The Inferno:
Into the Inferno
Feraco
Myth to Science Fiction
27 October 2014
Dante was born in late May or early
June of 1265, under the constellation
Gemini. His mother would pass away
five years later, with his father following
roughly a decade later, leaving Dante
parentless before he reached what we
consider the age of adulthood.
When one reads The Inferno, Dante
clearly wants the reader to avoid the
misery of isolation. He believed very
strongly in the idea of belonging to
something larger (i.e., society), and
drew comfort from that; one wonders
whether his particular familial history
contributes to his ideas.
Fortunately, his father remarried
before he died, providing Dante with
both additional company and
educational opportunities.
Dante’s literary studies as a youth brought
him into close contact with many significant
writers, although scholars differ vociferously
as to who actually influenced Dante. For
example, Brunetto Latini (who we find in the
third round of the seventh circle) taught Dante
“how man becomes eternal” – i.e. how man can
live on forever through his impact on the world,
such as through writing. Dante also met Guido
Cavalcanti, another poet of renown, at this
time; Cavalcanti would play a pivotal role in
the future.
But most importantly, Dante also
encountered a girl named Beatrice Portinari.
He first met her at the age of nine, and instantly
fell in love; he did not see her again until she
was 18.
Beatrice married – and died – young,
passing away at 25. She appears in Dante’s
works alternately as the object of his love and
as the inspiration for his art.
Dante entered a world –
medieval Florence, Italy – that was
coming apart at the seams.
We see Florentine society divide
along factional fault lines time and
again during the 13th and 14th
centuries, like a cell that continues
dividing without properly
replacing the substance it’s lost.
The first divides appeared – as
they always seem to – between
those who craved change and
those who wished to preserve the
status quo.
Prior to Dante’s birth, Florence operated
as a largely feudal – and stratified – society.
But as Florence’s trade market boomed, the
feudal underclass grew wealthier, and the
city’s cultural makeup began shifting as they
integrated themselves into the Florentine
economy.
There were forces that wished to see
society fall under even more direct church
control (the Guelphs) and landed aristocrats
who swore to uphold the principles of
feudalism and service to an emperor (the
Ghibellines). The Ghibellines supported the
old order, while the Guelphs supported the
new.
As these things often go, new supplanted
old, old tried to re-supplant new and failed,
and new proceeded to try establishing a
death grip on the power it just obtained.
The Guelphs eventually drove the
Ghibellines from power, and successfully
repelled counterattacks over the next few
years – including a particularly effective one
a year after Dante entered the world, led by
Farinata degli Uberti (whom Dante will see in
Hell). And as the years passed, Florence
became an almost-uniformly Guelph city.
Dante’s family, while nominally composed
of Guelphs, wasn’t very politically active.
Dante, however, was: We see him enroll in the
Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries – one
had to be a Guild member in order to serve in
government – and quickly ascend the
political ladder. He even marries Gemma
Donati and begins fathering children. (He
confesses in later works that he felt
unfaithful to Beatrice’s memory as a result.)
In the meantime, the dominant
Guelphs, having grown
complacent after thirty years of
unchallenged power, began to split
into factions. By the time Dante
had moved from an ambassadorial
position to a spot as a supreme
magistrate (a.k.a.“prior”) in 1300,
Guelph unity had given way to the
Neri (“Blacks”) and Bianchi
(“Whites”) factions.
Corso Donati – Gemma’s brother
– led the Blacks, while Guido
Cavalcanti led the Whites.
Dante only needed to serve as a prior
for two months; the role, although
extremely elite (only six men served as
priors at any given moment), was a
short-lived one if one proved ineffective.
He was a moderate White, a member
of the dominant faction.
And when the priors moved to dispel
some of the tensions by banishing Corso
Donati and Guido Cavalcanti…
…Dante went along with them.
I find this particularly interesting,
considering that betrayal serves as the
sin Dante punishes most viciously in
The Inferno.
