Dante’s Inferno, Dante Alighieri (13/14th century BCE) (1901 translation)

• “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.”
• “So bad and so accursed in her kind that never sated is her ravenous will, still after food more craving than before.”
• “He will not life support by earth nor its base metals, but by love, wisdom, and virtue.”
  • Material goods make for meaninglessness; they do not nurture a life worth living.
• Dante follows Virgil (one of Rome’s greatest poets), who inhabits the form of a lion, towards the depths of hell. Virgil gives Dante courage.
• As the day departs, Dante gets cold feet again. But the love of Beatrice reinvigorates him, a guiding light in the gloom of night. Still fearful, he presses forward, cherishing the pity and supporting love that Beatrice offers him.
• “Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”
• Between the gates of hell and hell itself laid a sea of weeping souls. These were the apathetic, worthy not of praise nor blame, driven out of Heaven and not accepted into Hell. They were true not to God, but to themselves only. “Their blind life so meanly passes, that all other lots they envy.”
  • Being apathetic, dull, and indifferent, their lives weren’t even lively enough to warrant entry into hell.

    First circle of Hell: Limbo

• This is where the virtuous mingle yet merit not the bliss of Paradise due to lack of baptism
• Sees Homer and Socrates and Plato and Seneca and Euclid and Caesar and so forth. Him and his guide speak with them pleasantly.

  Second circle (attachment?)

• The stormy blasts of hell sweep around souls like Achilles and Cleopatra, and they cling to the winds despite their anguish
• Why? “No greater grief than to remember days of joy, when misery is at hand.”
• These are people who had great lives but are unable to let them go, and thus cling to the tormenting winds of misery

  Third circle (gluttony)

• The gluttonous are showered with rain and hail (doomed to eternal empty consumption) and fed to Cerberus who gobbles them up.

  Fourth circle (avarice, greed)

• In this circle, the greedy are attached to their hoards of money, doomed to endlessly roll their hoards up the inclined circle
• “Not all the gold that is beneath the moon, or even hath been, or these toil-worn souls, much purchase rest for one.” o No amount of money will satiate their avarice

  Fifth circle (wrath and anger)

• “A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks betokening rage. They with their hands alone struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet, cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs.” o The relentless, self-inflicting nature of anger
• “The water dwells a multitude, whose sighs into these bubbles make the surface heave […] fixed in the slime, they say, ‘Sad once were we, in the sweet air made gladsome by the sun. Carrying a foul and lazy mist within: Now in these murky settings are we sad.’” o Meditate on this.

  Sixth circle (Dis)

• Upon arrival to the gates of Dis, Dante is denied entry for he hath not yet died. “Who is this that, without death first felt, goes through the regions of the dead?”
• Virgil is allowed in, and leaves Dante behind, though assuring him that he will return and by divine authority he will be let through. Dante, meanwhile, relishes the thought of being able to turn back and escape
• Virgil’s plea to let Dante in is refused
• Dante and Virgil observe Erynnis, the goddesses of vengeance and fury, clawing at each other.
• An angel comes down and opens the gate for them. Upon entry is a path laden with the open tombs of arch-heretics (leaders of movements at odds with the status quo) and every sect of their following
• When talking with one of the tombs: “We view, as one who hath an evil sight, plainly, objects far remote; so much of his large splendour yet imparts the Almighty Ruler: but when they approach, or actually exist, our intellect then wholly fails.”
  • The “evil” has a blinding reverence for the future that produces an ignorance for the present, such that when faced with the present they know not how to cherish it.
  • This is somewhat similar to the second circle of hell, where people are attached to the past. In this circle, they are attached to the future. Too far-sighted, they can’t see the good that sits before them in the present.
  • “Our knowledge in that instant shall expire, when on futurist the portals close.”

    Before the 3 lower circles

• Dante asks why the glutinous, avaricious, wrathful, and envious (of past and future) are spared from the lower rungs of hell. Virgil mentions how incontinence (lack of self-restraint) the least offends and is least incurring of guilt
  • With gluttony, greed, anger, and envy, we’re seemingly thrown around by these feelings as if puppets. Ignorance is shallow in these cases, and requires less intensive cleansing
• Those lying in the lower circles are the fraudulent. There is a difference in the degree of intentionality, or equivalently, depth of ignorance and thus malice.
• “He is indeed alive, and solitary so must needs by me be shown the gloomy vale, thereto induced by strict necessity, not by delight.”

