Conclusion

The Wonder of the Comedy

Dante was not the only or even the first writer to record a Christian vision of the world beyond. Well before Dante, there were dozens of written visions of the afterlife.1 In fact, judging by the hundreds of manuscripts that have survived, such afterlife tales of traversing lands of horror and wonder made up one of the most popular medieval genres of literature. For example, English and Irish monks took up their ancestral poems about seafaring warlords and turned them into stories about intrepid saints who went off in search of the “Blessed Isle,” such as in Saint Brendan’s Voyage (from around AD 900). Late Antique “apocryphal” works also remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, as they purported to relate visions of the afterlife revealed to apostles, as in Saint Peter’s Apocalypse and Saint Paul’s Apocalypse. Gregory the Great (sixth century), in his Dialogues, told stories of monks who had visions of the penitent and the damned, and several centuries later, an illiterate English farmer, Thurkill, was led by Saint Julian on a trip to the afterlife.

At the same time that such visions were being read and copied, medieval men and women could gaze in horrified wonder at the polychromatic sculptural groups that stood above the main doors to so many European cathedrals (such as at St. Lazarus in Autun and St. Pierre in Moissac). In central Italy, they could look at mosaics and frescoes, such as Pietro Cavallini’s Last Judgment in Rome or Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Arena Chapel in Padua. Standing under these frightening visions of souls being stuffed into the mouth of hell, or wounded with instruments of torture, those same medieval men and women could then enter the church to listen to sermons on the last judgment or the pains of hell. When he was still Cardinal Lotario, the later Pope Innocent III wrote a contemptus mundi (contempt for the world) treatise called On the Misery of the Human Condition, which gives us a good idea of what they would have heard.2 In the final chapter of that book, the future pope thunderously invokes for the reader what hell holds for the wicked. Lotario takes Matthew 13:41–42, where Christ says that “there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth,” and turns it into this overwhelming rhetorical masterpiece:

There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, as well as groans and cries, lamentations, yelling, and pained sobs; clamor and sharp wailing. There will be terror and trembling, sorrow and exhausting labor, heat and stench, darkness and fearful anxiety, bitterness and harshness, calamity and need, crampedness and sadness, bitterness and terrors, hunger and thirst, extreme cold and heat, sulphur and fire burning from age to age to age.3

Clearly such passages are meant to frighten you out of your wits. We find other medieval texts in Latin, such as Thomas Celano’s Dies Irae, that help readers imagine themselves in the position of a soul on the day of wrath.

When we consider Dante’s poem against the background of such sermons, paintings, carvings, poems, and visionary treatises, we get a better idea of what a stupendous feat the Comedy was, and why, after it was written, no one would again be able to write or paint about the subject without reference to the Comedy (think, for example, of Signorelli’s Last Judgment in Orvieto or of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, both of which refer continuously to the Italian poem). And so, to conclude, I want very briefly to set the Comedy against the backdrop of what came before, referring to two concrete medieval works (one visionary treatise and one painting), before returning to Dante.

The visionary treatise is the Vision of Thurkill, already mentioned, which dates to around 1206. It tells the story of how one evening a simple peasant sees Saint Julian walking across his field. Julian asks Thurkill to lie down, leave his body on his bed, and rise up in his soul to follow him. Thurkill is then shown the mansions of the just and the places of punishment of sinners. Thurkill sees pits of fire, which belch forth stench. He sees a theater in which the devils force the sinners to re-perform their earthly sins. The proud man is made to walk around with his chest swollen and palms back, praising his own fine clothes. Adulterers are made to perform their sin for the demons, but when they realize that all the demons are laughing at them, they grow angry at the partner who used to be the lover, and bite and tear one another up. In fact, all the plays end in gruesome ways. The demons interrupt the sinners’ performances to hack their flesh into bits, frying each piece in a pan of hot oil. Then they shove the reconstituted bodies into a heated iron chair that has nails and screws sticking out of it. Wicked priests have their tongues ripped out for their evil sermons; knights charge at one another, wearing armor that is on fire; lawyers eat burning money and vomit it back up; slanderers eat spears; and so forth. When the plays are done, all the souls are stuffed into big stew pots: one pot has a molten metal, one has salt water to sting open wounds, one is full of cold water, and one is full of sulfur. Every eight days the sinners are rotated to a new pot.

