Everyone's favorite section of the Divine Comedy is the Inferno. It has appealed to the human imagination since it first appeared 700 years ago. There's something in it for everyone, from the scholarly to the visually creative to those who just like a good story. Scholars today are still doing research on it, and visual artists are still making images based upon it, witness the extensive footnotes in Hollander's recent translation that I am using, and a 2009 video game, called simply Dante's Inferno. As a reader, when I went to quickly revisit it to refresh my memory for this diary, I got caught up in it all over again and reread the whole thing.
And then there's just the general idea of people being punished in appropriate ways for their misdeeds in life, which fuels a lot private revenge fantasies. Personally I have had many wretched vacuum cleaners, which prompt me to imagine the designer/engineer of each such machine I've had being forced to use it to clean the Gates of Hell, sucking up infernal soot for a very very long time. It helps a little when the damned things clog up to think of them as being truly damned.
So I hope this little piece of mine will also have something in it for everyone, or at least for lots of people with many different areas of interest and levels of knowledge.
The modern reader is going to have to look up a lot of things, or risk simply spending a great deal of time thinking "Huh? What was that about?" If you are naturally curious this won't be a problem and you will likely learn things you didn't know before, and will be glad you know now. It is for this reason that I strongly recommend getting a copy of the poem that includes extensive footnotes, or else read it on an iPad where you can quickly look stuff up as you read.
For me, one of the first instances of the necessity of finding out what in the world something meant was the reference to the Harrowing of Hell, which somehow I had completely missed knowing about. I can still recite the Apostles' Creed, mostly, including the part about "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead...." But for some reason it never occurred to me to wonder what had happened while he was in hell, and no one ever saw fit to inform me that there had been a harrowing of the inhabitants of the place. Nor had I ever run across a discussion of the topic at any time in my rather eclectic education. Perhaps if I had gone beyond First Communion to Confirmation I would have known all about it, but I didn't. If you are similarly clueless here's a brief discussion, which mentions the connection to the apocryphal "Gospel of Nicodemus" and to various traditions in Medieval English literature. It was all news to me, and I ended up downloading a copy of "The Gospel of Nicodemus" and reading it, too. There's a PDF of it HERE for the similarly hopelessly curious.
I always enjoyed studying the Classics (as in Classical Antiquity, not just as "things that everyone says you should have read"), and had enough college credits to say I had a minor in Classics. But rather early on in the Inferno I would run into some reference to Greek or Roman mythology that just sounded off or wrong. At first I would think perhaps I misremembered, or perhaps Dante just learned it wrong--after all his sources were a whole lot sparser than mine, basically he didn't have the Greek originals for anything (we can thank the Arabs and the Renaissance Italian humanists that we do), so maybe that's why he got something wrong or oddly twisted. But finally I realized that he often just made things up to suit himself, and sometimes he did so for reasons that might be forever unknown. That came as a surprise.
Dante's poem bears a rather complex relationship to truth and reality. For instance he takes great pains to give little details that will add to the impression that the story he is telling is the literal truth: that he really did take a trip to hell and beyond. He expends quite a bit of effort telling us exactly where the sun was as he moved from one place to another, and just how his physical body interacted with the objects he encountered. There is the poignant story in Canto XIII, concluded in Canto XIV, of the suicides who are incarnated as bushes and shrubs, and speak thru their broken branches which ooze blood and words, moving Dante to pity. The final suicide has been sorely abused by another sinner seeking to escape his punishment, who has broken up the branches and stripped many of the leaves of a hapless fellow Florentine, whose speech causes Dante to perform an act of pathetic compassion:
Urged by the love I bore my place of birth,
I gathered up the scattered leaves and gave them back
to him, who had by this time spent his breath.
A bit earlier, in Canto V, Dante had been so moved by the story of the lovers Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta that he had fainted and "down I fell as a dead body falls."
Both these stories have a strong visual component, details to convince one of the actual physicality of the events described, and an emotional component to move the reader with "pity and terror"--as Aristotle would have as the goal of the high art of poetry. But Aristotle is talking about tragedy, and Dante calls his work The Divine Comedy. So what gives here?
Hamlet is a tragedy, it ends badly. The murdered lovers obviously came to bad end, as did the suicide, so their stories can be considered tragic. But while Dante's own story begins badly, it is supposed to end very well indeed: he gets to see Paradise under the protection of the saved soul, Beatrice, and the whole experience is a redemptive one for him, and therefor NOT tragic. Thus Dante's title for his work: the Commedia.
But the happy ending belongs to Dante the protagonist of the poem, there is also Dante the author, who may insist that the story he is telling about himself as the protagonist is true, but he and we both know it isn't really and literally true. Indeed Dante the author simply makes up lots of things that are not only not literally true, they are downright, and verifiably, false. In short, he lies. Dante the author also knows things that Dante the protagonist doesn't, and is supposed to learn in the course of his journey. Which brings us back to the sympathy he has for the poor suicide and the unfortunate lovers. He isn't supposed to have any sympathy for them. They are damned by God, for good reason, and none of the angels nor any of the saved care one iota about them. If Dante were further along on his spiritual path, he wouldn't care either.
Even in Canto XX, almost two-thirds of the way thru hell, Dante is still being moved by the plight of sinners. He is weeping at the contorted bodies of the diviners--and asks us if we could avoid doing the same, trying to make us complicit in his failure--when he is sternly rebuked by Virgil:
..."Are you still witless as the rest?
Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.
Who is more impious than one who thinks
that God shows passion in His judgment?"
This idea is, I think, very problematic for a number of reasons. First, I believe most of us around here are simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of permanent damnation and torture. If we have souls that are eternal, and are the children of a benevolent god, how could such a god behave so meanly towards us? And like Dante the protagonist we feel natural human sympathy for many of the souls Dante meets and describes, and psychologically reject the idea of them being treated the way they are described as being treated, forever. It just seems....excessive. We ourselves would be kinder than that, how could a god be less compassionate than we are?
I think there is another problem, both for us and for Dante, and I suspect Dante knew it. It goes back to my opening statement about the Inferno being everyone's favorite book of the Commedia: if we aren't suppose to care about the damned, why is Dante writing about them, and why do we, and obviously he, find them and their stories the most interesting and emotionally engaging section of his great poem? To jump ahead, I think I should also observe that neither we nor Dante can find much of interest in Paradise. Not even the genius of Dante can make Paradise sound exciting. It's just boring.
I really don't know exactly what to make of these issues, but they are things worth thinking about. And thinking about them leads one to speculate on the role of art and the nature of religion and just what constitutes religious truth, and how do we know it is true. All things that are worth spending time considering. OK, but what about politics? That's something we all find interesting, or we wouldn't be spending time reading the diaries at Daily Kos. Dante was a very political man, and there is a great deal about politics and politicians in the Divine Comedy. As well as politics and religion, which is rather timely these days. Next time I'll discuss that.