Explication:
Reading: W&H: 1377-1522, Inferno.

Dante's journey of salvation is universal.  The opening suggest the usual European experience of learning about religion in childhood & being pious as a child.  Pubescence opens new worlds & adult  habits blunt the sharpness of religious ardor:
1.1     In the middle of the journey of our life [cf. mid-life crisis]
          I came to my senses in a dark forest,
          for I had lost the straight path.
1.10    I cannot tell how I entered it [the forest of unbelief],
          so heavy with slumber was I at the moment
          when I abandoned the true way.

Dante feels that  his life is preyed upon by 3 animals:
the leopard of lust
the lion of pride
the wolf of greed

His prayer for help is answered by the appearance of Virgil:
1.71     I lived in Rome under the good Augustus
           at the time of the false & lying gods

Dante nominates Virgil above Socrates or Aristotle as the model for what the mind can comprehend without the aid of revelation.  Why do you think Dante chooses Virgil as the greatest non-Christian mind of all history?  Although Virgil's Aeneid is in our text (pp. 991-1103), I chose to skip it.  So I obviously do not agree with Dante's choice.  Our Chat session will entertain this question: why did Dante choose Virgil as the greatest pagan mind?

Dante has second thoughts about undertaking the journey to salvation, especially in the company of someone as accomplished as Virgil.  He asks:
2.31      why should I go?  Who gants it?
            I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul
2.37      as a person unwills what he wills,
2.41      I delayed the undertaking

Virgil confesses that he envies Dante, because the Christian is given the opportunity to know what creation & time are all about.  In contrast, Virgil says:
2.52    I was among those who are in suspense
never able to fathom the ultimate reason why things happen as they do.  Moreover, Virgil suggests that personal accomplishments are insignificant in comparison to salvation, which is offered as a blessing.  The Virgin Mary, "who tempers harsh judgment" called Lucia (Illuminating Grace, i.e., faith), who called Beatrice (Revelation), who called Virgil to help save Dante:
2.106    Do you not see Death struggling with him
            on the river [of evil]

By the end of canto 2,  the 3 predator beasts have been replaced by:
2.124    3 such holy ladies [who]
            care for you in the court of Heaven

I suppose everyone recognizes the motto over the gates of hell:
426    Abandon every hope, you who enter here.
The point is that there is no exit, no way out, no reprieve.  Superficially, it sounds like Dante's hell resembles Homer's Hades where AK's complains that the "dimwitted dead are camped forever (OD 11.527).  But Dante has something else in mind when he says that hell is full of:
3.16    woeful people
          who have lost the good of the intellect
What good is the intellect?  It's function is to guide you to paradise.  If you end up in hell, the intellect has failed.

How do you know that you are in hell?  You hear foreign languages spoken!
3.25    Diverse tongues, horrible languages,
          words of pain, accents of rage,
          voices loud & hoarse, & the sounds of blows
          made a tumult which moved forever

Here is another of often quoted lines from the Inferno:
3.55    I never would have believed
          that death could have undone so many.

Who is in Limbo?  Unbaptised babies & virtuous pagans, including: "Homer, the sovereign poet," Latin authors, Hector, Aeneas, & Caesar (notice that these 3 are together), "the Master of Knowing" (Aristotle), Socrates, Plato & a host of presocratic philosophers.  I am shocked to find 2 Muslims, Avicenna & Averroes, because Dante consigns Muhammad to hell as a kind of schismatic.

In the first mild room of hell, we find:
5.38    carnal sinners . . . condemned
           who subject their reason to desire

Among those condemned to this level are: Dido (Queen of Carthage who committed suicide when Aeneas left her), Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Achilles, & Paris.  The more pedestrian prototype for these sinners are a pair of lovers who failed to work through the process of courtly love:
5.127    One day for our delight we were reading
            about Lancelot, how love constrained him;
            alone we were & without any suspicion.
            Several times that reading made our glances meet
            & changed the color of our faces;
            but one moment alone overcame us.

One of the lessons illustrated here is that every act in this world has incalculable effects in the next world.  You might be virtuous every day of your life but one.  If you die on that one bad day, you end up in hell.

Like all sinners, gluttons get what they want.  When they were alive, they subordinated spiritual matters to material concerns.  They considered the body more important than the soul.  Now they endure assaults on all their refined tastes.  Pelted by cold rain, their region of hell stinks & is noisy:
6.13     Cerberus, the fierce & cruel beast [a 3-headed dog]
           barks doglike with three throats

Dante offers a medieval theory of economics, believing that:
7.79      to transfer vain wealth in due time
            from people to people . . . [is]
            beyond the intervention of human intelligence.
7.85      Your knowledge is of no avail against her [Lady Fortune]

Dante also seems to subscribe to Aristotle's ethics that recognizes 3 moral positions in regard to any virtue: a deficiency, an excess, & the balance point.  In regard to money, Dante couples misers with profligates -- both deserving of hell for being fiscally irresponsible.

