Infernal Insight

I feel like something of a fraud teaching Dante’s Inferno for two reasons: 1. I must rely upon an English translation to do so effectively. I can tell a bolgia from a boulder and contrapasso from contraception, but my Italian is primitive at best. 2. I do not take the metaphysical or theological foundations of Dante’s work very seriously, insofar as I have a fraught relationship with Catholicism and remain obstinately agnostic. In spite of these considerations, I have continued to guide students through a translation of this astonishing text for many years as part of an introductory course in Comparative Literature. I think it would be irresponsible to ignore Dante's work in such a context, given its enormous historical and artistic significance. In the process, my understanding of moral and ethical matters has undergone a radical transformation. I have come to see betrayal as the most dreadful of transgressions, and to recognize that contemporary culture actually promotes and rewards the traitor at every turn.

As many readers are undoubtedly aware, Inferno is the first of three parts of a secondary epic that is known as The Divine Comedy, a work that chronicles the journey of Dante, who is simultaneously the poet who created the text, its protagonist and its narrator, from a dark wood in which he is revealed to be experiencing the mother of all mid-life crises, through hell, to purgatory and ultimately to paradise. It will surprise no one who is even casually acquainted with the basic tenets of Christian theology that the tripartite structure in question--reflective as it is of the nature of the Holy Trinity--anticipates and contours the form and content of the text in several ways. Monty Python’s The Holy Grail supplies a typically zany skeleton key that unlocks many of the secrets of Dante’s work:

Whether the question concerns the number of volumes in the whole work or the number of lines in a verse thereof, or indeed, the number of mouths possessed by Lucifer in the lowest part of the infernal pit, the number of thy counting shall always be three.

In the dark wood, Dante is confronted by three (surprise!) beasts: a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf. Oceans of ink have been spilled the better to elucidate the symbolic significance of these creatures. Suffice it to say that they strike me—and many minds more distinguished and perspicacious than my own--as symbols of the three parts of the soul and the sins to which each one is prone. Dante encounters them in reverse order, insofar as they foreshadow the structure of hell itself: the sins of incontinence—represented by the she-wolf—are in the uppermost layer (excluding the rather serene limbo, in which the souls of Dante’s guide, Virgil, and other virtuous pagans dwell, and the neutrals, for whom Dante as both poet and protagonist has special disdain, insofar as not choosing is a paradoxical sort of choice, with significant consequences). These sins of incontinence, i.e., lust, greed and gluttony, are punished according to the logic of the aforementioned contrapasso, or counter-penalty. Some sins are literalized, others ironically reversed, others grotesquely parodied. What unites them is the fact that Dante seems most sympathetic to those who are guilty of the sins of incontinence. They arise from the lowest and most carnal part of the soul: its appetitive component. All living beings are subject to powerful appetites, and yielding to them intemperately seems to be something that Dante can readily understand, if not forgive or excuse.

The second creature, the lion, is a symbol of the sins associated with the component of the soul that is volitional, the will. Sins of violence, whether it is committed against oneself, one’s neighbor, or God, are punished in this second, ghastly layer. Wrath, heresy, suicide: all entail willingly doing violence of one sort or another. Dante is less understanding and compassionate when he encounters sinners of these kinds.

The third creature, the leopard, symbolizes sins of malice: fraud, treachery and betrayal. The most heinous and despicable sinners of this kind are Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ himself, and Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar. Thus does Dante condemn those who betrayed the founder of a religious community of which he was an ardent but theologically heterodox member, which held sway over the whole Medieval, European world in which he lived, and those who betrayed the first Roman Emperor and therefore played the ugly midwives to all of the political and cultural change that followed his assassination, to being chewed for the rest of time in the three hideous mouths of Lucifer.

When Dante the protagonist asks the soul of Virgil the Roman poet, who serves as his guide through hell, to elucidate the moral and metaphysical map of the lowest part of hell, he responds as follows: “Since fraud to man alone doth appertain,/God hates it most; and hence the fraudulent band,/Set lowest down, endure a fiercer pain”(Dante 79). Thus does he make it plain to Dante the protagonist, who is ever the epistemological inferior of Dante the poet, that human beings are uniquely capable of this most pernicious sin. His expository efforts continue a few lines later:

"Fraud, ’gainst whose bite no conscience findeth shield,/A man may use with one who in him lays/ Trust, or with those who no such credence yield./Beneath this latter kind of it decays/The bond of love which out of nature grew;/Hence, in the second circle herd the race/To feigning given and flattery, who pursue/Magic, false coining, theft, and simony,/Pimps, barrators, and suchlike residue. The other form of fraud makes nullity/Of natural bonds; and, what is more than those, /The special trust whence men on men rely. Hence in the place whereon all things repose,/The narrowest circle and the seat of Dis,/ Each traitor’s gulfed in everlasting woes’ "(Dante 80).

Virgil’s soul makes it clear herein that the most abominable sins are those of malice and that unlike the others, sins of this kind can only be committed by beings who are possessed of the power of reason (the third and loftiest component of the soul) and the sort of heart that can invest others with trust, or enjoy their trust and fidelity in turn. Wrongs of other kinds are destructive and worthy of condemnation, but no other sin is as dreadful, nor as human, as betrayal.

How seriously do contemporary humans take fraud, treachery and betrayal? Not very, if the evidence is considered with dispassionate care. How often do we treat others with respect in public and savagely disparage them in private, or anonymously online? How often does the official email belie what the covert text message implies? How loyal to Mike Pence, who was as slavishly obedient a sycophant as one could conjure, was Trump on January 6th? How loyal to Jody Wilson-Raybould was Justin Trudeau, when political expedience and ethical rectitude clashed? How loyal and trustworthy are advertisers, marketers, elected representatives? When crises occur, as they inevitably do, how quickly are established norms discarded, freedoms curtailed, promises forgotten? If events are, in a bitterly ironic way, always unprecedented or special or unique, does that not move those with power to forget what they promised to those who lack it, the better to manage things efficiently, regardless of the suffering that follows? How fragile and temporary are most vows, promises or covenants today? How easily are friends deleted, lovers ghosted, spouses cheated on, marriages dissolved?

Let me reiterate that I do not know with any certainty that any deities exist, nor do I think it would behoove us as a species to wind back the clock and behave like our Medieval forebearers. That does not mean that I think Dante lacked psychological, moral or ethical insight. While I might feel like a bit of a fraud teaching Dante in English instead of Italian, I am not a fraud when I do so, for I am not pretending to do anything other than what I am modestly, fallibly trying to do. Dante made a work of art out of words that contains some real wisdom about what human beings do, as compared to what they ought to do. When we defraud or betray, we do wrong; moreover, we do evil.

Perhaps we ought to recognize that literature affords us the opportunity to imagine dwelling in many different worlds, the better to decide what sort of world we actually wish to dwell in. Indeed, literature allows us harmlessly to experiment in the imagination, so that we can avoid doing harm in life.

We ought to avoid defrauding one another in our ordinary lives, not because we fear hellish torment once our lives are over, but because we wish to avoid making our lives, or those of others, hellish while they are still underway. Some will inevitably argue that rules are flexible, temporary, subject to revision. All quite true, but my point is that there are some that we simply should not break, lest the concept of a rule be lost entirely. If we cannot trust anyone, no one can trust us. If we betray others, we will suffer betrayal.

Humans alone can be trusted. Why not be worthy of that trust? Reading and teaching Dante's work, I have confronted these questions, and moved others to confront them. The results have been transformative.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by James Romanes Sibbald. Release Date: December 2, 2012 [eBook 41537] [Most recently updated: July 16, 2022].