Inferno XVII: Of flying beasts and student loans

The full text of the canto in Italian/English

It’s been a while since I attended to this with any regularity, so it may pay to state when and where we are.

It’s the early morning of 9 April 1300, a mere hours after the beginning of Dante’s journey into Hell. The place is the third and lowest ring of the seventh circle, where those who committed the sin of violence against god and nature serve their sentence. More precisely, we are situated next to the drop where the river of boiling blood which runs through this circle – the Phlegethon – turns into a crimson fall. And since there is no apparent staircase or passage for Dante and Virgil to descend safely into the next circle, the pair have just summoned a flying beast by throwing Dante’s belt into the abyss.

Like uber, but for winged demons.

Except Geryon, the beast in question, is not described as having any wings. Not for the first time, an illustrator of the poem (in this case, Doré) has failed to read it properly. Indeed the first thing that Dante notices, as Geryon perches on the edge of the cliff, his tail dangling into the abyss, is that la faccia sua era faccia d’uom giusto – ‘his face was the face of a good person’. Deceptively, for Geryon is the allegory of Fraud, and is thus the appropriate vehicle for transporting the two poets among the most wretched and culpable of all the damned.

The wingless monster has the body of a serpent, the tail of a scorpion, and the legs of a lion, covered in fur. His torso, back and sides dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle, are ‘decorated with knots and circles’, in the manner of Arabian tapestries, but far more intricately. His way of perching, as if preparing for an ambush, reminds Dante of the beavers that lie on the river banks of Northern Europe, waiting to catch their prey.

Instead of pointing out to him that this is really not how beavers work, Virgil encourages Dante to move towards a small group of souls that is standing nearby, while he negotiates with Geryon the terms of their ride.

Illustration by a 14th Century Neapolitan illuminator

Another reminder: all souls which have retained their human form are naked folks. These few are no exception, save for the fact that they are carrying colourful purses around their necks. But otherwise their skin is exposed to the burning sand under their feet, and to the fiery rain that falls everywhere on this circle, except along the path that Dante is allowed to tread. The twin torment gives the souls no rest, and the purses adds to their contrappasso. For on them par che ’l loro occhio si pasca – roughly, their eyes seem to be feeding, meaning: they gaze at them with constant, insatiable hunger.

These purses or pouches are emblazoned: one with a blue lion on a yellow background; one with a white goose on a red background; one with a blue sow on a white background. The owner of this last one breaks from the small group to address the poet, gruffly. He says he hails from Padua, while his companions are Florentines. Together, they await a chap called Vitaliano. But instead of telling Dante about his sin or circumstances, as we have come to expect, the nameless soul cuts proceedings short but poking his tongue at him, obscenely, come bue che il naso lecchi – like an ox licking its nose.

Thus ends the short scene, leaving just enough clues for Dante’s contemporaries – and for scholars thereafter – to figure out the context and fill in the blanks. We know that we must be among usurers, because we were told to expect them in this circle six cantos ago, and Dante and Virgil are about to leave for Malebolge. Those emblazoned purses must contain gold, or IOUs, but above all the all-important ledger of the debtors, main tool of the usurer’s trade. And while it’s not absolutely clear who might have counted as an usurer in Dante’s eyes – whether anyone who lent money to anyone, as canonical law dictated, thereby including all bankers, or just those who lent money at disproportionate interest (the most likely answer being closer to the former) – at least we know the business of these particular ones, thanks to those blazons. They belong, respectively, to the families of the Gianfigliazzis, the Obriachis and – the guy who speaks, with the yellow sow or scrofa – to the Scrovegnis. And if it’s a Scrovegni and a usurer, it’s going to be Rinaldo, innit?

We met Rinaldo Scrovegni before: he’s the father of Enrico Scrovegni, who built a chapel in Padua and had it painted by Giotto with the possible intention of atoning for his father’s sins, or at least converting part of the money he made into a magnificent and lasting public relations exercise. Giotto painted the chapel in the very same years Dante was writing the Divine Comedy. How cool is that? This is Enrico:

Both the Obriachis (in Bologna) and Rinaldo Scrovegni (in Padua) were in the same business: lending money to university students. Those two cities have the honour of being regarded as among the birthplaces of this modern institution, but what may not be equally well-known is that even in those early days not all university students came from wealthy families, and that many students – rich and poor – relied on loans from the very beginning, under terms dictated by the cities that hosted them. Beyond that, there was the unregulated market of the usurers, and clearly it was a booming business that kept you into chapels. Then sent you to Hell.

(Though interestingly one theory about the genesis of the Scrovegni Chapel is that Enrico thought that his father must have been sent to Purgatory, and was trying to ‘buy him’ a discount. It’s kind of commerce that eventually precipitated the Reformation.)

Sandro Botticelli

It’s time to go: Dante is afraid that Virgil might be losing his patience, and re-joins him to find he’s already sitting on Geryon’s back. He instructs him to sit in front, so that the beast won’t be able to poke him with his presumably poisonous tail. Dante obeys, but he’s shaking, as if in the throes of a quartan fever. There is a tender moment, when he confesses to the reader that he planned to say to his guide – but for his voice failing him – Fa che tu m’abbracce, ‘put your arms around me.’

There’s no time. Geryon takes off. As per Virgil’s entreaties, he doesn’t dive headlong, but rather flies in sweeping circles, following the perimeter of the crater that is Hell.

How do you conceive of or describe a human flying in the fourteenth century? The sun is dawning, but offers no light at these depths. Maggior paura non credo che fosse… che fu la mia, quando vidi ch’i’ era ne l’aere d’ogne parte, e vidi spenta ogne veduta fuor che de la fera. ‘Never was fear, I think, greater than mine, when I saw that air was all around me, and that there was nothing to see save for the beast.’ This fearful uncertainty, this disorientation, is matched by the reticence we have come to expect at the end of these cantos, as Dante stops short of setting the scene with which the next canto will begin. He has landed, but where?

