Dante Inferno Mr. Reyes

Dante’s *Inferno*

 

Dante: 1265-1321, born in Florence

1274: See Beatrice for the first time

1285: Marries Gemma Donati, with whom he has three children

1290: Beatrice dies

1291-94: Studies in Florence with Dominicans and Franciscans

1295-97: Enrolls in the guild of physicians and apothecaries; allows him to enter Florentine 

     political life

1300: Pope Boniface VIII proclaims Jubilee year; Florentine Guelphs splinter into black and

     white factions. Black Guelphs supported the Papacy, while the White Guelphs opposed Papal

     influence, especially that of Pope Boniface VIII. Dante is a white Guelph.

1301: travels to Rome as part of Florentine embassy to Boniface; detained as Charles of Valois

     (at Boniface’s behest) enters Florence and allows black Guelphs to overthrow whites and

     sack the city

1302: Sentences to exile from Florence for two years and fined 5000 florins; then permanently

     banned from Florentine territory under pain of death by fire

1304-09: writes the Inferno

1309: Pope Clement V moves the papacy from Rome to Avignon

1314: Publishes the Inferno; implores Italian cardinals to return the papacy to Rome

1315: Refuses Florence’s offer to allow him to return in exchange for admission of guilt and

     payment of reduced fine.

1321: Dies in Ravenna

 

Terza rima (third rhyme): aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc. The rhyme scheme emulates one long chain of interconnected verses. Dante is linking everything together from the beginning of the poem to the very end in one long chain, to show that everything is interconnected. Each of the tercets has 33 syllables in Italian, and each line has 11 syllables. Note that there are also 33 cantos per each section of *The Divine Comedy*. Dante wants to aspire to a creation of perfection to emulate God’s own perfection, to show that God is in everything. Aesthetically, it is also an aspiration to perfect beauty—a perfect balance of rhyme and reason, sound and sense.

 

Dante wrote *The Divine Comedy* in the local Italian vernacular of the time, not Latin, Greek or French, which at that time were the languages of high culture and scholarly endeavors. In many ways, Dante was instrumental in giving Italy its national language. Many have attributed to Dante the formulation of Italian as a formal language. Furthermore, by using the local language, Dante could expand his audience. Note that at this time, Italian was not a fully formulated language yet. The language Dante used was Florentine.

 

Cantos 1-2: Dark Wood

It is early spring in the year 1300, and Dante, “midway along the road of our life,” has strayed from the straight path and finds himself in a dark wood. Heartened by the sight of a sunlit hill he begins to climb to safety, but soon he is beset by a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf and forced to retreat to the valley. Here Dante meets the shade of Virgil, the great Roman poet; to escape his dire predicament, Dante must visit the three realms of the afterlife, beginning with Hell, eternal abode of lost souls. Dane hesitates, declaring his unworthiness to undertake such a journey, but is persuaded to go when he learns that Virgil has been sent by Beatrice to rescue him.

 

Midlife crisis? Reflects what Dante was going through in exile? Time of discernment? Cosmogonic cycle. Is Dark wood a Freudian metaphor of the subconscious?

The three beasts as symbols? (Note that we have always anthropomorphized animals.) The three major divisions of Dante’s hell: concupiscence (immoderate desires or lust), violence and fraud. Note that the she-wolf may also be a political allusion; this beast nursed the legendary founders of Rome—Romulus and Remus—and came to symbolize the city. These animals are also mentioned in Jeremiah 5:6: “Wherefore a lion out of the wood hath slain them, a wolf in the evening hath spoiled them, a leopard watcheth for their cities; every one that shall go out thence shall be taken, because their transgressions are multiplied, their rebellions are strengthened.”

 

Virgil: most famous for writing the Aeneid, the epic poem that recounts the journey of Aeneas, son of Venus and a Trojan prince Anchises. Aeneas journeys from Troy to Italy, where he founds the line or rulers that will lead to Caesar and the Roman Empire of Virgil’s day. Dante might have been particularly interested in Books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid. In Book 4 Dido kills herself when Aeneas abandons her to continue on his journey and found a new civilization in Italy. In Book 6 Aeneas visits Hades to meet the shade of his father and learn of future events. It is a vivid portrait of the spiritual world, mythic creatures and rivers, which likely inspired Dante.

