(Inferno 18–26)
Exposing the Hidden Things of the Fraudulent Heart (Inferno 18–25)
After Dante’s wild flight on the monster Geryon (Inf. 17), he and Virgil arrive in the first part of “deep hell”—that is, among the rings of Malebolge. As we heard in canto 11, the heart of hell, hidden away in the center of the earth, is a large circle of ice. Around its circumference, the walls of hell begin, sloping upward like the sides of a funnel. Dug into these sloping sides are ten deep pits, and arching over each of these trenches are little bridges—although some of the infrastructure of hell was damaged one thousand years ago, and the local shift managers are still waiting on work orders to be filled. In any case, Dante and Virgil will climb to the apex of these bridges to look down to the bottoms of the pits, or they will make their way down into a ditch to hold conversation with the inmates (Inf. 18.1–18).
The ditches of Malebolge, or “evil pockets,” make up the eternal abode for those who used their intellects crookedly. To fulfill their lustful, avaricious, gluttonous, envious, or wrathful desires, they devised various crafty, deceptive strategies to get what they wanted. We could think of them as white-collar criminals, but Dante, rather unlike our penal system, doesn’t put them in minimum security. Rather, he puts them much farther down, because he sees these sinners as doubly offensive in the eyes of God. Why? Because they were not only fired by the “hot sins” we encountered in the earliest part of hell, but they, like the violent in the circle above them, were also malicious, willing to hurt those human beings who got in their way. The residents of Malebolge, though, exercised their malice not through force but by abusing that most precious gift of humanity: our speech-making, word-crafting, image-producing intellect. The Malebolge, then, make up the realm of “cold sin,” and you will notice that the closer we get to the base of hell, the icier the world becomes.1
In Inferno 18, the pilgrim and his guide cross over two ditches. In the first ditch, they see pimps and seducers, who used crafty stratagems to trick women into violating the marital bond. In the second ditch, they find flatterers—that is, those who crafted their speech to please patrons and gain financial remuneration. Whatever you want to hear can be purchased from the flatterer for the right price. In this disturbing canto, Dante makes reference to contemporary flatterers, those who loitered in medieval courts offering rulers the honeyed words they liked to listen to and, like the political science major working in a modern campaign, dutifully transmitting to subjects those opinions their masters wanted them to possess. But the poet goes further by drawing a shocking association. The banks are slimy and sticky, and the people within are plunged in disgusting excrement (Inf. 18.106–8, 113–14). Just as human excrement is that which is left over once useful nourishment has been extracted, so too here we find those speakers whose words had been evacuated of meaning.
Toward the end of this canto, the poet makes a fleeting reference to a minor figure from classical literature: Thais, a flattering prostitute (Inf. 18.127–36), who is included among these flattering medieval courtiers to make a striking connection between flattery and prostitution. Just as a prostitute, quite apart from love, is willing to put sacred things up for sale, so too the abuser of words is willing to take something as intimate as language, which binds human beings together, and sell it. We can see how much Dante, the poet, the theoretician of language, thinks of words: for Dante it is a sacred act to speak, and obfuscating the vision of reality through the abuse of language is a serious sin. He felt that these prostitutes and vendors of excrement were the opposite of the poet, who carefully crafts his words to nourish, but who also, when needed, uses his words as a scourge to drive out sinners. Dante’s words, according to the divine commission he receives in heaven, are to be “harsh,” free of “falsehood”: let the reader “scratch” where he itches (Par. 17.126–29).
Over the next several canti, Dante and Virgil progress in a spiraling descent toward the center of hell. On several occasions the wayfarers climb down the banks to the bottoms of the ditches for a closer look. In the third ditch (or bolgia, Inf. 19), for example, they go down to talk to souls who are being punished for simony—that is, churchmen who offered privileges and offices to those willing to pay money, as opposed to those who were spiritually worthy. Then Dante sees the twisted fortune-tellers (Inf. 20), those who longed for the secret knowledge of the future more than tending to what they needed to know for living well in the present. In the fifth ditch (Inf. 21–22), Dante and Virgil descend to meet the barrators, those who sold public offices or governmental goods for bribes. In the sixth ditch (Inf. 23), we meet the hypocrites, who process like monks, except that they wear heavy cloaks of lead gilded in gold. And finally, before we come to the great canto of Ulysses (Inf. 26), we meet the thieves (Inf. 24–25). At this point, before conducting a reading of the canto of Ulysses, one of the most important canti in the entire Comedy, I want to focus on four particular scenes in these canti of the fraudulent: Jason (Inf. 18), the barrators (Inf. 21–22), the hypocrites (Inf. 23), and the thieves (Inf. 24–25).
