felix hominum

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 12: descending to the center of Hell

While I had not planned it to be so, I find myself blogging of Dante's final descent into the center of Hell on Holy Saturday.  There is a timeline in the poem:  Dante's journey with Virgil in the underworld takes place over several days in holy week.  In the story of the poem, it is on Holy Saturday that he makes the final descent to the very presence of Satan at the center of Hades.  And so, fittingly, here we are.

In Canto XXXI Dante and Virgil make their descent from the malbowges of Circle VIII into the depths of the Well (Circle IX) with the aid of the Giants.  These are the great primordial figures of ancient myth.  These are the ones who rebelled against the gods, and by showing such uprising against the divine, are now at the entrance to the final geography of Hell.  Virgil points out one of the giants to Dante:

"So proud a spirit was this", my leader said
"He dared to match his strength against high Jove
And in this fashion his reward is paid."

XXXI, 91-93

The giant is compelled to lower them to the Xth and final Circle of Hell - the frozen lake of Cocytus.  Here Dante and Virgil encounter the Treacherous:  those who were traitors to their family, their country, their guests, and finally, those who were traitors to their lords.  At the center of Hell is Satan, who was the first Traitor to his Lord.

Both Sayers' and Charles Williams' notes capture the essence of the frozen center of Hell:

Beneath the clamour, beneath the monotonous circlings, beneath the fires of Hell, here at the centre of the lost soul and the lost city, lie the silence and the rigidity and the eternal frozen cold.  It is perhaps the greatest image in the whole Inferno.  "Dante", says Charles Williams, "scatters phrases on the difference of the place.  It is treachery, but it is also... cruelty; the traitor is cruel." (The Figure of Beatrice, 143).  A cold and cruel egocism, gradually striking inward till even the lingering passions of hatred and destruction are frozen into immobility - that is the final state of sin. (Sayers, 275)

In Canto XXXiii we see that even the traitors' tears are frozen.  They cannot even express that most basic of human expressions.  All that is human has died - frozen forever.

At the very center of Hell we find Dis (the classical name for Satan), the Devil, devouring the shades of three traitors to their Lords - Judas, Brutus and Cassius.  Perhaps we will better understand the placement of traitors to their Lords at the bottom is we understand that the whole medieval society was based upon some form of allegiance to one's lord.

To understand more fully the placement of Satan at the bottom of Hell, we need also remember that Dante knew that the earth is a sphere.  In constructing his vision of Hell, he places Satan at the center of the earth - a place where there would be no gravity.  And here we might understand Hell more fully if we consider the famous lines from Augustine's Confessions - "my love is my weight".  At the center of the earth, at the bottom of hell, there is no weight, hence there is no love.  It is a masterful image, drawing on Augustine's well known text to inform the reader.

At another level, while we might think we have escaped the condemnation of the upper regions of Hell, we have all been Traitor to our Lord.  For every sin is a treachery against Christ.  And so each one of us must, like Dante, descend to that place:  we must see what it is to betray (like Judas) our Lord.  It is to be devoured by Satan.

(We have just returned from celebrating the Great Vigil of Easter)

As they climb over the huge body of Satan at the center of the earth, a marvellous thing happens:  Virgil instructs Dante that as they finish climbing down, there will come a point where they must (at the center of the earth) turn themselves wholly upside down, at which point they will begin to ascend out the other side of Hell.  It is an image of the repentance of the soul - that point of descent and then wholly turning its orientation.

Gustave Dore's image of Dante and Virgil walking on the frozen center of the Inferno.

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 11: sowers of schism and discord

In unrelated news, there was a recent item from the National Post, based on an essay by Canadian Anglican Paul Gibson entitled "Why I am not afraid of schism".  The comments after the essay are worth a look for those so inclined. The headline on the Nat'l Post article is Anglican schism not 'catastrophic': theologian.

Not only that, but in keeping with Good Friday tradition, the church is in court once again.  I thought one trial was enough for holy week.

Well, settle in for a Good Friday special on the place of the sowers of schism and discord in the Inferno!  What better way to spend a Good Friday evening than perusing the torments of those who seek to tear once again, the flesh of Christ. We'll bring you up to speed after a latte. 

