A MODERN GUIDE TO HELL
Although Dante was a medieval European Catholic, that’s not how I want you to think of him. More importantly, he was a brilliant man. He was also an army commander and politician with a wide range of worldly experience. He had intimate knowledge of men at the height of considerable power. He also knew some of the same men on the brink of humiliation, banishment, or death. He lived war. He knew political and personal betrayal. And he himself endured the most despicable betrayal, permanent banishment, for twenty years (1301-1321).
Human nature under these circumstances does not change so much because of culture, religion, science, knowledge, or creed. The dominant institution of his age was the Roman Church. Yet in Dante’s world, many men of power were not influenced in the slightest by the Church. There were even popes who openly laughed at its teachings.
Therefore, the hell that Dante draws is not one depicted by Church dogma. (In fact, one woman with a strict Christian upbringing in one of my classes recently told me that her mother forbade her to read the Comedy when she was young because "it’s blasphemous".) The hell that Dante draws comes from his own imagination, and from his intimate knowledge of human nature in a wide variety of permutations.
Moreover, the denizens of Dante’s hell lived their tortures on earth, not under the ground.
According to Cliff’s Notes on the INFERNO, "Dante said plainly...that the cantos tell the story of the state of souls after death...He did not mean, nor intend his readers to infer, that it was a literal story of a trip through hell" (Vergani 14). "Hell (or Purgatory or Paradise) is, therefore, the condition of the soul after death, brought to that point by the choices made during life" (italics are Vergani’s). Hell is a psychological state, not a physical place, and that’s exactly what Dante intended it to be. The "modern" reading is actually the one Dante intended, and the way he read the poem himself.
According to Marguerite Mills Chiarenza in The Divine Comedy: Tracing God’s Art (Twayne Critical Series): "Hell, as its gate states, is a place made by God...But the suffering and eternal pain of the lost souls within are of their own making...The various punishments of the damned turn out to be concrete versions of their choices in life, not just arbitrary consequences of their sins, but semantically tied to them. (For example) the storm that blows the souls who were ruled by their passions around and about exemplifies their failure to control their desires. The tombs that confine the heretics eternally are monuments to their denial of the idea of life after death."
In other words, Dante has only created vivid physical images of psychological states that inevitably deprive men of their humanity and cause them enormous self-inflicted pain. These errors have their effects no matter what God the sinner believes in, or whether he believes in God or not. Why? Because their pain is the logical result of a willingness to hurt others.
Some of you who took my English 252 course will find Dante’s views reminiscent of Tolstoy’s. Maybe this shows that great minds with diverse social experiences see the same structure to the rules governing human nature. At any rate, like Tolstoy, Dante believed that the Ten Commandments are unbreakable laws of nature, as real as the laws of physics. He believed that breaking these laws is not consistent with psychological health, and ultimately with sanity. And he believed that men can’t choose to ignore these laws, even by mutual agreement, without paying the price. Also like Tolstoy, he wrote his finest work to depict that process and convince us (and his political enemies) of its reality.
My goal is to get you to experience the relevance of this medieval text today. With that goal in mind, we’ll be reading only the most vivid and unchanging passages, skipping some of the literary and philosophical digressions. And although we’ll mention some traditional interpretations of the text, we’ll be recasting many of these interpretations in more modern psychological lingo. I think you’ll agree with me that hell works--that is, it seems logically necessary and real--either way.
WOOD OF CONFUSION; the three evil beasts
Most people experience at least two life crisis points, one in early adulthood and one in mid-life. These psychological crises cause confusion and sometimes profound anxiety. Most people experience these crises regardless of religious upbringing or cultural background.
The first of these is called an "identity crisis." At this point, a young person realizes that he does not know what sort of person he wants to become, what path he wants to follow and what values he wants to govern his life. Should he be no more nor less than what his parents were, or what they wanted him to be? Should he make his own changes? What does he want to keep and what does he want to lose? What changes does a changing society demand that he make to live a successful life in a new time or place?
The second of these is called an "integrity crisis." At this point, a person reviews how he has lived so far. He asks himself whether what he has become--sometimes by drifting wherever fortune took him--is what he really wanted or intended to be.
