(Inferno 27–34)
Tears and Broken Words at the Center of the Universe
As Dante and Virgil descend to increasingly lower levels of hell, we feel the thermometer dropping, both in terms of the ice that imprisons the souls and the spiritual coldness of the souls they meet. The final canti of Inferno—canti 27–34—deal with two groups of sinners: the last of the fraudulent souls, stuffed into the lowest ditches of the Malebolge, and the traitorous souls, who are frozen within the frozen river of Cocytus.
As the two travelers move through the last of the ditches of Malebolge, we notice a number of overarching themes. First, with increasing frequency we hear of souls who refuse to reveal their names. In earlier canti, Vanni Fucci, Farinata, and Francesca were all too happy to share their names, stories, and personal details, but here, in deep hell, the pilgrim begins to encounter souls who have so willingly broken themselves off from the human community that they don’t wish to play any part in human society again, either directly or even through being remembered. Second, the final canti are extraordinarily violent. At the beginning of canto 28, for example, the canto of the schismatics, Dante racks his brain to recall all the stories of wounds and cadavers from wars old and new, and says that if you heaped all of those wounded limbs and mangled bodies into a pile, the viewer of that atrocity would not be so horrified as he was in this ditch. The pilgrim will see souls whose bodies are sliced and dismembered, like pieces of meat in a butcher’s shop. Later, he will see souls so “spotted with scabs from head to foot” (Inf. 29.75) that they feel that their nails are “biting” into them as they scratch (29.79). In canto 33 he will encounter Ugolino, who feverishly bites into the head of his hated enemy, Archbishop Ruggieri, forever. Indeed, it seems that as his pilgrim nears the bottom of hell, the poet pulls out all the stops in his quest to create a poetry of breaking glass and fingernails on the chalkboard, in an attempt to convey the devastating sense of shattered humanity.
Third, in addition to the violence, the wounds, the disease, the hatred, and the intense frigidity of isolation, we have one more motif at play throughout lower hell: tears. Although tears appear throughout the first canticle, they come more often and more copiously as we get closer to the base of hell. In Inferno 32 we hear of two sinners who are glued to one another by their tears; in Inferno 33 we hear that the sinners are actually unable to cry, because their tears freeze and form visors on their eyes (33.94–99). As much as they would like to give relief to the pent-up pain within, they are unable to do so. Because their eyes are frozen, their souls are almost overwhelmed with the repressed grief they cannot release. Ugolino tells the pilgrim, “You will see me speak and weep together” (33.9). And of course, in the final canto, Satan sheds copious tears as he remembers how beautiful he once was.
Finally, in these last canti, we encounter instances of a language that has become so broken that it leaves the speaker trapped within his own words. For example, when Dante and Virgil meet the old general Guido da Montefeltro, they have to wait because the damned soul’s first attempt to speak comes out as an incomprehensible bellowing (Inf. 27.7–19); the slick salesman of words and purveyor of selfish advice is here punished by his inability even to get his words out. Similarly, in canto 31, Dante and Virgil meet the legendary king (Nimrod) who was responsible for organizing the building of the Tower of Babel. When he sees the pilgrim, he shouts, “Raphèl maì amècche zabì almi” (31.67), which is not Italian. In fact, it is made-up, nonsense language. Virgil explains:
This is Nimrod. Thanks to his wicked scheming
a single language is no longer used in the world.
“Leave him here. Let’s not speak any more empty words,
given that every language is to him as his
to any other: understood by no one.” (Inf. 31.76–81)
Nimrod, the ambitious and proud king, who had designs to forge his own path to God, is here reduced to an ultimate isolation. It’s a powerful psychological portrait: he is the completely self-absorbed individual who, constantly meditating on his own private and secretive plan, slowly loses touch with reality, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment). Because he is driven by an obsessive, egoistic mania, he severs his bonds with others, reducing himself to speaking a language understood by none but himself. With these themes in mind (ice, tears, isolation, and broken language), let’s zoom in and focus on a few passages.
Guido da Montefeltro
When Dante meets Guido da Montefeltro, the old soldier famously responds:
“If I believed that my answer would be given
to a person who might ever return to the world,
this flame would stand still, without a flicker.