Four Snapshots of Fraudulence
The first figure of note is Jason, the famous Greek hero from mythology, who led a band of hardy sailors (Argonauts) in search of the Golden Fleece. Generally, these kinds of ancient heroes—like Aeneas, Ulysses, Hercules, Theseus, and Perseus—are positive exemplars for Dante. In fact, Jason’s voyage—his epic quest to capture something of great value and bring it home—is alluded to three times in Paradiso (2.16–18; 25.7; 33.94–96) and used as a model for Dante’s own epic literary undertaking. Dante suggests that he too, like a hero, ventures off to a faraway land and brings back its treasure. For this reason, it comes as a surprise to find the hero of epic courage tossed in among the ditches of the Malebolge. The truth, as Virgil points out, is that his greatness seems out of place here:
“Look at that great man who comes our way,
and seems to spill no tear over his sorrow.
“What regal bearing he carries still!
He is Jason, who by heart and head
deprived the men of Colchis of a ram.” (Inf. 18.83–87)
Like other magnanimous figures we have encountered in hell, such as Farinata, Jason is too dignified to whimper like the other souls as he is whipped by demons. He maintains something of that heroic fortitude even in the heart of hell, but, as the passage goes on to state, he is in hell because, on his return voyage, he used his smooth words, James Bond–style, to manipulate a few women, such as Hypsipyle, into aiding him. When he had got the assistance he needed through false promises of love, he abandoned her and continued on his journey. Thus, although Jason’s quest was admirable in Dante’s eyes, he is in hell because he manipulated people to get what he wanted. Threatening the harmony of the human community even in the pursuit of a great and laudable end is a damnable offense in Dante’s eyes.
Soon Dante and Virgil climb down to explore the ditch where the barrators are punished. Barrators are those who abused their positions in secular government to dispense public goods to friends or those who offered the appropriate bribes, not to those who needed them. Now these corrupt officials are forced to stay under boiling pitch, under which, of course, they can’t breathe. But when they come up for air, the devils are there waiting on the banks, ready to seize them. Of all the canti in the Comedy, these (Inf. 21–22) are some of the zaniest and most comical, in a lowbrow way. Throughout canti 21 and 22, the pilgrim nervously looks around at the band of demons who have been asked by Virgil to escort them through this ditch. The devils keep eyeing the pilgrim, sarcastically joking about him, and licking their lips. As you read through the canti, including the bizarre gesture of the head of the devils, who farts to signal to his company a forward march (21.136–39), you’re supposed to laugh at their slapstick, grade-B movie tone.
At the same time, I think Dante has created this goofy tone of levity for a reason. The sinners in this realm, such as Ciampolo, with whom Dante and Virgil have a brief conversation, find themselves in a situation a little like the poor they chose not to aid when they had the power to do so. Now, like the poor they ignored when they held political office, they live in a condition of desperation. Every time they rise up in order to seek a little relief from their suffocating conditions, there are demons waiting for them. Those who ought to aid them in their plight torture them instead. The strange comic tone of these canti is appropriate. All of this is funny to us, but it is not funny at all to the souls who are actually suffering from the juvenile, careless, and cruel hatred of the demons. It’s almost like being trapped in a nightmare, where everyone around you is careless and laughing, completely indifferent to the desperate anxiety you are suffering. This is a good example of what I suggested at the beginning of this chapter: Dante portrays those white-collar crimes in a way that makes us feel their gravity. We perhaps might not get that exercised over a little graft. What’s wrong with rewarding some of the folk back home with valuable but useless building projects? Or accepting foreign donations for your foundation? Everyone does it, right? Dante forces us to view these offenses for what they are: threatening to the harmony of a community.
