The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  the sacrilegious learned to be afraid.

  Seven choirs moved there before it, bringing

  confusion to my senses; with my hearing

  I thought “No,” with my sight, “Yes, they are singing.”

  In the same way, the smokes the censers poured

  were shown so faithfully that eyes and nose

  disputed yes and no in happy discord.

  And there before the Holy Vessel, dancing

  with girt-up robes, the humble Psalmist moved,

  less than a king, and more, in his wild prancing.

  Facing him, portrayed with a vexed frown

  of mingled sadness and contempt, Michal

  stood at a palace window looking down.

  I moved a little further to the right,

  the better to observe another panel

  that shone at Michal’s back, dazzling and white.

  Here was portrayed from glorious history

  that Roman Prince whose passion to do justice

  moved Gregory to his great victory.

  I speak of Trajan, blessed Emperor.

  And at his bridle was portrayed a widow

  in tears wept from the long grief of the poor.

  Filling the space on both sides and behind

  were mounted knights on whose great golden banners

  the eagles seemed to flutter in the wind.

  The widow knelt and by consummate art

  appeared to say: “My Lord, avenge my son

  for he is slain and I am sick at heart.”

  And he to answer: “Justice shall be done;

  wait only my return.” And she: “My Lord”—

  speaking from the great grief that urged her on—

  “If you do not?” And he: “Who wears my crown

  will right your wrong.” And she: “Can the good deed

  another does grace him who shuns his own?”

  And he, then: “Be assured. For it is clear

  this duty is to do before I go.

  Justice halts me, pity binds me here.”

  The Maker who can never see or know

  anything new, produced that “visible speaking”:

  new to us, because not found below.

  As I stood relishing the art and thought

  of those high images—dear in themselves,

  and dearer yet as works His hand had wrought—

  the Poet said: “Look there: they seem to crawl

  but those are people coming on our left:

  they can tell us where to climb the wall.”

  My eyes, always intent to look ahead

  to some new thing, finding delight in learning,

  lost little time in doing as he said.

  Reader, I would not have you be afraid,

  nor turn from your intention to repent

  through hearing how God wills the debt be paid.

  Do not think of the torments: think, I say,

  of what comes after them: think that at worst

  they cannot last beyond the Judgment Day.

  “Master,” I said, “those do not seem to me

  people approaching us; nor do I know—

  they so confuse my sight—what they may be.”

  And he to me: “Their painful circumstance

  doubles them to the very earth: my own eyes

  debated what they saw there at first glance.

  Look hard and you will see the people pressed

  under the moving boulders there. Already

  you can make out how each one beats his breast.”

  O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small,

  who by the dim lights of your twisted minds

  believe you prosper even as you fall—

  can you not see that we are worms, each one

  born to become the Angelic butterfly

  that flies defenseless to the Judgment Throne?

  What have your souls to boast of and be proud?

  You are no more than insects, incomplete

  as any grub until it burst the shroud.

  Sometimes at roof or ceiling-beam one sees

  a human figure set there as a corbel,

  carved with its chest crushed in by its own knees,

  so cramped that what one sees imagined there

  makes his bones ache in fact—just such a sense

  grew on me as I watched those souls with care.

  True, those who crawled along that painful track

  were more or less distorted, each one bent

  according to the burden on his back;

  yet even the most patient, wracked and sore,

  seemed to be groaning: “I can bear no more!”

  NOTES

  2. perverse love: All human actions, in Dante’s view, are motivated by love: right love produces good actions and perverse love produces bad. Virgil discusses this concept in detail in XVII, 103 ff.

  7-12. THE NEEDLE’S EYE: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew, xix, 24, and Mark, xx, 25. See also Luke, xvii, 25.) I understand Dante to mean here that there shall be no passage to purification without the ardor of the spirit that strips a man of worldliness. Once again, as in the first climb at the very foot of the mountain, the beginning is the most difficult part of the ascent.

  14. waning moon: The Moon had been full on the night before Good Friday (Inferno, XX, 127). It is now four and a half days later. In two and a half more days it will be a half moon.

  15. sunk to rest: The Moon rose sometime after 8:00 P.M., perhaps closer to 9:00, as described at the beginning of Canto X. It would set about twelve hours later. But Dante says it has already set. It is, therefore, sometime after 8:00 A.M. But to assume that it has just set, would make it only two hours after sunrise, and would mark the hour of Dante’s awakening outside the Gate. The passage, moreover, was a slow one. Something between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M. would, therefore, seem to be a reasonable time for Dante’s emergence on the first ledge. See XII, 80-81, note.

  22-24. The turns of Dante’s style and the natural tendency of Italian to use more syllables than does English in stating a similar thought, sometimes make it desirable to render six lines of Dante into three of English. I have so rendered it here. A literal translation of the original would read: “From its edge where it borders the void, to the foot of the high bank which rises again, would measure three times a human body; and as far as my eyes could extend their flight either to the left or to the right side, this Cornice seemed to me to be that [wide].”

  26 ff. THE WHIP AND THE REIN. At the entrance to each Cornice, Dante presents high examples of the virtue opposite the sin punished on that Cornice. Their purpose is clearly to whip the souls on to emulation. The form in which these examples are presented varies from Cornice to Cornice, but the examples are usually three, and the first of them is always taken from the life of the Virgin.

  At the end of the passage of each Cornice, also in various forms, Dante presents examples of the terrible price one must pay for succumbing to each particular sin. The opening exhortations designed to drive the souls on to emulation may be called the Whip of each sin; the closing examples, or admonitions, may be called the Rein, serving to check the impulse toward that sin. See XIII, 39-40.

  29. Polyclitus: Greek sculptor of the late fifth century B.C., contemporary with Phidias. His name seems to have been the word for artistic perfection during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, probably because he is often mentioned by Aristotle.

  31-90. THE WHIP OF PRIDE. It consists of three bas-relief panels carved on the inner cliff-face, each panel portraying a scene of great humility, humility being, of course, the virtue opposite pride.

  The first panel (lines 31-42) depicts the Annunciation. The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, bringing the word of her great election, and Mary, untouched by pride, answers in her great hour, Ecce ancilla Dei, “Behold the handmaiden of God.” (Luke, i,
38). the key: Christ.

  The second panel (lines 49-66) depicts King David putting aside all the offices of majesty to dance in humility and total abandonment before the Lord (see II Samuel, vi,

  14) on bringing the Ark to Jerusalem from the house of the Gittite, Obed-edom. Dante has confused, or deliberately blended, two scenes into one. The first journey of the Ark began with an ox-drawn cart and it was then that Uzzah (an example of overweening pride) was struck dead for laying unsanctified hands upon the Ark, a sacrilegious act. (See II Samuel, vi, 6-7.) David laid up the Ark in the house of the Gittite and returned for it three months later, on which occasion it was carried to Jerusalem by the Levites. It was on the second journey that David put by his majesty to dance before the Lord. Michal, daughter of King Saul, and David’s first wife, looked on scornfully and was punished for her arrogance by sterility: “therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.” (II Samuel, vi, 23.)

  The third panel (lines 70-90) depicts the Emperor Trajan halting his royal cavalry en route to battle and dismounting in order to secure justice for a poor woman. Dante places Trajan in Paradiso, XX, his soul according to legend having been summoned back to earth and baptized by St. Gregory.

  100 ff. THE PUNISHMENT OF THE PROUD. The simple and terrible penance of these souls is that each must crawl round and round the Cornice bearing enormous slabs of rock that press him down, each according to the degree of his sin. The higher a soul tried to raise itself in its pride, the more it is crushed to earth. For pride is a weight of worldliness and bears down the spirit, and therefore it is crushed under the rock of the earth. It is, moreover, the primal sin and the father of all other sins, for the proud man seeks to set himself up as God, and therefore his soul, here, is crushed agonizingly into the very dust until it has suffered itself clean and may rise free of the weight it has placed upon itself.

  Canto XI

  THE FIRST CORNICE

  The Proud

  As the souls of the Proud creep near, the Poets hear them recite a long and humble prayer based on the Paternoster. When the prayer is ended, Virgil asks one of the souls, hidden from view under its enormous burden, the way to the ascent. The sinner, who identifies himself as OMBERTO ALDOBRANDESCO, instructs the Poets to follow along in the direction the souls are crawling. He recites his history in brief, and it becomes clear that Dante means him to exemplify PRIDE OF BIRTH. The conversation between Dante and Omberto is overheard by ODERISI D’AGOBBIO, who turns in pain and speaks to Dante, explaining his sin of PRIDE OF TALENT, the avidity of the artist for pre-eminence. Oderisi also points out the soul that struggles along just ahead of him as PROVENZANO SALVANI, once war lord of Siena, who is being punished for PRIDE OF TEMPORAL POWER, though he has been advanced toward his purification in recognition of a single ACT OF GREAT HUMILITY performed in order to save the life of a friend.

  Oderisi concludes with a DARK PROPHECY OF DANTE’S EXILE from Florence.

  Our Father in Heaven, not by Heaven bounded

  but there indwelling for the greater love

  Thou bear’st Thy first works in the realm first-

  founded,

  hallowed be Thy name, hallowed Thy Power

  by every creature as its nature grants it

  to praise Thy quickening breath in its brief hour.

  Let come to us the sweet peace of Thy reign,

  for if it come not we cannot ourselves

  attain to it however much we strain.

  And as Thine Angels kneeling at the throne

  offer their wills to Thee, singing Hosannah,

  so teach all men to offer up their own.

  Give us this day Thy manna, Lord we pray,

  for if he have it not, though man most strive

  through these harsh wastes, his speed is his delay.

  As we forgive our trespassers the ill

  we have endured, do Thou forgive, not weighing

  our merits, but the mercy of Thy will.

  Our strength is as a reed bent to the ground:

  do not Thou test us with the Adversary,

  but deliver us from him who sets us round.

  This last petition, Lord, with grateful mind,

  we pray not for ourselves who have no need,

  but for the souls of those we left behind.

  —So praying godspeed for themselves and us,

  those souls were crawling by under such burdens

  as we at times may dream of. Laden thus,

  unequally tormented, weary, bent,

  they circled the First Cornice round and round,

  purging away the world’s foul sediment.

  If they forever speak our good above,

  what can be done for their good here below

  by those whose will is rooted in God’s love?

  Surely, we should help those souls grow clear

  of time’s deep stain, that each at last may issue

  spotless and weightless to his starry sphere.

  “Ah, so may Justice and pity soon remove

  the load you bear, that you may spread your wings

  and rise rejoicing to the Perfect Love—

  help us to reach the stairs the shortest way,

  and should there be more than one passage, show us

  the one least difficult to climb, I pray;

  for my companion, who is burdened still

  with Adam’s flesh, grows weak in the ascent,

  though to climb ever higher is all his will.”

  I heard some words in answer to my Lord’s,

  but could not tell which of those souls had spoken,

  nor from beneath which stone. These were the words:

  “Your way is to the right, along with ours.

  If you will come with us, you will discover

  a pass within a living person’s powers.

  And were I not prevented by the stone

  that masters my stiff neck and makes me keep

  my head bowed to the dust as I move on,

  I would look up, hoping to recognize

  this living and still nameless man with you,

  and pray to find compassion in his eyes.

  I was Italian. A Tuscan of great fame—

  Guglielmo Aldobrandesco—was my father.

  I do not know if you have heard the name.

  My ancient lineage and the hardihood

  my forebears showed in war, went to my head.

  With no thought that we all share the one blood

  of Mother Eve, I scorned all others so

  I died for it; as all Siena knows,

  and every child in Campagnatico.

  I am Omberto, and my haughty ways

  were not my ruin alone, but brought my house

  and all my followers to evil days.

  Here until God be pleased to raise my head

  I bear this weight. Because I did not do so

  among the living, I must among the dead.”

  I had bowed low, better to know his state,

  when one among them—not he who was speaking—

  twisted around beneath his crushing weight,

  saw me, knew me, and cried out. And so

  he kept his eyes upon me with great effort

  as I moved with those souls, my head bowed low.

  “Aren’t you Od’risi?” I said. “He who was known

  as the honor of Agobbio, and of that art

  Parisians call illumination?”

  “Brother,” he said, “what pages truly shine

  are Franco Bolognese’s. The real honor

  is all his now, and only partly mine.

  While I was living, I know very well,

  I never would have granted him first place,

  so great was my heart’s yearning to excel.

  Here pride is paid for. Nor would I have been

  among these souls, had I not turned to God

  while I still had in me the power to sin.

  O gifted men,
vainglorious for first place,

  how short a time the laurel crown stays green

  unless the age that follows lacks all grace!

  Once Cimabue thought to hold the field

  in painting, and now Giotto has the cry

  so that the other’s fame, grown dim, must yield.

  So from one Guido has another shorn

  poetic glory, and perhaps the man

  who will un-nest both is already born.

  A breath of wind is all there is to fame

  here upon earth: it blows this way and that,

  and when it changes quarter it changes name.

  Though loosed from flesh in old age, will you have