 

Three Blessed Women who play a role in Dante’s journey: Mary the virgin mother of Christ, St. Lucy of Syracuse (a Christian martyr who gouged her eyes out to protect her chastity) and Beatrice (the inspiration of Dante’s early love poems.) She is also his ideal, the object of his courtly love, his lodestar. Discuss courtly love. The object of one’s affection or more like obsession. 

 

Key Lines:

Midway along the road of our life (1.1)

I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul (2.32)

I am Beatrice who makes you go (2.70)

 

Questions:

What do the three Dante worlds—Hell, Purgatory and Paradise—mean to you? How do you envision them? How might they relate to each other and the world in which we live?

 

Dante faces a midlife crisis. What problems or issues are associated with such an experience?

 

Dante says at the beginning, halfway along the road of “our” life, rather than “my” life. Why?

 

Canto 3: Periphery of Hell (Cowardice)

After passing through the gate of Hell, marked with the ominous words “Leave behind all hope, you who enter,” Dante and Virgil observe the shades of those who lived such undistinguishable lives that they are refused entry either to Heaven or to Hell. Racing after a banner that never comes to a stop, these cowardly souls are repeatedly stung by flies and wasps, their blood and tears becoming food for the worms at their feet. The travelers approach the shores of river Acheron, where wretched souls of the damned gather to cross aboard a boat piloted by Charon. The quick-tempered ferryman denies passage to Dante who, shaken by an earthquake, loses consciousness and collapses.

 

Cowards, fence-sitters, wafflers, opportunists, neutrals, angels who refused to choose between God and Lucifer populate this realm. (This realm is all Dante’s imagination, though Revelation 3:16 states: But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth.”

Great refusal and Pope Celestine V. His refusal to perform the duties required of the pope (he abdicated five months after his election in July 1294) allowed Benedetto Caetani to become Pope Boniface VIII, Dante’s most reviled theological, political, and personal enemy. An alternative candidate is Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who refused to pass judgment on Jesus.

 

Charon: the ferryman who transports the dead to Hades. Has become an archetypal figure.

 

Key Lines:

Leave behind, you who enter here (3.9)

Those who lived without shame and without honor (3.36)

Let’s not talk about them, just look and move on (3.51)

 

Questions:

What does Dante’s invention of a region for cowards imply about Hell proper and its eternal inhabitants? What does this original idea say about Dante’s view of human behavior and its relation to the afterlife?

 

Why do you think Dante refuses to name any of the shades in this region, including the one who made the “great refusal”?

 

Consider the technique of *contrapasso*. This pertains to Dante’s logic of the punishment of sins. Expressed as: just as in life they … so now in Hell they … . Or because in life they failed or refused to … now in Hell they …” (See 3.52-57 and 3.64-69)

 

Canto 4: Circle 1: Limbo

Awaking on the other shore of Acheron, Dante follows Virgil into Limbo, the first circle of Hell Limbo is set apart from the rest of Hell by its tranquil, pleasant atmosphere. It is the eternal abode of spirits from the pre-Christian world who led honorable lives, as well as other worthy non-Christian adults and the souls of unbaptized children. Virgil is welcomed back to his home in a “noble castle” by a select group of classical poets, headed by Homer. Dante joins this prestigious company and sees other famous figures from the ancient world (both historical and literary)—among them Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Aeneas, Cicero, and Julius Caesar—and prominent medieval non-Christians, including Saladin, a sultan of Egypt.

 

Classical poets acknowledged: Homer (Odyssey); Horace (Ars Poetica); Ovid (Metamorphoses); Lucan (Pharsalia); Virgil (The Aeneid)

 

Limbo and Harrowing of Hell

 

Key Lines:

That without hope we live in desire (4.42)

So that I was sixth among such intellect (4.102)

I saw the master of those who know (4.131)

 

Questions:

Consider Dante’s behavior and his psychological/emotional state in Limbo. In particular, how do you think he was affected by the Harrowing of Hell? (4.52-63)

 

What are the implications of Dante’s self-identification as “sixth” among the great poets? (4.102)

 

What does the region tell us about Dante’s attitude toward the classical world and other religious traditions, such as Judaism and Islam?