“But since no one ever, from this depth,
has returned alive, if I hear the truth,
without fear of infamy I answer you.” (Inf. 27.61–66)
Guido, then, does not want to be remembered. In earlier circles of hell, even if souls pursued a good with immoderation or were snared by an excessive love, they still could boast at least of having done some good things, and thus felt they had a right to be recalled among the living. But as we descend deeper and deeper, we meet souls who spent their whole lives in self-centered calculation, manipulating the world around them, setting souls against one another in a radically self-centered existence, and thus in hell they are embarrassed even to have their names repeated. This is what I mean by the spiritual coldness of hell: it’s a touchiness—that is, a sad, morose desire to be left alone. As the pilgrim gets closer to the center of the earth, he gets farther away from the stars, away from beauty, away from harmony, away from order, away from love. The landscape gets colder and colder, as a kind of perfect symbol for how the heart freezes the more it chooses its own good and leaves behind participation in loving human communion.
Guido then tells his story. He was a soldier and a famous strategist (we know from other sources that he fought for the Ghibellines against the papal party, the Guelphs). Like Ulysses, he was accomplished at using craft to effect whatever end was desirable to him, but he repented from his life of war and became a Franciscan in 1296. All would have been well for him if he had not failed his final trial. The pope whom Dante hated the most, Boniface VIII, was faced with a rebellion led this time by a Ghibelline faction, and he called on the old soldier for help to suppress the faction he had once fought for. Guido obliged, and died two years later in Assisi. But in Dante’s story, Boniface VIII promised the reformed soldier that if he did this one last act for him, his sin would be pardoned. In Guido’s own words, the pope told him, “I can lock or unlock heaven / as you know.” Guido concludes his speech: “His weighty arguments then pushed me / to the point that silence seemed to me the worse course” (Inf. 27.103–4, 106–7).
Thus, the man who spent his life practicing at outwitting others allowed himself to be fooled, but in death Guido could not use his clever tricks to work his way out of eternal damnation. But here Guido, like so many other souls in hell, blames another, Boniface VIII. He is, of course, partly correct. Boniface, as Dante tells the story, certainly collaborated in his damnation. What Guido fails to mention—and this is a theme that will be one of the most prominent in Purgatory—is that he still had his own freedom. As quoted above, Guido says that “silence seemed to me the worse course” (Inf. 27.107). Pause to consider this a moment. Would it have been worse for Guido to refuse to aid the pope? Guido rightly realized that if he did refuse to give crooked advice, he would be punished by the pope, but we can only truly say this was the worse course within a very limited scope of observation. It might have been worse at that moment, but Guido failed to consider his actions within a larger context, within the context of eternity. He failed to view this choice, as the medieval writers liked to say, sub specie aeternitatis—in light of eternity. Thus, we have another personal tragedy, not unlike the suicide Pier della Vigna (Inf. 13). With an opportunity to become a hero, Guido balked and chose an evanescent good.
After Dante and Virgil leave Guido behind, they visit the last two ditches of the Malebolge, where the schismatics have their bodies sliced and divided with sharp swords, and then, in the final ditch, where counterfeiters are punished. The counterfeiters include those who practiced alchemy, those who impersonated other people, and those who created false coinage—in other words, those who created worthless, false images and passed them off as true. It is striking for the modern reader that, as I like to say, Dante thinks photocopying a twenty-dollar bill is more evil than getting into a drunken fight in a bar. Or perhaps we could put it this way: a bad and ideologically committed college professor is more evil than a murderer. Such is Dante’s commitment to the word and the image: for Dante, falsifying the image of nature—obscuring reality through a false reproduction, producing images that mislead—is more destructive than harming bodies. Dante the poet, the craftsman of language, feels in his gut the sacred responsibility to use language with exactitude and precision and to create images that show forth the actual nature of reality. For this reason, he is also horrified by language that obfuscates our view of what is.
Canto 28, though, is where Dante meets the schismatics (those who were not just heretics but leaders of divisive sectarian groups). The chief example is Muhammad, because the poet thought that Muhammad had been Christian before he broke away to found his own religion in pursuit of power. His description of Muhammad is one of the crudest and most graphically violent of the whole of the Comedy. Add up all the wars and wounded, heap up their corpses and lacerated flesh, and you could hardly equal the horror of this pit of hell (Inf. 28.7–8, 15–17, 19–21). But then the poet compares Muhammad to a hacked-up barrel split by a crude instrument:
No cask with a missing side-stave or supporting-stave
ever splayed open so wide as this man I saw:
cracked open from the chin down to where men fart.