In canto 23 we meet the hypocrites, who are in death (as in life) completely weighed down by their own religious cloaks—lead on the inside and sparkling gold on the outside. They are so weighed down they can barely move, and so they inch along in wearied step after step. For Dante, and for the monastic tradition, hypocrisy is the sin of those who love their reputation for holiness more than they love holy things themselves, the sin more properly called “vainglory.” Of course, it is likely that if you seek wisdom and try to live well, you will gain a good reputation. In some ways, this honor is the natural fruit of virtue. And yet there is the danger that, at some point, you will start saying things or doing things primarily to support or promote that reputation. It’s a subtle distinction that medieval monastic writers dwelled on at length. Imagine that if you were a teacher or a religious leader, you got into the habit of using words to say things not so much because you thought they were true but because you knew they would help enhance your reputation as one who is wise. You would be weaving for yourself a weighty cloak, in which you would eventually be crushed by your own words and false appearances. You would also be suffocated by the fear of being found out for what you really are. One ancient writer, Evagrius, summed it up this way: monks seek “a life lived free of all hypocrisy. For vainglory has a frightful power to cover over and cast virtues into the shade. Ever searching out praise from men, it banishes faith. . . . The good must be pursued for its own sake, not for some other cause.”2
Following the canto of the hypocrites is a section that Dante thought was as impressive an artistic tour de force as what he had penned in describing the flight of Geryon (Inf. 16–17). In fact, the Florentine poet boasts that he has surpassed those poets he had met in the castle of limbo (Inf. 4): “Silence, now, Lucan. . . . / Let Ovid be silent, too” (25.94, 97). Ovid, of course, was the poet of the Metamorphoses, the master of describing the transformations of gods and humans (for example, Daphne changing into the laurel tree, or a girl transformed into her own echo). Dante’s description, though, he is proud to say, surpasses Ovid’s in intensity, because in these canti the Florentine poet imaginatively describes how the souls of thieves are transformed into all sorts of nasty reptiles. Some are attacked by flying snakes that pierce the sinners’ necks; they then catch fire and burn down into ash before they are remade again. And so, in this canto, Dante goes all in with his poetry. He takes these inner, abstract truths and lets them figure forth in a poetry of evil incarnation. He gives the thieves the bodies they deserve. To do so, Dante racked his brain for all the passages from classical literature that describe nasty snakes, lizards, or flying serpents. He then poured them all into his hell to create a violent, phantasmagorical poetry that he was very proud of.
Dante also meets a famous “tough guy,” a kind of medieval equivalent of the leader of a biker gang. His name is Vanni Fucci, and here he boasts, “The life of a beast pleased me and not that of a man, / just like the bastard I was. I am Vanni Fucci, / an animal! Pistoia was a worthy den” (Inf. 24.124–26). But rather to his embarrassment, Vanni Fucci is this far down in hell—he should be up among the violent—because he stole vessels from a sacristy, and he is mortified to have his carefully crafted reputation uncovered. To express his rage, Vanni Fucci uses a medieval gesture of the fig, which is equivalent to flipping someone off, but he directs his obscene gesture, along with all the venom of his heart, at God:
When he had ended his words, the thief
raised his hands—both of them made the fig—
and shouted: “Take this, God!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Through all the dark circles of hell
I did not see a spirit so proud against God. (Inf. 25.1–3, 13–14)
We have yet again a sinner who, though he suffers externally, experiences his real punishment within. Vanni Fucci serves as a powerful image of the sinner: eternally flipping off God, cursing God, spitting in his face. His heart remains tempestuous, and he directs his hate at God forever.