 

Canto 5: Circle 2: Lust

Dante and Virgil encounter Minos, the monster who judges all the souls damned in Hell, at the entrance to the second circle. Tossed about by vicious winds, the spirits within this circle are guilty of lust, a sin that for many led to adultery and, for at least some of the most famous—Dido, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Paris and Tristan—to a violent death. Dante is drawn to two lustful souls still bound to one another in Hell: the beautiful Francesca and her handsome brother-in-law Paolo were murdered by the betrayed husband. Dante is so distraught after hearing Francesca’s moving tale of how she and Paolo came to act on their passion that he faints and falls hard to the ground.

 

Minos, son of Zeus and Europa, is admired for his wisdom and the keeper of the laws of his kingdom; is thus given the office of supreme judge of the underworld. He is charged with  verifying that the personal accounting of each soul who came before him corresponded with what was written in the urn containing all human destinies.

 

Love is complicated: questions the expressions, definition and nature of love. Where does love end and madness and obsession begin?

 

Francesca and Paolo: discuss the nature of their affair. It is not an uncommon one in history. (Note that she also cites the story of Lancelot and Guinevere as the catalyst for her own affair. She refuses to take responsibility for her action. \[5.127-38\])

 

Key lines:

Love brought us to one death (5.106)

Questions:

Why is Dante moved to tears after Francesca’s description of love (5.109-17)? Why does he fall after her personal account of an intimate relationship with Paolo?

 

Dante’s presentation of Francesca and Paolo encourages us to consider the place and moral responsibility in depictions of love, sex, and violence in our own day. We can certainly discuss music, television, movies, video games and advertising in these terms. Who is more (or less) responsible, and therefore accountable, for unacceptable attitudes and behavior in society: the creators and vehicles of such messages or their consumers and audiences?

 

Canto 6: Circle 3: Gluttony

Cereberus, a doglike beast with three heads, guards the third circle of Hell and mauls the spirits punished here for their gluttony. The shades, writhing in muck, are unrelentingly pounded by a cold and filthy mixture of rain, sleet, and snow that makes the earth stink. One glutton, nicknamed Ciacco, rises up and recognizes Dante as a fellow Florentine. Ciacco prophesies bloody fighting between Florence’s two political factions that will result first in the supremacy of one party (white Guelphs) and then, less than three years later, the victory and harsh retribution of the other party (black Guelphs). After informing Dante that several leading Florentines are punished below in other circles of hell, Ciacco falls back to the ground, not to rise again until the Last Judgment at the end of time.

 

Cereberus: Dante adapts this figure from the *Aeneid*. Dante gives him deafening bark. Its three heads, large gut and clawed hands perhaps suggest gluttony.

 

Ciacco may be an allusion to hog or pig. (Think cochon or cochino.)

 

Gluttony: one of the seven deadly sins.

 

Canto 7: Circle 4: Avarice and Prodigality

Plutus, a wolflike beast, shouts a warning to Satan as Dante and Virgil enter the fourth circle of Hell, but Virgil’s harsh rebuke silences him and allows the travelers to pass unscathed. Dante now sees a multitude of shades damned for the sin of avarice (holding wealth too tightly) or its opposite, prodigality (spending too freely). The two groups push heavy boulders with their chests around a circle in opposite directions: when the avaricious and the prodigal collide, they turn and, after casting insults at one another, repeat the journey in the other direction. So filthy have the souls become as a result of their sordid lives that Dante cannot recognize them individually, though Virgil reports the presence of many clerics, including cardinals and popes, among the avaricious. He also explains to Dante the divine role of Fortuna to human affairs.

 

Plutus: a variation of Pluto (Hades); Plutus is considered the god of wealth. Note the word plutocracy: rule by the wealthy class

Avarice and Prodigality: often the source of ethical and political corruption in society. Timothy

     6:10 states “avarice is the root of all evil.)

