‘Inferno’: A Journey Through Hell
A review of ‘Inferno’, by Dante Alighieri; c. 1320.
Voltaire said the problem with the Holy Roman Empire was it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Accordingly it often found itself locking horns with the Papacy, which in the teeth of imperial might wished to hold on to its independence, its influence, its right to appoint abbots and bishops. The tension between these two forces shaped Europe for hundreds of years. By the 12th century, Italy had become a crucial battleground, and two groups, one supporting the Empire and one backing the Pope, had emerged.
Supporting the authority of the Pope were the Guelphs, named for the Welf family, rivals of the imperial House of Hohenstaufen. Their counterparts were the Ghibellines – from Waiblingen, a Hohenstaufen stronghold – who were loyal to the Emperor. Their support rested less on principle and more on political and economic interest. At any rate, Italy was split: Florence and Milan were Guelph cities; Siena and Pisa were Ghibelline.
Dante Alighieri was a Florentine, and a Guelph. He was born in Florence in 1265, near the start of the 500-year spell of cultural and economic flourishing. A republican government, backed by wealthy banking families, had emerged; trading routes with Northern Europe, North Africa and the Levant had been established; and the Florin had become Europe’s ruling trade currency. Meanwhile, the Santa Maria Novella, a masterpiece of the Gothic and Romanesque, was under construction; the cathedral of Santa Reparata (predecessor of Il Duomo) was undergoing renovations; philosophers, scholars and poets had appeared; guilds sprang up; and the population had exploded to 50,000. It was the beginning of a golden age. And in 1300, Dante became one of the most powerful men in this city.
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, near the start of the 500-year period of cultural and economic flourishing described as its golden age.
As a town prior, Dante was one of six men who controlled the city’s finances, military and legal system, oversaw public works, and represented Florence in foreign diplomacy. He had a say over the forging of alliances and how the city dealt with Rome and the Empire. By dint of his position he was, it is no exaggeration to say, one of the world’s most influential statesmen. The power of the town prior was constrained only by his time in office, which was just two months.
During his Priorate, Dante’s concerned himself with trying to stop infighting among the Guelphs, which had split into factions. Having routed the Ghibellines, the group were now arguing among themselves. The White Guelphs, to whom Dante was sympathetic, wanted more independence from Pope Boniface VIII. The Black Guelphs, on the other hand, supported him. Keen to end the fighting, Dante, as prior, took a huge gamble and exiled the leaders of both the White and Black camps – leaders that included his friend, Guido Cavalcanti. It didn’t pay off. The exiled Black Guelphs, with the Pope’s backing and under the command of Charles of Valois, returned to the city, overturned Dante’s reforms, and charged him with fraud and corruption. In 1302, Dante was cast out. He lost everything.
Five years later, Dante found himself in middle age, wandering from city to city, seeking refuge with families sympathetic to the Ghibellines. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend.) He wondered how it had all gone quite so wrong. He had been a respected politician, an established poet, a fixture of Florentine cultural and political life. Now, he was an exile. And it was against this professional and psychological backdrop that he took up his pen and began to write his Commedia, which begins with the fitting and immortal lines: ‘Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita’: ‘Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, the straight way having been lost.’
Dante found himself in middle age, wandering from city to city, seeking refuge with families sympathetic to the Ghibellines.
The protagonist of Inferno and the one who utters these words is not Dante but Dante’s pilgrim, that is, Dante not as a poet but as a soul on a moral and spiritual pilgrimage. Fighting to escape the dark wood in which he finds himself, he sees light on a hill and starts towards it. But three animals – a leopard, lion and she-wolf – block his path. The shade of the poet Virgil then appears and takes him into hell, the gates of which bear the inscription: ‘Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.’ Hell, in Dante’s mythography, is a vast concentric funnel beneath the earth, the structure of which gets narrower and deeper as the sins of those trapped there grow increasingly grave.
Hell is both particular and universal. In the first circle, Limbo, Dante encounters virtuous pagans and unbaptised children, both existing in a state of eternal yearning. The shades suffer more intensely with each successive circle: the lustful are tossed about by violent winds; the gluttons wallow in filth, the hoarders and wasters push heavy weights in opposite directions. The fortune-tellers walk with their heads twisted backwards; the wrathful tear at each other’s flesh; the traitors are trapped in ice. Each shade suffers according to the principle of contrapasso, which states that the punishment must fit the crime. Thus, in the eighth circle, flatterers – those whose lies pollute and degrade relationships – are immersed in excrement. Tellingly, Dante does not depict every sinner as beyond sympathy. Francesca di Rimini, trapped in the circle of the lustful, does not regret her affair with Paolo, and speaks of the happiness she shared. Her story moves Dante’s pilgrim so completely that he faints.