Meanwhile, the penitent but yet unclean have to walk down an alley that is on fire and cross (unclothed) a bridge lined with thorns and briars, which poke their bare feet and tear their naked flesh. Then they are plunged in cold water for months or years. The author of this visionary treatise says that when Thurkill returned to his flesh, he became something of a local celebrity, telling his pious tale on every All Saints’ Day: “By his continual narration of the visions seen he moved many to tears and bitter lamentations.”4

The work of the Roman painter Pietro Cavallini is a more sophisticated artistic composition.5 He painted it on the western wall of the Church of St. Cecilia, in Trastevere, Rome, just a few years before Dante began work on his Inferno (sometime around 1300). Toward the top of this work, alas now only in fragments, is Christ, surrounded by a choir of angels. The lordly twelve apostles sit on thrones, holding the instruments of their martyrdom. On the bottom register, two sets of angels blow trumpets to assemble the souls of the dead. The group on Christ’s right rise and are shepherded toward the Judge: they stare, bow, fold hands in prayer. They are going to approach the Stupor Mundi (the awe of the world). They have wide-open eyes and solemn expressions. On the other side, souls are also assembled, but they are confused and crowded together, as they are pushed in clumps toward fiery pits and handed over to the dark angels. This is stern stuff. We see one pitiable tonsured monk staring out at us from among the damned, as if he now recognizes the falsity of his previous life.

As I have said, Cavallini’s fresco is much more sophisticated than Thurkill’s vision of graphic punishments. Thurkill seems to imagine that the gorier the description, the more likely you are to repent. And yet, while Cavallini’s fresco is artistically beautiful (ordered, balanced, and colorful—the angels’ wings are resplendent with many colors, like the feathers of some tropical bird), it still shares with Thurkill an important feature: both the painter and the writer aim to provoke a narrow set of emotional responses—sobriety, fear, awe, anxiety, and homage. The emotional temperature of each is restrained, sober, and cool.

It is against this background of such emotionally cool medieval works that we can appreciate Dante’s subtlety because, in contrast, the Comedy invites a rich range of emotional responses. You could say that what Cavallini does on the level of his variegated colors, Dante does on the level of psychology. The medieval writer or artist or preacher did, of course, feel a kind of holy obligation to tell the truth dramatically in order to wake up the lethargic world. And Dante, of course, has many of those same elements present within his work. Time and time again, the poet’s voice breaks off the narrative and cries out in impassioned warning. Dante’s gate to hell delivers a message of stern judgment, like that found in Cavallini’s Last Judgment fresco. And like Thurkill’s, Dante’s hell is also populated by foul and painful punishments: fire scorching feet, swords disemboweling schismatics, the fangs of fantastically scary reptiles biting thieves, diseases causing skin to fall off, and souls suffering from eternal thirst. Like Lotario, Dante’s poetry often captures the shrill tones the preacher needed to prick his audience. And yet we can see how emotionally monochromatic the earlier works are in comparison to the great Florentine master. For example, remember how Dante swoons, with deep pity, when he hears Francesca’s tale (Inf. 5). Dante was the only medieval author to give us Francesca’s side! But the pilgrim also experiences pity when he hears Pier della Vigna’s sad story, and he piously scatters the leaves of the Florentine suicide (14.1–3). Thurkill has no such response to the souls in hell.

In Dante, then, there is a rich variety of psychological responses. Among the envious, Sapia has a sense of irony when she admits that the cause of her salvation was the street vendor she had contempt for in life. When Dante meets his old drinking buddy, Forese, the two of them share a brief moment of humor as they remember how they were both complicit in incontinent fun. But in Inferno 15 we see the pilgrim manifest filial piety toward his old teacher, Brunetto; in Inferno 16, admiration for souls among the sodomites; in Inferno 4, esteem for the damned pagans in limbo; and in Purgatorio, simple delight in discovering that old mates, unlikely prospects for salvation (like Casella or Belacqua), somehow got in at the end. The pilgrim also seems to experience hints of remorse that his first best friend, Guido Cavalcanti, won’t make it (Inf. 10).

Of course, throughout Paradiso the pilgrim experiences visions of Beatrice that make even hot earthly passion seem tepid. Then there’s the peaceful spirit of Piccarda (Par. 3) and the hilarious exuberance of Peter (24.148–54), who, unlike Cavallini’s enthroned and stern judge, giddily dances around Dante the pilgrim, blessing him. There’s the gentle devotion of Bernard (Par. 33), the overwhelming joy of those on Venus to meet someone who will bring new love (Par. 8), and the high-spirited military pride of Justinian (Par. 5–6). Within the Comedy, then, there is a whole world of gradations of emotion. You find not generic damned or (worse) generic saints but individuals in their historical particularity—as if, to represent the full depth of the human heart, Dante needed the whole cast of humanity from all historical ages.