  7th Circle (Violence against God, Nature, and Art)

• In the first portion of the 7th circle lie the merciless tyrants (those who committed violence into their neighbours), who are mercilessly shot by patrolling centaurs if they try to escape.
• In the second portion are those who commit violence on themselves; those who commit suicide. They give their bodies away to hell, so their souls are turned into seeds and thrown into the woods where they grow into gnarled trees that harpies feed upon.
• The static, rooted nature of their being may reflect the seemingly rooted and immutable despair we feel when suicidal.
• “For what a man takes from himself it is not just he have.”
  • We can never take our “own” life. We are a social species, and thus our life invariably touches and belongs to a larger whole. In the selfish act of taking one’s life, we rob from the network in which we are interconnected. We rob our future and the potential relationships therein, which may not be as bad as the present may seem. We commit this robbery when we are lost without faith, rooted in the despair of our harrowing thoughts.
• In the third portion are those who committed violence against God, Nature, and Art. Example of Capaenus is given, burned from hot sands below and rained by flakes of fire above. “As still he seems to hold, God in disdain, and sets high omnipotence at nought.”
• “Thou by either party shalt be craved with hunger keen: but be the fresh herb far from the goat’s tooth.”
• Cultivate goodness within yourself but be wary not to be used by those who crave it for personal benefit.
• Dante sees his old teacher among those who have done violence to Nature, notably, sodomites (homosexuality or beastiality). They talk for a while, and his teacher sees him off to go tend to the group he was leading. Dante describes him as “of them he seemed not he who loses but who gains the prize.”
• Dante briefly encounters those who committed violence against Art. He sees a few usurers (loan sharks), implying that excessive interest rates harm Art… (why?)
• Geryon, or Fraud, takes them down to the 8th circle. Geryon is a winged beast with a wise inviting face in his upper half, but a serpent lower half. Misleadingly inviting and venomous

  Eighth circle

• In the first chasm are sexual deceivers (e.g., unfaithful, rapists, prostitutes). They are lashed and whipped endlessly by devils.
• In the second chasm are flatterers (verbal deceivers), doomed to sink eternally in a stinking swamp. “Me thus low down my flatteries have sunk, wherewith I never enough could glut my tongue.”
• In the third are those who practiced simony, i.e., using religion for monetary gain (i.e., paying for religious status or selling sacred objects for cash). They are doomed to stay face down in the soil with only their feet exposed to air, being burned by flames
• In the fourth are clairvoyants/seers/astrologers. Their necks are turned 180 degrees, doomed to only see and walk backwards with horrifyingly painful gait.
• In the fifth are barterers and those who misuse entrusted sums of money. They are doomed to be boiled in tar by demons.
• The demons swarm Virgil, but Virgil claims he has divine will to cross through hell. Upon hearing this the head demon “fell his pride, that he let drop the instrument of torture at his feet.”
  • The pride-extinguishing nature of submitting to God and demanding humility.
• In the sixth chasm are the hypocrites, who wear hoods and gowns “overlaid with gold, dazzling to view, but leaden all within, and of such weight, that Frederick’s compares to these were straw. Oh, everlasting wearisome attire!”
• Caiaphas, who gave the Pharisees counsel that it was fitting for one man to suffer for the people (i.e., to nail Jesus to the cross), is himself nailed to the ground in a cross position.
  • Is he the archetypal hypocrite? Perhaps because he made Jesus to suffer but was a coward who was unable to suffer/sacrifice himself or his pride for his people. According to John 11:51-52 it states that “being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.”
• As they journey to the seventh chasm, Dante becomes exhausted. Virgil assures him that “for not…under shade of canopy reposing, fame is won; without which whosoe’er consumes his days, leaves to such vestige of himself on earth, as smoke in air, or foam upon the wave.” He then encourages him to “therefore rise: vanquish thy weariness by the mind’s effort, in each struggle form’d to vanquish…a longer ladder yet remains to scale.”
  • Be courageous. Cowards are forgotten.
• In the seventh chasm are robbers, doomed to endless torment by venomous snakes. They meet Vanni Fucci, a robber who stole from a church and set up an innocent man who was then executed.
• A thieving sinner undergoes a transformation, where a monster steals the body of the sinner, and the sinner transforms into the monster.
• In the eighth chasm are evil counsellors, those who cowardly hid behind the pride of tyrants, enabling and enhancing the atrocities tyrants committed. They are each doomed to isolated pits deep below that bellow with flames
• “Then, yielding to the forceful arguments, of silence as more perilous I deem’d, and answer’d: ‘Father, since this washest me clear of that guilt wherein I now must fall, large promise with performance scant, be sure, shall make thee triumph in thy lofty seat.”
  • Cowardly caving
  • An irony of hell seems to be that deeper self-interest leads to higher-status positions on earth, but lower status positions in hell. Balance. The further the depths of self interest, the deeper cleansing required to absolve us of our ignorance.
• In the ninth chasm are those who seed scandal and schism. They are doomed to being maimed and chopped up, divided like how their counsel encouraged war and division
• In the tenth chasm are alchemists and forgers, doomed to torment by pestilence, scratching their skin till their nails fall off and laying in repugnant filth.
  • False claims to transform riches from nothing are punished by transforming the richness of live into decay (pestilence)
• Alchemists were frauds, using chemistry (magic at the time) to turn worthless iron into priceless gold. “I am Cappachio’s ghost, who forged transmuted metals by the power of alchemy; and if I can thee right, though needs must well remember how I aped creative nature by my subtle art.”