Between the legs his guts hung down;
his innards could be seen, and that sick sack
that makes sh*t out of that which is gulped down.
While I was frozen, staring at him,
he, looking at me, tore open his chest with his hands,
saying: “See how I tear myself to pieces,
“see how deformed is Muhammad!” (Inf. 28.22–31)
This is shocking, even for us!1 What happened to the love poet of delicate language and refined sentiment? Here we have rough and crude words, as if the poet were belching or vomiting forth a description. Why so much linguistic violence?
For Dante, Muhammad, as well as the many other sectarian leaders he quickly packs into this canto, was responsible for wounding and dismembering sacred bodies—that is, the body of Christ or the body politic. Because they themselves did not treat those assemblies of people as bound by a mystical love—as a group unified by more than their physical bodies—Dante here allows their own human bodies to be similarly reduced to the crude and broken machinery of bodily functions: the digestive system in poor Muhammad hangs out. Others have their tongues sliced. Bertran de Born, who divided royal son against father, carries his head in his hands. The schismatics failed on earth to pay respect to those sacred bodies of humans gathered into communion, and so they have their own precious bodies vulgarly demystified here in hell. In this way, Dante is a poet of X-ray vision. He aims to turn inside out that which we hide within. The schismatics are made to walk around the circle slowly—twenty-two miles around, Virgil tells us (Inf. 29.9)—and as they go round, their bodies begin to heal, only to be reopened and rewounded as soon as they’ve come back to the starting point of the circle. It’s a powerful image of the schismatic—those who don’t just disagree on principle but take delight in others being wrong. In their heart of hearts, Dante suggests, they don’t wish for true healing; they insist on opening up old wounds.
The Final Canti of Hell
In the final canti of Inferno, we meet the traitorous, men who broke the faith of those who had a special reason to trust in them. Some traitors violated the trust of family members, some broke the trust of their countrymen, some betrayed their lords, such as the assassins of Caesar (Brutus and Cassius) and Judas Iscariot. These are extraordinarily fast-moving canti, in which Dante packs a dizzying number of names into just two canti, reserving the final canto for a description of Satan. We have biblical and classical traitors, as well as traitors from medieval history who, apart from Dante, would have been forgotten by most. Appropriately, the traitors of lower hell have their identities, unwillingly, betrayed by the other residents of Cocytus. Traitors still betraying.
It is telling that within these canti the poet interrupts his narrative to express his longing for “rhymes, bitter and harsh” (rime aspre e chiocce, Inf. 32.1). The opening verses of canto 32 are extraordinary:
If I but had rhymes, bitter and harsh,
such as would fit this sick hole,
upon which all other rocks exert their weight,
I would squeeze the juice from what I perceive
more fully. But because I don’t have them,
I continue to speak, but with a sense of fear,
since it is not an enterprise for jest
to describe the center of the universe,
nor for a language that cries “mommy” and “daddy.” (Inf. 32.1–9)
In other words, we have it from Dante that he is trying to create a poetry that, by the end of these canti, will leave you dizzy and nauseated upon encountering the human heart in the worst possible state of existence. He wants you to have a deep and abiding repulsion for those actions that, often, even if we know they are harmful, we rarely detest. Dante was also very much aware of how difficult this would be for the ordinary language of Italian; he has to get all the power of the old epics into that language that, as he says, cries mamma and babbo.
And here the poet, much like the pilgrim, lets all compassion die:
O race, that should never have been! Worse than all the rest,
you abide in that place so hard to speak of.
How much better had you been sheep or goats! (Inf. 32.13–15)
Later on, Dante tells the Pisans that he hopes they will drown (33.79–84). You can feel the poet letting go. At the same time, the pilgrim doesn’t apologize for kicking the sinner Bocca degli Abati in the face (32.79–84). He then kneels down to start tearing out clumps of his frozen hair in order to force the stubborn soul to reveal his name. In canto 33 the pilgrim fools Fra Alberigo, refusing to help him remove the ice from his eyes. He lets the traitor feel the pain of betrayal: “But now extend your hand and open / for me my eyes.” The poet continues: “I did not open them. / But it was courtesy to be a villain to him” (33.148–50). What is going on? Moments like these have led eminent scholars to call Dante hateful and vengeful. Is the poet of love slipping? Is he becoming the poet of hate? Is this his chance to lash out at the world that had betrayed him?