The crisis Dante describes in the INFERNO is an integrity crisis. His "dark wood of error" (or "wood of confusion") is a sudden state of anxiety brought on by the realization that he’s not the person he wanted to become. The memory that comes to guide him is a memory from earliest childhood, that of a young girl he once admired. The boy he once was wanted to be loved by this girl. But did he really become a man this little girl would have loved, if she were still alive today? Since he doesn’t know, he imagines that she "sends" him the voice of a guide in the form of the hero he most admired as a boy. In his case, this is the Roman poet Virgil, whom he esteems for leading a nearly perfect life on the strength of common sense (reason) alone, without any Church, conventional moral teachings, or spiritual guidance.
The little girl and the boyhood hero tell him that he has in fact betrayed his ideals, and he has not become the person he dreamed of being. (That’s what they usually say. As Joseph Campbell says, life is a wasteland, and few people are vital enough to "live their bliss.") Dante has strayed from the path, and if he doesn’t find it again, his life will end in the hell of despair and personal disappointment. But what is Dante referring to here? He’s not talking about his political banishment.
Again according to Cliff’s Notes, "When Dante speaks of having strayed from the right path, the reader should not assume that Dante has committed any specific sin or cime. Throughout the poem Dante is advocating that man must consciously strive for righteousness and morality. (Italics are Vergani’s.) Man can often become so involved with the day-to-day affairs of living that he will gradually relapse into a sort of lethargy in which he strays from the very strict paths of morality" (Vergani 19).
Vergani continues: "For Dante, man must always be aware intellectually of his own need to perform the righteous act. Sin, therefore, is a perversion of the intellect. When Dante says he has strayed and he does not know how he came to this position, it simply means that by gradual degrees he has lapsed into a kind of indifference and now this must be corrected. Thus the dark wood typifies a human life where every waking moment is not consciously devoted to morality."
But by this point in a man’s life (Dante is 35, a modern man would probably be 45 or 50), it isn’t so easy to find your way back to the right path. You may be able to see it, but social obstacles as real as physical barriers obstruct your effort to return. Joseph Campbell calls these social obstacles "the demands of the System." The System, for Campbell, is evil. The man who serves it is Darth Vader; the man who resists is Luke Skywalker. Remember?
Dante is uniquely positioned to understand what Campbell called "the System." He was a total creature of politics, at the height of success within the System, when he was suddenly shut out of the System forever. This might have seemed unlucky for him at first, but ultimately it was lucky for him and certainly is for us. He looks back on the System in horror and sees what the men who serve it--himself included--let themselves become. (Imagine Nixon’s Watergate cronies in the late 80s, or the residents of the Clinton White House some ten years from now.)
For Dante these worldly social demands destroy man’s humanity and turn him into a beast. So in his poem, they’re represented by the three evil beasts, the she-wolf, the leopard, and the lion.
According to Cliff’s Notes: "The three beasts, referred to in Jeremiah 5:6, are sometimes considered to have a double symbolism. Allegorically, the leopard is worldly pleasure, politically it is the city of Florence, so given to worldly pursuits; the lion is ambition, politically the royal house of France, which sought to rule Italy; finally, the she-wolf symbolizes avarice, and politically is the papacy, which Dante viewed as an avaricious religious entity seeking more and more secular power" (Vergani 20). There are, of course, many other interpretations. Among them are these: that the beasts symbolize lechery (she-wolf), pride(lion), and covetousness(leopard); or the sins of incontinence or weakness (she-wolf), violence (lion), and fraud (leopard), which are punished in the three divisions of Hell. Whatever they are, they stand firmly in the way of Dante’s salvation" (Vergani 20).
THE LAW OF DESCENT: This is best stated simply at the outset. Then the journey will verify it or call it into question. Sins are ranked not in the order of seriousness of the damage done to the victim, but in order of damage done to the INTELLECT of the SINNER. Why? We’ll discuss this again at the bottom of hell. By then it may make more sense. But for now, let me share a few words of Chiarenzi’s on this subject.
"The main structure of Hell begins after Limbo with those who lost their souls through incontinence, or weakness...The sins in the early cantos are sins of appetite, immoral actions committed because the will gave in to the desire for a lesser good to the sacrifice of a greater one and, ultimately, traded everlasting fulfillment of all desires for the satisfaction of a momentary passion...