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI.

Inferno XVI: Dante's Tomb

The full text of the canto in Italian/English

It is heartening for the mortal to learn that not even Dante Alighieri got everything always right, and that the sixteenth canto of the Divine Comedy is something of a dud; little more than the B-side of the fifteenth. Dante meets more sodomites, and not in the fun way. They converse. They go their separate ways. Then at the end something unusual and rather mystical happens which I’ll get to at the end of this post. But seeing as I don’t want to go into the full details of the canto, I’ll tell you a little bit about Dante’s tomb, which I visited during my recent trip to Italy.

Entering the 'zone of silence'

Dante was as adventurous in death as he was in life. As you might recall, he wrote the Comedy whilst in exile, and was never allowed to return to his native and beloved Florence. He was in Rome when the sentence was issued, in 1302, and spent the rest of his life travelling from court to court in search of employment and protection. He lived in Verona, Treviso, Padua, the region known as Lunigiana, and finally Ravenna, where he completed the Paradiso some time before 1321. He died there at the age of 56, following a diplomatic mission to Venice, and was laid to rest in a Roman-era sarcophagus near the basilica of Saint Francis.

Then the Comedy became a hit, and Boccaccio started lecturing in Florence about it, and soon the city decided they would like to take him back after all. They made a first attempt in 1396, but were rebuffed, then again in 1428 and 1476. Finally, tired of asking politely, they got Pope Leo X – a native of Florence and son of Lorenzo de' Medici – to issue an order for the transfer of Dante’s body to his native city (Ravenna at this time was part of the Papal State). Michelangelo was at the ready, anxious to sculpt a monument in honour of the great poet. But when the Florentine envoys opened the sarcophagus, they found that it was empty. It transpired that the local Franciscan monks had stolen the body from inside the sarcophagus by drilling a hole on the other side of the wall against which it rested, Ocean’s Eleven-style. The envoys had no authority to order Franciscan monks around, and so Dante’s remains were placed under their protection.

And that would be fine, except the monks moved him around so many times that eventually they lost him. It happened some time after 1810, when the body was removed from the sarcophagus in its recently built new chapel for fear that Napoleon’s troops might steal it, as was their wont. The body was placed in a wooden box and hidden inside a wall but the monks didn’t keep good records and the precautionary shift was soon forgotten. So for the best part of the 19th century everyone simply assumed that the empty sarcophagus still contained Dante’s remains.

The box was found by accident in 1865, during the restoration of the chapel, and a student was quick enough to read the words “Ossa Dantis” (Dante’s bones) on the inscription before the find could be labelled as a generic bag of bones and placed in a common ossuary.

We’re not done. Dante was moved again during the Second World War, for fear that the tomb might be bombed, and placed in the adjoining cloister, under a plaque that still commemorates this fact.

Most recently, the tomb was found to have been included among the Italian targets of ISIS, which is mad at him for his depiction of Mohammed in Canto XVIII (maybe we’ll get there this year). It is now protected by a camera, installed in 2016 not just for security but also for counting visitors, including those who just pop their head past the rope to take a quick peek.

Today, Dante rests in a small, unassuming chapel, far less pompous than the cenotaph that the Florentines built in 1821, when they still harboured some residual hope that he might be returned to them. The sarcophagus still bears the epitaph dictated by Bernando da Canaccio in 1366, in a rather inapposite Latin, and that describes him as ‘Dante, exiled from his native land, born of Florence, a mother who loved him little.’ The chapel is lit at all times by a small lantern, fuelled by olive oil donated by the Florentines every year during a special ceremony on the second Sunday in September. I find this detail quite tender – his city rejected him, but they still light his room – as I do the fact that Dante’s Tomb is part of a special “zone of silence”, whereby the adjoining streets are kept quiet by the city’s authorities as a mark of respect.

We have come to the end of the sixteenth canto of the Inferno. It is less than 24 hours since Dante’s journey began. Virgil and Dante have reached a waterfall – except it’s not water, for the Phlegethon (remember?) runs with the blood of the damned. There is no apparent passage for travelling safely out of the seventh circle and into the eighth. Instead, Virgil asks Dante to pass him the cord he keeps around his waist and throws it over the fall. This strange incantation soon bears its fruit, as Dante begins to discern through the spray a meravigliosa figura (‘marvellous figure’) that – always loving a cliff-hanger – he stops just short of naming or describing.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV.

Inferno XV: Contains sexual politics

The full text of the canto in Italian/English

A strange canto in which the sin is never mentioned, and the penance – the contrappasso – is barely described. The very geography of this corner of Hell is understated. There is a sort of dam, or artificial bank, explains the poet. But it’s smaller than the ones they build in the Netherlands to keep the sea out, or near Padua to contain the rivers when the snow melts in the spring.

The bank built alongside the Phlegethon delimits the burning strip of sand on the other side, and acts like a walkaway for Dante and Virgil. One thing modern readers are liable to forget is that while Hell is built underground, it’s not a cave, it’s more like an open mine: therefore, the two poets always walk in full view of the sky, where the Sun is now rising.

Dante’s journey began only yesterday, less than twenty-four hours ago. He has now reached the bottom rung of the fifth circle, where the ‘violent against God’ reside, meaning not just blasphemers but those who sinned against God’s creation, that is to say nature. According to the prevailing theological theory, these are worse than those who inflict violence upon themselves (suicides, gamblers), who in turn are worse than those who inflict violence on others (murderers, tyrants). It’s a topsy-turvy moral world, from the point of view of secular modernity, but Dante himself might have harboured his own doubts about this hierarchy, at least judging from the relative punishments and – more to the point –the varying degrees of his own personal sympathy towards the souls he encounters.

