Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  Dante’s kind speech evokes a kind response from Francesca, blown about above him:

  “O animal grazïoso e benigno

  che visitando vai per l’aere perso

  noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno,

  se fosse amico il re de l’universo,

  noi pregheremmo lui de la tua pace,

  poi c’hai pietà del nostro mal perverso.”

  “O living creature, gracious and kind to bear

  The black fumes, and visit us who stained

  The earth with blood when we were living there,

  If the King of all the universe remained

  A friend to us, our prayer would be your peace,

  Because you pity our fate perverse and pained.”

  Dante, full of sympathy for their torment, is moved to tears by Francesca’s words. He asks her then, “how love gave her to recognize her dubious desires”—in other words, how did she and Paolo come to sleep together? She answers with one of the Comedy’s most famous sentences: “Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / nella miseria” (No greater sorrow [is there] / than to recall the happy time / in misery). She goes on to explain that one day she and Paolo were reading together. It happened that the book was an engrossing Arthurian romance of Guinevere and Lancelot:

  “Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse

  quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;

  ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

  Quando leggemmo il disïato riso

  esser basciato da cotanto amante,

  questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

  la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.”

  “Several times the reading changed our tone

  And color, drove our eyes to meet; just one

  Defeated us, one moment on its own.

  When we had come to where the kiss was won

  From such a lover with that fondest smile,

  What he, who never goes from me, had done

  Was tremblingly to kiss my mouth.…”

  Dante, himself a fedele d’Amore, a well-known writer of courtly love poetry, and (we may confidently surmise) an adventuring philanderer, knew just how such a temptation could overpower anyone. All the while Francesca spoke, the silent Paolo wept (“l’altro piangea”). It was too much for Dante; he grew so faint that he dropped to the ground as a dead body drops (“caddi come corpo morto cade”).

  The poet never has another word to say about this couple, locked in their eternal embrace as they are blown about by the wind. But there are at least two unspoken thoughts here: sexual sins are the least of all, deserving of the most forgiveness and the most lenient punishment; and Dante, fainting, here repents of his own sexual adventures, which certainly during his lonely exile have been sins of adultery, and resolves to lead a better and more honest life. Native discretion and a sincere regard for the reputation of his long-suffering wife, still lodged uncomfortably at or near Florence, keep him from saying anything explicit. But in Dante’s poetry his most foundational thoughts are often implied and left for the reader to intuit, and his strongest impulses are subtly dissolved in the color of the atmosphere and the scent on the wind.

  Honesty is the hidden key to understanding Dante’s Inferno. It is dishonesty the poet has come to hate most of all—the dishonesty of popes and politicians, of Guelphs and Ghibellines, of Whites and Blacks. It is dishonesty, which always begins with dishonesty to oneself, that has made such a mess of the world. In his tour of the world of sin—which is what the journey to Hell really is—Dante is trying with all his prowess to get things straight, the things that really matter. He is drawing, in all its latitude and longitude, as accurate a map of the moral universe as he can make. He has taken on this enormous task for all of us, but first of all for himself. He needs to know what is really true so that he can reorient his life and sail to his appointed end. He is tired of going rudderless. It is this new moral dimension in the middle-aged man that transforms his poetry from courtly love sweetness to ultimate seriousness. Dante retains the quick and playful sensibility that any great poet possesses. He has not lost his sense of ambiguity, his irony, his subtlety. But none of these things is an end in itself any longer, a bauble to pleasure a prince or to dazzle a crowd. All is now in service to his ultimate end.

  Hell, as Dante conceives it, is an upside-down cone formed from concentric circles, something like the cone of a great volcano. It is largest at the top, where the Circle of Limbo is, a little smaller in the Second Circle, to which the Lustful are confined. The Third Circle, the Circle of the Gluttons, is smaller still—and so on, till one reaches the depths of Hell and the most confined circle of all. In each circle, the punishment fits the crime: the Lustful perpetually blown about, as they were in life; the Gluttons perpetually prostrate in a stinking sewer.

  Sinclair has given us a lucid outline of “The System of Dante’s Hell,” which I reproduce here with some revisions.

  Click here to a view a larger image.

  Those who have sinned through incontinence (or lack of self-control) are the least guilty. They will never leave Hell, but, Dante learns from Virgil, their torments will lessen with time. Though heretics sin against truth, they may believe what they say, so they too are less guilty. The violent, likewise, lack self-control, though the consequences of their actions are far worse than those of the simply incontinent. But it is the Eighth and Ninth Circles of Hell, where those who have been dishonest and deceptive are incarcerated, that especially describe Dante’s vision of evil at work in the world.

  The circles of Hell are fairly crammed with the once rich and powerful, especially with kings and other titled personages and with members of the higher clergy. The clergy are also well represented among the avaricious of the Fourth Circle. “These tonsured ones were clerics without doubt,” Virgil explains to Dante, “And cardinals and popes in whom the sin / Of avarice brings its worst excess about” [Dale’s translation]. For Dante, as for all other thinking people of his time, the worldliness of churchmen and their constant craving after wealth and power were the most destructive forces loose in the world.

