(Inferno 10–17)
New Beginnings and Infernal Architecture (Inferno 9–11)
Inferno 9 ends with Dante and Virgil walking into the conquered fortress. Now they can see what precious thing the devils were so jealously guarding. We are rather surprised to discover what it is: an eerie graveyard in which all the lids of the big stone sarcophagi are off and standing to the side. The pilgrim can see a flame gleaming in each tomb, burning from below. This is the pathetic treasure hoarded by the demons. The souls in heaven will be described as precious gems (see, for example, Par. 18.115–17); but the wealth of hell is the dead, gaunt, self-absorbed souls of those punished within.
Passing through the Gate of Dis is a major transition, signaling that Dante and Virgil have entered the antechamber of what we could call “deep hell.” Fascinatingly, this is a threshold that Aeneas was not allowed to cross:
Aeneas suddenly looked back, and, below the left hand cliff,
he saw wide battlements, surrounded by a triple wall. . . .
A gate fronts it, vast, with pillars of solid steel,
that no human force, not the heavenly gods themselves,
can overturn by war: an iron tower rises into the air. . . .
Groans came from there, and the cruel sound of the lash,
then the clank of iron, and dragging chains. . . .
Then the prophetess began to speak as follows: “Famous leader
of the Trojans, it is forbidden for the pure to cross the evil threshold:
. . . all of them dared monstrous sin, and did what they dared.
Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
a voice of iron, could I tell all the forms of wickedness
or spell out the names of every torment.” (Aen. 6.535–627)
Clearly, Dante’s own Dis has been inspired by Virgil’s, but his pilgrim will go where even the great Aeneas was not allowed to explore. Meanwhile, the poet dares to speak about things the classical poets avoided. Seven hundred years before Virgil, the archaic Greek poet Hesiod said that deep hell, Tartarus, is a place that is fearful even to the gods. It was radically off-limits. But Dante the pilgrim will enter. He will see what lies at the bottom of the human heart. For the Christian, real purity cannot be achieved unless the heart is explored down to its base. The monsters, like Medusa, have to be called forth and made to emerge. Thus, in the next twenty-five canti Dante will be exploring new ground, ground that neither Aeneas the hero nor Virgil the poet had previously trod.
Shortly after the travelers pass through the Gate of Dis, the poet (in Inf. 11) will take the opportunity to help organize the many bewildering things his pilgrim has experienced and will experience. In the first third of Inferno, the pilgrim has had a number of intense face-to-face encounters with sinners, but he doesn’t seem to have been aware of how orderly hell actually is. Now his master informs him that hell is divided into two major divisions, separated by the walls of Dis: (1) upper hell, whose circles we have read about, where the incontinent sins are punished (Inf. 3–8); and (2) lower hell, which is surrounded by the grimy iron walls of Dis. It is within the walls of Dis, or within lower hell, that the sins of “malice” are punished. Dante, who is loosely cobbling together all kinds of classical theories about vice, thinks that the deep principle that divides the sins of upper hell (the incontinent) from the sins of lower hell (the violent, fraudulent, and traitorous) is malice. In the end, the sinners of deep hell want the same things the sinners of upper hell want, even if they act like they are more sophisticated. The truth is that they too are greedy, wrathful, gluttonous, and lustful. The difference is that they are willing to hurt fellow human beings (or themselves) to get what they want.
Deep hell itself can be divided into three more sections, based on three forms of malice: the first is the circle where the violent are punished; then there is a deep pit that leads down to where the fraudulent are punished; and finally, at the very base of hell, the pilgrim will encounter the traitorous. The architecture of hell is very precise.
Patriotism and Family Values . . . in Hell (Inferno 10)
Now we return to the spooky graveyard just within the walls of Dis, which the poet compares to an old medieval graveyard, where Dante and Virgil find the heretics (Inf. 9.127–29). It is when walking through this graveyard that the pilgrim is surprised by two souls who hear his Florentine accent and rise up to speak to him. The first soul was a great general, Farinata degli Uberti, who died the year before Dante was born. The second soul is Cavalcante Cavalcanti, the father of Dante’s best friend, Guido Cavalcanti (also a love poet, mentioned in the Vita Nuova). Guido exerted a great influence on Dante’s early poetry, but Guido’s poetry, unlike Dante’s early love poems about Beatrice, was decidedly this-worldly. He has been called “the poet of interiority,” and he was especially concerned with the joy and pain of love as experienced in this life. Thus, it makes sense that his father is classified among those who followed the sins of Epicurus—that is, those heretics who denied the immortality of the soul and lived only for the goods of this life.