"The great difference between these sinners and those found lower in Hell is marked concretely by the walls of Dis. Within Dis, another name for the city of Hell, are punished the violent and fraudulent. Violence and fraud are subdivisions of malice, which includes all sins committed with the intent of doing evil. The will of the souls within the walls of Dis was corrupted to the point that their purpose was to do what was wrong, not necessarily because it was wrong, but at least despite its wrongness. If a man strikes a man because he has lost his temper, the goal of his action may be to vent his anger, not to harm the other. But if his goal is to harm the other, his sin is not one of passion, but of malice. The more calculated the malice, the greater the corruption (of intellect) and degree of sin. Hence the further division between sins of violence (less calculated) and sins of fraud (more calculated)," ending in treachery (most calculated of all).
To show how the corruption of the intellect evovles from a seemingly innocent surrender to weakness, Chiarenza uses the example of Francesca (Canto 5, pages 985-7):
"We are not presented with a woman whose major concern was sensual gratification, who degraded herself in an undiscriminating pursuit of pleasure, but with a woman who gave in to the most natural of all desires, who sought love and comfort and closeness...But if the reader, receptive only to the beauty of Francesca’s natural desires, fails to see the insidious nature of her story, then he shares not only her desires, but her tragic self-deception as well. In fact, influenced by their romantic reading, Paolo’s and Francesca’s imaginations transformed what they clearly knew to be adultery...into the inevitable result of an irresistible love. By...imagining their own passion exalted beyond the domain of moral judgment, they were able to rationalize their desire as something uncontrollable and their surrender to it as guiltless...But when the conclusion comes, it is not justification but tragedy: ‘Love brought us to one death.’
DETAILED MAP & GUIDE
TO READING ASSIGNMENTS
Wood of Confusion: The path to cultivation
of a humane character is blocked by temptations to three distractions. Instead
of being true to yourself, you live for:
Human reason (Virgil) is sent by a memory of
innocence (Beatrice) to guide man through depression & despair (Hell), to
which these distractions naturally lead.
READ: Canto 1, lines 1-73, pages 968-70
Step down
The Vestibule of Hell: the Uncommitted (the
Opportunists). Pursuit of self-gratification leads first to the reluctance to
inconvenience yourself or risk loss of face in order to side against evil. You
may not do evil yourself, but neither will you oppose it in others. Rationale:
It's none of my business. I was only following orders. Punishment: You run
about aimlessly chasing a blank flag, stung by hornets, your blood sucked by
maggots. Not even hell will have you.
READ: Canto 3, lines 1-66, pages 975-77
Step down
Limbo: the Virtuous Pagans. Since they
didn't hurt others, they suffer no pain. Since they taught peace, they know
peace. Since they didn't know truth (Christianity), eternity for them is sort
of like always being in school. But hey, that's okay; they liked school.
READ: Canto 4, pages 979-983
Step down
The 4 shelves of the weak. Highest shelf:
Illicit lovers. Their sin is the least serious in hell because they sought
pleasure for themselves AND for another. But they still rationalized wrong-doing
and cared nothing for their victims. (See comments of Chiarenza on Paolo &
Francesca, from "A MODERN GUIDE TO HELL," page 4.) Rationale: We
couldn't help ourselves. Punishment: You are continually blown about in the
equivalent of a tornado, or the slipstream of a jet (as you were blown about by
your passions in life).
READ: Canto 5, lines 1-105, pages 983-6
Little step down….
The 2nd shelf of the weak:
Gluttons. This sin is more serious because it gratifies the self alone, but at
least it's the gratificaton of a natural appetite (for food). Rationale: You
only live once. Punishment: In life you produced only your own waste (garbage),
so now you live in it.
READ: Canto 6, lines 1-60, pages 987-8
Little step down
The 3rd shelf of the weak:
Prodigals, the Greedy (Hoarders & Wasters). These sins are more serious
because in addition to being aimed only at gratifying the self, they also aim
to gratify artificial rather than natural desires. (Compulsive shoppers are
wasters; misers are hoarders.) Rationale: If I have it I'll use it; therefore I
need it. OR: If I don't have it I don't need it. Punishment: Hoarders fight
wasters in an eternal, and eternally pointless, battle.
