The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  All about him in the ice are strewn the sinners of the last round, JUDECCA, named for Judas Iscariot. These are the TREACHEROUS TO THEIR MASTERS. They lie completely sealed in the ice, twisted and distorted into every conceivable posture. It is impossible to speak to them, and the Poets move on to observe Satan.

  He is fixed into the ice at the center to which flow all the rivers of guilt, and as he beats his great wings as if to escape, their icy wind only freezes him more surely into the polluted ice. In a grotesque parody of the Trinity, he has three faces, each a different color, and in each mouth he clamps a sinner whom he rips eternally with his teeth. JUDAS ISCARIOT is in the central mouth, BRUTUS and CASSIUS in the mouths on either side.

  Having seen all, the Poets now climb through the center, grappling hand over hand down the hairy flank of Satan himself—a last supremely symbolic action—and at last, when they have passed the center of all gravity, they emerge from Hell. A long climb from the earth’s center to the Mount of Purgatory awaits them, and they push on without rest, ascending along the sides of the river Lethe, till they emerge once more to see the stars of Heaven, just before dawn on Easter Sunday.

  “On march the banners of the King of Hell,”

  my Master said. “Toward us. Look straight ahead:

  can you make him out at the core of the frozen shell?”

  Like a whirling windmill seen afar at twilight,

  or when a mist has risen from the ground—

  just such an engine rose upon my sight

  stirring up such a wild and bitter wind

  I cowered for shelter at my Master’s back,

  there being no other windbreak I could find.

  I stood now where the souls of the last class

  (with fear my verses tell it) were covered wholly;

  they shone below the ice like straws in glass.

  Some lie stretched out; others are fixed in place

  upright, some on their heads, some on their soles;

  another, like a bow, bends foot to face.

  When we had gone so far across the ice

  that it pleased my Guide to show me the foul creature

  which once had worn the grace of Paradise,

  he made me stop, and, stepping aside, he said:

  “Now see the face of Dis! This is the place

  where you must arm your soul against all dread.”

  Do not ask, Reader, how my blood ran cold

  and my voice choked up with fear. I cannot write it:

  this is a terror that cannot be told.

  I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath:

  imagine for yourself what I became,

  deprived at once of both my life and death.

  The Emperor of the Universe of Pain

  jutted his upper chest above the ice;

  and I am closer in size to the great mountain

  the Titans make around the central pit,

  than they to his arms. Now, starting from this part,

  imagine the whole that corresponds to it!

  If he was once as beautiful as now

  he is hideous, and still turned on his Maker,

  well may he be the source of every woe!

  With what a sense of awe I saw his head

  towering above me! for it had three faces:

  one was in front, and it was fiery red;

  the other two, as weirdly wonderful,

  merged with it from the middle of each shoulder

  to the point where all converged at the top of the skull;

  the right was something between white and bile;

  the left was about the color that one finds

  on those who live along the banks of the Nile.

  Under each head two wings rose terribly,

  their span proportioned to so gross a bird:

  I never saw such sails upon the sea.

  They were not feathers—their texture and their form

  were like a bat’s wings—and he beat them so

  that three winds blew from him in one great storm:

  it is these winds that freeze all Cocytus.

  He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins

  the tears ran mixed with bloody froth and pus.

  In every mouth he worked a broken sinner

  between his rake-like teeth. Thus he kept three

  in eternal pain at his eternal dinner.

  For the one in front the biting seemed to play

  no part at all compared to the ripping: at times

  the whole skin of his back was flayed away.

  “That soul that suffers most,” explained my Guide,

  “is Judas Iscariot, he who kicks his legs

  on the fiery chin and has his head inside.

  Of the other two, who have their heads thrust forward,

  the one who dangles down from the black face

  is Brutus: note how he writhes without a word.

  And there, with the huge and sinewy arms, is the soul

  of Cassius.—But the night is coming on

  and we must go, for we have seen the whole.”

  Then, as he bade, I clasped his neck, and he,

  watching for a moment when the wings

  were opened wide, reached over dexterously

  and seized the shaggy coat of the king demon;

  then grappling matted hair and frozen crusts

  from one tuft to another, clambered down.

  When we had reached the joint where the great thigh

  merges into the swelling of the haunch,

  my Guide and Master, straining terribly,

  turned his head to where his feet had been

  and began to grip the hair as if he were climbing;

  so that I thought we moved toward Hell again.

  “Hold fast!” my Guide said, and his breath came shrill

  with labor and exhaustion. “There is no way

  but by such stairs to rise above such evil.”

  At last he climbed out through an opening

  in the central rock, and he seated me on the rim;

  then joined me with a nimble backward spring.

  I looked up, thinking to see Lucifer

  as I had left him, and I saw instead

  his legs projecting high into the air.

  Now let all those whose dull minds are still vexed

  by failure to understand what point it was

  I had passed through, judge if I was perplexed.