Although there is much to say about Cavalcante, for reasons of space I will focus on the greater figure of this canto: the old general, Farinata. He stands alongside Francesca da Rimini and Ulysses (Inf. 26) as one of the most powerful characters of Inferno. Dante clearly admires him. In fact, Virgil tells Dante to choose his words with great care (10.37). Later Farinata is called magnanimo (10.73)—that is, “magnanimous,” the same word that was used for Virgil in Inferno 2. And thus, in some ways, Farinata is a modern, Florentine counterbalance to Aeneas himself. Here in Inferno 10, he rises up with a stately self-confidence, in perfect self-control—the posture of a dignified soldier who commands the respect of all those around him even when he doesn’t explicitly ask for it. As Dante puts it, he was slowly “rising, chest and brow, / as though he held Hell itself in utter scorn” (10.35–36). In a way, the old campaigner’s strength and resolve haven’t dissipated in hell. He’s a man accustomed to enduring hardship, such that, even here, his dignity is barely broken by the dreadful surroundings.
The question of Farinata’s heretical belief, whether he denied the immortality of the soul, ironically doesn’t show up at all as an issue in this canto. We have to ask, then, whether his heretical disposition is somehow on display in how he goes about conversing with the pilgrim. And we note, immediately, that Farinata does display the partisan spirit of the heretic, that radically sectarian mentality, in his dedication to his political party. The first question he asks of Dante is “Who were your ancestors?” (Inf. 10.42). He does not ask, “Who are you?” or “What are you doing here?” He seems hardly amazed that a man, in flesh, is walking among the shades of the dead. There is only one thing on Farinata’s mind: the old strife between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. And when he learns that Dante was a Guelph, he replies, “They were savage enemies / toward me and my people and to my cause / such that two times I had to drive them out” (Inf. 10.46–48).
Farinata had led his exiled Ghibellines to a successful victory at the battle of Montaperti in 1260, five years before Dante’s birth. And, magnanimously, he exhorted his party to deal with the defeated Guelph party with leniency. But Florence never properly acknowledged him for this generous act and, a few years later, exiled many of his family members.
Thus, he still bears an undying resentment, even in hell. In fact, Farinata, in a Medusa-like way, is frozen: although he barely seems to register his external punishment, he locks his jaws and clenches his fists at the memory of that party strife. His resentment smolders within him, forever. He has, as it were, been given exactly what he wants: he remains committed to his party with a fanatical, sectarian devotion, forever. Farinata holds one truth, maintains one loyalty, even if, ironically, that strife between Guelphs and Ghibellines had become a little out of date. In Dante’s day, there were only Guelphs in Florence! And so Farinata is a little like someone who still thinks of the world as divided, let’s say, between Democrats and Whigs. Of course, Dante would not have thought that Cavalcante’s devotion to family or Farinata’s devotion to party were evil in themselves. But because these men love these things and these things alone, they barred from their minds any new vision of reality, of humans, or of ideas; and thus their love is frozen. Their sectarian love has metastasized into an unforgiving sorrow.
The Wasteland of the Violent (Inferno 12–16)
After Dante and Virgil leave the circle of the heretics, they must slip and slide down the scree of a mountainside, and when they arrive at the bottom, they are standing in the circle of the violent. From Inferno 12 to 16, Dante and Virgil walk through this realm, which Dante imagines as a huge circle. The circle itself is formed by three rings, which wrap around one another, each ring taking the form of a different landscape. The pilgrim and Virgil follow a stream that cuts across these rings, moving toward the center of the circle, where a pit is found that will lead them to the most evil parts of hell. In the outermost of these three rings, Dante and Virgil see those who were violent against others—that is, those who harmed their neighbors’ bodies or those who harmed their neighbors’ possessions. The second ring is where those who were violent against themselves reside, both those who were violent against their bodies (suicides) and those who radically wasted their own property and health (like celebrities known for their decadence). Finally, in the third, innermost ring, the pilgrim will see those who were violent against God—that is, blasphemers—but also those violent against God by violating his nature, a category that for Dante includes sodomy and, interestingly enough, usury.
The guardians of those violent against others are creatures taken from classical mythology: centaurs. It is a highly appropriate role for them, because these thick-bearded creatures of thumos (high-spiritedness) were more rage than reason, more horse than man, a fact that Dante playfully keeps pointing out throughout canto 12 through a series of small details. In any case, one of these centaurs, Nessus, gives Dante a tour of the violent souls who are being boiled in a river of blood (Phlegethon). The pilgrim sees conquerors (like Alexander the Great) and ancient tyrants (like Dionysius of Syracuse), as well as more modern Italian tyrants. In life the violent were often stained by hot blood; in death they get what they freely chose in life—the opportunity to be immersed in rivers of blood. Then Dante sees also those who assassinated out of vengeance, and he hears about souls, on the far side of the circle, who are completely submerged in the depths of the river: those who were outrageously destructive and violent, who loved plunder and war for its own sake, who made no pretense that their deeds were aimed at some final end. Dante mentions Attila the Hun, as well as highwaymen and pirates.