To begin Canto XXVIII, Dante bids the reader recall the fiercest battles and wars, with all their carnage, and the multitude of wounded and torn bodies, and then:

If each should show his bleeding limbs unhealed,
Pieced, lopt and maimed, 'twere nothing, nothing whatever
To that ghast sight in the ninth bowge revealed

XXVIII, 19-21

The shades of those who are in this section of hell are subject to a recurring punishment:  they are hacked and split by a demon with a sword, only to have their 'bodies' made whole again, and then hacked once more by the demonic sword.  Dante is told:

All these whom thou beholdest in the pit
Were sowers of scandal, sowers of schism abroad
While they yet lived, therefore they now go split.

Back yonder stands a fiend, by whom we're scored
Thus cruelly; and over and over again
He puts us to the edge of the sharp sword

XXVIII, 34-39

As they had no qualms about fostering division while on earth, these souls are now condemned to be themselves forever "divided".  They are subject to the very principle they espoused while on earth.  They divided the body of Christ, and now their own body will be divided and torn apart.

Perhaps Paul Gibson is right.  Perhaps one need not be afraid of schism.  He might be right on that one.  After all, a person might find himself, through no intention of his own, in the middle of such a situation.  But perhaps Mr Gibson would be wise to avoid being a sower of schism, a counselor of such things.

Dante gives us examples of sowers of discord in several categories:  church, society and family.

Sayers' notes on this section are an interesting read for those who have followed (as a perpetual penitence) the various goings-on in the Anglican world: the Sowers of Discord appear "in the Circle of Fraud  because their sin is primarily of the intellect.  They are the fanatics of party, seeing the world in a false perspective, and ready to rip up the whole fabric..." (Sayers trans, Inferno, pg 250)

Just to round things out, the series of 10 bowges ends with the "Falsifiers".  These are grouped according to the kinds of things they falsified. Cantos XXIX-XXX deal with those who have used their human intellect in order to falsify nature (the Alchemists); to falsify human personality (impersonators); to falsify language (perjerers) and to falsify civic commerce and interaction (counterfeiters). Again, Dante places them quite low in the circles of hell because more of our "human capacity" - our reason and intellect - is needed in order to commit these kinds of sins.  These souls have committed their falsehoods while knowing perfectly well what they were doing, and the consequences their actions would have on others.  Each one of these kinds of sins necessarily involves an offense against others.

For Holy Saturday we will descend into the pit and see the Traitors, and finally Satan himself at the center of Hell.

Have a miserable Good Friday!

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 10: hypocites, thieves and fraudsters

Once they have escaped the demons, Dante and Virgil find themselves in Bowge vi of Circle VIII.  Here they come across a sad company of souls

Who trod their circling way with tear and groan
And slow, slow steps, seeming subdued and faint

They all word cloaks, with deep hood forward thrown
Over their eyes, and shaped in fashion quite
Like the great cowls the monks wear at Cologne;

Outwardly they were gilded dazzling bright,
But all within was lead, and weighed thereby,
King Frederick's copes would have seemed feather light.

Canto XXIII, 59-66

These are the Hypocrites - they intentionally and knowingly deceived others about who they were.  All gilded on the outside, but really something quite different on the inside.  And so their punishment fits their sin:  they wear beautiful cloaks which cover their eyes (they deceived other mens' eyes) but the cloaks are really a heavy lead, and they must trudge in their true garment forever. 

In a most striking scene, Dante and Virgil come across the figure of Caiaphas, the high priest who counseled that it was better "for one man to die for the nation."  Caiaphas is seen crucified upon the ground.  Over his crucified soul the rest of the hypocrites trudge.  Virgil in particular is said to "marvel at him, thus racked forever on the shameful cross" (XXIII,124).  Apart from the shocking image this presents in and of itself, Virgil - the figure of human reason - still marvels at the cross.  In Dante's poem Virgil is said to have made a journey through hell once before, and now in his cecond journey through hell Virgil sees the things which have taken place since Christ came into the world.  At another leve, I wonder if this is not also meant to convey that the cross, in any appearance, is still a "folly" to human reason and wisdom.