READ: Canto 7, lines 1-60
Little step down
The 4th shelf of the weak: The
wrathful & sullen (misanthropes). These are the most serious sinners among
the weak because they alone cultivated a dislike for other individuals, for
human society, and for life itself. Other weak sinners were merely indifferent
to others; the wrathful and sullen have taken the first step down a slippery
slope; their sour disposition is the first step toward malice. Rationale:
People are no damn good. Punishment: In life they sought to uncover the faults
of others and slung mud and angry words at others; now they're submerged naked
in their own boiling mud.
READ: Canto 7, lines 100-132, page 993
Step down
THE WALL
In Canto 8, which you need not read, the
Pagan boatman Phlegyas ferries Dante and Virgil from the merely wrathful on
impulse down toward those of a more active ill will, who thought about and
intended harm to others. These are all sinners of malice, not weakness. First
among them are the heretics. (Those who disputed church teaching, which Dante
regarded as the Word of God.) Below the heretics, the malicious are divided
into two camps, the Violent (Lions) and the Fraudulent (Leopards).
READ: Canto 11, lines 1-69, pages 998-9
Down, down, down…
The 1st camp of the malicious:
The violent. They're bad, to be sure, but since they only wanted to destroy
bodies, they aren't as bad as the fraudulent, who sought to corrupt minds &
souls rather than just destroy bodies. The violent are further divided into the
violent against others, the violent against themselves, and the violent against
God/Nature.
First troop of the violent: The violent
against others (tyrants & murderers). Rationale: Might makes right; to the
victor go the spoils. Punishment: They shed rivers of blood, so now they swim
in the blood they shed.
READ: Canto 12, lines 44-75, pages 1002-3
Little step down
Second troop of the violent: The violent
against themselves (suicides). Rationale: Whose life is it anyway? Punishment:
As they sought to destroy their own bodies, they are denied a body in death; as
they sought to end the journey of their lives, they are rooted in one place in
the landscape of their blackest hour.
READ: Canto 13, lines 22-43 and lines 85-130, pages 1005-8
Little step down
Third troop of the violent: The violent
against God/Nature. (Blasphemers, Sodomites, & Usurers.) Blasphemers are
those who denied the existence of God. (Heretics merely denied the Church's
teachings about God.) Sodomites engaged in what Dante's society regarded as
unnatural sex acts of any kind (including homosexuality). Usurers included
anyone who lent money for profit, even at a reasonable or low rate of interest.
(Dante's society was pre-capitalist; it was considered wrong that money should
make money. They would have found the stock market unnatural too.) Punishment:
As they defiled the sweetness of nature and the gifts of God, they must now
live in a barren landscape devoid of nourishment, their only rain a burning
fire. In other words, they're all confined to a desert underneath a burning
rain of fire; the blasphemers must lie prone in it, the sodomites must run
around in it, and the usurers must huddle crouched in it, their eyes fixed upon
their purses. (We don't hear that detail about the usurers until Canto 17,
lines 30-60, page 1018.)
READ: Canto 14, lines 11-39, page 1010
Step down…
They fly on the back of Geryon, the Beast of
Fraud, down a great cliff.
READ: Canto 17, lines 1-30, pages 1017-18
THE ABYSS
The Malebolge (Evil Ditches and/or Pouches
full of Evil)
Only some of these are covered in your
textbook. I'll tell you what happens to some of the others if you want, or you
can access the Cliff's Notes on line.
Bolgia One: Panderers (procurers, pimps) and
seducers. Punishment: In life they goaded others into sin, so now devils goad
them into punishment. (They run around chased by devils.)
READ: Canto 18, lines 36-100, pages 1022-3
Little step down
Bolgia Two: The Flatterers. Punishment: They
led people into error by feeding them a line of bullshit, so now they're mired
in the shit they spoke in life.
READ: Canto 18, lines 100-126, pages 1023-4
Little step down
Bolgia Three: The Simoniacs. (Those were
clerics who sold the favors of the Church; for example, they might have sold
the right to divorce, which was normally forbidden, or they might have taken
money for allegedly influencing God to get you into heaven more quickly after
death.) Punishment: They're placed headfirst in stone monuments which are, in
effect, inverted baptismal fonts. Only their feet show, and these are scorched
by burning oil like the holy oil used in sacraments. Each time their bisop or
papal seats are assumed after their deaths by someone else who took money for
the Church's favors, the new sinner drops into their slot and they disappear
forever inside the rock of the monuments.