The Commedia has a classic shape: we must go down to go up. Odysseus visits the underworld to seek guidance on his journey home. In The Tempest, Propero undergoes a symbolic descent and ascent, suffering betrayal before gaining the power to forgive. Christian falls into the Slough of Despond before reaching The Celestial City in Pilgrim’s Progress. This reflects the moral, psychological and spiritual truth that we cannot make progress if we do not, as it were, look ourselves in the eye. Alcoholics make ‘a searching and fearless moral inventory’. Solzhenitsyn, in the gulag, did something similar, concluding that ‘The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human.’ To acknowledge is to start down the path to acceptance and to encounter what the psychologist Carl Rogers called ‘the curious paradox … that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change’. It is telling that Carl Rogers, creator of client-centred therapy, initially wanted to be a priest.
The Commedia has a classic shape: we must go down to go up.
Each circle of Hell forces Dante’s pilgrim and us to confront the different sides of human vice. But it is not a mere catalogue of sins. We pity the damned, even as Virgil wants Dante’s pilgrim to uphold God’s justice. We come to see that sin is not about wrongdoing, but turning away from God, that is, turning towards ourselves. At bottom, sin is about putting our own interest, or perceived interest, above those of others. The point of contrapasso is that sin is its own punishment. Poetically speaking, God is the one who punishes us. To put that in the language of scientific naturalism, selfishness cuts us off from the love, trust and joy that makes life worth living. It makes us lonely and unsatisfied. And its most extreme expressions elicit unbearable shame. Before the movement burnt out (and thank God, by the way), the New Atheists liked to claim humility was some sort of self-abasement when in fact, as C.S. Lewis put it, it is ‘not thinking less of oneself, but thinking of oneself less’. Pride makes us miserable. Humility, which is really just a mindful presence in the world, is the key to happiness.
One of the amusing things about Inferno is that for all his moralising Dante frequently succumbs to pride. Not for nothing does he write in Purgatorio: ‘Superbia è il mio peccato, e ne vado / piangendo al monte.’ (‘My pride is what has brought me to this plight, / and it weighs on my heart.’) He sticks his enemies in Hell. The Black Guelph Filippo Argenti is with the wrathful; the Ghibelline leader Faranata degli Uberti is with the heretics; Pope Boniface VIII (who was alive at the time, by the way) is with the corrupt. Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti, leading to their loss, is in the ninth circle, and seeing him sends Dante into a rage.
Linguistically, the text is a masterpiece. Dante created a new rhyme form, terza rima, which creates a sense of motion and inevitability, reflecting the inexorable logic of divine justice. The orderly form stands in contrast with the wild and dreamlike chaos of Hell, symbolising how divine order arises from earthly sin. By choosing to write in the Tuscan dialect at a time when Latin was the standard of serious writing he showed that the vernacular could convey lofty ideas, and brought his theological and poetic vision to the masses. It is in large part because of Dante that Italians speak Italian. His descriptions in Inferno are visceral, precise, evocative, grotesque. The traitor Ugolino gnaws on the skull of his co-conspirator Archbishop Ruggieri with ‘teeth, as strong as a dog’s’ which ‘sank into the skull with savage hunger.’ As striking are his renditions of the pride, bitterness and sorrow the shades express as he and Virgil come upon them.
It is in large part because of Dante that Italians speak Italian.
Dante’s various allusions to 14th-century politics and classical literature require and reward some unpacking, but give the poem at one and the same time a contemporary and traditional quality. I am with Iain McGilchrist in thinking that the proper way to think about progress may be as a spiral, that is, as a returning to the start but with something new to say, so to speak. So Dante places himself, rather boldly, in a tradition of Western thought and writing that includes Homer and Ovid and Virgil, but also puts his poem in the politically volatile world of Italy at the turn of the 14th century. And, needless to say, pulls it off.
It is worth glossing the relationship between Dante’s pilgrim and the shade of Virgil. Virgil, being a pagan, is condemned to Hell, but he is a highly sympathetic presence: a guide and father figure who embodies reason and classical wisdom. He shows a patience and authority that anchor Dante’s pilgrim as he undergoes a tumultuous emotional journey. Virgil’s limitations – namely, that he can never enter Paradise – foreshadow the need for divine grace, which Dante will only find in later parts of the Commedia. (There is more to say on the operation of divine grace and the question whether pagans really are barred from paradise, but I will save that for now.) The interplay between human reason and spiritual faith is an important relationship, one Dante attempts to negotiate with humility and ambition.
Dante’s real achievement with Inferno is his marriage of imagination and intellect. The poem deals with timeless moral and theological and psychological questions, invokes the Homeric tradition of epic storytelling, entails stylistic and linguistic innovation, and vividly depicts a gripping story of a man’s journey into the abyss. Set aside the historical context, the medieval backdrop, the rich Catholicity of the thing and what we find is a very human story about our fallibility, our longing for salvation. This is why Bishop Robert Barron says of the Commedia that ‘it’s not just Dante’s story. It’s everyone’s story.’ It is hard to overstate what a feat of human genius Inferno is.