In Cantos XXIV-XXVI they meet the Thieves.  As we noted earlier, property was considered an extension of one's personhood in Roman and subsequent medieval times.  Hence to damage or steal another man's material goods was to do "injury" to that man himself. The thieves' punishment is rather grotesque:  they are changed into different forms, intermingling their human and brute forms with one another.  Sayers adds a helpful explanatory note. "In this canto we see ow the Thieves, who made no distinction between meum and tuum - between mine and thine - cannot call their forms or their personalities their own".  Since they did not recognize the distinction between what is mine and what is yours on earth, they are denied the ability to have those distinctions in the afterlife.  They cannot hold even their own bodily shapes.

More properly, what we see here is not, again, a punishment imposed upon the Thieves, but merely the logical extension of what it means to be a Thief.  Having this in mind is the key to understanding the "punishments" of the Inferno.  The principles by which one engages in Thievery - taking what is not yours - is simply brought to its logical conclusion. 

In Canto XXVI we run across the figure of Ulysses, who not only was a thief himself, but also counseled others to commit fraudulent acts.  Thus we have the "Counselors of Fraud" - men who encouraged and manipulated others into committing a fraudulent act.  These are a more notorious form of thief, and so are placed lower down.

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lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 9: the barrators and the dissolution of civic life

In Cantos XXI and XXII Dante and Virgil come across the barrators - those who have disrupted civic life though buying and selling public office. 

We see one of the demons busily dispatching a barrator to his alloted fate:

On high hunched shoulders he was carrying
A wretched sinner, hoist by haunch and hip
Clutching each ankle by the sinew string

Bridge Ho! he bawled, Our own Hellrakership
Here's an alderman of St Zita's coming down
Go souse him, while I make another trip

For more; they're barrators all in that good town
Except Bonturo, hey? - I've packed it stiff
With fellows who'd swear black is white for half a crown!

XXI, 34-43

Readers may wonder why he places these kinds of folk further down than the simoniacs.  The simoniacs, you remember, are those who bought and sold the "things of God"; sellers of religious office and sacraments. Why should the barrators be more offensive to God? In addition, in these two Cantos we see much more dialogue and banter among the demons who are set to guard and prod the damned.

On one level, the corruption of the church affects, well, only the church.  But the corruption of civic life affects everyone.  We should also remember that the vision of heaven is that of a city - the New Jerusalem.  Civic life is the proper form of human community.  What the barrators do is wreak havoc upon that most basic form of human community.  The ancient Greeks had a definition of humanity - zoon logon politikon:  the animal that speaks and lives in cities.  So to wreak havoc upon civic life in the form of barratry is devasting to the very fabric of human community, even more so that wreaking having upon the church in the form of simony.

The punishment of the barrators is to be plunged under burning pitch.  If they try to get out of it, a demon thrusts them back down.  In the midst of all this, one of the souls decides to play a trick upon his demon overseers.  The demons fall for the trick, having been outwitted by the clever barrator.  As they realize they've been tricked, they start fighting among themselves.  While Dante presents the episode with some humour, the message is clear:  Satan's kingdom (the civic life of evil) is divided, and it falls into fighting and quarrelling.  The demons, further enraged, fighting and floundering among themselves, are united in purpose again onoy when it dawns upon them to chase after Dante and Virgil, whom they chase all the way into Canto XXIII.

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lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 8: the Circle of Fraud and Malice

Dante and Virgil now descend to a new region of Hell:  the 10 malbowges of the Eight Circle.  These are a series of steep ridges which descend into the bottom of the pit.  In this section of Hell we will see a deeper kind of sin.  Here we will find those who had to use all their human powers to commit their sins.  These sins are no "accidents" or mere impulsive sins.  These are sins which require us to use our specifically human powers:  intellect, speech and persuasion, knowledge and so forth.  To use the extreme example from criminal law, think of the difference between a "crime of passion" and premeditated murder.  These are the sins in which we abuse the very gifts which make us human.