The Canto of Ulysses (Inferno 26)
By the time Dante arrives at the eighth bolgia, he has crossed over bridges and climbed down into ditches; he has seen faces covered with excrement, wept over twisted bodies, stared at men crushed under metal cloaks, and marveled at souls bitten, scratched, clawed, and penetrated by loathsome reptiles. These canti of the fraudulent are intense, and so it is with a start that we leave the serpents behind and come up to a bluff that overlooks a peaceful valley where the souls shine like lightning bugs. Inferno 26 opens with a peaceful, pastoral simile, which changes the tone of Dante’s poetry from the heavy metal of the canti of the thieves to the string quartet of Inferno 26 (26.25–29, 31–32). This pastoral simile is immediately followed by a second one, in which Dante compares these glowing flames to Elijah’s fiery chariot (26.34–42). The pilgrim’s eyes are clearly attracted to the beauty of these flickering lights. As we shall later hear, the souls here are in fact wrapped in a fiery light that makes them resemble—on the outside at least—the appearance of souls in paradise. This explains Dante’s reaction:
“Master, I sincerely beg you,
and beg you again, and will beg a thousand times,
“that you not deny me the chance to linger here
long enough for the horn-shaped flame to come here:
you can see that my desire makes me lean inward.” (Inf. 26.65–69)
Imprisoned within this double flame are Diomedes (who never speaks) and Ulysses, who, of course, is the Odysseus of Homer, the hero from Ithaca who designed the deception of the horse to help the Greeks win at Troy. In Homer’s account, Odysseus is known above all for his wit, his ability to persuade, and his ability to strategize. After the war, Odysseus began his long trek home, a journey that became even longer because his curiosity and vanity constantly got the best of him. In Homer’s tale, for example, Odysseus enters the cave of a one-eyed monster, a cyclops, because he wants to receive a memorable gift from him. He barely gets himself and a few remaining crew members out of the cave alive. Later, Odysseus choreographs his crew so that he can claim to be the only man to hear the song of sirens without being lured to his death. Odysseus, then, is a kind of swaggering, confident, but lovable hero who cleverly twists the truth when he needs to.
Dante did not read Greek, and so what he knew of the Homeric hero had to come indirectly from Latin sources, either Roman philosophers (such as Boethius, who used Odysseus’s story to illustrate philosophical ideas) or Latin poets (such as Virgil and Ovid) who added to the collection of stories they inherited from Homer. In medieval academic commentaries, Ulysses became (believe it or not) the philosophical hero, the exemplar of the man who was so discontented with the world that he sought out the depths of wisdom. Ulysses’s search for his homeland was interpreted as the gradual awakening of the inner power of the soul to know God. This is in part the Ulysses whom the pilgrim meets here—a strong, virtuous, bold explorer looking for something deep.
Dante drew on one more tradition about the ancient hero—that is, that this great and curious traveler didn’t end his life in Ithaca but rather continued to journey in order to know more and more of the world. Where he died, no one knew. Dante takes this opportunity to add a tale of his own to this long tradition, one more chapter in the “fan lit,” in which Dante presumes to reveal the secret of the ancient hero’s death. Ulysses says that he convinced his old shipmates to go on one last adventure with him in search of the unknown:
“I and my companions were old and slow
when we came to that narrow straight [the Straight of Gibraltar]
where Hercules set up his signs of caution
“lest men venture into that which is beyond. . . .
“‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who have come through a hundred dangers and more
now to arrive at the West,
in this our so fleeting vigil
“‘of our right minds, while they remain to us!
How could you deny yourself the experience
of that land beyond the sun, of the uninhabited world?
“‘Remember your lofty origin:
you were not made to live like brutes,
but to seek after virtue and understanding.’
“I made my companions so ardent for the way,
by this brief speech,
that after it I could have held them back only at great pains.” (Inf. 26.106–23)
This is one of those literary passages that sends shivers down your spine. Ulysses continues his narrative, explaining that when he and his men had sailed down into the southern hemisphere, they saw a mountain rising up out of the mist, a mountain he did not know. They were excited because they suspected that this was the mysterious land they had set out for. Dante will later help us understand that this is the mountain of purgatory. They almost made it.
Ulysses’s speech and story are so moving that we feel ourselves responding to this narrative as if it were a brief play, the tragedy of the noble Ulysses. In fact, the passage is so powerful that many scholars of Dante over the years have wondered why Dante even put Ulysses in hell. After all, he seems so brave and indomitable, even in old age. He reminds his companions, “You were not made to live like brutes, / but to seek after virtue and understanding” (Inf. 26.119–20). Even more importantly, Ulysses seeks experience not just of the world but also of that which is beyond it (più oltre, 26.109). Ulysses has a keen sense that there is something more of the depths, something that all things have reference to. Ulysses’s ardor, his fervor to know, is so great that he is willing, all over again, to run the risk of all those “dangers” (26.113) he had already been through. Ulysses has a sense of urgency and a strong sense of the brevity of life, what he calls the “so fleeting vigil / of our right minds” (26.114–15).
