WORLD LITERATURE I (ENG 251)
Dante's Inferno Study Guide
Diane Thompson, NVCC, ELI
Why Dante is difficult:
- his rigid view of good and evil
- his idea of damnation for any non-Christian (this bothered medieval
folks too--they developed the legend of harrowing of hell to rescue virtuous old testament
patriarchs; the middle ages also developed the idea of limbo for those who were not
Christian, but not evil
Why Dante is worth studying:
|The Commedia is the greatest European medieval
|It is near the end of the line of this kind of
thinking and art-- The Renaissance was developing in Italy as Dante wrote.
|It's a splendid poem (if shocking to modern
|It's one of the best and most serious works
dealing with good and evil and God's justice in Western culture.
|There are many excellent translations. Dante's
language is direct, clear, powerful, and lends itself well to translation.
Born in Florence, Italy, in 1265; well-educated in arts and sciences
of the time he was betrothed by the age of 12 met Beatrice when he was nine, she eight
love for life; first spoke to her nine years later Beatrice married about 1287 and died in
1290 at 25 Dante wrote many poems praising her and was devastated by her death Dante
became involved in the bitter politics of his city and country; he was especially opposed
to the pope interfering in secular affairs; in 1301 he was permanently exiled from
Florence He spent the rest of his life wandering in exile, supported the unsuccessful
movement to crown a new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and died in exile in 1321.
A method of expressing ideas by using a parallel story or images;
Examples: Dante wandering in the woods in the midpoint of his life; the situation is an
allegory for his personal confusion and lack of direction, his mid-life spiritual crisis
The leopard, wolf and lion are allegorical beasts; each represents a vice which keeps
Dante from getting to heaven.
The use of the local (Tuscan) dialect of Italian rather than Latin
was a daring gamble at the time; most serious writing was done in Latin because the
vernacular languages kept changing and people were afraid that no one would be able to
read them in a few years. Some dialects lasted better than others and luckily, Tuscan did
pretty well that way.
Although it may not seem "funny" to us, the The Divine
Comedy is just that, a mixed narrative, some epic, some tragedy, some melodrama, but with
a happy ending (Paradise). This was the old definition of comedy, as opposed to our
current notion that a comedy should keep us laughing. The Inferno, of course, is not a
happy place, but since the Narrator (and presumably his readers) will learn from the
Inferno to obey God and be virtuous, all these folks will have an improved chance to end
up in Heaven, a definitively happy ending.
CHURCH (POPE) VS STATE (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE)
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, there were attempts to
recreate the "Holy Roman Empire." Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Romans
in St. Peter's church at Rome on Christmas Day, A.D. 800. Conflicts between various Popes
and emperors continued for hundreds of years and were based at least partly on the
"essentially theological problem of divining the right relationship between spiritual
power and the temporal order as such, understood as the whole of material creation. Christ
and the apostles had been poor in material possessions. The medieval church was rich--too
rich, many thought" (Tierney 4). Dante wanted to separate these two forms of
authority and have the church only deal with spiritual powers, while the empire dealt with
CITY-STATES: CONFLICTS AND FACTIONS
Guelphs and Ghibellines; Blacks and Whites; factions based on local,
papal, national and imperial politics; people were killing one another over these issues
Just know that there were a lot of conflicts between political factions in Italy; Dante
was exiled from his native Florence because of political conflict.
Vision literature describes life after death in terms of other
worlds, heaven and hell for medieval Christians. For medieval Christians, the soul
was separated from the body at death and then judged based on the life it lived in the
body while on earth. The soul was then sent to its proper place in heaven, hell or
purgatory until the Last Judgment, at which time if will be will go to its permanent final
place forever. "Until the mid-twelfth century there was no distinct place known as
purgatory. The Christian other-world included only heaven and hell. Purgation was, however,
a part of the afterlife, and the place of purgation occupied the outer reaches of either
hell or heaven, depending on whether the soul was "good but not totally good" or
"bad but not totally bad" (Gardiner xii-xiii).