Fortuna: a powerful force beyond human understanding; fickle and whimsical goddess, can

     easily lean towards good or ill. A neutral goddess that does not get praise or condemnation.

 

Consider the contrapasso in this canto. How does the punishment fit the sin?

 

Cantos 7-9: Circle 5: Wrath and Sullenness

Dante sees wrathful souls battering and biting one another in the swampy waters of the Styx, the fifth circle of Hell, and he learns that the bubbles on the surface are caused by sullen spirits stuck in the muddy bottom of the marsh. The travelers across the Styx in the swift vessels piloted by Phlegyas. When Filippo Argenti, an arrogant Florentine whom Dante knows and detests, rises up and threatens to grab the boat, Virgil shoves him back into the water, where he is slaughtered by his wrathful cohorts, much to Dante’s delight. The resentful boatman deposits Dante and Virgil at the entrance to Dis, the fortressed city of Lower Hell. Over a thousand fallen angels who guard the entrance refuse entry to the travelers, slamming the gate in Virgil’s face. Bloodcurdling Furies then appear above the walls and call on Medusa to come and turn Dante to stone. However, a messenger from heaven arrives to squelch the resistance and open the gate, thus allowing Dante and Virgil to visit the circles of Lower Hell.

 

Wrath and Sullenness: the wrathful endlessly attack each other while the sullen stew below the surface of the swamp, even as they are all confined to Styx.

 

Questions:

How does Dante respond to Filippo Argenti?

 

 

Canto 9-11: Circle 6: Heresy

After passing through the walls of Dis, Virgil leads Dante across the sixth circle of Hell, a vast plain resembling a cemetery. Stone tombs, raised above the ground with their lids removed, glow red from the heat of flames. Buried in these sepulchers are the souls of heretics, each tomb holding an untold number of individuals who adhered to a particular doctrine but who are all punished according to the broadest notion of heresy: denial of the soul’s mortality. Dante sees standing upright in one tomb the imposing figure of Farinata, a Florentine leader of the Ghibellines, the political party bitterly opposed to the party of Dante’s ancestors. Peering out from the same tomb is the father of Dante’s best friend; Cavalcante is upset that his son Guido is not with Dante on this journey. Here Dante learns, as the result of a misunderstanding, that the damned possess the power to see the figure but not the present. Needing time to adjust to the stench wafting up from the lower circles, the travelers take refuse behind the tomb of a heretical pope. Virgil uses this time to describe the overall layout of Hell and the reasons for this organization.

 

Epicurus: Greek philosopher (341-270 BCE) who espoused the doctrine that pleasure—defined in terms of serenity, the absence of pain and passion-is the highest human good. By identifying the heretics as followers, of Epicurus, Dante condemns the Epicurean idea that the soul, like the body, is mortal.

 

Canto 12-17: Circle 7: Violence

After slipping by the Minotaur, Dante and Virgil visit the three areas of circle seven, where the violent shades are punished. Astride the Centaur Nessus, Dante views those who committed  violent acts against fellow human beings, from ruthless tyrants and warriors (such as Attila the Hun) to murderers and highway bandits, all submerged to an appropriate depth in a river of boiling blood. The travelers then enter a forest whose gnarled and stunted trees are the souls of suicides. Harpies inflict pain on the suicide-trees by feeding on their leaves, while the wounds created by the Harpies’ gnawing provide an outlet for his pain. Here Dante is moved by the talk of Pier della Vigna, a high-ranking official brought to ruin by envious rivals at court, and he sees men who squandered their wealth chased and dismembered by ferocious black dogs. Dante and Virgil next cross a desert scorched by a rain of fire, which punishes violent offenders against God: blasphemers flat on their backs (including Capanaeus, a defiant classical warrior); sodomites in continuous movement (among these Brunetto Latini, Dante’s beloved teacher) and usurers crouching on the ground with purses, decorated with their families’ coat of arms, hanging from their necks. D and V descend to the next circle aboard Geryon, a creature with a human face, reptilian body, and scorpion’s tail.