How do you know you are in hell?
8.68    the City of Dis [Satan[ draws near
          . . . already I discern its mosques

After passing through a gate into the deeper regions of hell, Dante encounters more sinners whose vice was money:
11.95     usury offends
             divine goodness
11.106   if you recall
             the early part of Genesis,
             man should earn his living & prosper
             [by the sweat of his brow].
             & because the usurer takes another way,
             he scorns Nature [natural law]

The violent are condemned to simmer in:
11.46    the river of blood
            . . . in which are boiled
            those who through violence harm others.
When the condemned dare to rise above the blood, they become a target for centaurs:
1170     Chiron, the teacher of Achilles,
            & the other [centaur] is Pholus, who was so full of rage.
            Around the ditch they go by thousands
            shooting shades that rise from the blood
            father than their sins allow.

The Wizard of Oz borrowed the idea of sentient trees from Dante's Christian suicides.  Because they rejected the bodies that God gave them, they are condemned to spend eternity as trees:
13.107  in the sad wood [forest where] our bodies will be hung
            on the branches of our injurious souls [which take the form of trees]

Flatters are:
18.112    down in the ditch
              . . . plunged in excrement
              which seemed to have come from human privies.
The idea is that their mouths were full of this in life (figuratively speaking), so it is now appropriate that they spend eternity literally "plunged in excrement."

We Texans probably have theories about where oil came from.  Dante has a theory as well.  He suggests that corrupt popes, guilty of simony, are compressed into oil!  The joke here is based on:
Matthew 16.18    thou art Peter, & upon this rock I will build my church

Simonists who:
19.3   prostitute the things of God
         for gold & silver
find themselves stuffed into holes & cracks & fissures in rock.  Only their feet protrude, serving as something like lamp wicks:
19.25    The soles of the feet of all were on fire
Below the pope whose feet stick out:
19.73    under my head, the others
            who preceded me in simony are compressed,
            squeezed into the fissures of the rock.
They must become oil!  In any case, they were attached to the rock instead of considering it to be an instrument of salvation.  So they got what they wanted.  They will never be drilled out of the rock.

I don't know about you, but as a professor at an institution of higher education, I am content to find the astrologers & magicians in hell:
20.13    for their faces were turned to the rear,
            & each was obliged to move backward,
            since seeing ahead was denied them.
20.38    because he wished to see too far ahead,
            he looks behind, & goes backward.

Dante puts Tiresias on this level!  You remember that Tiresias finally got Creon to recognize his pride & change his mind in regard to Antigone.  Even if Tiresias' counsel was too late to save Antigone & all the associated victims, clearly Tiresias view was wise.  Why does Dante put him in hell?  Apparently for his/her sex change!  More likely, Dante put him here because, in Dante's view, Tiresias was a false prophet or soothsayer.  He would have to be since the only authentic prophet, from Dante's view, would have to be a Hebrew or Christian.
20.40    See Tiresias who changed his semblance
            when he became from man, a woman,
            transforming all his members

Those who take bribes are called barrators (not to be confused with lawyers, who are also called barristers):
21.42    for money, a "no" becomes a "yes.".

Their punishment is to languish in pitch or boiling oil/asphalt.  The devils caution:
21.49    Here you do not swim as in the Serchio!
            So, unless you want to feel our hooks,
            don't show yourself above the pitch!
            Here you must dance [i.e., take bribes] under cover
            & pilfer secretly if you can!

Dante says:
22.16    I was attentive to the pitch
22.25    &, as at the edge of the water of a ditch,
            frogs lie with just their muzzles out,
            . . . so, on every side, the sinners lay
            . . . & Graffiacane . . .
            hooked his pitchy locks, & pulled him out [to skin him]
22.71    & with his prong seized his arm
            & tearing it, carried off a sinew.

This victim let criminals go for bribes:
22.85    money he took, & let them off quietly

Hypocrites, a "painted people," wear heavy gowns:
23.61    they wore capes . . .
            cut in the style
            of those worn by the monks of Cluny,
            outwardly gilded, so that they dazzled,
            but within of lead, & so heavy

Even though Dante attempts to be something like a systematic theologian to give the most comprehensive & unified view of the next world, he is eclectic.  We have already seen him tacitly rely on Aristotle's ethics.  Here he seems to echo Homer on the notion of fame.  Virgil says:
24.46   Now you must free yourself from sloth,
           . . . for, sitting on down
           or lying under covers, no one cames to fame,
           without which whoever consumes his life
           leaves such vestige of himself on earth
           as smoke in air or foam on water.

Such ego formation has no ground in Christianity where the model is Paul who said, "I live not, but Christ in me."

