Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) Florence, Tuscany. Italian.
Once again we
descend into the underworld. This time, however, the descent becomes the
entire story....
The first part of the trilogy: The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio.
Written between 1308-1321 in Tuscan Italian. The characters are drawn from
classical works or, mainly, from Dante’s Florentine, Tuscan “Italy” – the city
of Florence itself being one of the most powerful city-states of this time.
A “comedy”? Yes, in this classic sense this doesn’t mean “ha ha” but a work moving from suffering and ending in peace, resolution or happiness (as opposed to tragedy).
Introduction
As we are told in the opening cantos, in his 35th year, the narrator, Dante, enters the Dark Wood of religious and/or personal despair.
He is having a mid-life and/or spiritual crisis.Guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and later by his muse, a young woman named Beatrice (modeled after Dante's first love), the poem records in detail his descent into a fantastic vision of hell, organized as a series of spiraling circles or rings, and populated with all of the earth’s sinners.
As the pilgrims
descend, their journey takes them into deepening levels of sin, corresponding
with the leopard, lion and wolf encountered in the Dark Wood:
a) Leopard: sins of immoderation, from lust to gluttony. Think of the Lovers
encountered in Book V and Dante's relative pity for them (see Pietas, below).
b) Lion: sins of violence
c) Wolf: sin of fraud, dishonesty. At their worst, this is Satan, and then Judas and Brutus ("et tu, Brute?"), for they have sinned against mankind itself and, worse, God.
Medieval Dark,
Renaissance Spark
As a Renaissance
work,
Dante’s combines Medieval and Classical (Greco Roman) Ideals.
He reminds us that the Medieval world was dominated by:
a) The Church. The Italian Renaissance is a religious movement, or a movement that occurs within the realm of traditional Catholic doctrine. From Dante to Michelangelo, the most brilliant Italian Renaissance art focuses on Christian themes, characters and stories.
b) Grotesque smells, a world that, like Dante’s Inferno, is literally steeped in shit and piss and plague – a world devoid of all sanitation, of no plumbing and the no medical science. Thus, it is a world dominated by death.
c) Physical suffering, inflicted by governments and the Church, either operating together or fighting against each other or amongst themselves. It is an age of endless wars and political rivalries – rivalries that take up the vast majority of The Inferno -- which will all but consume the lives of these authors and artists. Obviously such physical suffering would be compounded in a world with no medical science.
In contrast to this Medieval darkness, the Renaissance spark is to be found in Virgil as Dante’s guide: in Dante’s -- and then the Renaissance’s -- belief that Neo-Classical Humanism could lead one into a deeper, fuller understanding of religious belief, that the two ways of thinking could be melded into one.
(Dante chooses Virgil instead of Homer in part for the logical reason that both are "Italian" -- or at least Roman and Tuscan, respectively -- but more importantly this is because Homer's actual writings had disappeared from the shelves of Medieval Europe -- Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox Christian) scholars read in Greek, while Roman Catholics read in Latin, so until the Renaissance, Catholics looked down on Homer and Greek heroes.)
The
Symbolic Geography of Hell and Dante's Poetic Structure
Two concepts
shape the physical layout of both the Inferno as a place and The Inferno as a
poem: a) the Neo-Platonic Ladder of Eros and b) The Holy Trinity
Plato's
Ladder of Eros
Borrowing from Augustine's (354-430)
Neo-Platonism, Dante's Inferno, and the trilogy as a whole, is structured on
Plato's vision of sensible and intelligible knowledge:
a) The soul is naturally drawn to truth and beauty via eros/love but it is easily distracted by "fallen" earthly beauty/love; and this the very nature of "sin": to mistake earthly desire for spiritual love.
b) Sensible knowledge is a "fallen" version of "higher" Intelligible (or "spiritual") knowledge, thus the soul returns to truth where the body holds us down, for this reason the entire trilogy uses mass or gravity as a guiding theme: the closer one is to God the more one becomes simply "light" and the further one is from God the more one becomes "mass" or a body: the soul ascends, the body descends. For this reason the Inferno begins with "light" sins (the lovers) blown about by wind and it literally descends, with each sinner becoming "heavier" until it reaches that heaviest thing in the universe -- in the higher level of the Inferno Dante cannot touch the characters, but toward the center they take on a physical body etc.
This also tells us how to read the poem itself: following Augustine, Dante presents an entirely allegorical, metaphorical journey: to read a text literally is become distracted by sensible knowledge, while its higher truth is entirely spiritual, abstract, intelligible.
The Holy
Trinity
The entire structure of the three poems acts as a metaphor toward the
Trinity:
a) There are three poems or visions, based around a tripartite afterlife: The Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise; the Inferno itself has three divisions, representing three types of sin (incontinence/immoderation/lust, violence, fraud/untruth), represented in the opening by the she-wolf, lion and leopard etc.
b) Dante invents a new rhyme scheme based on threes, terza rima: aba bcb cdc; each tercet has 33 stressed syllables
c) Each of the canticles (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) contains 33 cantos (chapters)
d) Satan has three heads and so on.
Medieval Sin, Punishment
A graphic representation of
this vision is here:
Dante's World.
As we soon learn, much of the symbolism and structure of the Inferno revolves around Dante’s vision of contrapasso – that the punishment fits the crime. While there is certainly a fairly sadistic, ironic pleasure to be found in the sinners’ eternal torture and suffering, the larger points express a Medieval vision of the body and soul:
a) in the Medieval world, physical torture was the primary means of criminal punishment. This wouldn’t change until after the Enlightenment, in the 19th century.
b) the Inquisition was in full swing, and the Church routinely practiced physical torture as a means of revealing – and thus either rehabilitating or punishing – the true essence of one’s soul.
c) sin was believed to corrupt the very essence of one’s soul, and Dante’s Hell reveals sinners reduced to this remaining essence.
Two More Major Themes: Contrapasso and Pietas
Contrapasso:
"The punishment fits the crime."
The wage of sin,
here is sin: What we do on earth distills our
soul to its most fundamental nature, and this is the soul, the fundamental self,
that we take with us into the afterlife. At its very root, Dante's characters suffer a damnation
of sin itself -- that is, their souls are reduced to the sin itself, and the
punishment of sinning becomes eternal sinning. This is important because Dante
creates a world in which the symbol refers to back to itself and we are
therefore reminded that Dante's lesson is a metaphorical, spiritual one:
we aren't simply supposed to fear some fantastical afterworld/afterlife called
Hell (after all, who is Dante to know what happens after we die?) but to realize
that when we sin we become that sin: when we tell a lie we
become a liar and the punishment is usually to be untrusted, untrustworthy;
when we cheat we become cheaters and so on.
For the Medieval Christian, we should all want to climb the Platonic ladder toward God's glory, and the failure to do so is not only "sinful" but illogical; thus, the characters in Dante's Inferno suffer because they have made an illogical choice: they have chosen sin over faith and God.
For me it becomes easiest to understand this Dantean/Sartrean contrapasso as the experience of addiction: that point at which we want to stop smoking, eating, drinking, gaming, coming to class late etc. but simply "cannot"; we have lost control of our desires and now they control us: the body (physical/earthly desire) has taken over the mind/soul.
Retribution: Note that we're back to we're we've been much of the semester, but with a Christian spin: the Inferno, Hell, is actually a spiritualized version of retribution -- "an eye for an eye." Like Homer's treatment of the suitors in The Odyssey, Dante seems to relish the punishment; but like Aeschylus' treatment of Orestes in the Oresteia, just punishment is administered by the God or gods, not the injured party.