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Inferno, Cantos 2-4

How could Love have created Hell? Why are the virtuous pagans damned?
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Because I want to go through Inferno before I head to Florence, I’m going to have to do three cantos per day. It might be more accessible to you readers if I don’t write 5,000 word essays on each canto. We’ll see. It is going to be an exercise in discipline for me, to go through and only talk about the highlights. I did a word count of all my Commedia blogging so far, and found that my combined Purgatorio and Paradiso blogs amount to 135,000 words. The Dante book I’m writing needs to be no longer than 100,000 words. By the time I finish with Inferno, I’ll be in the ballpark of 200,000 words, if I do as before. This means that I’m going to have to do a great deal of winnowing and shaping when I write the actual book. It’s so much easier for me to write long than short, so I’m going to do what I can in the Inferno blogs to edit myself.

I was delighted this morning to pick up Anthony Esolen’s translation of Inferno and find it open to me in a way it had not been a year ago. I have had a copy of it in my home library for a few years, but had never read it. I picked it up last summer when I first came to the Commedia, but I found that I couldn’t catch the rhythms of his language. Hollander and Musa were more my style. For whatever reason, I opened Esolen again this morning, and it really spoke to me. It’s beautiful! How odd that what was once sort of opaque has now opened like a flower. Why is that, I wonder?

Esolen has a great introductory essay in his Inferno. Excerpt:

So we find, despite ourselves, that to analyze what we find so attractive about the Comedy and its author, we must turn our gaze where he has turned his. And there, if I may venture a guess, the modern reader finds something lovely and appealing. It is not that medieval Christian cosmos, necessarily, which excited his interest, although it may and indeed should — it is surely far nobler than our lazy relativist world, wherein every man creates his own moral order (that is, until he suspects he has been overcharged by his auto mechanic). Rather, what arouses is the intriguing presence of any cosmos at all. For us, the setting sun, the number pi, Seattle, a father’s role in the family have nothing to do with one another. Even those who profess the Christian faith live in a dead and silent world: religion has retreated into the foxholes of the heart and says nothing about the stars. It is, I think, refreshing, invigorating, to enter a world of significance — of love and of love’s profound consequences.

I had not thought of it that way, but this is true, and it’s a truth that resounds through every canto like the tolling of church bells. In Dante, the entire universe is alive with and in God. I can’t say what encountering this is like for a non-believer, but for a Christian, to be called out of the foxhole of the heart and into a world of wonder and meaning and divine order — and a world that, unlike Narnia or Middle Earth, is real. For a modern Christian, encountering the Commedia can be like learning how to see, to taste, to hear, smell, and feel, for the first time. As Louis Markos writes of the medieval vision that undergirds the Commedia, “Dante’s universe did not simply exist; it meant, and it meant intensely. The universe was less a thing to be studied than a poem to be loved and enjoyed.”

Esolen says that there are three principles of Creation that undergird Dante’s moral and metaphysical vision:

1. Things have an end. That is, things have a purpose, are created for something. Man’s ultimate end is to achieve unity with God, the Creator. Anything we do that gets in the way of achieving that end, especially substituting another end for God (e.g., worldly success, sexual fulfillment, getting rich), is sin, and will cause our own spiritual death.

2. Things have meaning. Things of this world, including our actions, point to realities beyond themselves. Nothing is accidental; nothing is in vain. What we do has moral weight, and eternal consequences. All of human experience plays a role in the great cosmic drama. In the Commedia, the punishments of the damned in Hell, and the purification of the penitent in Purgatory, tell us something about the nature of those particular sins.

3. Things are connected. God, the Architect of the universe, wishes for all of us to dwell in harmony with Him, through Him, and within Him. But it must be a bond of Love, and love cannot be commanded, only freely given. Love is the bond that unites all things in heaven and earth; even those in Hell are there because they failed dramatically at love: they loved the wrong things, or they loved the right things in the wrong way (i.e., too much or too little). Plus, ideas have consequences, and so do actions. For example, the murder in 1216 of a Guelph aristocrat on Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, to settle a debt of honor, triggered generations of fighting between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines that would ultimately savage Florence, and drive Dante from his city.

Keep these in mind as we go, and you will be in a better position to understand Dante’s meaning and message.

In Canto 2, no sooner has Dante taken his first steps than he has second thoughts. He thinks about Aeneas, and how his epic journey, including a passage through the underworld, resulted in the founding of Rome. He considers St. Paul, and how his journey into Paradise (II Corinthians 12) helped him come back and lay the evangelical foundations of the church. The now-reluctant pilgrim says to Virgil:

“But why should I go there? who allows it?

I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul.

Neither I nor any think me fit for this.

 

“And so, if I commit myself to come,

I fear it may be madness. You are wise,

you understand what I cannot express.”

 

And as one who unwills what he has willed,

changing his intent on second thought

so that he quite gives over what he has begun,

 

such a man was I on that dark slope.