Common Elements of Vision Literature:
|one individual visionary, almost always male
|soul separated from the body
|visionary usually lies as if dead for three days
while his soul views heaven and hell
|a guide, usually an interested guardian angel or
|guide interprets and protects
|the vision is a profound religious experience -
purges & illuminates
Following Gardiner xv-xxiii
PUNISHMENT FITS THE CRIME: JUST RETRIBUTION IN
"One large and important group of punishments in the tours of
hell consists of those based on the principle of measure-for-measure. The principle
appears in many ancient legal systems. The biblical formulation, "an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth" is part of a wider ancient Near Eastern pattern." Example:
Fortunetellers pretend to know future; in hell their heads are fastened on backwards so
they must always look behind themselves (Himmelfarb 75-76).
GEOGRAPHY OF HELL: NINE CIRCLES OF INFERNO
||Misers & Spendthrifts
||Wrathful & Sullen
ENTRY TO HELL
Leopard, Lion and Wolf - Canto 1: 31-33 (worldly pleasure/lust; lion
- ambition, wolf - avarice); these creatures turn Dante from his true path.
Beatrice and Virgil - Canto 2: 70 - Virgil stands for human reason;
he is sent by Beatrice, who stands for divine love
Gate to Hell: "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."
Dante's hell is a place where sinners deliberately chose their sins and did not repent;
now they are unable to repent forever; each vice is personified in the Inferno; the soul
IS the vice; it retains those qualities which sent it to hell in the first place.
Consequently, there is no possible hope of change or salvation for these sinners.
TOUR OF HELL
VESTIBULE - UNCOMMITTED race endlessly after a blank banner; they
would not shed blood or tears in life for any cause; now they shed it endlessly for
nothing; feed worms. Includes fallen angels who took no stand for or against the
CHARON & RIVER ACHERON - Canto 3: 82-84.
CIRCLE 1: LIMBO - INNOCENT SOULS - Canto 4: 41, 42 - blameless but
unbaptized; old testament patriarchs rescued by Christ; great pagan poets and philosophers
comfortable but separate forever from God.
CIRCLES 2 - 5: INCONTINENCE (SINS WITHOUT MALICE):
||Spendthrifts and Misers
||Wrathful (in Styx) & Sullen (under Styx)
These sins do not hurt others.
CIRCLE 2 - LUSTFUL
The second circle is the real beginning of hell. Here we see the
principle of retribution: sinners tossed and whirled by winds as in life they were
helpless in tempests of passion. Paolo and Francesca go swirling by in Canto 5. They were
murdered before they could repent carnal courtly love as sin.
CIRCLE 3 - GLUTTONS
This circle is guarded by Cerberus with three hungry heads that are
appeased with clumps of mud; gluttons who feasted away their lives now lie like pigs in
CIRCLE 4 - MISERS AND SPENDTHRIFTS
Pluto, god of riches, guards the entrance to the fourth circle.
Misers and Spendthrifts - Canto 7: 64 - 66 - roll stones to crash against one another;
opposites in life and in death; they abused material goods.
CIRCLE 5 - WRATHFUL
Styx (river of hate) forms a marsh holding the openly wrathful who
strike and bite one another; sullen lie under the surface of the marsh, just as their
silent anger lay hidden during their lives.
AN ANGEL COMES TO OPEN GATES TO DIS - Canto 9: 89, 90 - DIS (SINS
WITH MALICE). The abyss of the rest of hell is included within the walls of the city of
CIRCLE 6 - HERETICS
Heretics chose their own opinions instead of following the teachings
of the Church.
Farinata, an epicurean - Canto 10: 40 - 42 - epicureans believed
there was no soul, that pleasure was the primary goal of life, and that everything dies
with the body, so they get to spend eternity with their bodies in burning graves.
CIRCLE 7 - VIOLENCE
1. Violent against Neighbors
2. Violent against Self
3. Violent against God
First Ring: Violent against others; includes murderers and robbers -
NOTE: Dante does not really distinguish between lives and property; submerged in
Phlegethon - river of blood.
