Dante's Architecture of Hell
I took the plunge this summer and decided to leave Mark Musa’s translation of Dante on the shelf. I looked at five different candidates, and I decided to use a 40% off coupon at Borders to get John Ciardi’s translation.? The footnotes are better than Mark Musa’s and the best I could find at Borders, which remains important for me.? His “terza rima lite” (his term), in which the first and third lines of each triad rhyme, struck me as a good way to keep it sounding like Dante without forcing English, which Ciardi calls “rhyme-poor,” to do what King Alfred and Geoffrey Chaucer never intended it to do.? So, with Mary in West Virginia and Micah in bed for the night, I started into Inferno on May 24. I made it to the thirty-fourth Canto, the end of Inferno, yesterday.
I also found this Inferno graphic which, to my amusement, pairs a careful eye for document design with an assignment of the three beasts of Dante that reverses the leopard and the she-wolf.? If you could ignore that reversal, it’s quite nice.
Something different stands out to me every time I read Dante, and this time, given the texts I taught last spring and the work that I’ve been doing on my dissertation, Dante’s treatment of the will interested me most.? When I taught Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, I emphasized to my class that, if one sees the play’s events through Protestant lenses, although God never appears as a voice (much less a visible character) on stage, nonetheless event after event arise that keep Faustus from following his perverse will to quickly into the fires of Hell.? Since Dante is writing about Hell itself, those stops come off.? When sinners arrive on the banks of the Acheron, there are no slave-driving demons herding them towards Charon’s ferry; they go because they desire their own damnation.? Without God’s grace holding them back as it did when they were alive, their sins impel them from within, driving them towards the circles of Hell in which their lust or their wrath or their fraud become the totality of their existence.? Moreover, when they reach Minos, judge of the underworld, nobody has to waterboard them to get the truth about their lives; because they loved their sins more than God, they readily and eagerly tell the legendary king exactly what their true souls’ desires were, and he accordingly sends them to the place where they can have precisely what they wanted.
This time through the infernal Canticle I also took more note than usual of the fact that the tormentors in Hell should themselves have turned out as more than they did.? In Cocytus, the lowest circle, for traitors, there is no direct demonic torment at all; most of them face eternal torture from other damned human souls, and all of them are frozen in ice by the ever-beating wings of Satan as he cools the ice that entraps him, his unchecked desire to escape lowness keeping him eternally low.? Previous to that, in the ditches of Malebolgia, the same holds for thieves, who steal one another’s bodies (you’ll just have to read it), and for alchemists, who rush on one another in periodic frenzies and tear one another’s flesh.? The demons who hook the grafters, who shoot arrows into the wrathful, and who bar the doors to the city of Dis all exhibit the ugliness of soul that comes not from doing one’s work as a service to God but from taking joy in the sorrow of others (the classical Christian definition of Envy).? I realize that Dante and Sartre would not find much to agree on, but in both of their Hell-texts Hell is indeed other people.? Most poignant of all of the mutual tormentors are Paolo and Francesca, the most famous dwellers in the circle of the lustful.? Francesca’s account of their damnation-through-Arthur-tales is always a favorite of the crew that wants all poetry to be about being a poet, but what’s really haunting about the scene is that they’re together in eternity.? The pairing has to be a foreshadowing travesty of the union that Dante and Beatrice will enjoy in the end of the poem, and the contrast is stark.? Whereas Dante and Beatrice, because they become one in the light of God, grow canto by canto in their love for one another, there is no sense of completion for Paolo, who silently weeps next to his illicit lover.? Instead of coming to rest in God together, they forever float about, reminding each other of the eternal goods that they’ll never enjoy, and I can’t help but imagine that they eternally blame one another for what went wrong even as they’re torn with guilt for what each has done to the other.
Speaking of blame, the encounter with Guido de Montefeltro also jumped out at me this time around.? T.S. Eliot highlighted this episode by making some of its lines the epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (I quote from Ciardi’s translation):
If I believed that my reply were made
to one who could ever climb to the world again,
this flame would shake no more.? But since no shade
ever returned–if what I am told is true–
from this blind world into the living light,
without fear or dishonor I answer you.