With too much thinking I had undone

the enterprise so quick in its inception.

Giuseppe Mazzotta points out that this is a meditation on the divided will. For Dante, the intellect and the will depend on each other. The will needs the intellect to tell it where to go and what to do, but the intellect is powerless without the will. They must both move in harmony. Who am I? asks the pilgrim. I’m not worthy to go on this journey. Maybe this is crazy, he thinks.

Virgil sees into Dante’s character, and tells Dante that his second thoughts come not from humility, but from cowardice. Dante is flat-out scared, and has rationalized his fear. This double-mindedness is awfully familiar. For some time, when I was in high school, college, and shortly thereafter, I kept God at a distance, telling myself that I was unsure that Christianity was true. Some of my concerns were exactly that: uncertainty over the truth of the faith. But my position of inquiring skepticism was the virtuous gloss covering my fear and sloth. Deep down, I was afraid that Christianity might really be true — and what the consequences for me would be if that were the case. I would have to change my life. And that was something I was not prepared to do.

All of us have something like that from our pasts (or maybe our present) that we can point to, a situation in which we masked our fear of acting behind a veil of virtue.

In this instance, Virgil bolsters Dante’s confidence and courage by telling him how he, Virgil, came to Dante’s rescue. There was Virgil, resting in Limbo (the gentle, even pleasant, circle of Hell where the virtuous unbelievers dwell; more on this when we get there), when a beautiful woman appeared before him. This was Beatrice, who descended from Heaven to Hell itself to engineer Dante’s rescue. It turns out that the Blessed Virgin Mary saw Dante’s spiritual distress, and told St. Lucy to rush to his aid. St. Lucy, knowing how much Dante loved Beatrice in life, asked her to help him. And Beatrice, in turn, went to Virgil to ask him to go to Dante.

Why this chain, why this hierarchy of help? I think it’s because Dante is making a theological point about how God’s grace comes to us. It was love that moved the Virgin, then the saints, and finally Virgil, to go to Dante. As we see throughout the Commedia, grace comes from God through many channels. The poet, I think, is teaching the reader to see connections.

Virgil, in his recollection, asks Beatrice how she dared to brave Hell. She replies:

“We should fear those things alone

that have the power to harm.

Nothing else is frightening.

 

“I am made such by God’s grace

that your affliction does not touch,

nor can these fires assail me.”

In other words, I belong to God. Hell can’t touch me. 

If you don’t go to him, Beatrice tells Virgil, he’s going to die. Virgil doesn’t stop to think about it; he obeys the lady’s request.

So, Dante, says Virgil, when you have three women in Paradise who love you so much that they undertook these extraordinary actions to save your soul, why are you so afraid? You have Heaven itself on your side, and I am here with you as your guide and shepherd. Don’t be afraid.

This is the moment when faith first blossoms within Dante. He is moved by the love of these women (and Virgil), and by Virgil’s authority, such that his heart opens like “little flowers” greeting the morning sun — a simile that means so very much when you think that at the end of his journey, the court of Heaven will appear to him as a vast Mystic Rose. He was able to see the Mystic Rose open before his eyes because in the dark wood, he accepted grace sufficient to open his own heart to faith, like a little flower.

Regaining his courage, Dante commits to the journey, calling Virgil “my lord and master.” We will hear similar words again, but spoken to Dante by Virgil at the end of their journey together at the top of Mount Purgatory. Virgil says then, “I crown and mitre you lord of yourself.” This is far into the future. For now, the pilgrim, who is dissolute and lost, needs a master to show him the way to self-mastery.

This is why do-it-yourself religion doesn’t really work. If you will not submit to an authoritative tradition, or at least to some authority outside of yourself, you will remain lost. I’m not talking about crudely letting someone else do your thinking for you. I’m talking more generally about what my priest says our prayer should be: “You are God, I am not. Please help.” Dante has navigated by his own lights until now, and ended in a dark wood. Now it’s time to let somebody else take over for a while. Virgil has disclosed to Dante that he is coming on a mission of mercy, sent by love. And Dante knows him to be a wise man; indeed, Dante told him when they first met that he, Virgil, was his authority in all things poetic.

The point is, Dante has reason to trust him. It’s not a slam-dunk, of course. For all Dante knows, Virgil could be lying. But what choice does Dante have? He can’t remain in the dark wood, or he will die. He makes a leap of faith.

In Canto 3, they enter the Inferno. It is Good Friday, the day that Jesus died on the Cross, and that Christian tradition tells us he descended into Hell to rescue souls. Here is the inscription over the archway leading into Hell:

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE,

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO EVERLASTING PAIN,

THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST.

 

JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH.

DIVINE POWER MADE ME,

WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE.

 

BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS ETERNAL,

AND ETERNAL, I ENDURE.

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

Dante tells Virgil he doesn’t understand what these words mean. Virgil says:

“Here you must banish all distrust,

here must all cowardice be slain.