  In the Third Pit of the Eighth Circle, this circle called Malebolge (Evil Pits), Dante finds the simonists, those who bought and sold church offices for personal gain—“who prostitute the things of God for gold and silver.” These are buried headfirst in apertures of solid rock from which only their feet and calves stick out, the rest of their bodies buried deep in the flames of Satan’s oven. Though the Comedy is set in 1300, when Boniface was still on the papal throne, Dante sees that a flaming orifice has already been prepared for him. At the moment, it houses Pope Nicholas III, who died in 1280. Soon it will welcome Boniface (who died in 1303), as Nicholas is pushed farther down below him. One day, it will claim in his turn Clement V, the French pope who moved the papacy from Rome to Avignon at the behest of Philip the Fair and who was reigning as pope when Dante wrote the Comedy.

  Dante is positively delighted at the prospect of so many terrible popes receiving their due at last and chortles expectantly: “Are you there already, there already, Boniface?” He then turns on the current occupant of the hellhole and delivers a mini-homily: “Pray, tell me now, how much money did our Lord ask up front from Saint Peter before he gave the keys [to the Kingdom of Heaven] into his charge? Surely, he asked nothing but ‘Follow me,’ nor did Peter or the others take gold or silver from Matthias when he was chosen [to replace Judas] …. So, stay where you are, for you are punished well. You are the shepherds,” Dante goes on, that Saint John the Divine had in mind when he foresaw the Whore of Babylon fornicating with all the kings of the earthj—the very image Martin Luther will apply to the corrupt papacy a little more than two centuries later. “You’ve made a god of gold and silver, and what’s the difference between you and the idolaters but that they worship one and you a hundred? Oh, Constantine, how much evil was given birth, not by your conversion, but by the Donation the first rich pope had from you!” As already noted, t
he so-called Donation of Constantine was a forgery, used by the papacy to prop up its legitimacy in Europe, but Dante could not have known this. How much more righteously he would have railed had he known.

  Dante may be circumspect about his own peccadilloes, but not about his satisfaction in seeing his tormentors punished nor in seeing those responsible for the chief political ills of the medieval world receive their eternal comeuppance. He is a medieval man and has no need to feign the pious sympathy occasionally evinced by our contemporary media figures. If he feels like chortling, he’ll chortle.

  The last and deepest circle of Hell is called Cocytus after the river of Greek Hades whose name means “Lamentation.” Cocytus is an eternally frozen place where Satan himself is confined. Its four rings are named for the historical and mythological characters Dante considers most treacherous: Caina, for instance, for Cain, the world’s first murderer—and of his brother, at that—Judecca for Judas, whose head lies inside one of Satan’s three enormous mouths, in the eternal process of being crushed by Satan’s jagged teeth. Though mountainous in stature, Satan is almost as much a figure of pity as of terror: “With six eyes he was weeping and over three chins dripped tears and bloody foam.”

  The deeper circles of Hell will satisfy any schoolboy with a taste for comic gore, so full are they of body parts, human excreta, and every extreme of degradation. In Cantos XXXII and XXXIII, Dante encounters a couple who are the moral opposite of Paolo and Francesca. Whereas those two lovers are bound together for all eternity by their mutual love, Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, both of Pisa, Florence’s western neighbor, are frozen together in mutual hatred. Ugolino succeeded in betraying everyone, first his fellow Ghibellines, then the Guelphs with whom he subsequently allied himself. Exiled from Pisa, he was invited back by the archbishop, who promised to effect a reconcilation between Ugolino and his many enemies. But on Ugolino’s return, the archbishop had him clapped in irons, along with his two sons and two grandsons. Imprisoned in the tower of the Gualandi, the count and his family were at length left to starve to death after Archbishop Ruggieri gave instructions that the tower be locked to all and its keys thrown into the Arno. When the fastness was at last reopened and the dead removed, it was found that Ugolino had feasted on his (already dead?) progeny before dying himself. “Hunger,” he explains to Dante, “soon had more power than grief.” Now he feasts on the head of Ruggieri:

  Noi eravam partiti già da ello,

  ch’io vidi due ghiacciati in una buca,

  sì che l’un capo a l’altro era cappello;

  e come ’l pan per fame si manduca,

  così ’l sovran li denti a l’altro pose

  là ’ve ’l cervel s’aggiugne con la nuca.

  We’d left him [another traitor] when I noticed, frozen hard,

  Two in the same hole, so cramped, one head

  Seemed, for the other one, a cap or guard.

  But, as when hungry one would chew at bread,

  So in that neck he sank his teeth to gnash

  Just where the brain into the nape is led.

  The subsequent canzoni—the Purgatorio and the Paradiso—though meant to have equal weight with the first, do not invade the imagination and constrict the heartbeat as does the Inferno. Eternal damnation, after all, commands one’s attention as can few other themes. And, besides, as C. S. Lewis put it dryly, “The joys of heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, an acquired taste.” All the same, the sequence on Purgatory makes a splendid sequel to damnation, for, unlike Hell, Purgatory is a place of punishment that is also a platform of hope.

  The denizens of Hell have chosen their sin over all else; it is because of this unwavering choice that they are unable to rise. The citizens of Purgatory, on the other hand, though hardly models of moral life, struggled while on earth—in some part of themselves—to overcome their attachment to their sin. For this reason they will rise to glory—one day, and in certain cases that day remains a long way off. But, cautions Dante to the reader:

  Non vo’ però, lettor, che tu ti smaghi

  di buon proponimento per udire

  come Dio vuol che ’l debito si paghi.

  Non attender la forma del martìre:

  pensa la succession; pensa ch’al peggio

  oltre la gran sentenza non può ire.

  I’d never wish you, Reader, ever to grow

  Fearful of a good purpose, because you learn

  How God decides what debt we undergo.

  Ignore the pain; think what such pain will earn.

  Think that at worst it cannot stretch or spread

  Beyond the great Day of Judgement’s sure return.

  “Non attender la forma del martìre: / pensa la succession” (“Ignore the pain; think what such pain will earn”) is advice for thinking not just about Purgatory but about one’s life in this world. For Purgatory—a time of trial with glory at the end—is but a second chance at life, a second lifetime of suffering for sure, but this time with Paradise securely in reach. Purgatory was the mitigating invention of medieval theologians who felt that there must be a place of purgation beyond death where the great mass of humanity—those not evil enough for Hell nor pure enough for Heaven—could atone for their unatoned sins. “In Dante’s vision,” writes the insightful Peter S. Hawkins, “the point of purgatory was not so much to ‘serve time’ in a place of temporal suffering as it was to enter a process of transformation, to become someone new. In short, the poet took what was popularly imagined as an upper chamber of hell and turned it into an extended passage to heaven.”

  Purgatory is also a passage of social leveling. Having encountered many popes in Hell, Dante meets more in Purgatory. One of these, atoning for the sin of clerical avarice, is Adrian V, to whom Dante kneels in reverence and whom he addresses using the honorific plural, voi. Adrian beseeches him to stand. “Straighten your legs, brother, and stand up straight,” urges the pope. “Make no mistake: I, like you and all the others, am just a fellow servant of the one Power.” All are brothers and fellow servants, all earthly titles and social differentiations are ultimately meaningless. Dante, democratic townsman and impoverished wanderer, possesses far greater insight into the human condition than cloistered Hildegard was capable of.

  In Heaven, where Dante meets his great-great-grandfather, the crusader Cacciaguida, the ancestor bemoans the introduction into Florence of differences in affluence, rank, and power and recalls (in a famous passage) a simpler, more virtuous Florence of times past:

  “Fiorenza dentro da la cerchia antica,

  ond’ ella toglie ancora e terza e nona,

  si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.

  Non avea catenella, non corona,

  non gonne contigiate, non cintura

  che fosse a veder più che la persona.”

  “Florence, within its ancient bounds, from where

  She still hears tierce and nones [monastic hours of prayer], reposed as yet

  In peace, sober and chaste, serene and fair.

  There was no bracelet then, no coronet;

  No embroidered gowns; no girdle’s sway

  That strikes the eye before the person met.”

  It is the lure of avarice, of a gluttonous desire for more than one needs—and at the expense of others—that has brought upon Florence all the fraudulence and treachery that have issued in its bloody wars and shameful divisions.

  These brief incursions into the Purgatorio and the Paradiso must content us here. The Commedia is too great and too grand to be commented on by a shelf of good books, let alone by a single chapter in a book of many things. I leave it to you, the reader, to continue the awesome pilgrimage “parte per te stesso” (a party of your own), using this chapter only as a feeble introduction.

  If you visit Florence, enter the baptistery to see the layered mosaics of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven that surely served Dante as inspiration. But then enter the cathedral and look upward at Brunelleschi’s amazing dome of light, suspended in space, i
t seems, without earthly supports over the cathedral’s crossing. There you will be reminded of the stupendous ode to the Light of God with which Dante closes the Commedia. Though the dome was not raised till more than a hundred years after Dante’s death, there can be no question that Brunelleschi, in this summation of all European architecture, ancient, medieval, and even modern, had Dante’s closing pages in mind, the dream of seeing God:

  Oh abbondante grazia ond’ io presunsi

  ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,

  tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!

  Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna,

  legato con amore in un volume,

  ciò che per l’universo si squaderna.…

  A quella luce cotal si diventa,

  che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto

  è impossibil che mai si consenta.

  O Grace abounding, in which I dared prolong

  My look, and in eternal Light immerse,

  Till power of vision waned at beams so strong.

  Within its depth I noticed intersperse,

  By love within a single volume bound,

  The scattered leaves of all the universe.…

  And, at that Light, a man becomes so he

  Could never turn from it to other sight,

  For that is past all possibility.

  Remember always that, as Dante wrote in a letter to Can Grande della Scala, he intended the Comedy “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of happiness.” He meant his poem for you, Reader, as much as for anyone, for his was a profound faith that one can actually be transformed by the experience of reading and that one’s desire and one’s will may be moved not by the cheap, winking lights of worldly success but, as Dante names it in the last line of the Commedia, by “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle”—the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.