As his tale comes to an end, the crescendo of hope is dramatically interrupted when the hero is destroyed by a storm. After five months of sailing, the crew sees a mountain that takes their breath away. The men who spent their whole lives fighting giants, killing monsters, and eluding witches are stunned by the mountain’s mysterious power. Ulysses and his crew rejoice, convinced that here they have found what they have been looking for, that which was beyond the merely human, più oltre. It is at this moment that their hopes and ship are destroyed. By whom? Ulysses does not know. He describes the dramatic moment when they see the mountain in this way:
“[It was] hazy,
on account of the distance. It seemed to me taller
than any I had ever seen before.
“We rejoiced! But immediately that turned to grief,
since from that strange land there was born a whirlwind
and it struck us at the head of our ship.
“Three times it made us reel about.
On the fourth it jerked the stern into the air,
and the prow went down—as pleased some other—
until the sea held us within.” (Inf. 26.133–42)
For what reason? Why such a noble desire would conclude in such a terrible way is beyond his ken. In search of the sublime, Ulysses is overcome by the tragic. You will remember the two similes used at the beginning of the canto: Ulysses, although desiring to ascend to heaven like Elijah in a chariot, actually is more akin to a humble firefly that flutters through the air on a summer evening. So what did he do wrong? And perhaps more importantly, why does Dante work so hard to get us to admire yet another great sinner in hell? In Paradiso, in fact, Dante will liken his own spiritual journey to God to Ulysses’s journey into the unknown, taking Ulysses’s tragic failure as the model for his own poetic undertaking!
At the beginning of his speech Ulysses seems to slip, revealing, just a bit, a bad conscience:
“[When] I departed from the isle of Circe,
who, for more than a year, kept me by wiles there near Gaëta,
before Aeneas named it that,
“neither the sweetness of my son, nor piety
toward an aged father, nor the due love
which I owed Penelope, to make her glad,
“could overcome that ardor that burned within me.” (Inf. 26.91–97)
Ulysses, almost accidentally, contextualizes his own epic journey with reference to that very different journey of Aeneas, and this brings into focus a huge difference between the two epic heroes. Ulysses’s journey began with a choice to disembark from the larger human community, a decision that runs—as we hear Ulysses himself say—directly contrary to Aeneas’s willful choice to remain united to those human relationships that touched him (his fatherhood, his sonship, his kinship to Trojans, his status as ancestor to future generations of Romans). It is telling that Ulysses, although he first says his passion is to know the ways and customs of men, urges his crew to seek “the experience / of that land beyond the sun, of the uninhabited world” (26.116–17). Ulysses lacks the willingness to found, defend, and cultivate the city. He lacks allegiance to a particularized human community, and he lacks the willingness to remain bound by those human relationships, which, as we shall see, is one of the pillars of the experience of purgatory.3
But recall what Virgil had said before the conversation with Ulysses even began: Ulysses and Diomedes mourn “the deception / of the horse that made a gate / whence came the noble seed of the Roman people” (Inf. 26.58–60). Long before he launched out on this journey into the unknown, Ulysses developed the crafty trick of the horse to destroy an ancient city. In light of this, Ulysses’s end was in some ways the fitting conclusion to his lifelong practice of fraudulence, the end for which he had inadvertently prepared. Ulysses had been guilty of astutia, employing false or counterfeit means to pursue a good end, a perversion of prudentia according to Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 55, a. 5). To state it plainly, Ulysses spent his whole life inventing clever stratagems to win and get what he wanted (most notably, using the deception of the Trojan horse to unjustly destroy his enemies), but that bad formation, that bad practice of cleverly cheating, plays out at the end of his life. Ulysses pursues the highest end, with bravery and heroism, but he forgot the intermediary steps of virtue, which he could only have learned within a human community! For this reason we can admire Ulysses and his boldness to know that which is più oltre (that which is beyond), while, at the same time, we can understand why Dante is so cautious: “More than I am accustomed to do, I rein in my intellect / lest it race forward where virtue fails to guide it” (Inf. 26.21–22).