From here the two wayfarers continue to move toward the center of the circle, proceeding into the inner ring, where they walk through a dark wood, full of underbrush made up of ugly, gnarled, thorny plants. This is where Dante and Virgil meet the suicides and those who squandered away their resources, like some modern playboy or celebrity. After this, they walk into yet another landscape, that of the innermost ring, which encircles the pit: this is a desert landscape, completely barren of all life, upon which slow and large snowflakes made of fire drift down and land on the skin of those who were violent against God or violent against his nature.
If you pause to think about the imaginative world we have walked through to this point, from the initial dark wood and the sunbathed mountain in Inferno 1, to the allusions the poet made to the sea; from the windswept plains of the circle of the lustful, to the rain and hail and snow of the realm of the gluttonous; from the muddy river that turns into the swampy marshlands of the Styx, to the castles, fortified gates, eerie graveyards, and now these rivers, woods, and desert landscapes, then you can see the extraordinary power of Dante’s imagination. He seems to be trying to incorporate not only a full range of characters from ancient history to his present age but also an encyclopedic representation of all possible landscapes. The whole world is meant to fit into this poem.
At this point, having enjoyed this view from above—that is, having zoomed out for a moment—I want to zoom in and consider two memorable scenes in more detail. The first comes from Inferno 13: the conversation that Dante has with Pier della Vigna, who was a minor official in the court of Frederick II in Sicily in the early 1200s—a man whom all would have forgotten if he had not been made immortal in the Comedy. The second character comes from Inferno 15, where Dante meets another Florentine, one who died in 1294 (that is, right around the time Dante was working on his Vita Nuova). This is Brunetto Latini, whom Dante describes as his beloved teacher.
Pier della Vigna: The Failed Boethius
In Inferno 13, Dante walks into a thick, dark, haunted wood completely barren of clean and healthy vegetation:
No green leaf . . .
no branches straight, but twisted and gnarled—
there were no healthy fruits . . . just thorns with venom in them. (Inf. 13.4–6)
It is a wood of rough and dense thickets, an abode for wild beasts (see 13.7–8). Here, spooky voices are heard speaking, crying, and lamenting, although Dante cannot see a single embodied soul. The canto recalls a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas encounters a landscape that had become spiritually polluted because of an act of betrayal and murder. In Virgil’s account, Aeneas goes up to a plant and snaps off a twig. To his horror, human blood flows forth from the broken stem. This act allows the soul imprisoned within the plant to issue his breath through the gurgling blood and to tell his sad story. He was Polydorus, the son of Priam, who, when Troy was nearing its inevitable end, was sent with gold to be protected on foreign shores; but the local king, who was supposed to be his protector and host, slaughtered him instead to steal his riches (Aen. 3).
Dante has rewritten this episode and has placed into his thornbush not an innocent victim but one who would wish to appear so: Pier della Vigna. When the pilgrim snaps one of the twigs that make up the house for his soul, Pier asks: “Why do you tear me? / Have you not any spirit of pity?” (Inf. 13.35–36). He then proceeds to tell his story:
“I am he who held both keys
to the heart of Frederick, and I turned them,
locking and unlocking, so subtly
“that I kept almost every man from his secrets.
I carried so much trust in that glorious office
that first I lost my sleep and then the beating of my heart.
“The slut who never took her greedy eyes
off Caesar’s household,
the common death and usual vice of courts,
“inflamed everyone’s soul against me.
And, once inflamed, they so inflamed Augustus
that my joyous honors became heart-sickening grievances.
“My mind, with a taste of disdain,
believing that I could flee disdain by dying,
made me unjust against myself, though just.” (Inf. 13.58–72)
Pier, then, was a victim (Inf. 13.64–66) of the envy of the other courtiers, and those envious rivals went so far to tarnish his reputation that the emperor, Frederick II, came to believe that Pier had been embezzling funds. The destruction of his reputation destroyed his career and, as he says, “made me unjust against myself, though just” (13.72)—that is, he took his own life because of his unfairly tarnished reputation. Not surprisingly, the pilgrim is compassionate—in fact, so compassionate that he cannot ask him any more questions, because “so much pity fills me, it makes me ache in my heart” (13.84). Here again we note another sympathetic portrayal of a damned soul, with much the same effect as the canto with Francesca. Does that mean that the story of Pier is tragedy?
