canto iv

Canto IV begins as Dante awakens in the first of nine circles of hell.

There are no levels of hell mentioned in the Bible, where hell is generally a miserable place to be, if not a place of actual, eternal torment. The Greek word most commonly translated as hell in the New Testament is hades, which is more or less equivalent to the Hebrew sheol used in the Old Testament. The term refers to a more or less universal destination for the dead; good, bad, or indifferent, everyone ends up here.

Whether Alighieri based his detailed soteriography of hell on ideas he inherited, or created it from scratch, I have no idea. The hell of “Inferno” is an inverted cone of nine concentric circles, gouged into the earth by the impact of Satan when he was cast out of heaven. Overseen by devils who see that the damned are appropriately tormented for their sins, each circle is marked by the type of sin that defined the character of those imprisoned there, with the sin worsening the deeper into hell you go.

Damnation in the First Circle isn't that bad, all things considered; actually, eternal separation from God is easier for those imprisoned here than for the undecideds whom Dante saw chasing the banner in Canto III. That's because the First Circle is home to the righteous pagans and unbaptized infants, people who would have believed in God if they had been given the chance. In their commentary novel “Inferno,” Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle remark that this is the saddest circle of all because the absence of torment allows those imprisoned here the illusion of contentment.

It's here that we see the first actual example of any sort of biblical teaching about hell. Dante, hearing the woe-begotten sighs of those confined to the First Circle, asks his guide if any have ever left this circle. Those whom Virgil names are a brief Who's Who of personalities of the Tanakh, such as Adam, Noah, Abraham and David. Church teaching is that the Old Testament saints, some of whom Virgil names, waited in Limbo until the coming of Christ, whom the Apostle Paul wrote descended into hell (Greek hades) and freed those imprisoned there.

But it wouldn't be much fun to have Limbo empty save for the souls of unbaptized infants, so Alighieri fills the First Circle of hell, many unnamed souls packed so thick that he compares them to a wood, until he comes to a castle that houses a laundry list of exalted ancients. On the way there, he is greeted by a group of ancient poets who (naturally) hail Virgil as their chief.

The castle is an interesting thing. Dante notes that it has seven walls circling it, each with a gate that leads inward, and at the center is a meadow filled with the somber, quiet shades of the most righteous. This probably is the Elysian Fields, where Virgil claimed in “The Aeneid” is where the virtuous dead reside, which makes his pre-eminence among the dead here ironically appropriate.

The dead whom Dante names here are an interesting mix. He begins with heroes, mixing mythological figures like Hector and Aeneas, with historical figures like Caesar and Brutus -- not the Brutus who killed Julius Caesar, but the Brutus who liberated Rome from the Tarquins. Surprisingly, at least to me, he also includes here Saladin, a Muslim leader who fought the Crusaders during the Middle Ages, and who was so well known for his compassion and dignity that there were legends that he actually was a secret Christian. (According to one story, when Richard Lionheart became ill, Saladin not only refused to press an advantage against him, he sent supplies and medical help to his ailing foe.)

Following the warlike souls, Dante notes the philosophers: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and others who are noted for laying the foundations of mathematic and scientific disciplines, like Euclid and Ptolemy, and Galen the physician, and a few other classic names like Cicero and Seneca and the mythical singer Orpheus. The only reason we're given for these people's presence in Limbo is that they were great thinkers whose name and fame remained until Dante's time, so that God was inclined to be merciful and spare them further punishment than the oblique sadness that permeates the First Circle.

And that is itself telling about Alighieri. While a lot of the sins depicted in his hell get a poetic comeuppance in their punishment, it seems he's only too willing to make exceptions for those he likes and approves of, since, like the rest of us, he supposes that God must feel the same way that he does. Thus the damned souls are damned for the actions that he believes are worthy of damnation, and those who are granted respite or a commuted sentence get it because he believes they should.

If that's revealing about Dante, it's revealing about all of us who are quick to pronounce God's judgment on others. Too often, it's not God's judgment that we are pronouncing, but our own, and the presumption we have in ascribing to God our own petty biases and hatred should chill us to the bone.

After he beholds all those magnificent souls in the castle of the First Circle, Dante takes his leave of the First Circle and, with Virgil as his guide, follows the path to a region where nothing shines.

canto iii

This canto contains what the most recognizable line in "The Divine Comedy," and possibly one of the best-known lines in Western literature. It is the sign above the entrance to hell: "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here." That line encapsulates the miserific vision of hell: no hope, no escape, just unrelenting torment, day after day, year after year, until even the mountains have been worn down to grains of sand, and even then, there is no relief.