  Ninth circle

• The ninth circle has giants monitoring the perimeter. When speaking of the giants, “Nature, with her last hand left framing of these monsters…repent her not of the elephant and whale, who ponders well confesses her therein wiser and more discreet; for when brute force and evil will are back’d with subtlety, resistance none avails.”
  • The grand and imposing nature of giants makes their threat honest, what’s much more threatening are those who are small but deceptively cunning and harmful. An elephant provides an honest signal to avoid, but a parasite is more crafty and deceptive
• Nimrod is doomed to blow a deafening horn that shackles him. He was the first lord, and ordered the construction of the Tower of Babel, that which caused inhabitants to stop understanding one another. “Nimrod is this, through whose ill counsel in the world no more one tongue prevails. But pass we on, nor waste our words; for so each language is to him, as his to others, understood by none.”
• In the first round is a frozen lake inhabited by doomed souls, “Blue pinch’d and shrined in ice the spirits stood, moving their teeth in shrill note like the stork.”
• The ninth circle is about treachery against those we are close with. The first round has those who betray family and loved ones, second who betray politically or nationally, third who betray their guests (they are punished more harshly because of the belief that having guests means entering a voluntary relationship, and betraying a relationship willingly entered is more despicable than betraying a relationship born into), and the fourth is for betrayal against benefactors appointed by God.
• In the first and second (betrayal of kin and country) is the tragic story of Ugolino locked in the tower of Pisa with his sons and forced into famine for political treachery. His sons die of hunger, after which he eats their bodies. “Fasting got the mastery of grief.” This man gnaws on the skull of his betrayer Ruggieri while in the frozen pools of Cocytus, compelled to devour even that which hath no substance.
• In the third was friar Alberigo, who had his brother and nephew killed at a banquet in his home.
• In the final are those who betrayed their benefactors and Lucifer himself, a giant, winged, three-headed beast who had two of Julius Caesar’s betrayers (Brutus and Cassius) in the mouths on the side, and the body of Judas (betrayer of Christ) in the middle.
• Virgil and Dante escape and ascend the cave to reveal a starry sky, for night has passed and a new dawn arrives. They find their way out “discover’d not by sight, but by the sounds of brooklet, that descends this way along the hollow of a rock, which, as it winds with no precipitous course, the wave hath eaten. By that hidden way my guide and I did enter, to return to the fair world: and heedless of repose we climb’d, he first, I following his steps, till on our view the beautiful lights of heaven dawn’d through a circular opening in the cave; thence issuing we again beheld the stars.”
  • The path towards Good isn’t immediately obvious. It’s hard to see. We must listen closely. But if we follow that feeling, foregoing what is immediate and obvious, we are awarded with unfathomable beauty. This is faith.