Dante’s Inferno

Dante (Alighieri) 1265 -- 1321 The Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy, the greatest poetic composition of the Christian Middle Ages and the first masterpiece of world literature written in a modern European vernacular.

Dante lived in a restless age of political conflict between popes and emperors and of strife within the Italian city-states, particularly Florence, which was torn between rival factions. Spiritually and culturally too, there were signs of change. With the diffusion of Aristotle's physical and metaphysical works, there came the need for harmonizing his philosophy with the truth of Christianity, and Dante's mind was attracted to philosophical speculation. In Italy, Giotto, who had freed

himself from the Byzantine tradition, was reshaping the art of painting, while the Tuscan poets were beginning to experiment with new forms of expression. Dante may be considered the greatest and last medieval poet, at least in Italy, where barely a generation later the first humanists were to emerge.

Dante was born in Florence, the son of Bellincione d'Alighiero. His family descended, he tells us, from "the noble seed" of the Roman founders of Florence and was noble also by virtue of honors bestowed on it later. His great-grandfather Cacciaguida had been knighted by Emperor Conrad III and died about 1147 while fighting in the Second Crusade. As was usual for the minor nobility, Dante's family was Guelph, in opposition to the Ghibelline party of the feudal nobility which strove to dominate the communes under the protection of the emperor.

Although his family was reduced to modest circumstances, Dante was able to live as a gentleman and to pursue his studies. It is probable that he attended the Franciscan school of Sta Croce and the Dominican school of S. Maria Novella in Florence, where he gained the knowledge of Thomistic doctrine and of the mysticism that was to become the foundation of his philosophical culture. It is known from his own testimony that in order to perfect his literary style he also studied with Brunetto Latini, the Florentine poet and master of rhetoric. Perhaps encouraged by Brunetto in his pursuit of learning, Dante traveled to Bologna, where he probably attended the well-known schools of rhetoric.

A famous portrait of the young Dante done by Giotto hangs in the Palazzo del Podestà in Florence. We also have the following description of him left us by the author Giovanni Boccaccio: "Our poet was of medium height, and his face was long and his nose aquiline and his jaws were big, and his lower lip stood out in such a way that it somewhat protruded beyond the upper one; his shoulders were somewhat curved, and his eyes large rather than small and of brown color, and his hair and beard were curled and black, and he was always melancholy and pensive." Dante does not write of his family or marriage, but before 1283 his father died, and soon afterward, in accordance with his father's previous arrangements, he married the gentlewoman Gemma di Manetto Donati. They had several children, of whom two sons,

Jacopo and Pietro, and a daughter, Antonia, are known.

Lyric Poetry

Dante began early in life to compose poetry, an art, he tells us, which he taught himself as a young man (Vita nuova, III, 9). Through his love lyrics he became known to other poets of Florence, and most important to him was his friendship with Guido Cavalcanti, which resulted from an exchange of sonnets.

Both Dante and Guido were concerned with the effects of love on the mind, particularly from a philosophical point of view; only Dante, however, began gradually to develop the idea that love could become the means of spiritual perfection. And while Guido was more interested in natural philosophy, Dante assiduously cultivated his knowledge of the Latin poets, particularly Virgil, whom he later called his guide and authority in the art of poetry.

During his youth Dante had known a young and noble Florentine woman whose grace and beauty so impressed him that in his poetry she became the idealized Beatrice, the "bringer of blessings," who seemed "a creature come from heaven to earth, A miracle manifest in reality" (Vita nuova, XXVI). She is believed to have been Bice, the daughter of Folco Portinari, and later the wife of Simone dei Bardi. Dante had seen her for the first time when both were in their ninth year; he had named her in a ballad among the 60 fairest women of Florence. But it was only later that Beatrice became the guide of his thoughts

and emotions "toward that ideal perfection which is the goal of every noble mind," and the praise of her virtue and grace became the subject of his poetry.

When the young Beatrice died on June 8, 1290, Dante was overcome with grief but found consolation in thoughts of her glory in heaven. Although another woman succeeded briefly in winning Dante's love through her compassion, the memory of Beatrice soon aroused in him feelings of remorse and renewed his fidelity to her. He was prompted to gather from among all his poems those which had been written in her honor or had some bearing on his love for her. This plan resulted in the small volume of poetry and prose, the Vita nuova (New Life), in which he copied from his "book of memory" only those past experiences belonging to his "new life"--a life made new through Beatrice. It follows Dante's own youthful life through three movements or stages in love, in which Beatrice's religious and spiritual significance becomes

increasingly clear. At the same time it traces his poetic development from an early phase reminiscent of the Cavalcantian manner to a foreshadowing of The Divine Comedy. In the last prose chapter, which tells of a "miraculous vision," the poet speaks of the major work that he intends to write and the important role Beatrice will have in it: "If it be the wish of Him in whom all things flourish that my life continue for a few years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other lady."