These violent reactions are all the more shocking in light of the pilgrim’s pietate (pity) for souls in the upper regions of hell. Recall that the pilgrim swooned with pietate when he heard Francesca’s story (Inf. 5.139–42). After hearing Pier’s story, he was so moved by pietà that he could not ask his follow-up question (13.84). Elsewhere, Dante reverently bows his head before his old teacher, Brunetto (15.44–45), without a word of judgment: “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” (15.30). In Inferno 16.52 Virgil tells the pilgrim to feel sorrow (doglia) for the plight of the Florentine heroes he meets. The new Christian pilgrim to the afterlife builds on what the mythological Aeneas had been famous for (pietas). Dante, though, stretches the virtue, making it now include a new vulnerability, a feeling of complicity in the fragility of the human condition. Your sin is also mine.
As I said in the introduction, Dante’s journey through Inferno is the guerra della pietate (“war of pity,” 2.5–6). It is a struggle of interiority, not just a story of how some brawny Beowulf overcomes monsters in a swamp. To the extent that it is a war, the pilgrim has to develop a whole range of interior responses and then bring peace to those various parties. The pilgrim does have to develop pietate, but he also has to develop the power to show “disdain” (as he is praised for displaying toward Filippo Argenti in Inf. 8.31–60). In addition to feeling the weight of the sin he sees, in addition to feeling compassion for the twisted figure of humanity, he must also respond with justice and severity, understanding that what they now suffer was (and still is) freely chosen. The pilgrim must develop the full range of interior responses and then bring them into concert.
And if anyone is worthy of stern judgment, it is the sinners in the bottom of hell, for they do not just err through excessive love of things that are sometimes good (physical love, food, wealth, revenge), but rather they choose things that are always evil, in any circumstance (fraudulence and betrayal). Bocca degli Abati, for instance, was one of the few Ghibellines who was not exiled from Florence in 1258. Although he claimed a new allegiance to the Guelph faction, at the Battle of Montaperti (1260) he cut off the hand of the Florentine standard-bearer, which created panic in the Guelph lines and led to their disastrous defeat by the Ghibellines. He betrayed those who had shown him mercy. Ugolino is the sinner, in canto 33, who is ravenously biting pieces of flesh out of the head of Ruggieri, the archbishop of Pisa. Count Ugolino was the leader of the Guelphs in Pisa, who entered into traitorous negotiations with the Ghibelline party, but he himself was betrayed by Ruggieri. Along with his children, he was imprisoned within a tower and allowed to starve to death. Fra Alberigo is the sinner who asks Dante to remove the ice from his eyes. He was from a small Italian town. In 1284 he discovered that a close relative, Manfred, had been plotting against him. Alberigo publicly said he forgave Manfred, attributing his foolishness to the impetuousness of youth. Years later Alberigo invited Manfred and his son to dinner. After the main course, Alberigo called out to the servants, “Bring out the fruit,” at which point assassins, hidden behind tapestries, rushed forward to cut down Manfred and his son. Such sinners existed for themselves alone, and now Dante has to learn the stern justice of letting them be what they chose.
With these sinners fresh in mind, we come to canto 34 and, at last, meet the great king of this realm: Satan. He who was once the fairest of all creatures is now reduced to this: having the wings of a bat, bloody saliva drooling from the mouths of his three repulsive heads, and his engaging in an absolutely futile attempt to escape. Scholars have pointed out that the three heads of different colors help us see Satan as a parody of the Trinity. Even here, in the heart of hell, the image of God cannot be erased.2 The archtraitor, who betrayed God, here chomps on three traitors who conformed themselves to his image. But what has always interested me is this: the more energetically Satan exerts himself, the more of a prisoner he becomes. If, somehow, Satan could but momentarily stop the beating of his wings, then perhaps the ice that imprisons him would melt and he could go free. But here he is left entirely to his own choosing. He is left free to seek what his heart desires, and thus his furious rebellion ensures he will forever remain in captivity. Satan is the slave of his freedom.