Chiron - Canto 12: 77,78 - warrior-centaurs patrol this circle;
another man/beast combination; easily angered; they patrol & torture those who killed
Second Ring: Violent against themselves - suicides (wasted their
bodies) and squanderers (wasted their goods) NOTE: Dante does not differentiate much
between the values of life and property.
Suicides - Dante plucks a branch - Canto 13: 31 - 33 - this recalls
Polydorus in the Aeneid.
Suicides (with harpy) - Canto 13: 115 - 117 - Harpies stole
anything, so here they symbolize stealing away of the souls by suicides.
Third Ring: Violent against God - blasphemy and denial; the worst
kind of violence in Dante's world-view
CIRCLE 8 FRAUD: MALEBOLGE OF FRAUD (ten pockets or pouches for the
ten kinds of malicious fraud)
||Simoniacs (sell church favor)
||Grafters (sell political favor)
||Sowers of Discord
||Falsifiers (Alchemists &
Fraud starts at base of an abyss, so Dante and Virgil must descend
on the back of the Fraud Monster, Geryon - Canto 17: 115, 116. Geryon has a pleasant face,
a snaky body, to symbolize the pleasant first appearance of fraud and its twisted snaky
||Panderers and Seducers (Jason)
||Flatterers are sunk in excrement
||Simonists trade the grace and favor of the
church for money - Canto 19: 47, 48. Their punishment is a kind of reverse baptism; they
are upside-down in fonts (holes) and baptised by fire, not water; several popes here;
NOTE: Dante criticizes popes BECAUSE he is a devout Catholic.
||Fortunetellers - they tried to foretell the
future, so now their heads are on backwards.
||Grafters - Canto 22 - (grafters or barrators
trade the powers and favors of their political office for money).
||Hypocrites - they wear gorgeous cloaks lined
with lead; pretty outside, awful inside; heavy cloaks force them to behave sedately,
although seething within (inner anger); cloak true character in false appearance.
||Thieves turning into snakes and snakes turning
into thieves - Canto 24: 91, 92. Thieves steal other people's possessions; they cannot
keep their own bodies.
||Evil Counselors - Ulysses and Diomedes helped to
destroy Troy with the Trojan horse scam. Ulysses cut loose from all human ties (home,
family, etc.) to sail to the edge of the world. Deceit and pride, virtues in Homer's
Odysseus, have become Ulysses' sins in the Christian middle ages.
||Sowers of Discord - Mahomet, disembowelled.
Dante thinks of Mohammed as a sinner whose religious beliefs led to discord and schism.
Note the total intolerence for another religion; this is typical of the Christian middle
ages and later; it led to many wars against those who believed differently (including
different sects of Christians) and massacres of unbelievers as well as Christian heretics
Another sower of discord was Bertram de Born, a Provencal troubadour poet - Canto 28: 121
- 123. He carries his head like a lantern because he used vicious scandals to separate
Henry II of England from his eldest son. Therefore, his head is separated from his body.
||Falsifiers (alchemists and counterfeiters) -
Canto 29: 79 - 81. Falsifiers include Sinon, the Greek in the Aeneid who let himself be
captured by the Trojans and gave them a story about the Trojan Horse, which tricked them
into bringing it into Troy. How far we've come from Greek heroes!
ANTAEUS hand-carries Virgil and Dante down to the last circle
- Canto 31: 142,143] (Antaeus was a giant from Greek myth who accosted passing strangers
and wrestled them to death, because he was invulnerable while touching earth. Hercules
killed him by holding him in the air to weaken him and then crushed him.
CIRCLE 9 - TRAITORS IN COCYTUS
||To Kindred - Caina
||To Country - Antenora
||To Guests - Ptolemea
||To Masters - Judecca
Cocytus is a frozen lake of ice; Satan is immobilized at the center.
Cocytus includes four kinds of traitors.
Traitors to Kindred - Caina named after Cain, the first
murderer of a kinsman
Traitors to Country - Antenora; named after the Trojan
Antenor who in the Middle Ages was believed to have betrayed Troy to the Greeks
Bocca degli Abati - Canto 32: 97 - 99 was a noble
Guelph from Florence. He betrayed his party by cutting off the Guelph standard bearer's
hand during the battle against Manfred's troops at Montaperti in 1260, which caused the
Guelphs to panic and lose the battle.