As to the first point, you could argue that being submerged for all eternity in a pool of boiling blood (as is the case of tyrants, in the first rung of the circle) is worse than running, sitting or lying in a desert of burning sand, which is the penance in the lowest rung. As for the second, Dante’s compassion for the suicides contrasts with the indifference he showed for the ‘less guilty’ murderers.

Divine law cannot be neatly overlaid on the emotion-inflected law of humans. Not even for this staunch ambassador of the belief system of medieval Christians.

Who are the ‘violent against God’, anyway? They are – in ascending order of guilt – sodomites, usurers and blasphemers. The first are condemned to run across the desert. The second, to sit on the burning sand. The third, to lie on it, which causes maximum pain with no measure or relief.

That we are among the sodomites in this canto we can only tell by the fact that they are running. The sin is neither explicitly mentioned nor reflected upon, which makes it difficult to establish how Dante might have felt about it.

Hartmann Schedel's depiction of Lot's family leaving Sodom, minus his wife (1493)

Scholars of the poem report that the practice was very common in Florence, proverbially so – the German for sodomite at this time was ‘Florenz’. It should also be remembered that until relatively recent times, sodomy was also not primarily associated with male homosexuality, and was a very common contraceptive method. If the crime that caused the downfall of Sodom in the Bible was the citizens’ demand that Lot release his guest to them, so they may rape them, here it is merely sex for purposes other than procreation. As such, it’s hardly surprising that Dante should fail to express any great outrage. But the canto goes a step further by focusing on a very sympathetic figure for whom the poet shows great affection and even admiration.

Francesco Scaramuzza, Brunetto Latini and the Sodomites (1859)

"Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?" The straightforward translation – ‘Are you here, ser Brunetto?’ – doesn’t tell us where we should place the emphasis. Is it ‘Are you here, ser Brunetto?’ or are ‘Are you here, ser Brunetto?’ In other words, is Dante surprised to see ser Brunetto at all, or to see him in this particular place? There seems to be no doubt that the words are spoken with tenderness, especially since Dante goes on to offer Brunetto to rest with him a while, so that he may stop running while they talk. Brunetto replies that if he were to rest even for a moment he would be condemned to the penance of the usurers – that is to say, to lie down – for a period of one hundred years. And so they walk. Dante above, on the stone bank, but crouching so that he may hear and be heard. Brunetto below, literally looking up to the person who used to look up to him metaphorically.

Notary public, prominent politician and author of a famous rhetorical compendium, Brunetto Latini was born 45 years earlier than Dante, and died when the poet was in his late twenties. The only evidence that they knew each other is to be found in the Commedia. Dante writes:

’n la mente m’è fitta, e or m’accora,
la cara e buona imagine paterna
di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora
m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna

Paraphrasing: ‘your dear, paternal image is fixed in my mind, and fills my heart with fondness, of when in the world hour after hour you taught me how man becomes eternal’ (meaning: how a person can achieve immortality through their writings).

There is no evidence that the relationship between the two was anything other than platonic. However, seeing as the group in which Dante recognised Brunetto is made up of clerics and fellow men of letters, it seems reasonable to speculate that Brunetto adhered to the practice, common among men in such positions, of taking young male lovers among their proteges or students. Yet evidently this hasn’t moved Dante to despise him, or feel any revulsion for those whose sin – in Brunetto’s words – ‘sullies them in the eyes of the world’ (fur… al mondo lerci).

By now, the reader has had many occasions to measure the distance between the private morality of Dante ¬and the eternal judgment of his God, which sometimes appear in open contradiction. Yet it was Dante-the-poet who invented the torment of Brunetto Latini, which is found in no scripture; it was him that chose to make his old teacher immortal (come l’uom s’etterna…) because of his sexual preferences, and to show him naked and disfigured, begging for the attention of the old pupil. Therein lies the limit of his compassion.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV.

Inferno XIV: Horrible justice

The full text of the canto in Italian/English

The giant lies on a bed of fiery sand, and barely seems to notice the lightning bolts that are raining upon him. Dante calls him quel grande, ‘that great one’, a qualifier that William Blake took to indicate physical as opposed to moral stature. It could have gone either way, really. For mythology dictates that Capaneus – one of the seven kings of Thebes – was both a man of indomitable spirit and enormous size.

Dante and Virgil have come to the third rung of the fifth circle of Hell, out of the forest of the suicides and to the edge of a desert where fire rains as thick and steady as snow in on a mountain on a day with no wind. This is di giustizia orribil arte, a horrible form of justice. The damned are naked – though in fact they all are, throughout Hell, it’s mentioned here just to emphasise the punishment – and react to the torment in different ways. Some crouch, some lie face down, some stomp around in a vain attempt to extinguish the flames. But not Capaneus. He lies still, disdainful, refusing to show any outward sign of pain. And when he boasts that an army of cyclops churning bolts out of the furnace of Mount Etna for Zeus to throw at him would not be sufficient to give to his enemy the satisfaction of seeing him squirm, Virgil retorts that this is the true nature of his punishment: not just suffering through an eternity of physical agony but also being consumed by that anger without outlets, save for this once in a death-time encounter with the unlikely traveller.

Di giustizia orribil arte. This is the essence of the Inferno and of its catalogue of punishments, which have to be borrowed from ancient literature because there is no explicit mention of Hell – let alone a detailed description – in either the Old or the New Testament. Although its roots date back to Augustine, Hell is a medieval invention: the distorted mirror, perhaps, to ordinary life for the majority of people. That ‘horrible justice’ warps the image of the merciful Christian God into an architect of infinite torture chambers. (Remember: in Dante’s vision, Satan is not the administrator of Hell, but its chief prisoner.)