In a similar way, the traitorous souls continue to choose what their hearts long for, a crooked and treacherous love at the expense of all other members of the human community. When harmed by the pilgrim, they cry out, outraged and offended by the pilgrim’s seeming lack of justice (e.g., Inf. 32.79); but precisely in crying out for justice, they put on display their striking ignorance of the fact that they themselves had committed the same injustice in life. They still have not learned their lesson. None of the souls seem to note the just irony that to be betrayed is the due reward for those who spent their lives traitorously. But even here, even now, they are allowed their freedom. And with that gift of freedom, they continue to choose their life of treachery, to cling to their isolation from the human community.
Conclusion: Fear in Inferno
Imagine that you had the opportunity to sit down and listen to Inferno recited in a single performance. By the end of such a performance, you would be completely emotionally exhausted. As the poem unfolded, you would listen with tense expectancy; at times you would shed tears of sympathy; sometimes you would even laugh at a sinner’s myopic view of the world. Although Inferno does call forth this rich range of responses, the master passion invoked is fear. In an earlier chapter, I pointed out that Dante, very intentionally, asks us to compare his Comedy to the pilgrim’s ride on the back of Geryon.3 The poet wants your reading of his poem to feel like his wild flight: full of horror, shock, vertigo, and intensity (Inf. 16.127–36). And, for Dante, this is a good thing: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding” (Prov. 9:10).
Fear is everywhere in the first canticle: the pilgrim experiences fear in the dark wood (Inf. 1.19–21); his fear in Inferno 2 almost ends the journey before it had begun (2.49–51); Divine Justice is fearfully proclaimed in the inscription on the portal to hell (3.1–9); and then there are the many instances of what Dante calls the orribil arte of Justice (the “horror-provoking art” of punishment; e.g., 14.6). References to fear or internal suffering appear in every single canto, and in some passages Dante goes out of his way to create a nightmarish experience of primal fear, such as in the canti of the barrators (Inf. 20–21), where words for “fear” appear seven times.
But what is even more remarkable is that those who failed to fear God in this life still do not fear him in the next, despite being immersed in the horror of his wrath. Capaneus and Vanni Fucci, of course, still rage away at God; Farinata ignores his punishment to complain about politics; Pier thinks his life was a tragedy; Francesca is hardly bothered by the wind; Satan flaps his wings with eager hope of escape. Though the souls who arrive in hell are said to be afraid, they do not fear God:
But those souls, naked and listless,
lost their color and gnashed their teeth,
as soon as they comprehended [Charon’s] brutal words.
They blasphemed God, their parents,
the human race, the place, the time, the seed
of their begetting and their birth.
Then, weeping bitterly, they drew together
to the cursed shore that waits
for every man who fears not God. (Inf. 3.100–108 [lines 103–8: trans. Hollander])
In other words, they still don’t fear God, despite the terrors that surround them.
This is perhaps the most frightening part of Dante’s poem: the pilgrim has to watch the human community come undone, return to the chaos of formless matter, like some evil act of uncreation. The souls who are plunged into these terrible conditions seem blind to the fearfulness of their surroundings, as if they are at home in the environs they choose to help create! It is as if God, who still respects their freedom, lets them experiment at being creator gods of their own universes. He lets them create the world they wish to become incarnate in, and the evil universes they do create to dwell in do not frighten them as they should. In this way, we can read each of these horrific scenes as doubly fearful: because of the pain sinners suffer, but also because they would rather suffer in the universe they created for themselves than admit their status as creatures.
It is for this reason that the poet felt the need to create Inferno, that poem of power, exposure, and fear. It is a poem so intense that, by its end, we are quite overwhelmed by this vision of sin, almost sickened. We feel its weight, almost to the point of being crushed. But remember what the psalm says: “If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there” (Ps. 139:8). At the point that is as far away from light and joy and music as possible, God is there; even if in a twisted parody, he is there; even if the damned are blind to his presence, he is still there. The pilgrim had to go down to the depths, though, because as medieval theologians taught, God’s power can only really help those who are so broken that they have come to the point that they admit they need assistance. And so Dante had to burn, blow, and break before moving onto his canticle of hope: Purgatorio.