 

Violent: those who do violence to themselves, they are trees whose branches, if broken, bleed words.

 

Usury: was not forbidden in the Hebrew bible, but became forbidden with Christ. Christians were not allowed to partake in this, only the Jews. Christ came and made all the old rules twice as hard. Christ has harsh words for bankers and money lenders—refers to them as a den of thieves. He loses his cool in the temple. This made life hard for Christians who wanted to make a loan. They had to go to Jews. This is the origin of much anti-Semitism in history. Jews were locked up in ghettos in Italy and were reviled, as much as Christians needed them. Shakespeare’s Shylock, a usurer, became one of the most villainous figures in literature. Today, there are conspiracy theories of how Jews run Hollywood or all the banking and diamond industry.

 

Sodomites: their faces are turned in the opposite direction from the rest of their bodies because they are going against nature; Dante feels sympathy for them, for in life, they were his teachers who contributed significant works to the culture of the time, and he liked them, especially Brunetto Latini.

 

Thieves are constantly stealing from each other. They transform from snakes to humans and back as they bite each other. They are stealing each other’s humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cantos 18-23: Circle 8 (Malebolge 1-6): Fraud

 

Circle 8, also called Malebolge (“evil pouches”), contains ten concentric ditches corresponding to different categories of fraud. The embankments separating the ditches are connected by some bridges. D and V view the shades by walking along the embankments and across the bridges, and at times by descending into a ditch. Punished in the first six ditches are (in order) pimps and seducers, flatterers, simonists (corrupt religious leaders), soothsayers, barrators (crooked public officials), and hypocrites. Jason, leader of the Argonauts captures Dante’s attention among the seducers being whipped by horned demons. In the next ditch, Dante recognizes a flatterer from Lucca wallowing in excrement. After verbally thrashing Pope Nicholas III, stuffed upside down in the ground for prostituting the church, Dante is himself rebuked by Virgil for weeping at the sight of the soothsayers, whose necks are twisted so that tears wet their buttocks. Barrators, immersed in a sea of boiling pitch, are tortured by a band of devils, whose malicious intentions force Virgil to grab Dante and slide down into the sixth pouch. There the travelers find Caiaphas, nailed to the ground, he is trampled by other hypocrites weighed down by gilded, lead-lined cloaks.

 

Jason: one of the biggest seducers of mythic history; notorious lover and leaver of women only to achieve the golden fleece. Hypsipyle and Medea are two women whose lives he wrecked after using and abandoning them. Medea would avenge his defection by murdering their two children and poisoning Jason’s new wife Creusa.

 

Simony—named after Simon Magus in the Bible (Acts 8:18-19) who wants to buy an apostle’s miraculous power. The concept came to be known as a selling of divine power, or making profit out of sacred things. Think indulgences, selling church offices, positions and services. The Medieval church was notoriously corrupt. Hence Martin Luther’s campaign.

 

Pope Nicholas III: the simonist pope who is stuck headfirst in a hole. He believes Dante is Boniface VIII. Notorious for nepotism.

Pope Boniface VIII: Dante’s arch enemy, is also in this 8th circle of Hell.

 

Soothsayer: a person who professes to foretell the future

Tiresias: perhaps the most famous soothsayer in classical mythology. Prophesied to Odysseus and most notoriously to Oedipus.

Malebranche: Dante having fun here with a band of agile fierce devils in Canto 22

Caiaphas: the high priest of Jerusalem, who, according to Christian Scripture, advised a council of chief priests and Pharisees that it would be expedient for one man to “die for the people” so that “the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50). He called on the Romans to crucify Jesus. His proclaimed interest in the people was known to be false and is so, considered one of the great hypocrites. He and his council are now crucified on the floor of the pit.