But Dante’s Comedy stands out in another way: he shows us that the most painful part of punishment exists on the psychological plane. At one point, Virgil tells a violent sinner (Capaneus) that he is his own punishment (Inf. 14.65); in other words, it is not the external punishment of the flakes of fire but the fact that he can’t let go of the anger that rages within. That is the true source of pain for Capaneus. We all know the experience of anger, how it makes us momentarily manic so that we cannot think of anything else. Dante gives us a Capaneus who, at no point, will choose, or can choose, to let this anger subside. Similarly, Francesca and Paolo barely notice that they are shaken and rocked by hurricane-like winds. They have what they want; they have what they think they want. In this way, Dante allows freedom to play an extraordinary role throughout the Comedy, even in Inferno. Sinners continue to “choose” their misery, because they cannot imagine a reality in which this one thing is not the only thing that is desirable.

Dante’s poem is also extraordinary because the poet shows us that moral growth is moving from having a cramped soul that loves too little to having a generous, open, porous soul that cannot love too much. For Dante, sin is not so much doing “bad things” as it is loving small goods idolatrously, as if they were the only goods that existed. Thus, sinners in hell are portrayed as loving only one thing: Pier his honor, Farinata his party, Satan his beauty, Francesca her Paolo. In purgatory, however, sinners are helped to break the hold of these addictive loves by being coached to love new things in new ways. God so organizes their spiritual exercises that their neighbors become their good. The envious have to lean on another; those waiting in antepurgatory need prayer to move on; the lustful have to exchange brief kisses of peace, and nothing more. In this way, they add to that solitary love they had on earth. But in heaven, souls begin to love all creatures in the cosmos, because each reveals a facet of the beauty of God that could not be seen otherwise. The more facets the gem has, then the more the brilliance of God is manifest—he who has “made for himself so many mirrors in which he spreads himself out / even while he remains one in himself just as before” (Par. 29.143–45). Likewise, the pilgrim confesses his love of all things, which together

“have drawn me from the sea of twisted love

and have placed me on the right shore.

“I love the leaves with which the garden

of the eternal Gardener enleaves itself,

as their good comes from him.” (Par. 26.61–65)

Over the course of his poem, Dante progressively reveals how love is at the center. The poet leaves us with “positive” views of some sinners, exciting our pity without explicitly condemning them, because what they wanted was admirable, even though limited. If they had loved more things and more deeply, they could have been liberated from their narcissistic smallness. If they had just been high enough to get a view from above! But the fact is, their own freedom is what imprisons them; because they tightly grasped one thing, they remained voluntarily anchored in mire.

But Dante is not just a psychologically subtle portraitist: at the same time that he gives us convincing individuals, he also locates them within an imaginary world whose architecture is rigorously constructed on the basis of ancient moral philosophy and Christian ethical traditions. Thurkill saw souls who received punishments that more or less fit their crimes, but it is also true that all the souls are lumped together and suffer generic punishments of mutilation, fire, and demonic torture. But Dante divides his souls in layer upon layer, terrace upon terrace, so that his imaginary world becomes the literary incarnation of the treatises of moral philosophy in his day. In Inferno 11 and Purgatorio 17, Dante explains that his regions are divided according to the severity of the sin, which itself is based on the hierarchy of human powers. This extraordinary architecture regulates the whole vision of the afterlife, and it is a feature of Dante’s poem that no medieval visionary treatise had had before.

And finally, in comparison with the monochromatic visions of the afterlife that came before, Dante’s vision has one feature that they did not: it is written as a poem. It is in verse, organized into terzine, canticles, and canti. And within this formal, geometric structure, Dante weaves in almost every form of writing imaginable: lowbrow comedic interludes, hagiographies, history, denunciatory sermons, hymns, liturgical songs, scientific treatises, snatches of love poems, theoretical reflections on writing, allegorical dreams, apocalyptic visions, and even epitaphs. He maps onto his visionary treatise all of these genres, so that his poem is not only encyclopedic in terms of the diversity of historical people and creatures but is also an encyclopedia of forms of writing.

And yet, within this diversity, you could say that there are two primary literary poles: the epic and the lyric. In Dante’s day, the epic was primarily admired as the genre that gets at everything. Thus, Virgil’s Aeneid was thought not only to tell a story but also to give lessons on all seven of the liberal arts, teach moral theology, and provide information on scientific phenomena.6 The lyric, though, was that very intimate poem in which I used my words to make you feel what was happening in me. It was performative, the vehicle by which the lover made the beloved return his affection. The Comedy weaves the lyrical moments, especially in Paradiso, into the larger epic framework, because for Dante it’s not enough just to know someone’s story; you also have to love it as a revelation of God. This, I think, is Dante’s single most powerful addition to the genre of visionary writings about the afterlife. Previous attempts give a rather two-dimensional vision of heavenly bliss, but Dante shows us a heaven of lovers wooing one another, as it were, in a way that causes heaven to be constantly and dynamically deepening in love. For Dante, the Comedy is not only a universalizing poem; it also portrays a universe of poets, each of whom is singing his or her own lyric song of praise. Each of those individual melodic lines is folded into the choir of the whole.