One of the scariest scenes in the Inferno is "The Metamorphosis of Thieves" in canto 25.  The sinner makes the mistake of giving the finger to God:
25.1    the thief
          raised both hands, making the [obscene] sign of the fig,
          & shouting, "Take that, God, for at Thee I point them!"
25.48  As I kept my eyes on them, a serpent [Cianfa]
          with 6 legs darted in front of one [sinner]
          & fastened itself wholly to him.
          With its middle feet it clasped his belly
          & with those in front seized his arms;
          then it set its fangs in both his cheeks.
          It spread its hind feet over his thighs

Do you think the makers of the Aliens movies read this passage?  Dante's monster doesn't parasitically gestate inside the victim, but melts & fuses together with the shade, ending up by trading places:
25.70    The 2 heads had already fused into one . . .
            All the former features were blotted out:
            the perverse image seemed 2 & none
25.101  . . . face to face so that both forms
            were ready to exchange their substance.
            The 2 responded to each other in such a way
            that the serpent made a fork of its tail,
            & the wounded shade drew its feet together.
            The legs & the thighs united,
            so that in a little while there was no sign
            you could see of the joining.
            I saw the arms withdraw through the armpits
25.133  his tongue which had been undivided
            & apt for speech, split; & the forked tongue
            united . . .
            The soul that had become a brute
            fled hissing through the ditch.
The lizard now takes the shape of the shade/man.

We find Odysseus/Ulysses in the next canto.  Again Dante's version of classical literature is not accurate.  He puts Ulysses in hell for destroying Troy, which was the precursor or ancestor city to Rome.  Dante makes Ulysses confess:
27.94    neither fondness for my son, nor pity
            for an old father, nor the love for Penelope
            . . . could overcome in me the desire I had
            to gain experience of the world
            & of the vices & the worth of men.
Apparently, curiosity & ambition land Ulysses in hell!  Notice how medieval this sounds.  The Renaissance will soon reverse this judgment, sailing off to steal so much gold from the New World (Mexico, Peru) that in 100 years the gold in Europe doubled.

Muhammad is in Dante's hell for being a "Sower of Discord" or a kind of Christian schismatic or Reformation heretic.  Because he sought to split Christianity (in Dante's outlook), Muhammad is himself:
28.24   split from his chin down to where wind is broken.
            His entrails hung between his legs,
            the vital parts appeared with the foul sack
            which makes excrement of what is swallowed.
& if the body heals or grows back together:
28.37    A devil is here behind us who cuts us
            thus cruelly with the edge of his sword,
            reopening all the wounds.

You know Dante's version of how oil is made.  Here is his explanation of thunder:.
31.43    the horrible giants [Titans], whom Jove [Jupiter/Zeus] still threatens
            when he thunders in the heavens

Dante provides a humorous theory of evolution:
31.49    when Nature gave up the art
            of producing these [giant[ creatures she did well
            to provide Mars of such agents;
            & if she does not repent for elephants
            & whales, whoever looks closely [into the earlier case of giants/Titans]
            will hold her more discreet & just

Dante & Virgil finally reach the bottom of hell, where the temperature sudden reverses.  The bottom of hell is full of ice, suggesting cold blooded treachery & deceit.  We learn that some people are so evil that their is plucked out of their body before their fated time of death.  A demon substitutes to allow the body to meet its fated death:
33.130    its body is taken from it by a demon
               who afterward controls the flesh
               until its allotted years have passed..

Once again this is Greek rather than Christian -- the notion that one is given a fate at birth.

Satan is:
34.28      The emperor of the dolorous realm
              [who] from mid-breast protruded from the ice

In a nightmare mirror image of the trinity, Satan has 3 heads:
34.55     In each mouth he chewed a sinner with his teeth

We are not surprised to find Judas Iscariot in one mouth.  We are surprised to find Brutus & Cassius nominated as the next worst sinners of all time!  Attila the Hun:
12.34 who was a scourge on earth
is hardly roasting at all back in the 7th circle (p. 1433).

What makes Brutus & Cassius so evil?  They conspired to murder Caesar.  Because Rome was both the center of the European cultural world in the days of the Roman Empire & then the center of Christendom, we can almost imagine Dante replacing at least one of those conspirators with Martin Luther, who 2 centuries later (1517) sought to topple the majesty of Catholic Rome.

Somehow the scene with Satan is both too short & less than overwhelming.  Not only are we not very scared, Dante & Virgil crawl around on:
34.73     the shaggy sides
             & descended from tuft to tuft
             between the tangled hair & the frozen crust.

This Satan does not seem to be an awesome beast & certainly not a protean & glib liar, expert at laying traps for the unwary.  Perhaps this is intentional.  In Milton's Paradise Lost, most readers find Satan to be the most interesting character.  Perhaps Dante recognized the problem in making evil fascinating & consciously sought to present Satan as dull & something of a common beast.  In any case, Dante & Virgil descend "by such stairs" down the back of Satan to find a crack in the ice through which they exit hell to enter Purgitorio whereupon down becomes up & Dante will begin to ascend from the center of the earth back to the crust.
 

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