The finality of such a sentence is one of the reasons I don't particularly care for the doctrine of hell. As avoidable a fate as it may be to those who set the doctrines, an eternity of searing torment is still too much, too late. The torments of Dante's hell offer no redemption to those incarcerated there, as the sufferings of this life may; nor is there an escape, as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle provide in their own "Inferno" novel.

And yet readers have returned to "The Divine Comedy" for centuries, despite objections to the severity of hell.

A lot of the reason for the poem's appeal begins to come clear in this very canto. Alighieri uses some apocalyptic imagery in Canto I, placing savage animals in Dante's path that commentators see as representing both political states and worldly vices; and Canto II saw garden-variety mysticism in the intercession Beatrice makes on Dante's account to rescue him from the dark wood; but so far we have seen none of the turn-your-head sorts of images that we associate with "The Inferno." Until now.

Here at the entrance to the land of the dead, unearthly moans assault Dante's ears with a din that he renders in a manner both poignant and unsettling. The people uttering these tormented cries run through the vestibule of hell, stung by hornets and wasps as they chase a banner that flutters in the breeze, just beyond their reach; their tears mixing with blood as they fall, to be consumed on the ground by worms.

And this picturesque torment is just what occurs in the vestibule to hell; the sin for which these people are being tormented endlessly is one of cowardice, not one of the more horrible sins that mark the lower circles of hell. Those punished could not bring themselves either to follow God nor to live lives of open sin. Virgil likens them to angels who neither fought with God when Satan rebelled, nor sided with the Devil. The price of their cowardice is that neither heaven nor hell will admit them.

And in this procession of banner-chasers is where we find a cipher for one layer of interpretation of "The Inferno." Dante claims to recognize several members of the crowd, but comments only on one, whom he accuses of "cowardice in making the great refusal." Alighieri makes no further comment on this, but commentators apparently believe it was Pope Celestine V, who resigned the papal office five months later and gave it to Pope Boniface VIII..

From what I can tell, Celestine V's papcy is remarkable only for its brevity, and even his successor was inconsequential. The issue Alighieri has with Celestine seems to be solely that he relinquished his papal office. And to a man like Dante, who took a bullet not once, briefly, but over much of his adult life, for his views, that decision to reject the Seat of Peter must have been not only incomprehensible, but reprehensible as well.

And, after all, that's what hell is all about? Setting aside our theological bases for hell, the people we most would like to see in hell are the people who are unlike us. A hundred years ago in the United States, native fundamentalists conflated dislike of hard-drinking Irish workers and Italian immigrants, with religious differences that Protestants have the Roman Catholic Church. Today it's not uncommon to hear conservative preachers calling down God's wrath upon pro-choices, gays and lesbians, and environmentalists; or for liberal Christians to get snarky and suggest that when things go wrong for the GOP, it's because conservatives aren't following God. Hell's a great place to send people who aren't like us, because they clearly deserve it. If they didn't, they would be more like us.

Canto III is also where we see Alighieri begin to draw more fully upon Greco-Roman mythology to flesh out his vision of hell, from its soteriography to its personalities. Virgil here refers to the Acheron, one of the rivers that flowed through Hades; and Dante himself beholds Charon, the ancient oarsman whose job it was to ferry the dead across the River Styx. A widely held religious view in the Middle Ages was that anyone who worshiped pagan gods actually was worshiping a devil, a belief Alighieri himself seems to have held. He portrays Charon not just as an old man, but one "with eyes of glowing coal," with no patience or pity for any who dawdle.

The entire experience is too much for poor Dante. Although he had resolved at the end of Canto II to put aside fear, he notes that even years after this experience occurred, he still trembles at its mere recollection. Now having crossed the Styx a living man, he is witness an earthquake accompanied by a bright light, and he passes out.

canto ii

The first time I ever tried the high dive, I was too scared to jump.

It was agonizing. The whole time we had been at the pool, I had been watching one kid after another climb the ladder, walk or even run the length of the board, and then dive in. Some of them had jumped, some of them had cannonballed, and a few had actually dived, arms stretched out to part the water before them. It looked like a lot of fun, and so I had decided to give it a shot.

It didn't feel as easy as it looked, though. For one thing, the top of the ladder seemed much higher off the ground than it had seemed when I was on the ground. And the diving board didn't feel very once I was standing on it. I walked carefully out to the end of the board, and froze. There were kids down in the water, playing and splashing about, and having a grand old time, and I knew that it was perfectly safe just to jump off.

