Inferno
Cantos IV-V
Virgil
• One of the Virtuous
Pagans
– “’The pain of these below us
here,
drains the color from my
face of pity..” (19-20)
• Guides Dante
– “’You do not question
what souls these are that
suffer here before you?
I wish you to know before
you travel on…’”(31-33)
Circle One: Limbo
The Virtuous Pagans
• There is no harsh punishment
– “No tortured wailing rose to greet us here, but
sounds of sighing rose from every side…a grief
breathed out of untormented sadness…” (25-29).
– “Sinners” born before Christ’s teachings
– “Their birth fell before the age of the Christian
mysteries, and so they did not worship God’s
trinity,” (36-39).
• Still considered virtuous – respected
The Virtuous Pagans
• “For such defects are we lost, though
spared the fire and suffering of hell in one
affliction only: that without hope we live on
in desire,” (40-43)
– They now know Christ’s teachings
– They will never know him (heaven)
The Harrowing of Hell
“has any, by his own or another’s merit,
gone ever from this place to blessedness”
“…a Mighty One descended here among us,
crowned with the sign of His victorious
years…” (49-63).
The Harrowing of Hell
• The gates of heaven did not open until the
death of Christ
• Those born before Christ and considered
virtuous waited in Limbo
• After his death, Christ descended into Hell to
choose the souls worthy of Heaven
– Figures from the Old Testament
• Caused an earthquake in Hell
The Virtuous Pagans
• “’The signature honors
left on earth is recognized in Heaven
and wins them ease in Hell out of God’s favor.’”
(76-78)
– Honored in life and respected in death (heaven)
• Homer, Lucan, Ovid, Horace, Virgil
Citadel of Human Reason
• “…we reached the base of a great Citadel
circled by seven towering battlements
and by a sweet brook flowing all around them…
This we passed over as if firm ground.
Through seven gates I entered with those sages
and came to a green meadow blooming round”
(106-111).
• Citadel= philosophy
• 7 liberal arts/ sciences
• Water separates them from those in darkness
Inhabitants
• Heroes and Heroines
– Trojans
• Hector, Aeneas
• The Philosophers
– Acceptable to the
church
• Plato, Aristotle
• The Naturalists
– Theoreticians,
historians of science
Canto V
Circle Two
The Carnal
Minos
• “There Minos sits,
grinning, grotesque, and
hale./ He examines each
lost soul as it arrives/ and
delivers his verdict with
his coiling tail” (4-6).
– Judges and delivers the
realm the soul will reside in
– From mythology, King of
Crete
– Known for wisdom
– Presented as horrific in
Inferno
• Zeus took form of bull and
Minos
• “…when the ill-fated soul
appears before him it confesses all,
and the grim sorter of the dark and foul
decides which place in Hell shall be its end,
then wraps his twitching tail about himself
one coil for each degree it must descend.”
(7-12)
– Souls want to confess
– They choose their fate, free will
– No repentance in Hell
The Carnal
• “I came to a place stripped bare of every light
and roaring on the naked dark like seas
wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight
Of storm and counter storm through time foregone,
sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge.
Whirling and battering it drives them on…” (28-34)
–
–
–
–
Committed in dark
Swept by temptations
Had no restraint so brutally hit
Sins of the she-wolf, first division of Hell
• Incontinence
The Carnal
– Destructive nature and
consequences of
sexual desire
– Desire takes over
reason
– Associated with love
– Least severe
punishment
Sinners
• Dido
– Left husband for Aeneas
• Achilles
– Deserted Greeks for Love
Francesca and Paolo
• Francesca & Paolo
“Love, which permits no loved one not to love,/ ok
me so strongly with delight in him/ that we are
one in Hell” (100-103).
– Affair
– Husband killed them
“In the depths of Hell/ Caina waits for him who tok our
lives” (104-105).
• He is in Caina, treacherous to kin
Dante’s Emotional Reaction
• “…and I was swept by pity and confusion” (72)
• “ …I felt my sense reel
and faint away with anguish. I was swept
by such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell” (136140).
– Pities souls
– Resemble his love for Beatrice