’s role as guide suggests, Dante does not cast aside the pagan world; in fact, much of the philosophy and science shaping Dante’s vision of the world stems from Aristotle and Plato. This passage is also another important reference to the limitations and possibilities of language. The further Dante travels, the more difficult he finds it to match his words to his experiences; by the time he hits Heaven, he will often remind the reader that the best he can do is to give them metaphors for what he experienced.

“I saw two frozen in one hole so that one head was a hat to the other; and as bread is eaten by the starving, so the one above put his teeth to the other, there where the brain joins the nape: not otherwise did Tydeus gnaw Menalippus’ temples in his rage, than this one did the skull and the other things. ‘O you who show by such a bestial sign your hatred over him you are eating, tell me why,’ I said, ‘with this pack, that if you justly complain of him, when I knew who you are and what his sin, in the world above I shall repay you for it, if that with which I speak does not dry up.’” 

As Dante descends further into Hell, his language becomes both broader and more gruesome. Here, the reader is introduced to Ugolino’s grisly skull-gnawing with the blackly comic image of his head as Ruggieri’s hat. (Later, Ugolino will politely wipe his mouth on Ruggieri’s hair before answering Dante’s questions.) The incongruous civility of hat-wearing and mouth-wiping stands in contrast with the “bestial sign” of skull-gnawing, further emphasizing fraud’s dehumanizing power.

“After we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo threw himself stretched out at my feet, saying: ‘My father, why do you not help me? There he died; and as you see me, I saw the three fall one by one between the fifth day and the sixth; and I, already blind, took to groping over each of them, and for two days I called them, after they were dead. Then fasting had more power than grief.’ When he had said that, with eyes askance he took the wretched skull in his teeth again, which were strong against the bone, like a dog’s.” 

Many images in Hell parody Biblical mysteries. Here, Ugolino’s son Gaddo speaks to Ugolino using the crucified Christ’s plea to God. Ugolino, though, is not capable of making the connection—and has not been capable of making the connection all through the story of his imprisonment. He only sees that his story is appalling, but not that he could have made it less appalling by offering his sons comfort and spiritual guidance in a situation where no physical relief was to be found. A worldview that includes only the material has no recourse in the outer reaches of humans suffering.

“How then I became frozen and feeble, do not ask, reader, for I do not write it, and all speech would be insufficient. I did not die and I did not remain alive: think now for yourself, if you have wit at all, what i became, deprived of both. The emperor of the dolorous kingdom issued from the ice at the mid-point of his breast; and I am more to be compared with a giant than the giants with his arms: see now how great must be the whole that fits with such a part. If he was as beautiful then as now he is ugly, when he lifted his brow against his Maker, well must all grieving proceed from him. Oh how great a marvel did it seem to me, when I saw three faces on his head! One was in front, and that was crimson; the others were two, and they were joined to the first above the midpoint of each shoulder, and came together at the crest; and the right one seemed between white and yellow; the left was such to see those who come from beyond the cataracts of the Nile. [...] With six eyes he was weeping, and down three chins dripped the tears and the bloody slobber. In each of his mouths he was breaking a sinner with his teeth in the manner of a scutch, so that he made three suffer at once.” 

Dante’s final encounter with Satan is at once chilling and curiously anticlimactic. Later critics have remarked that this devil is much less impressive than, for instance, the silver-tongued Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost. But this is precisely the point. Satan here is the reduction of the sublime to the material: He is a mechanical beast, like a bloody weeping windmill, frozen and paralyzed in his own kingdom, a victim of his own evil. Though he is vast and horrible, he is, importantly, measurable; Dante can calculate how many make up a Satan. This is critical. Satan may push Dante to a point where he is neither dead nor alive, but in his very physicality and his self-centered pride, he is limited; he is finite. God is not.

“As it pleased him, I clung to his neck; and he watched for time and place, and when the wings were fully open he took hold of the furry sides; from tuft to tuft then he descended between the thick hair and the frozen crust. When we came to where the thigh is hinged, exactly at the widest of the hips, my leader, with labor and difficulty, turned his head to where he had his shanks, and clung to the pelt like one who climbs, so that I supposed we were returning into Hell again. ‘Hold fast, for by such stairs,’ said my master, panting like one weary, ‘must we depart from so much evil.’ Next he went forth through the hole in the rock, and placed me sitting on the rim; then he extended his careful step to me. I raised my eyes, thinking to see Lucifer as I had left him, and I saw that he extended his legs upward; and if I labored in thought then, let the gross people ponder it who do not see what point it was that I had passed.” 

Virgil once more gives Dante a piggyback ride, but this one reveals something important about the shape of Hell. By climbing up—and then down—the Satan’s pelt, Dante and Virgil pass through the center of the earth, which, contrary to popular belief, the people of Dante’s time knew very well was a sphere. This is spiritually and referentially important. As readers who move on to Purgatorio will learn, the stone of Mount Purgatory, where Dante and Virgil eventually emerge after their journey out of Hell, is the displaced earth thrown up by Satan’s plummet from the heavens. Dante and Virgil have thus made a journey through Hell that reveals that descent has been ascent all along: As in many mystical traditions, they must fall in order to rise.