But I couldn't do it. Heart in my throat, I carefully turned around and walked back to the ladder, which I climbed back down to terra firma.

So I think I can understand the reaction Dante has at the start of Canto II. At this point, he is still in the dark wood, in sight of the holy mountain and not yet on his way down into the circles of hell. It's at this point that Dante has the only sensible reaction anyone can have at the mouth of hell: What am I thinking? I can't go down there!

When I stood at the end of the diving board, I'm fairly sure I tried to psych myself into making the jump. I'd been off regular diving boards plenty of times. I'd seen dozens of kids jump off the high-dive that day alone. (I had the same problem trying the zip line at an Afs camp in New Zealand in 1987.)

Dante does the same thing. Journeys into hell are a pretty common thing in literature, after all. Odysseus made such a trip in “The Odyssey”; Heracles went there at least twice; the Bible teaches that Jesus descended into hell to free all those who had died in faith; and so on. Dante calls to mind two other such stories, in an attempt to put his impending descent into perspective.

The first tale he mentions is Virgil's own “Aeneid.” In that poem, Aeneas, one of the surviving members of the royal family of Troy, visits hell and discovers that he is destined to be the ancestor of the Roman Empire, which will restore a golden age to the earth under the august leadership of its first emperor. (Coincidentally, I'm sure, Virgil wrote “The Aeneid” during the reign of Augustus Caesar.) The other tale Dante mentions, which I've never read, comes from a medieval vision of the Apostle Paul descending into hell. (2 Corinthians 12 tells of Paul having a vision of heaven.)

What's interesting about these reminders is that, to Dante, they underscore his unworthiness of such an undertaking, which he is sure he will regret. He is neither a great Trojan lord, not a hero of the faith, like Paul, and is fairly sure he is going to regret such an undertaking once it has begun.

Perhaps it would be useful here to differentiate between Dante the character in the poem, and Dante Alighieri the poet. Dante the character is practically shaking with fear here, humbly considering himself unworthy of the task set before him; Dante Alighieri is using this to lay the foundation for declaring his worthiness to his readers.

And that justification comes swiftly from the mouth of Virgil, who as the premiere poet of ancient Rome naturally is going to make an impression on Dante. Virgil explains that he was in Limbo, the first circle of hell, where, as Alighieri explains in a later canto, virtuous pagans and unbaptized infants go when they die.

Virgil explains to Dante that he was sent to his side from Limbo by Beatrice, who came to him straight out of heaven to see to lead Dante away from the wild beasts that had been threatening him on the hillside. And not only Beatrice, but two other women from heaven, are calling for him. (Though I count three besides Beatrice: the Virgin Mary, Lucia and Rachel.)

Dante finds this heavenly encouragement more than enough, and he resolves anew to go into hell, with Virgil as his guide.

So what's at work here is that Alighieri, in presenting his Dante avatar as fearful and unnerved by the trip, essentially is casting himself as a humble sort of fellow who would never presume on his own to say any of what follows in the remaining cantos of his own poem. As a result, the journey he takes, the things he claims to see, and the political ramifications of what he finds there – such as political foes suffering the torments of the damned – acquire a gloss of greater credibility.

The closest I've ever come to hell was attending middle school for three years, but at the time, that high dive felt pretty close. I tried it again later that same day, and after some of the other kids in line teased me for wanting to chicken out a second time, I made the jump.

Unlike Dante, I had a blast.

canto i

Probably one of the most important things to remember as we started reading "Inferno" is that it's about a man who is going through a mid-life crisis.

The first canto of "Inferno" sets the story at halfway through Dante's life, roughly around the time he was 35. Dante's family were associated with the White Guelfs, which political alliance had fallen out of favor with the ruling class in Florence, forcing him into exile away from his wife and children. To some extent, though the poem is thoroughly imbued with religious meaning, the despair that marks this first canto reflects the political/spiritual anguish Dante feels as one has been wronged. He is suffering from a sense of grievous wrong, and he hopes that justice one day will prevail, both spiritually and politically, as the wrong is made right and those who have been humbled are exalted.

The canto begins in a dark wood, where Dante has been suffering deeply, and where he encounters a brace of wild animals: first, a beautiful leopard that keeps blocking his way for all that it is enchanting to look at; secondly, a fierce lion; and lastly a terrifying she-wolf. It's a common device to use animals to represent either an attitude that matches that animal's demeanor, or at least a person who possesses that attitude. The notes in my copy of "Infero" mention that these animals all represent political powers -- the leopard, Florence; the lion, the royal house of France; and the wolf, no less than the papal see. Yet the same three also correspond to mortal vices: worldly pleasure, ambition, and avarice. What is significant is that the animals all keep Dante from mounting the hill that he is trying to climb, presumably to escape the fearsome woods and gain some perspective on where he is.

At this point, Virgil arrives and explains to Dante that he can never make it up the hill, because the she-wolf eats all who pass that way and becomes only the hungrier for having eaten. Dante's way out is to go down, through the depths of hell, where he will witness the torments of those confined to eternal fire; but of greater importance to the poet Dante, it seems, is the coming of the Greyhound that will destroy the she-wolf and return her to hell from whence she was set loose, and that will deliver Italy.

The writing about this Greyhound is decidedly messianic in style, to the point that the greyhound feeds on virtues like wisdom, love and "manfulness," which fits the other apocalyptic imagery of the canto. But it also works on a political level, apparently, since it may refer to any number of other political figures from Dante's life, especially given the rather limited range of the Greyhound's dominion.

I've always found Dante's choice of Virgil for his guide to be interesting, but in many regards it makes sense. Dante was Italian, and Virgil himself was an Italian, from the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. As a scholar, Dante doubtless had studied Virgil's "Aeneied" extensively, and in any event, he refers to himself as Virgil's disciple and student. One thing that is mildly worth noting: Virgil's epic "Aeneid" also depicted a trip to the Underworld, as Aeneas sought counsel from the shade of a prophet there, as Odysseus once had as well. The shade Aeneas visited, whose identity temporarily eludes me (I last read "The Aeneid about 15 years ago), spoke of a coming gold age for Aeneas' descendants. The terms of Virgil's prophecy were clearly intended to describe Augustus Caesar, but some people have tried to interpret them around Christ.

Which of course is only fitting. The messianic expectation is archetypal, common to all people; just as we all believe that things used to better Once Upon a Time, we all have the hope that One Day Things Will Be Better Again.

And I suppose, when we're in a situation where our hopes and dreams have been thwarted by political machinations and bad luck, as many of Dante's had been, such an expectation and hope only makes sense.

blogging through 'inferno'

If you read back over the past few years that I've been blogging, you're quickly going to reach a few conclusions:

1. I write a lot.
   
2. I write about a lot of things.
3. Some of the things that I write about, I write about a lot, like a man picking at a sore, or like a man who is hopelessly in love. (Sometimes even like a man hopelessly in love with picking at a sore.)
4. If something about my writing has struck your fancy, it can be hard to deal with all the other crap on the blog to follow the thread all the way through.

I decided tonight that I want to try something different. Starting tomorrow, I want to blog exclusively about Dante's "Inferno," one canto a night, until I have finished. Then, perhaps, I will continue through the rest of "The Divine Comedy," although the last time I tried reading Dante's masterpiece, I never made it more than halfway through "Paradiso."

Dante's epic poem is a phenomenal piece of literature. Although he did not invent the doctrine of hell, nor even create the doctrines and images expressed in it, there can be no doubt that it is his vision of hell; his beautifully haunting pictures of the circles and cornices of hell, filled with the damned who are buffeted by gale-force winds, submerged in muck, burned in fire or frozen in ice; that has defined hell in popular understanding for all the centuries since. Some of the details are changed -- Satan is more commonly seen as king in hell, rather than a prisoner there, each of his three mouths chewing on a different traitor -- but our grotesquely exaggerated sense of elaborate punishments, too ironically chosen for the person's defining sins, has its deepest root in Dante's poem. The Wood of Suicides appears in "Sandman"; Dr. Strange once led Marvel's band of mutants through the Nine Circles in the pages of "Uncanny X-men," and authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were once inspired to journey through hell themselves, in their own "Inferno."

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to hell. I hope you come with me.

jesus h. christ

the big easy

Finishing up here in New Orleans tonight. The city has been absolutely amazing, and I've loved how relaxed a lot of the city is where music and entertainers are concerned. Even now, months from Carnival and Mardi Gras, you can't go anywhere without encountering live jazz music, often from amateur musicians playing for tips.

It's been tremendous. We've loved pretty much every minute of it.

Of course, tonight we visited Bourbon Street for dinner with the extended family. Probably a place I would have enjoyed more if I were 14 years younger and didn't have impressionable young girls with me.