Returning to the passage from Virgil can help us begin to unravel this “fearful paradox.” In the Aeneid, the soul trapped in the branches was innocent, the victim of what Virgil calls that “cursed hunger for gold” (Aen. 3.56). It was a story, then, of evil committed out of avarice—the sick and evil craving that values wealth and personal advancement over human lives. But, to our surprise, it becomes evident that Pier too, although innocent of the crimes of which he was accused, was guilty of avaritia—not an avarice for money but an excessive fondness for his own reputation. Thomas Aquinas had said that, just as a man can be greedy for wealth, so too can he be greedy for honor (see Summa theologiae I-II, q. 84, a. 4). He can love his reputation for being successful, love his own success in climbing the ranks of the corporate ladder; he can also be greedy to be known as a man of learning and wisdom. In such a situation, that ambitious man loves the created good of his own reputation more than he loves Primal Love. Thus, Pier della Vigna, though indeed unjustly accused, threw away his own life because he couldn’t see anything else worth living for. He forgot that the one Love, which can never be taken away, would have willingly remained with him, even in his prison cell.
If we also briefly recall the famous Roman senator Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy so deeply influenced Dante, then we can realize the sick and sad irony of Pier’s decision. Pier, if he had had a longer view of history, could have become the kind of suffering hero who would indeed have gained fame throughout the long ages to come—he could have got, in time, the very reputation he sought in court! But he didn’t. When his reputation was stolen, he forgot that he still had his life, his memory, his breath, his Maker. He loved too little.
The Sterility of Fame: Brunetto Latini
We come now to our second close reading from the canti of the violent: Inferno 15, where we meet the Florentine Brunetto Latini. This canto has a very different tone from the pitiful, dark, and sighing lamentation of Inferno 13. Indeed, Dante’s work has a kind of symphonic quality, in which each of the canti, like movements in a symphony, has a different tempo, mood, and key. This Brunetto is not in the wood but in the desert wasteland like the souls in canto 14, but not because he was blasphemous. Rather, he walks about the area where the sin of sodomy is punished. We should note right away that the medieval understanding of sodomy was much broader than we might think today; in fact, it consisted of any use of human sexuality that was not formally open to procreation. Thus, certain private sins would fall into this category: you can commit sodomy by yourself. Sodomy can also take place between male and female couples. Thus, for the medieval mind, the sin, at its base, is a sin against fruitfulness, the transformation of a fruitful act into a sterile one. Remember that this sin is punished in an absolutely barren desert landscape.
But there are some puzzles about this canto. For example, there is no historical evidence whatsoever that Brunetto was guilty of any form of this sin, and Dante remains absolutely silent on the subject. What is more, the pilgrim goes a long way to show great reverence for his former teacher. At Inferno 15.45, Dante says the pilgrim reverently kept his head bowed. Later, the pilgrim praises Brunetto, saying, “In my mind is fixed—and even now it causes an ache in my heart!— / that precious and good paternal image / of you, sir, when . . . / you used to teach me how a man can become eternal” (Inf. 15.82–87).
It’s a very affectionate conversation, like when you go back to your high school and run into your favorite teacher in the hallway. Dante’s gratitude is real and palpable. Thus, although the setting is a barren landscape, we have these fatherly images used for Brunetto. It’s another one of Dante’s literary puzzles. Why is Brunetto here? Dante never directly tells us. And yet, note how insistent Dante is to credit Brunetto with teaching him “how a man can become eternal” (Inf. 15.85)—that is, how to achieve literary fame. Brunetto Latini was a politician, a diplomat, and a man of letters in Florence. He wrote a vast encyclopedia in French prose, a long didactic poem in Italian, and a book on rhetoric in Italian. And thus it makes sense to hear him reassure Dante,
“If you follow your star,
you cannot fail to arrive at a glorious port,
if I understood things well in the beautiful life.” (Inf. 15.55–57)
Even Brunetto’s closing words touch on this theme of memory, fame, and literary immortality: “Let my Tesoro [Brunetto’s encyclopedic treatise] always find favor with you. / In it, I still live on, / —I ask for nothing more” (Inf. 15.119–20).
Dante clearly shows that Brunetto taught him the literary craft by which a person can make a lasting contribution to humanity, but surely, within the theological context of eternity, there’s something badly mistaken to wish only to be remembered for your literary work. Brunetto rather disturbingly says, “I ask for nothing more” (Inf. 15.120). Within the context of hell, Brunetto displays an extraordinary spiritual myopia. Indeed, in light of what the pilgrim will see in Paradiso, Brunetto’s understanding of “glory” and “eternity” seems sadly limited. The pilgrim will see things so glorious that they will burn his eyes; he will hear music so sweet that he won’t even be able to recall its beauty. In light of the unspeakably beautiful and the ineffably true, Brunetto’s literary accomplishments and goals seem paltry. Thus, the sad truth is that Brunetto is a kind of failed father, who set up his adopted son, Dante, well, but did not set him up for a life of ultimate fruitfulness. His fatherly love was, we could say, somewhat sterile in that it generated love only for the earthly good of reputation and fame.