Within the poem itself, the joke here is that Montefeltro, who got into Hell taking bad advice about the nature of Hell, now publishes his story to all posterity because–yes–he got bad advice about the nature of Hell.? Guido was something of a strategic genius who, realizing that his talents were causing incredible harm in the world, repented and became a friar.? But when Pope Boniface VIII needed his services again to crush some of his enemies, he promised to pull strings in heaven to make sure any further sin would not damn Guido.? More precisely, of course, as the inheritor of Peter’s keys to heaven and hell, he made Guido an offer he couldn’t refuse.? Guido de Montefeltro, out of fear (and, one suspects, the satisfaction of an evil job well done), does the Pope’s planning, and upon his death, when St. Francis comes to escort his soul to the sphere of the contemplatives, a demon makes a counter-claim that his repentance for his latest act of Karl-Rovery did not count because he was planning for and repenting of the action simultaneously, and the premeditation cancels out the pre-pentance.? So he burns in an everlasting flame (I had to edit that phrase so as not to evoke the Bangles) for giving advice that leads to destruction, which he only did because he took advice that led to his own destruction.
Dude can’t catch a break.
Count Ugolino’s story is still among the most horrifying that I’ve read.? The awful climax of the story comes across so understated and so suddenly that I have to go out in the sunshine every time I read it.? When you next read Dante (as everyone should), don’t read Canto 33 right before bed.? Seriously.
I also think it’s funny, every time, that Julius Caesar, who crossed the Rubicon, is among the virtuous pagans but that Curio, the guy who told him to go ahead and cross the Rubicon, is in Malebolgia for causing schism in the Roman Republic, and Brutus and Cassius, the guys who assassinated him for crossing the Rubicon, are in the center of Cocytus for treachery towards a benefactor.? There’s no explaining Dante sometimes.
By the time one reads of the four districts of Cocytus, named for Ptolemy and Antenor and Cain and Judas, the horrors of Hell have grown so overwhelming that numbness and madness are really the only options left, and the character Dante, in the cantos just before Virgil leads him out of the pit of madness, says often that the sights of the place strain his ability to find ugly words for them.? I’m always eager to get out of Cocytus once I’m there, and I look forward, in the next few days, to starting the journey through my favorite part of Dante.? These are the days each year that I let myself believe in Purgatory; I might as well enjoy them.
Being the science fiction aficionado that I am, I recently read a modern day sci-fi re-telling of Dante’s “Inferno” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I was fascinated, because I have read several of Niven’s books, and he never seemed to show much of an interest in religious issues before. So, I decided to pick up a copy.
In it, the protagonist was an agnostic science fiction writer in life, and after falling from a windowsill at a sci-fi convention, finds himself inside one of the bottles in the Vestibule. After an indeterminate amount of time, he finally calls out to God and finds himself outside the bottle, next to none other than Benito Mussolini, who becomes his guide through Hell. Benito has made it his task to help sinners out of Hell by taking them lower and lower, all the way to where Satan is entombed at the bottom, out through the only exit, which leads back up to Purgatory. Throughout the book, you see the protagonist slowly coming to terms with the fact that he really is in Hell, and not some sort of high-tech futuristic amusement park for some sort of demented alien race. He wrestles with the age-old question of what sort of God could punish people in such a way, and so on. Benito, on the other hand, acts as sort of a defender of God’s punishment (you really have to read it to see this interplay). The authors also toy with the idea that Hell is actually some sort of last-ditch effort on God’s part to get people’s attention, and cite C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” as part of their inspiration for writing the novel. That is, there are shades of universalist thought, as there were in “The Great Divorce”, except this time with the truly hellish punishment and torture of Dante’s “Inferno”. I would recommend giving it a read if you get a chance.
Sounds like an interesting send-up; I might check it out some day. As it stands, I’m a third of the way through Purgatory, and I’m cooking up a post for Friday. That means that I’ll likely be reading Dante in the VBS teachers’ break room next week, and I like that idea a good bit.
Borrowed your sketch, with attribution, for my students. I figured seeing a hand-made map that neatly lays it all on one page might help them get a grip on the work.
No problem at all; I found the sketch online, so it’s not actually mine, but any publicity for the old blog I welcome.