We were taught about these things at high school. Our school had circles, too, and it too was upside down: in the sense that it started hard, and it finished easy. In the first two years, it separated the worthy from the unworthy. Of our intake of thirty-three, nine survived unscathed at the end of the first year. Nine were held back. The remainder had to set a varying number of remedial exams (call it Purgatory), which some failed so they were held back after ruining their summer holidays. The main rituals of school were the written and oral tests, both scheduled and unscheduled. The oral ones we called ‘interrogations’. They could happen at virtually any time, and its subjects were chosen via lotteries designed by the teachers which were sometimes so elaborate as to resemble the ancient art of the Kabbalah.

At the end of the first year, I was deemed one of the worthy ones. But only just. And on the last day our maths teacher warned me: study as if you had to sit a remedial exam, for I’ll test you as soon as school comes back. Which, naturally I didn’t. And so, on the first day we had maths after the summer holidays – I swear this is true – our teacher came into the classroom, put her book down, didn’t say hello, but rather: “Mr Tiso, please come to the blackboard.” Thus, I spent the remainder of that year trying to climb back the mountain of that failed mark. Another pilgrim’s progress.

By the time we covered Dante – from the third year to the fifth – the terror had abated somewhat. All of the unworthy (at least in the eyes of the school system) had been weeded out, and the subjects became easier. Not relative to the supposedly superior intellect and work ethics of the survivors, you understand, but in terms of the actual curriculum and the pace at which it was taught. The school’s brand of justice became a little less horrible, although in most respects it remained just as arbitrary and opaque.

This was the context of our Dante: a block of knowledge that sat on top and next to the others in the strange edifice we were intent on building. Just as in the study of history, philosophy and the rest of literature we were moving into the modern era – there to meet with the hard sciences we had been studying since the first year – in that weekly hour or two we returned to the Middle Ages.

It wasn’t an unpleasant detour, far from it. I think most of us rather enjoyed it. But all our subjects were compulsory, and we were never invited to question or reflect on the underlying logic. What was the theory of education that led to three years of close readings of the Divine Comedy alongside the study of Latin, algebra or physics? What sense were we supposed to make of all that knowledge, and whom was it supposed to turn us into?

Whilst continuing to walk alongside the great ring, between the forest and the sandy terrain on which the rain of fire falls, Dante and Virgil come to a stream of putrid red water. Why had they not crossed it before, and where does it come from, asks Dante to his guide. Virgil explains that their counter-clockwise trajectory down the pit of Hell hasn’t quite spanned the whole circumference yet. He then answers the second question: in the middle of the sea (ie the Mediterranean, the only sea that Dante knew) there is a paese guasto – a country in ruin – by the name of Crete, and on that island there’s a mountain, and inside that mountain there is the colossal statue of an old man, with his back on Egypt and the eyes bent toward Rome. His head is made of gold, his chest and arms of silver, his belly of copper, his leg and his left foot of iron, while the right foot – on which the statue leans – is made of clay. There is a crack running down the statue, from which a stream of tears springs. And these tears, which pool at the bottom of the hollow mountain, are the source of all of the rivers of Hell – Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon – as well as the stream to which the two poets have come.

For once, this is a biblical story: it is told in the book of Daniel, in the form of a dream of the king of Babylon’s, Nebuchadnezzar. Except his statue had both feet of clay, not just one (from which we get the expression ‘a giant with feet of clay’). The various materials of which the colossus is made are meant to represent the ages of humanity, and its progressive moral decay. What the allegory meant for Dante is not conclusively clear, though it is regarded as probable that the foot of clay represents the Papacy, the foot of iron the emperor: one weaker, but more heavily leaned on; the other stronger, but less relied upon.

For us, the giant is a mystery. For Dante, it was an explanation. For his world made a kind of sense that ours doesn’t, and never will again.

.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII.

Inferno XIII: The forest of the things that aren't

Of all the cantos, this may be the saddest. Nowhere else does the worldview of the poet – which reflected the most enlightened thinking of his time, at least among Christians – seem more warped and distant. Hanging over it are all the innumerable personal stories lost to history of people whose mental illness was viewed by society as a sin.

George Grosz, Trees at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts (1946)

Having crossed the river of boiling blood that delimits the first level of the fifth circle, Dante and Virgil have come to the edge of a wood che da neun sentiero era segnato – that paths, it had none. This is the beginning of a description through negatives. You know the forests that surround Cecina and Tarquinia – asks the poet – where only the wild boars roam? Well, this one was nothing like that. And then:

Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco;
non rami schietti, ma nodosi e ’nvolti;
non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco.

Per Longfellow: not foliage green, but of a dusky colour; not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled; not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison.

This is the forest of the things that aren’t. And so even its sole apparent living inhabitants – the harpies that nest among the trees – are not described and perhaps not even seen by Dante, but recalled from the relevant passage in Virgil’s Aeneid, safe for remarking that fanno lamenti in su li alberi strani: literally ‘they make laments up in the trees strange’, where strange could refer either to the trees or the laments.

However, what Dante hears as the pair ventures into the pathless wood are definitely human voices.

Io sentia d’ogne parte trarre guai
e non vedea persona che ’l facesse;

‘I heard on all sides lamentations uttered and person none beheld I who might make them.’ The absence now is the absence of human forms, from which the reader would quickly deduce that we’re in the presence of a very ancient trope, that of people turned into trees. But Dante – the great scholar of classical literature who thinks or pretends to think that his journey is not occurring in a book – appears blind to this most obvious of foreshadowings. Or does he? The next line is delicious.

Cred’ïo ch’ei credette ch’io credesse…
I thought he thought I thought…

So, to try to explain: Dante was standing in the forest, listening to voices of uncertain provenance, and (at the time of writing) he recalls thinking that Virgil might have been thinking that he (Dante) might have been thinking that people might be hiding among the trees. The implication of the line is that he didn’t in fact think that, but had figured that the voices were coming directly from the trees. So, when Virgil instructs him to break a twig off one of the trees, believing that he would not be believed if he just told him the truth, Dante plays along, but knowing that he would likely be causing pain to what is left of a person.

Therefore, he puts his hand forward, and gently plucks the thinnest of branches. To which a voice replies: Perché mi schiante (why do you break me?) and quickly again Perché mi scerpi (why do you tear me?). Maybe these tree-people are highly sensitive to pain. Or maybe this tree-person – one Piero della Vigna – is reacting so violently because he knows that the injury, however slight, was quite needless; that it was all a narrative pretext to get the action going.

For the trees cannot speak unless they are being attacked in that way. It is the Harpies which, by feeding on the leaves, fanno dolore, e al dolor fenestra – ‘create pain, and a window to pain’.

It is a recurring question in the Inferno, whether for the spirits to talk to Dante is a form of torment or temporary reprieve. What he has to offer to them, in most cases – as he does to Piero – is the promise to speak of them to the living. And in fact, little would be known of this disgraced counsellor to emperor Frederick II, were it not for the Commedia. But remember the words of Francesca in the fifth canto: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria. There is no greater pain that to think back on one’s happiness in a time of misery. And time, for the damned, stretches like a Mobius Strip: circular, eternal, always folding upon itself, always taking them back to the time of their personal Fall. To speak therefore is to feel pain and in this forest it is only through pain that the spirits can speak.

The second level of the fifth circle is reserved to suicides (and gamblers, which I won’t get into except to say their fate is to be hunted by dogs through the thick woods). It is lower than the first level, because for medieval theological ethics to cause harm upon oneself was worse than to cause harm to others. To take someone’s life is a crime against that person, and to the laws of God. But to take one’s own is a crime against nature, therefore directly against its creator. And God, who is omnipotent and cannot be harmed, nevertheless takes all offences against His divine person very seriously. Therefore, the mere murderers are upstairs, whereas those that squandered their own life or their own fortune are down here, and subject to an even more exquisite torment than being turned forever into ragout.

Remember: to suffer from what we would call depression, the Romantics called melancholy and medieval Christians called sloth, was also a deadly sin, and for similar reasons: to negate the beauty of life and creation was regarded as an affront to God. We already found the souls of the slothful who stopped short of suicide along with the souls of the violent who stopped short of murder, submerged in the murky waters of the Styx. Murderers and suicides similarly go together.

We can, I hope, reject outright these archaic notions. But as well as reaffirming this ethical system as it applies to the dead, the canto hints at its likely social consequences for the living. For while Piero’s speech is dignified and moves Dante to pity, the poet’s imagery – for which there is no known theological source – is merciless. In the end of ends, Piero explains, when all the spirits of Hell are reunited to their bodies after the Judgment, the suicides will be condemned instead to hang theirs from these branches: as a lifeless simulacrum and eternal reminder of the life that they rejected.

It’s hard to read these lines today without thinking of Billie Holiday and Strange Fruit, but those are historical contexts that resist comparison. What reading a medieval poem can also be good for, however, is to remind us that the stigma of mental illness has roots that reach very deep into our culture.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII.

Inferno XII: Of false cows and rivers of blood

The Lavini di Marco (literally ‘slides of Mark’) are blocks of limestone created by prehistoric landslides and criss-crossed by the footprints of various species of dinosaurs. They are mentioned in a treatise by the late medieval scholar Albertus Magnus – who thought them to be of much more recent origin – and can be spotted today while driving along the Modena-Brennero motorway, near Rovereto, at the foot of the Italian Dolomites. Dante is unlikely to have visited them, but he read Albertus Magnus’ De meteoris (which is concerned with the weather and earthquakes, as opposed to meteorites) and uses the Lavini to describe the landscape of Hell. Or, more precisely, the steep rocky terrain that Dante and Virgil have to cross in order to descend into the seventh circle.

Image source

Hell is a place on earth, and places on earth resemble Hell. Few of Dante’s contemporary readers would have had the opportunity to visit the Lavini, so in all likelihood the reference is of a literary nature, aiming at readers of Albertus Magnus. In this and in other details, the Commedia appears to be written for an audience of Dante’s peers: fellow men of letters who took an active interest in political life, versed in classical sources and Christian theology and familiar with the Who’s Who of thirteenth-century Italy. Yet Dante also dared to imagine that the poem would be a future classic, written in a new language – the language of ordinary people – and building upon the towering learning of previous ages. Thus the references in the poem are like geological layers, each built on the existing bedrock of facts and stories slowly accreted before Dante’s time. And the Commedia itself is an ark or storehouse of the knowledge accumulated up to the time of its production.

The Western tradition up to the two centuries immediately before the Christian reformation was a system of beliefs with an absolute claim to universality. Dante would not have conceived that this knowledge could ever be departed from. He didn’t know about the dinosaurs that left their mark on the limestone of the Lavini di Marco, and would have struggled to expand his stories to incorporate those monsters. Virtually all of the scientific knowledge of our time contradicts the foundations of his worldview, and he would barely recognise Catholicism itself. Yet the book survives, like the encyclopaedia of a dead world imagined by Borges.

However, this is not the book that Dante wrote. It can’t be. He wrote it for other thirteenth-century Christians who believed in the same natural world as he did. A world with ice in the middle, cored by the cone-shaped Hell, with a Southern (or ‘bottom’) hemisphere full of nothing but water except for the mountain-island of Purgatory. The book we read is a different book because we live in a different world. Only the words stay the same.