The Vita nuova, written between 1292 and 1294, is one of the first important examples of Italian literary prose. Its 31 poems, most of them sonnets symmetrically grouped around three canzoni, are only a small selection of Dante's lyric production. He wrote many other lyrics inspired by Beatrice which are not included in the Vita nuova; in addition there are

verses written to other women and poems composed at different times in his life, representing a variety of forms and stylistic experiences.

Political Activities

Dante's literary interests did not isolate him from the events of his times. On the contrary, he was involved in the political life of Florence and deeply concerned about the state of Europe as a whole. In 1289 he had fought with the Florentine cavalry at the battle of Campaldino. In 1295 he inscribed himself in the guild of physicians and pharmacists (membership in a guild being a precondition for holding public office in Florence). He became a member of the people's council and served in various other capacities. For two months in 1300 he was one of the six priors of Florence, and in 1301 he was a member of the Council of the One Hundred.

In October 1301 Dante was sent in a delegation from the commune to Pope Boniface VIII, whose policies he openly opposed as constituting a threat to Florentine independence. During his absence the Blacks (one of the two opposing factions within the Guelph party) gained control of Florence. In the resulting banishment of the Whites, Dante was sentenced to exile in absentia (January 1302). Despite various attempts to regain admission to Florence--at first in an alliance of other exiles whose company he soon abandoned and later through his writing--he was never to enter his native city again.

Dante led the life of an exile, taking refuge first with Bartolommeo della Scala in Verona, and after a time of travel--to Bologna, through northern Italy, possibly also to Paris between 1307 and 1309--with Can Grande della Scala in Verona (1314). During this time his highest hopes were placed in Emperor Henry VII, who descended into Italy in 1310 to restore justice and order among the cities and to reunite church and state. When Henry VII, whose efforts proved fruitless, died in Siena in 1313, Dante lost every hope of restoring himself to an honorable position in Florence.

Minor Works

During these years of wandering Dante's studies were not interrupted. Indeed, he had hoped that in acquiring fame as a poet and philosopher he might also regain the favor of his fellow citizens. His study of Boethius and Cicero in Florence had already widened his philosophical horizons. After 1290 he had turned to the study of philosophy with such fervor that "in a short time, perhaps 30 months" he had begun "to be so keenly aware of her sweetness that the love of her drove away and destroyed every other thought." He read so much, it seems, that his eyes were weakened. Two uncompleted treatises, De vulgari eloquentia (1303-1304) and the Convivio (1304-1307), belong to the early period of exile. At the same time, about 1306, he probably began to compose The Divine Comedy.

In De vulgari eloquentia, a theoretical treatise in Latin on the Italian vernacular, Dante intended to treat of all aspects of the spoken language, from the highest poetic expression to the most humble familiar speech. The first book is devoted to a discussion of dialects and the principles of poetic composition in the vulgar tongue; the second book treats specifically of the "illustrious" vulgar tongue used by certain excellent poets and declares that this noble form of expression is suitable only for the most elevated subjects, such as love, virtue, and war, and must be used in the form of the canzone.

The Convivio was intended to consist of 15 chapters: an introduction and 14 canzoni, with prose commentaries in Italian; but only 4 chapters were completed. The canzoni, which

are the "meat" of the philosophical banquet while the prose commentaries are the "bread," appear to be written to a beautiful woman. But the prose commentaries interpret these poems as an allegorical exaltation of philosophy, inspired by the love of wisdom. Dante wished to glorify philosophy as the "mistress of his mind" and to treat subjects of moral philosophy, such as love and virtue. The Convivio is in a sense a connecting link between the Vita nuova and The Divine Comedy. Thus in the latter work reason in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom

becomes man's sole guide on earth, except for the intervention of Divine Grace, in his striving for virtue and God. In the Convivio Dante also defends the use of the vernacular as a suitable medium for ethical and scientific subjects, as well as amorous ones.