Meanwhile, having lost a great
deal of influence during this
particular period, the Blacks
decided to make a power play. They
were more loyal to Pope Boniface
VIII – a man who would become
Dante’s arch-nemesis – and
begged him for intervention.
Boniface, as well as the larger
church, craved more control over
Florence and its politics. To achieve
this end, Boniface sent a
“peacemaker”, Charles of Valois,
who assumed direct control in the
Pope’s name.
Charles’s ostensible “peacemaking”
didn’t last long. He allowed the Blacks to take
power once he situated himself in Florence
(over the Whites’ vociferous objections), and
the Neri faction immediately began
murdering and pillaging its old rivals. This
power shift quickly gave way to a series of
trials meant to purge remaining White
elements from the system.
When the trials began, Dante had already
traveled outside of Florence as part of a
group intending – ironically – to “appeal for a
change in papal policy towards the city and
to protest the machinations of the Neri.”
He was convicted of crimes in absentia –
graft (essentially skimming money he was
supposed to allot for other purposes) and
corruption (fraudulent activity in office) –
that pop up again in The Inferno’s
Malebolge.
At first, Dante stayed away
voluntarily, apparently hoping that
things would blow over (an unrealistic
hope, considering that the Pope silently
backed Charles’s moves).
When he was sentenced to
immolation in 1302, however, his exile
became mandatory.
“To [Dante], a penniless exile
convicted of a felony, separated under
pain of death from home, family, and
friends, his life seemed to have been cut
off in the middle.”
Between the time of his exile and his
death in 1321, Dante traveled all over
Italy, staying with patrons, studying
philosophy, and writing while
perpetually eying Florence’s stillturbulent politics.
Other exiles pinned their hopes on
the various fights that still broke out
between the Ghibellines (remember
them? Still going at it) and the
dominant Blacks. True, if the
Ghibellines returned to power, it would
probably be the end of the Florence
they’d built…but at least they’d get to
go home.
Dante, however, refused to turn on
his city, choosing instead to reject all
party designations and become “a
party by himself.”
His intentions were undercut in
1315, when the Ghibellines had
gathered enough strength to attack
the Guelphs once more.
This led to Dante’s being branded as a
Ghibelline and a rebel (this was also true of
many other “enemies”), crimes punishable by
decapitation. For those keeping score, this
meant Dante had moved from being burned to
being beheaded.
And while one may see this as a distinction
without a difference – both being ways to kill a
man they weren’t going out of their way to
catch – Dante’s sentence in 1315 carried a
different wrinkle: While his sons with Gemma
had previously been spared punishment, they
were also included in the sentence – even
though they’d never seen Dante after 1302.
Yet one year later – 1316 – Dante was offered
a chance to return to Florence. All he had to do
was meet certain conditions, conditions which
happened to be designed to humiliate him (the
public payment of a heavy fine, the public
performance of penance, etc.).
Dante refused.
Is this, then, the glorious recall of
Dante Alighieri to his native city, after
the miseries of nearly fifteen years of
exile?...No! This is not the way for me to
return to my country. If another can be
found that does not derogate from the
fame and honor of Dante, that will I take
with no lagging steps. But if by no such
way Florence may be entered, then will I
enter Florence never. What! Can I not
everywhere behold the sun and stars?
Can I not under any sky meditate on the
most precious truths, without first
rendering myself inglorious, nay
ignominious, in the eyes of the people
and city of Florence?
Dante’s time with his patrons (most
notably Cangrande della Scala, a man
Dante greatly admired and hoped would
lead Florence out of its darkness) came to
an end when he grew sick and died at the
age of 56 of malaria.
He didn’t quite make it through his
“alloted” 70 years (although, in all fairness,
he couldn’t have foreseen such a thing
while writing The Inferno).
Even so, Dante embodies Latini’s lesson;
our fascination with him is greater than
with any other figure from his era.
He left a philosophical, linguistic, and
literary legacy that would be the envy of
any man – a legacy we’ll study in greater
detail as we continue examining his most
enduring work.
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As for his famous creation, Dante doesn’t
invent Hell so much as remix it. He takes the
general idea of an afterlife reserved for those
who deserved punishment and fused it with
both old ideas and his own concepts regarding
justice and morality.
Aristotle, for example, inspired Dante’s
hierarchy of incontinence, viciousness
(“brutishness”), and malice; we have the SheWolf, the Lion, and the Leopard.
(In some translations, the Leopard
represents incontinence, and the she-wolf
represents fraud. This may explain the
apparent inconsistency between how greatly
Dante fears the she-wolf and how “mildly” his
Hell treats sins of incontinence; another
explanation could simply be that Dante tends
to ease up on the sins he feels more personally
tied to…)
Sins of incontinence or desire are
punished in circles two through five,
those whose sins involved violence
occupy circle seven, and perpetrators of
fraud are consigned to circles eight and
nine.
Having established fairly Aristotlean
foundations for his Hell, Dante turns to
medieval Christian doctrine in order to
identify both which sins should be
cataloged and where each belongs.
This is why we see most of the Seven
Deadly Sins, and why even the Virtuous
Pagans – those who were good people,
but lacked faith – end up in Limbo, the
first circle.
With that said, Dante does add his own
touches to Hell. Limbo, for example, had been
pre-established within doctrine – but it was
meant for the souls of, say, unbaptized
children. Dante’s placement of the great artists
who’d lived and died before Christ’s birth in
the same circle represents some fairly
significant editorializing on his part.
Another one of Dante’s touches is more
chilling; he argues that those who betray their
guests have their souls ripped from their
bodies at the moment of betrayal, and that
demons inhabit their empty shells from then
on.
Finally, Dante’s “vestibule” – the place just
outside of Hell reserved for cowards, as well as
the angels who did not side with God – is his
own invention. Given the events of Dante’s life,
it’s not surprising that he’s disgusted with
those whose morals are defined by their
opportunism, and who refuse to choose
between good and evil.
Dante now has a conceptual framework of
Hell, rationale for its organization, and an idea
of where he’ll go over the course of his journey.
But what goes in Hell? Even though it’s an
allegory, we can only buy into it if we believe in
the physical experiences Dante presents.
The Inferno documents a spiritual journey
exclusively in physical metaphor, so Hell can’t
just be a conceptual place – it needs to be
populated. We have to sense things – see great
beasts, confront monsters, witness torments –
and shudder at the horrors we experience;
then, and only then, can we begin unpacking
what each thing “really means.”This was a
book born of anguish, after all – an attempt by
a single man to resolve the questions that
harried him. Unless we engage with The
Inferno at an emotional (as well as
intellectual) level, we can never connect with
Dante at his.
In order to fill his empty Hell, Dante reaches
back into mythology, religious texts, and epics.
Virgil’s Aeneid, which features a
protagonist’s visit to the Land of the Dead,
provides both a point of comparison and
contrast. While Virgil’s underworld was much
less physically realistic than Dante’s, the
various creatures, rivers, and geographical
features the former employed serve much the
same purpose in The Inferno.
Raffa notes that Dante and Virgil both use
Charon, Minos, Cerberus, Plutus, Phlegyas, the
Furies, the Minotaur, the Centaurs, the Harpies,
Geryon, and the Giants: Each serves both as
allusion and as metaphor within Dante’s
allegory.
Clearly, Dante’s choice of Virgil as his guide
through Hell isn’t arbitrary; who better to know
how to deal with the monsters we find than the
man who documented them over a millennium
earlier?
In conclusion, Dante’s Hell is
both his own and not his own, a
fusion of original thought and
respect for the stories of the past.
Dante’s journey through it,
however, is his own – and it’s that
journey through fire and ice that
we’ll study for the next few weeks!