  “Get up. Up on your feet,” my Master said.

  “The sun already mounts to middle tierce,

  and a long road and hard climbing lie ahead.”

  It was no hall of state we had found there,

  but a natural animal pit hollowed from rock

  with a broken floor and a close and sunless air.

  “Before I tear myself from the Abyss,”

  I said when I had risen, “O my Master,

  explain to me my error in all this:

  where is the ice? and Lucifer—how has he

  been turned from top to bottom: and how can the sun

  have gone from night to day so suddenly?”

  And he to me: “You imagine you are still

  on the other side of the center where I grasped

  the shaggy flank of the Great Worm of Evil

  which bores through the world—you were while I climbed down,

  but when I turned myself about, you passed

  the point to which all gravities are drawn.

  You are under the other hemisphere where you stand;

  the sky above us is the half opposed

  to that which canopies the great dry land.

  Under the mid-point of that other sky

  the Man who was born sinless and who lived

  beyond all blemish, came to suffer and die.

  You have your feet upon a little sphere

  which forms the other face of the Judecca.

  There it is evening when it is morning here.
/>
  And this gross Fiend and Image of all Evil

  who made a stairway for us with his hide

  is pinched and prisoned in the ice-pack still.

  On this side he plunged down from heaven’s height,

  and the land that spread here once hid in the sea

  and fled North to our hemisphere for fright;

  and it may be that moved by that same fear,

  the one peak that still rises on this side

  fled upward leaving this great cavern here.

  Down there, beginning at the further bound

  of Beelzebub’s dim tomb, there is a space

  not known by sight, but only by the sound

  of a little stream descending through the hollow

  it has eroded from the massive stone

  in its endlessly entwining lazy flow.”

  My Guide and I crossed over and began

  to mount that little known and lightless road

  to ascend into the shining world again.

  He first, I second, without thought of rest

  we climbed the dark until we reached the point

  where a round opening brought in sight the blest

  and beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars.

  And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.

  NOTES

  1. On march the banners of the King: The hymn (Vexilla regis prodeunt) was written in the sixth century by Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers. The original celebrates the Holy Cross, and is part of the service for Good Friday to be sung at the moment of uncovering the cross.

  17. the foul creature: Satan.

  38. three faces: Numerous interpretations of these three faces exist. What is essential to all explanation is that they be seen as perversions of the qualities of the Trinity.

  54. bloody froth and pus: The gore of the sinners he chews which is mixed with his slaver.

  62. Judas: Note how closely his punishment is patterned on that of the Simoniacs (Canto XIX).

  67. huge and sinewy arms: The Cassius who betrayed Caesar was more generally described in terms of Shakespeare’s “lean and hungry look.” Another Cassius is described by Cicero (Catiline, III) as huge and sinewy. Dante probably confused the two.

  68. the night is coming on: It is now Saturday evening.

  82. his breath came shrill: Cf. Canto XXIII, 85, where the fact that Dante breathes indicates to the Hypocrites that he is alive. Virgil’s breathing is certainly a contradiction.

  95. middle tierce: In the canonical day tierce is the period from about six to nine A.M. Middle tierce, therefore, is seven-thirty. In going through the center point, they have gone from night to day. They have moved ahead twelve hours.

  128. the one peak: The Mount of Purgatory. 129. this great cavern: The natural animal pit of line 98. It is also “Beelzebub’s dim tomb,” line 131.

  133. a little stream: Lethe. In classical mythology, the river of forgetfulness, from which souls drank before being born. In Dante’s symbolism it flows down from Purgatory, where it has washed away the memory of sin from the souls who are undergoing purification. That memory it delivers to Hell, which draws all sin to itself.

  143. Stars: As part of his total symbolism Dante ends each of the three divisions of the Commedia with this word. Every conclusion of the upward soul is toward the stars, God’s shining symbols of hope and virtue. It is just before dawn of Easter Sunday that the Poets emerge—a further symbolism.

  THE PURGATORIO

  To Dudley Fitts, Magister

  INTRODUCTION

  One of the qualities which distinguish Dante’s Divine Comedy from most other long narrative poems is the individual character and, as it were, physiognomy peculiar to each of its three great divisions. Readers of the Inferno will recall its frequently harsh materialism, the great variety of intonation, the vivid realism, in which its ghostly figures rapidly seem to become people and the whole scene appears the “hell on earth” Dante probably wished it to represent.

  To understand the Inferno, some historical background was obviously essential. It was important to know that Dante, by being born an upper-middle-class Alighieri in the independent commune of Florence in 1265, had inherited the political loyalties of a Guelph and that he had also acquired hereditary enemies called Ghibellines. The history of the civil strife between these parties was of equal importance, for, even if it culminated in a Guelph victory just after Dante’s birth, talk of it and of fears lest it flare up again filled his mind during his formative years. Outstanding members of the preceding generation of both parties such as the great Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti, and the Guelph statesman and scholar Brunetto Latini, were to supply a number of his infernal figures, and allusions to victories, exiles, and defeats fill its pages.

  Since participation in public life would determine Dante’s fate, we had to be aware of new dissension among the Guelphs, now divided among themselves into the “Blacks” and the “Whites” to which he belonged, and to follow the strange fatal parallel between his political progress and the growth of this new partisan strife. We saw the irony of his rise to the highest magistracy just as violence broke out in 1300, so his prominence made him a prime target for his foes.

  What happened next, however, was of fundamental importance for all parts of the Comedy and, indeed, for all Dante’s thinking thereafter. The Blacks schemed to interest the Pope in intervening in the dispute. Boniface VIII, ever alert for an opportunity to strengthen his political influence, ignored the protests of the Whites, and invited a supposedly neutral third party, Charles of Valois, to enter Florence in the role of impartial arbitrator and peacemaker. What the Pope’s secret orders had been became instantly apparent when Charles was admitted in November 1301. After seizing and disarming the Whites, he opened the gates to the banished Blacks, and stood by as they gave themselves over to murder and pillage. Dante was absent on a political mission and, fortunately for him and for posterity, he preferred exile to the sort of justice he would have faced had he returned.

  This experience, crushing and embittering to most of its victims—and Dante’s share of bitterness can be tasted in the Comedy’s invectives and many ironic allusions—launched Dante’s mind on one of its greatest drives: to understand the problem of evil, and to try to solve it. What could lead the head of the church, of all Christendom, vicar of the Christ who scorned the hypocrites and drove the money-changers and shopkeepers from the Temple, to engage in the fraud and perfidy of the Florentine conspiracy? How could such a man rise to such a position? What hope was there that men in general might be persuaded to a just life in this world and salvation in the next when they saw their spiritual leaders behave in such a way? Surely such a marvelously ordered physical universe, created for man’s enjoyment, must contain somewhere a clue to a better political organization or government than that of Dante’s day.

  Exploration of these questions led Dante through the Scriptures with their commentators, the Church Fathers, notably Anselm, Bonaventure, and Augustine, to Boethius and beyond to Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, and his beloved and revered Virgil. Cicero’s treatises were a wonderful discovery (“like happening upon gold while looking for silver”) but bristling with difficulties both stylistic and conceptual. This was the new and alien material—philosophy—that the church had repeatedly proscribed until the recent appearance of Aquinas’ Christian explanation of Aristotle.

  The fruits of his long and painstaking exploration of the problem of evil formed the substance of Dante’s Inferno. In this remarkable amalgam of the Nicomachaean Ethics and Cicero there is little that is peculiarly Christian except for a few borrowings from St. Thomas and the implicit application of St. Paul’s “Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas” as the principle underlying the worst categories. It is not a theological arrangement but a philosophical one; not a theoretical exposition—save for the marvelously concise discourse of Virgil in Canto XI—but what might be called a case-system presentation of classic examples of evil
in its outward social manifestations. The theoretical approach had already been tried in Dante’s first work after his exile, the unfinished Banquet (Il Convivio). Here he had set out along the scholiast’s favorite way—a commentary on an established text—with the purpose of making available to the un-Latined the corpus of philosophy as he had found it. Yet when only about one-third complete, this ambitious task had been abandoned, with no word of explanation such as that which terminated his only preceding work, the Vita Nuova.

  These two works together, the tender autobiographical effusion and the unfinished encyclopedia, or more precisely the experiences they represent, are of central importance to the Comedy. The Vita Nuova in particular is as essential to a deeper understanding of the Purgatorio as the Florentine events and Dante’s part in them are to an understanding of the Inferno. Without a knowledge of at least the outline of his rapturous, remote love for Beatrice, the many allusions to her lose their meaning and the growing tension as the poet mounts to the top of Purgatory cannot be fully felt. Of even greater significance is the knowledge that Beatrice died in 1290, and that, in the ten years between then and the supposed date of the Comedy, Dante had been unfaithful to her memory; without it, we are puzzled by her severe reproof when she confronts him in the Earthly Paradise. An understanding of the allegorical meaning with which Dante invested both earlier works and their relationship explains another of her reproofs and illuminates the poet’s spiritual biography. No one reading the Vita Nuova can doubt that its characters are real persons, especially the object of its idealized love. Likewise when Dante describes how deeply he was affected, in his grief after Beatrice’s death, by the obvious compassion shown by the “Lady of the Window,” he was clearly describing how his grief was being lessened by his interest in another woman; and the remorse with which this little book closes is obviously sincere. Twelve or more years later, when he begins the Banquet, Beatrice has gradually become a sacred abstraction relegated to Heaven, having no further role in this life, while the “Lady of the Window” has become “daughter of God, queen of everything, most fair and noble Philosophy.”