READ: Canto 19, lines 13-78, pages 1024-6.
Little step down
Bolgia Eight: The Evil Counselors.
Punishment: In life they used the gifts of God, such as cleverness, leadership,
charisma, and skill at speech making, to lead others astray into death or ruin.
As they hid their true natures and agendas from their victims in life, so they
are now hidden inside giant flames. Since they usually sinned by abusing the
gift of speech, the flames of most of the evil counselors have formed into
giant tongues. The most famous resident of this Bolgia is Odysseus or Ulysses,
the hero of the Odyssey which we'll be reading.
READ: Canto 26, lines 25-132, pages 1029-31.
Little step down
Bolgia Nine: The Sowers of Discord. These
differ from both the heretics & the blasphemers in that they not only
denied some of the main teachings of the Church, but preached their
"errors" to others and gathered followers. Punishment: Their own
bodies are split and mangled the way they split and mangled the
"body" of God's Church, from Dante's perspective. The most famous
resident of this bolgia is--you guessed it--Mohammed. (Mahomet)
READ: Canto 28, lines 23-42 & lines 112-143., pages 1033, 1035-6.
Way, way, way,
way down down down
THE PIT OF ICE (COCYTUS)
(You've heard of the
pits. Now you're here.)
The bolgias of the fraudulent, above the
pit, contain those who schemed to gain something for themselves even at the
expense of great pain to others, such as the brother who sold his little sister
as a whore. Note that the number of possible sins and types of sinners has
multiplied as the descent continues and the soul loses all intellectual control
of itself.
Malebolge contains those who schemed to
exploit others for their own advantage, not caring how badly others were ruined
in the process. But there's something still worse, still further down in hell.
At the very bottom of hell are those whose main purpose was to destroy others,
even if there was no advantage to themselves--in fact, even if they also
destroyed themselves in the process.
These souls have lost all human connection,
even the heat of wrath. A weird inversion takes place at this point. Most of
hell is hot with anger, rage, passion. But the bottom of hell is frozen in ice.
These are people who have utterly destroyed their own humanity, even their
capacity to have negative feelings. At the bottom of hell, they who once lived
only for their own advantage have lost interest even in that advantage, and in
themselves. They're motivated only by hatred, especially of the good. The
result is total paralysis. There's no action they can take that will bring even
momentary happiness to themselves or to anyone else. In life they reached a
nadir of being absolutely frozen psychologically, and so they're frozen
physically in hell. (This is also the fate of Satan himself.)
CAINA: THE
FROZEN WHO BETRAYED THEIR KIN. Caina is
named for Cain, who killed his brother Abel in "Genesis." Here we
read the story of two medieval brothers known to Dante who fought and killed
one another over their inheritance.
READ: Canto 32, lines 22-60, pages 1037-8. Also read a general description of
the residents of Caina/Cocytus, lines 70-80, page 1038.
Step in and
down….
ANTENORA: THE
TREACHEROUS TO COUNTRY. Here we read the
story of Count Ugolina & Archbishop Ruggieri.
READ: Canto 32, lines 124-40, page 1040; and Canto 33, lines 1-80, pages
1040-2.
Step in and
down….
PTOLOMEA:
TREACHEROUS TO GUESTS AND HOSTS. Here we
read the story of Manfred, a monk who murdered his brother at a banquet.
READ: Canto 33, lines 92-152, pages 1043-4
Step in and
down….
JUDECCA:
TREACHEROUS TO THEIR MASTERS---AND SATAN. Here
we read the story of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, and Cassius and
Brutus, who betrayed Julius Ceasar. And we see the giant figure variously known
as Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, and the Great Worm of Evil, the spirit who rules
all Hell.
READ: Canto 34, lines 1-81, pages 1045-6
THE POSITION OF SATAN IN
HELL
We had a long discussion in one class about
whether Dante thought the world was flat or round. I maintained that Dante's
description of climbing up and down the body of Satan is surprisingly
inconsistent with the view, then dominant, that the earth is flat. Only a round
earth, I thought, could possibly lead to the description given in lines 104-120
of Canto 34 (page 1047). But one student described a possible flat-earth Satan
that could be depicted here. In class we'll see diagrams, for what they're
worth.