Traitors to Guests - Ptolomea, named after Ptolomey, a
captain of Jericho who invited guests to a banquet and then murdered them while they
were his guests.
Traitors to Masters (or benefactors)- Judecca is where
Satan is munching on Judas, Cassius and Brutus) - Canto 34: 20, 21. The Judecca is named
for Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ. Also includes Cassius and Brutus who betrayed
Julius Caesar. This puts together the betrayal of masters of Church and State Frozen
center contains Satan - total absence of goodness; absolute distance from God; Virgil and
Dante climb down Satan's side to the center of the earth; turn around and start climbing
up toward Purgatory, but that's another story.
Francesca & Paolo; Dido; Helen; Cleopatra; are all women in hell
there for sexual behavior? It seems that way. "The sins in the [pre-Dantean Jewish
and Christian] tours of hell range from murder to idle chatter in church or synagogue, but
the two most common kinds of sins are sexual sins and sins of speech [e.g. breaking vows
and blaspheming]" (Himmelfarb 69). In early Jewish and Christian vision tours
of hell, "Adultery/fornication is the most widely diffused category of sexual
sin...It appears almost everywhere. Loss of virginity before marriage and
abortion/infanticide... appear almost exclusively in Christian texts....
"Sexual sins also play a part in texts of the Hellenistic and
Roman period that are neither Jewish nor Christian, although they do not seem to have
rated among the major sins of archaic and classical Greece... Sexual wrongdoing and even
the tendency to such wrongdoing, a lustful disposition, are found in pagan lists of
vices" (Himmelfarb 71).
Courtly love and the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic: Love as both a
positive and a negative force - Beatrice and Francesca. This makes an interesting contrast
to other pairs of lovers, such as Dido and Aeneas or Odysseus and Penelope, or Adam and
Look at how Dante's Inferno is similar to and different from
Virgil's Underworld: Virgil's underworld is not forever; temporal recycled souls;
concerned with destiny destiny and future Dante focuses on punishment for timeless sins
instead of possibilities eternity No future except Last Judgment which will fix current
hell forever (heaven too) Fate is forever after moment of death; if a person dies
unrepentant, he/she is fixed forever in that part of hell based on his/her dominant vice.
ISSUES: RESPONSIBILITY, FATE AND FREE WILL
Look at concept of just retribution: the punishment fits the crime
and all crimes are known and punished. Concept of free will, the ability to choose to sin
or not to sin, was central to medieval Catholicism, although they had difficulty
explaining exactly how this worked (so do we). A very interesting concept to
compare/contrast with Aeneas' devotion to will of Destiny and the gods in the Aeneid.
ISSUES: HERO/KING'S CHARACTER
Pilgrim (Dante) as flawed, seeking knowledge as means to
salvation Virgil (poet) as hero a far cry from the armored warriors of the Greeks. Ulysses
is now seen as an evil hero - his ability to lie and manipulate now seen as evil Also,
Troy understood as the homeland of Europe, so anyone who harmed Troy was evil. This makes
a fascinating contrast to Homer's Odysseus.
ISSUES: HERETICS AND MONSTERS
Monsters: Geryon, Cerberus & Satan (both three headed), Demons,
Centaurs, all creatures in hell Heretics: Mohammad & Epicureans; Dante full of anger
against those who were not "true believers;" both religiously and politically.
Dante's monsters can be compared to the raging monsters such as Allecto (and Juno...) in
the Aeneid, and hungry monsters, such as Polyphemos and Skylla in the Odyssey.
Gardiner, Eileen, Ed. Visions of Heaven
& Hell Before Dante. N.Y.: Italica Press, 1989.
Himmelfarb, Martha. Tours of Hell: An
Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature. Philadelphia: U. of Penn. Press,
Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of
Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1984.
Tierney, Brian. The Crisis of the Church &
State: 1050-1300. A Spectrum Book. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
Thompson: 8/14/98; updated: