Inferno (1314)
Dante Alighieri (Modern Library, 2002; trans. Anthony Esolen)

516 p. Third reading.
Posted 12 September 2006.

Love is the great theme of The Divine Comedy, and this is as true of Inferno as of the other panels of the great triptych. For all of its grim majesty, macabre humour, and appalling visions of deformity, the poem is the opening stage of a sustained and profound meditation on love. It is love, after all, that moves the Blessed Virgin, beholding Dante's aimless wandering in a dark wood, to summon St. Lucy, who beckons to Beatrice, who tasks Virgil with the rescue, and thus sets the whole journey in motion (Canto 2). It is also love -- disordered, inordinate, misdirected love -- that has so badly deformed all those souls whose suffering Dante witnesses, a false love which, circle by circle, is slowly stripped of its allure until all that remains is cold, paralyzed sorrow, presided over by the bloodied maw of the great deceiver.

The suffering of the population of Hell ought not to be seen as punishment imposed from above by a cruel God. Dante wants us to see that sin, by which we turn away from true happiness and fulfillment, by its own logic results in pain. Thus when the wrathful souls in the fifth circle thrash about in a swampy river, or when the hypocrites in the eighth circle lumber heavily under the burden of leaden cloaks, they do so because this is, in truth, what they have chosen for themselves. They have received their reward, stripped now of all self-delusion. Thus Inferno is not about vengeance, not about measuring out punishment or relishing revenge upon the wicked. It is a drama about the grave consequences of our choices, the love that guides those choices, and the stern hand of justice which gives to everyone his due.

Dante's Hell is a cosmos, an infernal echo of the larger universal order. It is an inverted cone, terraced into nine concentric circles, each of which is reserved for sinners of a particular sort, the intensity of the suffering increasing as one moves closer to the center. We can judge the vigour of Dante's condemnation of the sin based on where he places the sinner. The structure is carefully considered, but can in some respects strike the modern reader as surprising. Why are adulterers only in the second circle, while counterfeiters land far down in the eighth? One might think that pride, the cardinal of the cardinal sins, would be punished at the very center, but Dante populates it with betrayers. What are the guiding principles of his architecture?

In the outer perimeter, the first circle, are the virtuous men of antiquity. They live in the Elysian fields, and do not suffer. Yet, lacking divine grace, they cannot be admitted to heaven. Circles two through four form a unit, housing the lustful, the gluttonous, and the greedy. Their sin was to love a true good in an inordinate way. They did not aim at evil, but fell into it because of poor discipline. Consequently, their suffering is comparatively minor.

The fifth circle, the swampy river of the wrathful and the sullen -- those whose anger erred either by excess or defect -- is a great divider. On the inner shore of the river are the imposing walls of the city of Dis, the Civitate Diaboli, lined by jeering, belligerent devils. Within the walls the agony of the sinners steadily increases, and what marks off those within from those without is precisely the degree of self-consciousness of sin. Within the walls we find thieves, the fraudulent, traitors, and all manner of deceivers. These are the sinners who intended to sin, to defy God and his established order, and to sow discord among their neighbours. This is why, at the very center of Hell, Dante puts the three great betrayers of history -- Judas, Brutus, and Cassius -- into the very jaws of Satan, for it was they who traitorously betrayed the greatest goods.

There are so many fine moments in the Inferno. Perhaps my favourite scene, set in the eighth circle, is that in which the theives metamorphosize, slowly exchanging identities with one another, a vivid manifestation of their failure in life to distinguish carefully enough between themselves and others; or the grotesque figure of Bertran de Born, whose own severed head he holds before himself as a lamp; or the prophet Mohammed, seen by Dante as a Christian heretic and schismatic, whose torso gapes open, torn up the middle, his intestines spilling out into his bloodied arms.

Then there are the scenes of dark humour, as when Dante has Pope Nicholas III, sunk upside-down into a fiery pit, mistake Dante for Pope Boniface VIII, still living at the time of composition, and, we are led to believe, expected in Hell sometime soon. There is also the endearing precision of Dante, who, for instance, has himself and Virgil approach Satan, a giant sunk in ice to his torso, grasp hold of his hairy hide and lower themselves toward the center of the earth; reaching it, they then must swing themselves around, and begin climbing toward his feet. It is, as C.S. Lewis once said, "the first science-fiction moment in literature".

I have read The Divine Comedy a few times before, but this time I decided to read the recent translation of Anthony Esolen. He has not tried to capture the intricate terza rima of Dante's verse, rendering it instead in blank iambic pentameter. The translation is excellent, but, more than that, his introduction and thorough notes make clear that he takes Dante seriously, and wants us to engage the poem not as an stale artifact from another world, but as a wholly relevant, incisive commentary on our own lives. The book is enlivened by the famous illustrations of Gustave Dore, and augmented by a generous set of appendices containing excerpts from Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, the early Christian apocryphal text Visio Sancti Pauli, and some of Dante's other writings, all of which help to clarify the context for Dante's poem. The whole book is beautifully done.

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