 

 

 

 

Cantos 24-30: Circle 8 (Pouches 7-10) Fraud:

 

After climbing out of the pit of the hypocrites, Dante and V observe the punishment of fraudulent souls in the remaining four ditches of circle eight. In the seventh ditch Dante sees Vanni Fucci, who is reduced to ashes by a snakebite and then just as quickly regains his human appearance, and other thieves, who undergo transformations between human and reptilian forms. In the next ditch, enveloped in tongue-like flames, are authors of devious stratagems, particularly those involving persuasive speech. Here the Greek hero Ulysses, paired with his sidekick Diomedes, recounts his fatal final voyage, and Guido da Montefeltro, an Italian warlord, tells how he was damned for providing Pope Boniface VIII with fraudulent counsel. In the ninth ditch Dante encounters sowers of discord, whose shade-bodies are split by a sword-wielding devil. The arresting figure of Betran de Born a poet whose severed head continues to speak, exemplifies the law of contrapasso. Falsifiers—alchemists, counterfeiters, impersonators, and liars—are afflicted with various diseases in the tenth and final ditch of circle eight. Virgil scolds Dante for observing a quarrel between Master Adam (a counterfeiter) and Sinon, the Greek whose lie led to the destruction of Troy.

 

Mohammad and Ali

Consistent with the Medieval Christian thinking, in which the Muslim world was viewed as a hostile usurper, Dante depicts both Mohammed, and founding prophet of Islam, and his son-in-law Ali as sowers of religious divisiveness. One popular view held that Mohammed had himself been a cardinal who, his papal ambitions thwarted, caused a great schism within Christianity when he and his followers splintered off to form a new religious community. Dante creates a vicious composite portrait of the two holy men, with Mohammed’s body split from groin to chin and Ali’s face cleft from top to bottom (28: 22-33).

 

According to tradition, the prophet Mohammed established Islam in the early seventh century CE at Mecca. Ali married Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, but a dispute over Ali’s succession to the caliphate led, after his assassination in 661, to the division among Muslim’s into Sunni and Shi-ite sects. Still very much part of the collective memory in Dante’s world were the crusades of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, in which Christian armies from Europe fought, mostly unsuccessfully and with heavy losses on all sides, to drive Muslims out of the Holy Land. In the Middle Ages, Islam had great influence in Europe culturally—particularly in medicine, philosophy and mathematics—and politically: Spain (Al-Andalus) was under complete or partial Muslim control from the eight through the fifteenth century.

 

Sowers of scandal, discord, schismatics. This includes Mohammed; Dante sees him as a fallen Christian who creates schism within Christianity. Muslims acknowledge the OT and the NT, Moses, Isaac and Jesus. It just adds another prophet that comes after them. It adds a third book. These people’s bodies and faces are torn open, split in two.

 

 

Cantos 31-34: Circle 9: Treachery

Towering over the inner edge of circle eight are Giants, one of whom (Antaeus) lowers Dante and Virgil onto the frozen surface of Cocytus, the ninth circle of Hell. Embedded in separate regions of the ice are those who betrayed kin (Caina), homeland or political party (Antenora), guests (Ptolomea), and benefactors (Judecca). After kicking one of the political traitors hard in the face, Dante learns that this man (Bocc) betrayed the Florentine Guelphs at Montaperti. In the same region Dante finds Count Ugolino gnawing on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, whose cruelty cause Ugolino (with his sons and grandsons) to die of hunger. Fra Alberigo informs Dante that the souls of those who betray their guests arrive in Hell even while their bodies continue to live on earth. In Judecca, at the very center of Hell, Dante sees Lucifer. Much larger that the Giants, he has three hideous faces and six huge, batlike wings that generate the winds needed to keep lake frozen. Two mouths, one on each side, chew on Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, while the middle mouth engulfs Judas, the betrayer of Jesus. Virgil carries Dante down the shaggy body of Lucifer, making sure to flip over and climb once they have passed through the center of the earth. Dante then follows Virgil along a trail through the other half of the globe until he is able to see again the stars.   

 

 

Ninth circle of hell has four rivers—mud, ice, fire, water. Dante walks across the river of ice and he feels a cold wind (being caused by the beating of Satan’s wings.) The titans are frozen in the ice.

 

Judeca (named after Judas, the greatest traitor of all) is the last territory before Satan’s dwelling. It is for the betrayers of one’s master.

Satan is chewing on three sinners: Judas, Brutus and Cassius (Julius Caesar’s assassins.)