 

“We have come to where I said

you would see the miserable sinners

who have lost the good of the intellect.”

In other words: Buck up, because you are going to see people here as they truly are, and it’s horrible. These are men and women who have no hope, because their eternal fates have been decided. To have “lost the good of the intellect” means they are no longer reasoning creatures, but zombies, more or less. That is, they have become one with their sinfulness, and therefore one-dimensional. They have no hope because their condition will last forever.

What does it mean to say that “love” made this horrible place? It is the love that will not force itself upon a man, but rather one that will give him for eternity what he chooses in the temporal life. As you will remember from Purgatorio, all it takes to avoid Hell is to say a word asking for God’s mercy, even in your dying breath. And we learn that God, in His mysterious justice, even let some non-Christians into Paradise. Hell is for those who would not have God, those who made a final, remorseless choice for their own passions over unity with and submission to their Creator. Remember that Satan’s sin was to rebel against God. The root of all sin is this fundamental pride, a pride that prefers the Self, with all its disordered passions, to God. God is loving, but God is also just; in His love, He will give us what we choose.

The reason Dante must first go down before he can ascend is that he has to become re-awakened to the true horror of sin — that is, to be scared straight. As I said earlier, the torments he will observe all have meaning; they are not random acts of cruelty. They represent the ultimate out-working of the particular passions the damned chose over God. Divine justice means that you gain for all eternity what you loved more than God, or, to put a fine point on it, what aspects of your Self that you loved more than you loved God. The journey downward, then, is in truth a journey of introspection for Dante. It symbolizes his personal pilgrimage into the dark recesses of his own heart.

The first of the terrible things Dante sees is a line of miserable souls. These are the lukewarm: those who would not take a side for good or for evil. Virgil:

“They intermingle with that wicked band

of angels, not rebellious and not faithful

to God, who held themselves apart.

 

“Loath to impair its beauty, Heaven casts them out,

and depth of Hell does not receive them

lest on their account the evil angels gloat.”

The strange predicament of these souls: not even Hell wants them, because they lack passion. God cannot permit them to be thrown into Hell proper (they are in the vestibule of Hell) because the demons would feel superior to them; at least the demons stood for something. Dante beholds the vast throng, and says:

These wretches, who never were alive,

were naked and beset

by stinging flies and wasps

The message of this is that in the great drama of life, you cannot be a spectator. You must choose. They “never were alive,” because to live is to desire. They desired nothing good, or nothing bad. They were without passion, and therefore dead even in life.

Now they arrive at the crossing of the river Acheron. On the other side is the first circle of Hell. The demon Charon, the infernal boatman, waits to ferry the crowd across. Dante describes the cold, naked, desolate souls awaiting passage:

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 accursed shore that waits

for everyone who fears not God.

Virgil explains:

 

“My son,” said the courteous master,

“all those who die in the wrath of God

assemble here from every land.

 

“And they are eager to cross the river,

for the justice of God so spurs them on

their very fear is turned to longing.”

What does this mean? Why are the damned eager to cross the river into Hell? Because they know that they deserve it. They understand, at last, that they are going to receive a fate they have chosen, because of what they loved. This is how they harmonize with the universe.

Now we come to the first circle of Hell, an unusual place, one of “grief without torment.” This is Limbo, where the good who died unbaptized rest forever. Virgil:

“And if they lived before the Christians lived,

they did not worship God aright.

And among these I am one.

 

For such defects, and for no other fault,

we are lost, and afflicted but in this,

that without hope we live in longing.”

There is nothing unpleasant about Limbo, but the suffering everyone there lives with is knowing that they will never be with God — that their ultimate desires will never be satisfied. I think of them as like a woman who refuses her true love to marry a wealthy man whom she does not love. She may live the rest of her life in a mansion on a hill, but she will always long for the one she did not choose.

In Limbo, Dante does not meet the great figures of the Old Testament; Christ released the faithful Hebrews from Hell on Good Friday. (Cook & Herzman say that Christ’s action here is a model for Dante, who in a literary way descends into Hell, hoping to rescue others from Hell by his testimony.) In Limbo, he does meet great poets and philosophers of antiquity. There is Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. Those four, and Virgil, do Dante the honor of inviting him to join their group. On they walked toward the light, and came to a castle sheltered by a moat. Into the castle keep they travel, until they come to a fresh green meadow. There they find the greatest intellectual garden party of all time. There is Socrates, Plato and Seneca. Julius Caesar is there, and look, Euclid and Hippocrates. And there are Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, as well as the wise conqueror Saladin. On and on the list goes. Says Dante, “In my heart I exult at what I saw.”

Well, why shouldn’t he? This is a lovely place. It would be my idea of Heaven, but there would also have to be heathenous chefs. Clearly Dante is very pleased to be there, and to have been so flattered by the greatest poets in history by their invitation to spend time with them. It’s almost as if he forgets that they are actually in Hell. More on this tomorrow.

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