Dante’s intended reader commanded the knowledge of his time and needed few words to be reminded of the well-worn stories of that shared imaginary. Twelve lines into this canto, for instance, we come across l’infamia di Creti… che fu concetta ne la falsa vacca – the infamy of Crete, who was conceived inside the false cow. This is the Minotaur, the part-bull, part-man monster whose origin story – as told by Ovid – is as follows: having gifted a magnificent white bull to Minos, king of Crete, as a sign of his favour, the god Poseidon expected that Minos in turn would sacrifice it to him. But the sacrifice never came. Poseidon therefore cursed Minos’ wife Pasiphaë, causing her to fall madly in love with the bull. In order to consummate this love, Pasiphaë asked Daedalus to build a wooden cow for her to hide inside, and presented it to the bull (as it were). From this union came the Minotaur, a monster child with the head of a bull whom Pasiphaë tried in vain to nurse, for the child’s only sustenance was human flesh. After seeking advice from the oracle at Delphi, Minos asked Daedalus to build a labyrinth in which to imprison the Minotaur in his palace at Knossos. At this time, Crete was at war with Athens, and for every battle won Minos would exact a tribute of young men and women to the feed to the monster. Finally Theseus, son of the king of Athens, volunteered to be one of the sacrifices, slayed the Minotaur and found his way out of the labyrinth thanks to the thread gifted to him by the Minotaur’s half-sister, Ariadne.

All of this, the model reader of the Commedia would recall by a mere mention of the infamy of Crete and a false cow. Funnily enough, however, Dante seems to get the Minotaur the wrong way around: not a fearsome man with the head of bull – as is represented in all of the classical iconography – but a bull with the head and possibly the torso of a human, similar to a centaur. This reminds us that his sources were not the ancient statues or the pictures on black figure pottery, but books with few or now illustrations. Whereas we, who know about the dinosaurs and that the earth revolves around the Sun and all the other things, can instantly call up hundreds of visual sources to test and if necessary contradict the poem. This is another of the paradoxes of the Commedia: that a book that produced and continues to produce so many images was written by a man who lived in a world were pictorial representations were almost incomprehensibly scarce.

Image source

How’s this for a picture: this is the canto of the river of boiling blood, in which those who committed violent acts against others are left to cook, each at a depth commensurate to the gravity of their crimes. So the tyrants are almost completely submerged – all that sticks out is the hair – whereas common highway robbers are soaked merely to the ankles. This is a purely visual scene: gone is the stench that overpowered Virgil and Dante before they came down the landslide, forcing them to repair behind a block of marble. Or rather, it’s not gone but it no longer rates a mention. From now on, as the horrors of the lower Hell pile upon one another, Dante will tell us of the things he has seen.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI.

Inferno XI: The geography of crime and punishment

Hell is a place on Earth. And although it is inhabited by spirits that are non-corporeal, they too will be reunited with their bodies after the Day of Judgment – whereupon they shall have to endure a second eternity, longer than the first, except now they’ll be endowed with an even greater capacity to feel pain, and even less hope of future relief. A sentence, mind you, that can never be served in full: for the debt is not to society, but to God.

The Divine Comedy is a poem about crime and punishment, as well as virtue and reward. God’s justice consists in punishing the dead in order to educate the living, and its geography recalls a concentrationary universe as opposed to a prison system, precisely because it does not allow for rehabilitation or redemption.

The eleventh canto of the Inferno, like the third, is devoid of action or movement, and takes the form of a discussion between its leading actors – or more precisely a lecture by Virgil to Dante – concerning the geography of Hell: that is to say its spatial organisation, which is highly symbolic and allegorical but nonetheless also concrete and physical. For Hell is a place on Earth. And to remind us of this earthly nature is the setting of the conversation: for the two poets, having walked away from the open graves in which the Epicureans are crammed by their thousands, are now standing behind the upturned stone of the tomb of another heretic – an early medieval Pope by the name of Anastasius – to seek protection from a prodigious stench. ‘We had better delay our descent,’ proposes Virgil, ‘to give time to our senses to get used to the tristo fiato’, the ‘doleful breath’ emanating from the depths of Hell.

This stench is another mix of body and spirit: as much physical (there are rivers of boiling blood just below) as it is moral. The three lowest circles of Hell are where the violent spirits are housed. This violence includes not just physical assaults but also theft, robber, deception and fraud: anything that causes injury, whether to people or their possessions, or to the self (suicide, gambling), or to God – which includes blasphemy, of course, but also subverting the order of nature. So, not only sodomy (as we might expect) but also usury. For – as Virgil explains to Dante, who questioned him on this particular placement – the worldly labour of humans (be they farmers of tradespeople) mirrors the celestial work of God, and is thus descended from it, whereas trying to get monetary wealth to reproduce itself, without labour, perverts the purpose of creation.

I’m not going to attempt to discuss here the minutiae of Dante’s penal code, with its synthesis of Aristotelean ethics and Christian theology. This is the Comedy at its most obscure, opaque and ultimately distant to the modern reader – so much so that not even the Italian school system, with its passion for testing students on arcane knowledge, expected us to seriously delve into Virgil’s dissertation. Besides, there will be further opportunities to go over the catalogue of the damned in some detail, for the last three circles span the remaining 23 cantos of the Inferno. As the upside-down cone of Hell narrows down, the poem will progressively expand.

For now, I just want to hint at this geography, and at its double nature – both actual and symbolic, both physical and metaphysical – because reading the Comedy is also a journey into understanding how these categories operated in the psyche of medieval Europeans. To repeat a point I’ve already made and will continue to make in this series of posts: Dante knew the things he imagined to be true.

And then those things had to be represented, that is to say reimagined. From the crude, naïve schematism of Priamo della Quercia, the miniaturist who illustrated the poem a little over a century after Dante’s death (and who hear compresses the entire contents of this canto, including a spurious Pope Anastasius, whose spirits does not in fact appear).

Through the expressionistic and already modern map that Sandro Botticelli drew for an edition commissioned to him by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici and completed around the year 1500.

Via William Blake.

Down to the present day textbook diagrams

and the infographics

Click here for the full-size image

Click here for the full-size image

or the printable study posters.

Source

The history of these representations is also a history of the readings of Dante and of the uses of the comedy – from quasi-sacred poem to text you have to study in order to demonstrate competence at school, and that some read for pleasure.

This very limited gallery shows how Botticelli’s extraordinary cross-section map is still the dominant model for thinking of the Inferno. This seminal illustration has become the subject of a documentary released in Italy and Germany last year, which I wish I had an opportunity to see but so far has not been screened in this country. So the best I can do is to point you to the highest resolution image I could find, so you can pore over the details if you wish. For the record, we are roughly here, at the edge of the living cemetery of the heretics, under the flaming walls and towers of the city of the Dis. Midway down Botticelli’s map.

All of these pictures fuse the mental structure of the poem with the physical shape of Hell, which is appropriate since in Dante’s imagination they were one and the same. The Comedy is both fantasy and vision, both poem and prophecy. And for the justice it describes to be realised, the reader must believe that its punishments are real. Hell is a place on Earth.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X.

Inferno X: The circle of me

In 1985, just as I enrolled at high school, the new law on the teaching of religion came into effect. Instruction in the history and practice of Catholicism had been part of the compulsory state curriculum since the Lateran Treaty signed by Mussolini and Pope Pius XI in 1929. Now as before, every state school would have to offer an hour per week of the stuff, under the supervision of a teacher nominated by the local dioceses. However, the process of opting out had been simplified. During our first year, in my class of 33, only two students chose to sit it out, of which I was one. That number may have risen by one or two units – if that – by the time we entered the third year, when we began studying the Divine Comedy. The alternative to the teaching of religion was… nothing. By law, schools were not allowed to dismiss students early or let them start late, so we had to remain in the building. But there were no replacement activities or teachings. We just spent an hour in an empty classroom.

Picture the breakfast club, but for atheists.

Individual reasons for not opting out of what we called ‘the hour of religion’ might have been complex, so one shouldn’t read too much into those numbers: I suspect social anxiety played as big a part in the decision as the strength of a family’s Christian faith. All the same, when it came to Dante, our teacher could rely on the fact that he was presenting the poem to a class that by a very large majority identified as Catholic. Albeit Catholics of a different era.

The sixth circle of Hell is where the heretics dwell. They were introduced at the end of the ninth canto as a vast population of souls twice dead, sentenced – that is – to spend eternity in a cemetery of open graves – some of which, though not all, are on fire. And since this cemetery is encircled by walls, like a city, Dante told us specifically to think of contemporary examples, such as the still surviving cemetery of Arles. The famous Alyscamps, pictured above.

The scene, then, is that of a necropolis, or city of the dead. But the contrappasso only makes sense for a specific subset of heretics: namely, atheists. The taxonomy is somewhat questionable, seeing as members of different contemporary religions don’t count for Dante as either unbelievers or heretics (remember how he placed a number of famous Muslims as well as ancient Pagans in a rather heaven-like region of limbo?). But the atheists are here, including Epicurus – who lived three centuries before Christ, hence could have been grouped with Pagans and more specifically with the eminent Greek philosophers of limbo – because those who l’anima col corpo morta fanno, ie believe that the soul perishes at the same time as the body, commit an actual sin. And a mortal one at that.

Thus the contrappasso of atheists is to ‘live’ (to exist, to think, to feel) forever as dead people. Or at least until Judgment Day, when the open tombs will be sealed, presumably with their regained bodies inside, but – also presumably – there to continue to suffer in the knowledge that others would enjoy eternal life in the timeless post-apocalyptic universe.

Back to our room (nearly) full of sixteen year old Catholics, where I was being taught these lines, it occurs to me now that had we believed those scenarios to be literal – as some young men and women of Dante’s age would have, or might have – then the vast majority of the class could have pointed its collective finger at the three or four of us who opted out of the weekly religion hour and declared: ‘There. This is where you’ll end up.’ And maybe I did think it, something along the lines of: this is my circle. The circle of me.

But my friends and I were not written into the canto. Frederick II was – he, who my mother venerated precisely because he had tried to make knowledge, and not religion, the business of the state; he who built, among many other things, the incomparable Castel del Monte.

Here is also a Cardinal, Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, because making open professions of atheism didn’t disqualify one from highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy at a time when the power wielded by Cardinals was above all temporal and political. Here is also – and I mean quite literally, all these souls and a thousand others are crammed into a single grave – Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, father of Guido, a great poet and great friend of Dante, who feverishly asks the pilgrim if his son still lives. For that is the second part of the punishment: the souls of the atheists, along with some others in the great prison system of the Inferno, can see some way into the future, but not the present, like old people whose sight and whose memory can only focus on distant things. They, the Epicureans, who when they lived, lived only for the present moment.

However, the tenth canto is above all the canto of Farinata degli Uberti, the great Florentine Ghibelline (to simplify: supporter of the Holy Roman Emperor, that is to say first Frederick II, then his illegitimate son Manfred, King of Sicily, as he vied for the succession), who triumphed at Montaperti against the Guelphs of Florence and, at the great council of Empoli, cast the deciding vote against those who wanted to destroy the city; and who yet, after Manfred’s death and the rise of the Guelphs, was exhumed from the grave where he had spent the previous two decades and summarily thrown into the Arno, while two of his living sons were beheaded in the public square (a macabre feast to which Dante would have been a spectator, as a young man, long before his own disgrace and exile), and three more were burned at the stake, along with his widow Adaletta. His family’s palace, then destroyed, lies under the paving stones of what is now Piazza della Signoria.

Dante and Farinata, members of feuding families – though the Ubertis were of far higher rank and importance than the Alighieris – engage in this canto in one of literature’s great dialogues. Farinata, who is disdainful of Hell and of his fate, is still somehow defiant, yet humbles himself to ask why the Florentines of Dante’s generation hate his family with such ferocity. Dante, who is desperate to hear a prophecy of his own future, is also moved by compassion for the fallen enemy and his butchered progeny. It’s a great dramatic conversation, a piece of theatre. But, as always, it must end swiftly. And, as if to undercut the parole conte – the high, ornate words thatVirgil counselled Dante to use when addressing Farinata – the two proceed to the edge of the next circle, and are immediately overcome by its stench.

So there’s something to look forward to for next time.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX.

Inferno IX: God is late

God is late. And because of the lateness of God, the poet and his guide are left outside the walls of the city of Dis, stranded and worried that the divine help will never come.

Remember, the army of demons that guards the iron-walled city had closed its doors on Virgil’s face. Up to this point, whenever they encountered a roadblock, all he had to say was Vuolsi così colà…, a formula roughly equivalent to ‘We’re on a mission from God’, and the ways would part before them. But not this time. And if Dante is afraid, which is common, so too does Virgil hesitate, which is not. ‘Still we should win this fight,’ he declares. Se non…

Dante calls it a parola rotta, literally a 'broken word', less literally a truncated phrase. Either way, there is a world of sense in those two words, and even more so in the ellipsis. Se non. If not. Or else. Or else… The ellipsis dilates time. How long does the doubt last? Long enough for Dante to question not only his own fortitude, but the wisdom of his guide. He asks, almost innocently: Say, did you ever come down here before, you who live in the first circle, among those whose only sentence is to have no hope of ever seeing God? By which he means: Are you sure you know the way? To which Virgil replies that yes, he travelled the full depth of Hell once, not long after his death, having been sent by the witch Erichtho to collect the soul of a dead soldier who resided in the ninth circle – the circle of Judas.

Lots of questions here. The literary reference is to the De Bello Civili (‘Concerning the Civil War’), an epic poem by Lucan which covers the events of the civil war between Julius Caesar and the army led by Pompey. In the episode of the summoning, Lucan makes no reference to Virgil or anybody else venturing through the underworld to pluck the soul of the dead soldier. More to the point: Virgil was still very much alive. Even more to the point: Judas wasn’t even born at the time. The Hell that Dante alludes to here was still in its primitive state, waiting to be remodelled following the death of Christ. So for Virgil to claim that he knows that way makes little sense. However, let’s just assume that Dante simply got a bit confused here – although it’s hard to fathom how he wouldn’t know that Virgil died more than two decades after Caesar, hence the events depicted by Lucan. There is still the question of why Virgil obeyed the command of an evil sorceress, and what power she may have held over his not-quite-dead-yet soul.

The hasty and somewhat incongruous digression is interrupted when – in very modern fashion – Dante-the-narrator tells us he can’t quite recall what Virgil said next because a horrific sight distracted him. They are the Furies, rapidly advancing. Their female-shaped bodies stained with blood, with serpents for hair, tearing at their own bodies with claws and beating them with the palms of their hands. Megaera, Alecto and Tisiphone, plus, not far away, their absent cousin, the Gorgon known as Medusa.

As painted much later by Caravaggio

The threat of the possible arrival of Medusa makes Virgil warn Dante to quickly cover his eyes – lest he be turned to stone at the sight – and then, in a rather beautiful and tender image, wrap himself around him and put his own hands over Dante’s, for extra safety.

There is something zombie-like in the way that all these souls appear to be attracted by the scent of Dante’s living body, is there not?

So on one side we have the Furies, behaving as women in ancient times did at funerals – including professional mourners, which in some countries (including mine) existed as late as one hundred years ago. On the other, Dante and Virgil united in a fearful embrace, awaiting the coming of a fourth, more dangerous monster.

And then God arrives.

This is the ‘problem’ with the Divine Comedy: that it literally takes place inside Deus’ own machina, so every threat to the safety of the travellers – no matter how theatrically elaborate – can never be truly suspenseful. The only way Dante will be lost is if he strays from the path. The appearance of danger, then, can only exist within occasional moments of (self-)doubt, in which to condense both the horror of the hero’s surroundings and the fear for his life. Such is the predestined nature of the pilgrim’s progress.

When God arrives, it is in the form of an angel that strides imperiously over the Styx while fending and fanning with his left hand the air made thick and greasy by the presence of so many condemned souls. Having reached the iron, red-hot doors of Dis, he opens them with the slightest touch of the reed he carries in his right hand. Then, after briefly haranguing the demons – off stage, as it were, since they fled the scene – and without deigning either Dante or Virgil of so much as a glance, he leaves again.

This particular God is like a cheat sheet for one of the videogames I played with my friends at the time we did Dante at school, in the mid to late eighties, and we got stuck on a level, either because we couldn’t solve a riddle or defeat a particular monster. Its function is to make it possible to advance. And, like the next level of the videogame after the enemies have been cheated out existence, the city of Dis appears at first empty. Una campagna, a countryside, like a walled city turned inside out. But, really, upon further inspection, a graveyard, its open tombs brimming with fire, each containing not just one corpse – souls of souls, people twice dead – but a whole army. Of whom and why, we’ll have to get into next time.

Previously: Inferno I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII.