Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

Started in Verona in 1308 and completed in Ravenna in 1321, the year Dante died, the Divine Comedy is divided into three canticas or books: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise). Each consists of thirty-three cantos, plus an initial canto, usually considered part of the Inferno, bringing the total number of cantos up to a hundred. In the days before the printing press, Dante’s Divine Comedy would have existed only as handwritten copies, very expensive and for the very few. Instead his epic poem was read aloud to groups of people. That entailed holding their attention by dramatic openings and cliff-hanger endings, and by maintaining a furious narrative drive. Dante did so by inventing the terza rima, an interwoven rhyme scheme which is forever tumbling forward. The 14,233 lines of the poem are arranged as tercets, that is groups of three, the first line of the tercet rhyming with the third, and the second line rhyming with the first and third lines of the following tercet – aba, bcb, cdc, ded, efe, and so on – each tercet announcing the one to come.

  In the Divine Comedy, the Roman poet Virgil guides Dante through Hell, a huge funnel-shaped pit running down to the centre of the Earth. No other living person can enter Hell, and nobody consigned to Hell can ever escape: it is a place of eternal punishment with no remedial element, where the condemned cannot profit from their dreadful experience.

  Virgil is the image of Human Wisdom, the best that man can become through his own strength without the grace of God, and so, excellent as he is, he cannot go beyond Purgatory. Instead Beatrice collects Dante in Purgatory, where souls are purged of the seven deadly sins and made fit to ascend into the presence of God in Paradise – which is where Beatrice now leads the poet.

  FIRST-PERSON ADVENTURE

  Dante’s revolution was to write the original first-person fiction. Instantly that turns his epic into an inquiry, and gives it a set of eyes that present us with a live feed from the moment he begins his journey on the night before Good Friday 1300. He ventures first into Hell, then up through Purgatory, and eventually, on the Wednesday after Easter, into Paradise. Dante is a master of images, dramatic and fantastic, yet always remains rooted in human experience. He pities, he admires, he quarrels, he weeps, he embraces; he shares and elicits emotions, even though his characters are dead.

  Images and phrases from the Divine Comedy pervade our culture. Botticelli, William Blake, John Flaxman and Gustave Doré have all illustrated his epic; it influenced Chaucer, the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites; and it continues to work its way through writers from T S Eliot to Seamus Heaney – and to Dan Brown. There is even a Dante’s Inferno computer game. Above all, there are those familiar terrible words inscribed on the Gate to Hell: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’.

  Dante called his work a Comedy because, instead of the doom of tragedy, his poem progressed from a dark beginning to hope and salvation. His first biographer and early great supporter, Giovanni Boccaccio, added the word Divine because of what he perceived to be the superhuman excellence with which it handled its redeeming purpose.

  The inspiration for his Divine Comedy began with Beatrice. Dante’s epic poem would be his final exaltation and deification of the woman he loved. As he recorded in his Vita Nuova – this would have been in about 1294, four years after her death – he suddenly beheld ‘a very wonderful vision’, presumably the vision of his great work, the complete Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, which decided him to write nothing more about Beatrice until he could do so in a more worthy fashion. ‘It is my hope’, he wrote, ‘that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman.’ For it is she who will lead him out of the errors of this world and into the divine presence.

  THE FUN OF HELL

  Though T S Eliot once said that the last cantos of the Paradiso were as good as poetry gets, Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Mis and therefore ought to know, claimed that the Purgatorio and the conceptual complexities of the Paradiso were beyond human comprehension: ‘We no longer recognise ourselves in the angels; the human eye was perhaps not made for so much sun, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring’. The best imagery, the most outlandish, terrifying or grimly amusing encounters, are found in the Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy. Dan Brown is far from being alone when he says that he focused on Hell ‘because it is the most fun’, or if not exactly fun, certainly irresistibly fascinating, which for an observer, if not a denizen, it is.

  The punishments meted out to sinners by Dante in the Inferno are known in Italian as contrapasso, that is suffering in a manner that contrasts with or resembles the sin itself. Take for example the astrologers, sorcerers and false prophets who have been consigned to Bolgia Four of the Eighth Circle. They have their heads twisted round facing their rear, so they have to walk backwards because they cannot see ahead of them. Then there is Count Ugolino in the Ninth Circle, who died of hunger after eating his own children and now spends eternity wiping his lips as he eats the brains of his co-conspirator in infamy. Or the delightful image of the pope in the Third Bolgia of the Eighth Circle with his head stuck into a hole, his legs waving in the air, awaiting the arrival of yet two more popes, simoniacs like himself, who will be shoved into his posterior. Or, for that matter, the lovers Francesca and Paolo, forever locked in their lustful embrace in the Second Circle of Hell.

  ‘A writhing pair of legs, which protruded upside down from the earth’. Dan Brown might well be describing this image of hell by Botticelli.

  * * *

  A Numerology of the Divine Comedy

  * * *

  3 books: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.

  9 circles of Hell.

  9 rings of Mount Purgatory.

  9 celestial bodies of Paradise.

  33 cantos per book

  (+1 canto introduction at the beginning of Inferno = 100 cantos)

  14,233 lines

  Terza rima: lines arranged in groups of 3, the first line rhyming with the third, the second line rhyming with the first and third of the following group of three: aba, bcb, cdc, ded. Each line with 11 syllables: 3 x 11 = 33

  3 = Trinity

  9 = Beatrice = Divine Love

  * * *

  SYMBOLS AND NUMBERS

  In addition to Dante’s powerful imagery, there is also his use of symbolism and numerology. Not for nothing do the last words of Dan Brown’s Inferno read, ‘The sky had become a glistening tapestry of stars’. He is following Dante’s Inferno, which ends with the words, ‘and thence we came forth to see again the stars’. Also Dante’s Purgatorio, whose last words are ‘pure and ready to mount to the stars’. And finally the Paradiso, which concludes with ‘the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’.

  For Dante, contemplating the injustice of his exile and refusing to return to Florence on humiliating terms, the stars were a solace. He could still gaze upon the mirrors of the sun and stars, he wrote, and contemplate, under any sky, the sweetest truths. To observe the circulation of the heavens and the regularity of that movement instilled admiration for the works of God. To look up at the stars was the beginning of the journey towards them. It was a step towards leaving the Earth behind and achieving unity with the divine. And that is what Dante does in his Divine Comedy; in the Paradiso he journeys with his beloved Beatrice far beyond the surface of this world, to the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn and finally to the outermost stars.

  FROM THE DARK WOOD TO THE GATE OF HELL

  The symbols begin right at the start of Dante’s Inferno. It is the eve of Good Friday and therefore the season of death and resurrection. But the date is significant in other ways; the year is 1300 and Dante is thirty-five, halfway through his allotted biblical span of life.

  In real life, as the 1,300th anniversary of the birth of Christ, 1300 was declared a jubilee year by Pope Boniface VIII, who promised full remission of sins to those who visited the Basilica of St Peter in Rome. Two hundred thousand pilgrims answered his call and lined the papacy’s pockets. In the following year Dante was sent as Florentine ambassador to Rome, met Pope
Boniface VIII, and witnessed corruption in the Church at first hand; for the sin of simony, Dante will assign Boniface to one of the deepest circles of Hell.

  Finding himself in the darkness of the wood of error, Dante realises he has strayed from the true path. Lost and confused, he seeks a way out. He lifts his eyes to the sunrise. The sun symbolises divine illumination; its rays touch the crest of a hill, the Mount of Joy, and he begins to climb. His way is blocked, however, by three beasts symbolising the sins of worldliness – the leopard of lust, the lion of pride and the she-wolf of avarice – and a fearful Dante is driven back into the dark wood.

  Dante and Virgil in the dark wood, as depicted by Corot.

  As Dante falls into despair, a figure appears, the shade of Virgil, the poet whom Dante most admires. Virgil is the author of the Aeneid, the first-century BC Latin epic poem recounting the journey of Aeneas from his escape at the fall of Troy to his founding of Rome. Along the way Aeneas has a dalliance with Queen Dido at Carthage and descends into the underworld, where he receives a vision of his own and Rome’s future.

  Virgil, who symbolises human reason, tells Dante there is no easy way out of the dark wood; the beasts of worldly sin will destroy him. Instead he must descend into Hell, which represents the recognition of sin, then climb through Purgatory, which symbolises the renunciation of sin. Only then can they arrive at the Mount of Joy and ascend into the light of God. Virgil will lead the way through Hell and Purgatory as far as Earthly Paradise. He cannot take Dante any farther; that is as far as Reason can go. But when Virgil disappears, a worthier spirit than himself will appear and show Dante the way into the divine presence.

  There is another reason, however, why Virgil cannot take Dante farther than Purgatory. According to the doctrinal requirements of the Church, Virgil can never enter into the divine light, into the love of God. Although a virtuous pagan, he is condemned to spend eternity in Limbo simply because he was born a bit too soon, before he could respond to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Dante repeatedly questions this, as in these lines that appear in the Paradiso (19:70–8).

  Suppose a man is born on the shore

  Of Indus, and is none who there can speak

  Of Christ, nor who can read, nor who can write;

  And all his inclinations and his actions

  Are good, so far as human reason sees,

  Without a sin in life or in discourse:

  He dies unbaptised and without faith;

  Where is this justice that condemns him?

  Where is his fault, if he does not believe?

  Quite simply, insists Dante, to condemn a pagan who was not able to become a Christian because there was no Christianity on offer, is wrong and stupid. Nevertheless, Dante will accept what the Church demands.

  By the evening of the first day – it is now Good Friday – Dante is tired and daunted by the journey still ahead. He feels himself unworthy of the promised vision of the divine. But now Virgil explains that he was sent by Beatrice, the woman Dante has loved since the age of nine. She has died and dwells in Paradise now, and symbolises divine love. Seeing Dante stumbling in fear and error, Beatrice descended to Virgil’s habitation in Limbo and asked him to show Dante the way. ‘Love moves me’, she tells Virgil. ‘Assist him so that I may be consoled.’ What is more, Beatrice has been sent with the prayers of the Virgin Mary, who symbolises compassion, and of St Lucia, symbolising divine light, and of Rachel, symbol of the contemplative life. Realising that such heavenly powers are concerned for the welfare of his soul, Dante’s spirits rise and he resumes his journey with Virgil in a mood of optimism and joy.

  The poets arrive at the Gate of Hell, above which Dante reads these words cut into stone:

  Through me the way is to the city dolent;

  Through me the way is to eternal dole;

  Through me the way among the people lost.

  Justice incited my sublime Creator;

  Created me divine Omnipotence,

  The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.

  Before me there were no created things,

  Only eterne, and I eternal last.

  Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

  The famous line is the last. But the centre three lines are critical to an understanding of Dante’s apparent view, which is an entirely theologically correct Christian view. They make the point that Hell is not the Devil’s domain, but that rather it is created by God. Far from being home to perverse and arbitrary punishments, it reflects divine justice and love. The word justice is important and appears seventy-one times in the Divine Comedy; everything in Hell, Purgatory and Paradise is an example of God’s justice. The universe is run by that justice; the only deviants are man, who has free will. But of course the punishments meted out in Dante’s Hell are Dante’s inventions, and the system he imposes is an allegorical one, the torment somehow matching the sin, usually in a highly figurative and imaginative way. Nevertheless, whoever the inventor of the punishments may be, Dante never doubts the good in God’s justice, even if he sometimes he feels pity at its effect – though at other times he is indifferent or even cheers the tormenters on.

  THE ANTEROOM OF HELL: THE OPPORTUNISTS

  As Virgil and Dante pass through the gate they hear the anguished cries of souls in torment. These are the opportunists, those who pursued neither good nor evil but only their own ever-changing interests. They are the pusillanimous, the people of no fixed purpose, displeasing to God and to everyone else. Dante remarks, ‘I never would have believed that Death had undone so many’. In this anteroom of Hell they forever chase a fluttering aimless banner and are themselves pursued by hornets and wasps which sting them, causing blood and putrefaction to dribble down their bodies which attracts feasting worms and maggots.

  Among the opportunists Dante recognises one in particular. ‘I beheld the shade of him / Who made through cowardice the great refusal’. This is Pope Celestine V, who became pope in 1294 but within months resigned the papacy for fear of contaminating his soul with worldly affairs and therefore his prospects for eternal salvation. Urging Celestine on was a priest called Benedetto who promptly filled his shoes as Pope Boniface VIII, Dante’s enemy. Celestine had been a saintly man, but Dante condemns him to the anteroom of Hell because his selfish concern for his own spiritual welfare opened the door to great evils in the Church.

  Dante and Virgil arrive at the River Acheron, which circles the rim of Hell, before descending deeper, but the monstrous boatman Charon refuses to ferry Dante across because he is not dead. Virgil forces Charon to take them, but Dante passes out in terror and does not awake until he reaches the other side.

  THE FIRST CIRCLE OF HELL: THE VIRTUOUS PAGANS

  Having crossed the River Acheron, Virgil and Dante stand on the brink of the great abyss. The poets descend into the First Circle, which is Limbo, the dwelling place of those who have not been baptised, including all the virtuous pagans born before the coming of Christ, and virtuous Muslims too (a number of Old Testament Jews, as well as other nameless Jews, were taken to Paradise by Jesus during his harrowing of Hell). They are not punished, but because they have not received salvation through Jesus, they cannot enter into the divine light of God.

  Virgil inhabits a more luminous part of Limbo and here he is greeted by the great poets of antiquity, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, who welcome Dante among their number, making him one of the six. With them he enters a noble castle and within that a green meadow, reminiscent of the Elysian Fields, known in the classical world as the paradise of the dead. Here he sees heroes such as Electra, Hector, Aeneas and Julius Caesar, also Saladin standing aloof and alone; the philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thales and Heraclitus among others; and men of science and mathematics, including Euclid, Galen, Hippocrates and Avicenna.

  Crossing the Acheron, courtesy of Charon the boatman.

  Then leaving their fellow poets behind, the six become two as Virgil and Dante venture deeper, to ‘where nothing shines’.

  THE S
ECOND CIRCLE OF HELL: LUST

  The Second Circle marks the beginning of Hell proper and its torments. As Dante and Virgil make their way round the dark ledge of the circle they are swept by a powerful whirlwind, caught up in which are the souls of those who surrendered reason to their lust. These sinners will never see the light of reason or know God. Among them are Helen of Troy and her abductor Paris, Cleopatra, Dido of Carthage, and Achilles because of his love for Polyxena, daughter of King Priam of Troy, which caused him to desert the Greeks and be murdered – this according to the version known to Dante – by Paris when he went to the temple to be married.

  Dante gives a lot of space and sympathy to the story of the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, who were murdered by Francesca’s husband in about 1286, and are forever locked together naked in Hell. When Francesca is able to pause long enough in the whirlwind to tell Dante something of her story, he is so overcome with pity that he faints. Francesca da Rimini was a contemporary of Dante but her fame, and that of Paolo, greatly increased after featuring in the Inferno; the French sculptor Rodin’s The Kiss was originally called Francesca da Rimini.

  Rodin’s The Kiss took its inspiration from Dante’s Inferno.

  THE THIRD CIRCLE OF HELL: GLUTTONY

  A great storm of putrefaction amounting to stinking snow and freezing rain forever falls on those consigned to the Third Circle. The souls of the gluttonous sinners lie in the slush underfoot where the three-headed dog Cerberus rips them apart with his claws and teeth. The gluttons made nothing of their abilities in their lifetimes, they offered nothing to God; as they wallowed in food and drink, producing nothing but excreta, so now in Hell they themselves are reduced to garbage and filth. Dante’s system of punishments in his circles of Hell becomes clear: like for like; as one lived, so one suffers throughout eternity, though usually by grotesque analogy.