In Canto XVIII Dante encounters the panders and seducers.  These are the people who have either exploited the sexual appetites of others, or who "pimped", and then those who used to deceit to satisfy their own sexual appetites.  Remember that the lustful were much higher up in Hell.  Here the difference is that the other person is merely seen as an object for one's own material prosperity, or simply as an object to satisfy one's own desire.  This is what makes then different from the merely lustful.  They are exploiters of others. Just where would Dante place certain people of the internet age - both the users and providers? Just as the lustful ran to and fro endlessly, so the panders and seducers are forced to run - in opposite directions.

Two things about their running:  they are sparked onward by demons who encourage them with whips, and they are running counter one another.  First, we see the appearance of demons.  These sins have something of the demonic about them.  They are not merely "animal-like" sins; they are more deeply spiritual than that.  And so they are accompanied by teh presence of demons to signal their severity. 

Second, the running in opposite directions is a bit of a theme which will be seen again.  In these malbowges we find people who turn things into their opposites:  flatterers who use words for profit or deception, instead of using words for their God-intended purpose;  Simoniacs who sell the things of God - sacraments and offices:

O Simon Magus! O disciples of his!
Miserable pimps and hucksters, that have sold
The things of God, troth plight to righteousness,

Into adultery for silver and gold.

XIX, 1-4

The Simoniacs are buried upside down into the living rock.  They turned the things of God upside down, and now they themselves are turned upside down.  In antithesis to the "blessed feet which bring good news", the feet of the Simonicas are covered in fire.  Interestingly, Dante comments on the donation of Constantine, lamenting the place of greed, money and temporal power in the Church:

Ah, Constantine, what ills were gendered there,
No, not from they conversion, but the dower
The first rich Pope received from thee as heir

XIX, 112-114

Going from opposite directions, then to upside down, next we have the Sorcerers, whose bodies are twisted backward.  There heads have been turned 180 degrees,

And backwards each must needs creep with their feet,
All power of looking forward being denied.

XX, 12

Here we meet some of the famous pagan seers of old - those who had sought to look into the future.  Dante condemns here all those who seek the powers of God for their own purposes.  And now, those who sought to look forward into the future for their own gain, are now forced to forever look backward.

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 7: violence against God

In Canto XIV Dante and Virgil meet the souls of those who were – and still are – “violent against God.”  First they meet the blasphemers, who lie on a vast ring of burning sand.  They lay on their backs facing heaven;  it was God they blasphemed while living on earth, and now in death they are made to face the throne of the One they detested.  Dante’s meeting with Capeaneus tells us much about the state of the soul which riles against God:

Who is that shade that lies, mighty of limb,
Contorted and contemptuous, scorning the flame,
So that the rain seems not to ripen him?

But he himself, soon as he heard me frame
This question to my guide about him, cried:
“That which in life I was, in death I am”.

XIV, 46ff

It is the last line which gives us the key to understanding the rest.  For the souls of the damned, the afterlife is merely a confirmation of the choices they have made in life.  What one is in life, God will allow to continue after death.  Only, you will then see the true form of that choice.  Here we see the blasphemer is still “contorted and contemptuous”.  As we look ahead, it is helpful to keep in mind this attitude in Hell, and compare it with the attitude of the repentant souls in Purgatory  The flames of God become for each of us either a punishment, a purging, or the fire of love.  It depends on how one chooses or rejects those flames.

After those who have been violent against God directly, they come across those who have been violent against those things directly arising from God’s creation:  the “violent against nature” and the “violent against art”.  Dante, holding to a theology of natural law, places in this section of the Inferno those who have offended against nature through homosexual activity.  In his view, they have sinned by reversing the course of nature which God intended in creation.  As a parallel, an earlier commentator noted that they are paired closely with the usurers.  The one group makes sterile and unfruitful that which God intended to be fruitful (against nature), and the latter group takes something which is sterile (money) and makes it artificially “multiply”.  It is this false “artifice” of the usurers which causes them to be in the circle of those who offend against “art” in the very broad sense of the word.

In Canto XVII there is a transition.  As if to signal that they are about to enter a new region of Hell, Dante and Virgil must make a bit of difficult crossing of a great barrier which divides the seventh from the eight circles of Hell.  To make the matter clearer, they are borne downward over the barrier by the monster Geryon.  Geryon is described as having the face of a just man, but a the body of a beast and a scorpion like sting in his tail.  Here then we will enter the circles of the more malicious sins – those sins which have a “just face”, but conceal poison underneath. 

It is this intentional deception in sin which we will now see.  These are the circles of fraud, malice, deceit and treason.  These are the kinds of sins which we need all our faculties in order to accomplish.  These are not the sins into which one merely falls as if by accident.  These are the intentional, 'sought-ought' sins - which we all share in one form or another.

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 6: the Circle of the Violent

Carrying on past the heretics, Dante and Virgil encounter the rest of the inhabitants of the circle of the Violent, or in Aristotle’s terms, the Bestial.  The violent are classified according to their “victims”:  violence against neighbour, violence against oneself (the suicides), and the violent against “God”.  This section of the Inferno:

…Holds violent men; but as threefold may be
Their victims, in three rings they are dispersed

God, self and neighbour – against all these three
Force may be used; either to injure them,
Or theirs, as I shall show convincingly.

While we may easily understand the first two, how does one commit violence against God?  Virgil continues:

Those men do violence to God, who curse
And in their hearts deny Him, or defame
His bounty and His Natural Universe.

In Canto XII they are greeted by the Minotaur and some Centaurs – proud and haughty and, well, a physical example of the combination of human and animal natures.  Half man and half beast.  One can choose to let the “animal nature” have the upper hand over the rational and human nature.  The results are seen in the physical images of the creatures from Classical mythology.  As a side note, I would be curious to know exactly what Dante would make of the Sphinx…but that is for another series.  Here they also meet the political tyrants - those who used force and violence against their neighbours.

In Canto XIII they meet the suicides – those who have committed violence against themselves.  Because they rejected the life of the physical body, they are deprived of human form in this circle.  They become the famous “bleeding trees”, an image which Dante borrowed from his companion Virgil (see Aeneid 3.22-68).  We see as well the “profligates” – those who wantonly allowed the destruction of their personal property.  Such property was, by Roman law, and extension of one’s own person, and so it was seen as a form of violence against the self. 

got to go for a few minutes...

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 5: the City of Dis

In Canto IX Dante and Virgil gain entrance to the "City of Dis", a community built on sin.  Perhaps it is not unlike some of our North American gated communities. But we will leave that thought alone for the time being.  At first they are denied entrance, and have to await a "heavenly messenger" who will gain access to the city for them.

Now why would the City of Dis deny entrance to them?  What has gone so wrong with the idea of a city, a community, that Dante and Virgil cannot enter?  On the one hand one might say that to travel safely through this place they need such heavenly aid (as Sayers and others point out).  That would be true enough.  But from the point of view of the inhabitants of the city, why not let them in, with the hope of ensnaring them?  Well, it may well be that such a disordered community, based on sin, has no place for reason (the figure of Virgil) or for real life (the living Dante, who is not a 'ghost' or 'shade').  A community based on sin cannot abide these two - it drives them out or seeks to prevent them from entering.

The first folk they meet in the City of Dis are the heretics.  They are encased in tombs made of iron (representing a set, obstinate and determined will) but with fire on the inside.  Charles Williams notes:

It is necessary to remember what Dante meant by heresy.  He meant an obduracy of the mind; a spiritual stae which defied, consciously, 'apower to which trust and obedience are due'; an intellectual obstinacy.  A heretic, strictly, was a man who knew what he was doing;  he accepted the Church, but at the same time he preferred his own judgment to that of the Church.  This would seem impossible, except that it is apt to happen in all of us after our manner."

The Figure of Beatrice, 125

The sense here is the choice between what one believes privately or locally, and the sense that the Church is truly catholic.  On another level, it is by heresy that one enters the lower circles...

As they progress toward the seventh circle, Virgil gives Dante a brief overview of how Hell is arranged.

Dost thou not mind the doctrine of thy school -
Those pages where the Ethics tells of three
Conditions contrary to Heaven's will and rule,

Incontinence, vice, and brute bestiality?
And how incontinence offends God less
Than the other two, and is less blameworthy?

Canto XI; 79-84

Here we have the three great divisions of the geography of Hell.  Remember the three beasts which Dante encountered at the very beginning of the Inferno?  There are, in this view, three basic types or kinds of sins, and all sins are varieties or expressions of these three types.

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lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 4: Inferno VI-VIII

Having enjoyed the company of those in Limbo and souls of the lustful in the first circle, we now join Dante and Virgil as they proceed further down into circles III, IV and V of Hell.  In these three circles we will meet the gluttons, the "hoarders and spendthrifts" and then the wrathful.  Each type is given its own circle, as each has its own particular kind of vice.  At the same time, it is worth considering:  why does Dante connect these sins in order? 

First Dante and Virgil see those whose sin was gluttony.  I might add that their sin still is gluttony - the soul continues in the state it has chosen.  Here we can begin to see why this sin is "lower" than the lustful.  At least the lustful attempted some sort of "mutuality" in their lust.  In the circle of the gluttons, the sin becomes more selfish.  Gluttony is not concerned with the wants or desires of another.  It is the beginning of the self centered sins.

(will be back again shortly...the great thing about blogging at my favorite cafe is that you can get in a game of chess with one of the regulars and the readers will never know...)

At the entrance to the circle of the gluttons, Dante and Virgil encounter Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the underworld.

I am now in Third Circle: that of rain
One ceaseless, heavey, cold, accursed quench,
Whose law and nature vary never a grain;

Huge hailstones, sleet and snow, and turbid drench
Of water sluice down through the darkened air,
And the soaked earth gives off a putrid stench.

Cerberus, the cruel, misshapen monster, there
Bays in his triple gullet and doglike growls
Over the wallowing shades; his eyeballs glare

Canto VI, 7-15

Gluttony is a cold state, unlike the hot winds of lust.  It is fitting that here they find Cerberus  ever hungry with three mouths. As a side note,  Cerberus is also the name of one of the largest capital investment groups in the world (they just bought Chrysler).  It is in this Canto that Virgil tells Dante a very important thing about the state of souls after the resurrection of the body:

Go to, said he, hast thou forgot thy learning
Which hath it:  The more perfect, the more keen,
Whether for pleasure or for pain's discerning

Our contemporary world often sees the afterlife as somehow "less" than this life.  But Virgil reminds Dante that in the state of the resurrected body, our senses will be more keen, thus more able to delight in the New Jerusalem, the new heavens and the new earth.  Likewise, the condemned will be more adept for "pain's discerning".

Next we have the hoarders and spendthrifts - two seemingly opposite kinds of people who are now grouped together.  Their sins are, in Dante's view, the same in this:  they were so small of mind that "in the handling of their wealth to use/ No moderation - none in either kind". (VII.41).  Here we can see that Dante is drawing on the ancient virtue of moderation in all things, expressed in Aristotle's Ethics.  Here these two "opposites" are really one and the same:  they fail to be moderate in their use of worldly wealth. In this circle, the souls rail against each other.  They have moved from simple selfishness to opposition to others.  Here as well Virgil warns Dante against "Luck" or "fortune":

For all the gold that is beneath the moon,
Or ever was, could not avail to buy
Repose for one of these weary souls, not one

Canto VII.64-66

Just before we leave this Canto, we have to distinct displeasure of meeting up with the "sullen" - those who "took no joy in the pleasant air, no joy of the good sun, our hearts smouldered with a sulky smoke" (VII. 121).  These are souls who simply refused to accept the naturally given joys of God and creation.  They simply bubble in a black mud, refusing all joy and all delight.  "Bah Humbug" might be their anthem.

The river Styx appears to them next - they are progressing downward in the geography of the underworld.  Throughout literature we can see the natural symbol of rivers as places of transition from one state to another.  Think of the positive parallel of the "River Jordan", and then think of what it's opposite must mean.  They are coming to a new level of Hell - the City of Dis.  Here they see the wrathful, and they encounter fierce opposition from the fallen angels who guard the city.  Virgil is bewildered at their opposition, and they must wait  for divine assistance to gain entrance.  Sayers' note is, I think, quite helpful:  "Humanism is always apt to underestimate, and to be baffled by, the deliberate will to evil."

Just as the final vision of Christian community is a city - the New Jerusalem - so also in Hell there is portrayed a perverted kind of anti-city.  It is here that Dante begins to understand and know the truth about sin: 

...Amid the weeping and the woe,
Accursed spirit, do thou remain and rot!
I know thee, filthy as thou art, I know.

It is not merely any soul which Dante encounters in the story, but allegorically, it is the sins in his own soul.  Here for the first time he comes to the point where he recognizes the hatefulness of sin.  It is really sin in himself of which he says "I know".

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy

lenten series: Dante's Divine Comedy pt 3: gates of hell, Limbo

Inferno, Canto III-IV

Backing up a bit from our Valentine special on the circle of the lustful, we have a few noteworthy episodes to consider. Many can remember the famous line “Lay down all hope, you that go in by me” over the entrance gate of hell in Canto III.  Yet while we may be drawn to the image of misery which this line evokes, it is only part of a larger text:

Justice moved my great maker; God eternal
Wrought me: the Power, and the unsearchable
High Wisdom, and the Primal Love Supernal.

We might at least understand that Dante imagines “justice” to be wrought in Hell.  But how are we to understand the idea that “Primal Love Supernal” had an equal part in making the gates of Hell?  Hell becomes simply the soul’s experience of the Love which it rejects.  Even Hell is held together, and owes its existence, to the Love Supernal.  Hell is simply a rejection of that love.  Hell depends on that Love for its very existence.

Some sins to consider: Virgil points Dante to the souls of those “whose lives knew neither praise nor infamy”.(III.36).  These are like the lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, who will be spit out of His mouth. Mingled with this “dismal company” are those

Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him
Were faithful, but to self alone were true.

This is an interesting image to consider.  In our culture we tend to value a certain kind of disposition we have come to call “integrity”.  So long as you are true to what you believe, you are accounted as having “integrity”.  However, to be true to self alone is to place oneself at the center.  Even the soul which tries to ignore God, neither rebelling nor faithful, cannot postpone the choice forever.  To refuse to follow does not mean one will not have an object of worship.  It will turn out to be the self.  And there will come a point when the soul will realize that it has in fact made a choice.

In Canto IV we meet the virtuous pagans and the souls of the unbaptized.  A word about the latter:  pretty high view of sacramental grace here.  Say no more, unless you are a Calvinist.  But back to the virtuous pagans.  They are placed in Limbo – a place neither of bliss nor torment.  “Perhaps in limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the beatific vision” (Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited).   So who do we have here in Limbo?  We have the great poets and philosophers who predate Christ – those who did not have the opportunity to rebel or follow Him.  Contemporary ears grate against hearing of such souls in Limbo.  But let’s consider what Dante is saying, and indeed, what the great pagans themselves have said.

Aristotle, writing of the blessed and divine life, has this to say:

But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of excellence. If intellect is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. This would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of himself but that of something else. And what we said before will apply now; that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to intellect is best and pleasantest, since intellect more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics X.7

What it boils down to is this:  the soul still gets what it asks for.  Dante calls Aristotle the “king of men who know”, and yet Aristotle is here in Limbo.  Why?  Because he failed in his imagination of the goodness of the divine toward humanity.  It is the failure of human reason that it cannot imagine such an afterlife and communion with God which the Christian religion speaks of.  “But such a life would be too high for man”.  And so the virtuous pagans receive the kind of afterlife which they imagined: the spirits of the virtuous pagans have the afterlife which they thought appropriate to humanity.  God gives the soul what it truly asks for.

Limbo shows us just how high pure reason, on its own, can be elevated...

view entire post series: Dante's Divine Comedy