The Latin treatise De monarchia, of uncertain date but possibly attributable to the time of Henry VII's descent into Italy (1310-1313), is a statement of Dante's political theories. At the same time it is intended as a practical guide toward the restoration of peace in Europe under a temporal monarch in Rome, whose authority proceeds directly from God.

During his exile Dante also wrote various Latin epistles and letters of political nature to Italian prices and cardinals. Belonging to a late period are two Latin eclogues and the scientific essay Quaestio de aqua et terra (1320). Il fiore, a long sonnet sequence, is of doubtful attribution.

In 1315 Dante twice refused pardons offered him by the citizens of Florence under humiliating conditions. He and his children were consequently condemned to death as rebels. He spent his last years in Tuscany, in Verona, and finally in Ravenna. There, under the patronage of Guido da Polenta and joined by his children (possibly also his wife), Dante was greatly esteemed and spent a happy and peaceful period until his death on September 13 or 14, 1321.

The Divine Comedy

The original title of Dante's masterpiece, which he completed shortly before his death, was Commedia; the epithet Divina was added by posterity. The purpose of this work, as Dante writes in his letter to Can Grande, is "to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity." The Commedia is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, respectively). The second and third sections contain 33 cantos apiece; the Inferno has 34, since its opening canto is an introduction to the entire work. The measure throughout the poem is terza rima,

consisting of lines in sets of 3, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, and so on.

The main action of the literal narrative centers on Dante's journey to God through the agency of Beatrice; the moral or allegorical meaning that Dante wishes the reader to keep in mind is that God will do for everyman what he has done for one man, if everyman is willing to make this journey. Dante constructs an allegory of a double journey: his experience in the supernatural world points to the journey of everyman through this life. The poet finds himself in a dark wood (sin); he tries to escape by climbing a mountain illuminated by the sun (God). Impeded by the sudden appearance of three beasts, which symbolize the major divisions of sin in the Inferno, he is about to be driven back when Virgil (human reason)

appears, sent to his aid by Beatrice. Virgil becomes Dante's guide through Hell, in a descent that is the first stage in his ascent to God in humility. The pilgrim learns all there is to know about sin and confronts the very foundation of sin, which is pride, personified in Lucifer frozen at the very center of the universe. Only now is he spiritually prepared to begin his ascent through the realm of purification.

The mountain of the Purgatorio is a place of repentance, regeneration, and conversion. The penitents endure severe punishments, but all are pilgrims directed to God, in an atmosphere of love, hope, and an eager willingness in suffering. On the mountain's summit Beatrice (divine revelation) comes to take Virgil's place as Dante's guide--for the final ascent to God, human reason is insufficient.

The Paradiso depicts souls contemplating God; they are in a state of perfect happiness in the knowledge of His divine truths. The dominant image in this realm is light. God is light, and the pilgrim's goal from the start was to reach the light. His spiritual growth toward the attainment of this end is the main theme of the entire poem.

Dante AlighieriContextDante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy, to a family of moderate wealth that had a history of involvement in the complex Florentine political scene. Around 1285, Dante married a woman chosen for him by his family, although he remained in love with another woman—Beatrice, whose true historical identity remains a mystery—and continued to yearn for her after her sudden death in 1290. Three years later, he published Vita Nuova (The New Life), which describes his tragic love for Beatrice.

Around the time of Beatrice’s death, Dante began a serious study of philosophy and intensified his political involvement in Florence. He held a number of significant public offices at a time of great political unrest in Italy, and, in 1302, he was exiled for life by the leaders of the Black Guelphs, the political faction in power at the time. All of Dante’s work on The Comedy (later called The Divine Comedy, and consisting of three books: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) was done after his exile. He completed Inferno, which depicts an allegorical journey through Hell, around 1314. Dante roamed from court to court in Italy, writing and occasionally lecturing, until his death from a sudden illness in 1321.

Dante’s personal life and the writing of The Comedy were greatly influenced by the politics of late-thirteenth-century Florence. The struggle for power in Florence was a reflection of a crisis that affected all of Italy, and, in fact, most of Europe, from the twelfth century to the fourteenth century—the struggle between church and state for temporal authority. The main representative of the church was the pope, while the main representative of the state was the Holy Roman Emperor. In Florence, these two loyalties were represented by the Guelph party, which supported the papacy, and the Ghibelline party, which supported imperial power. The last truly powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, died in 1250, and by Dante’s time, the Guelphs were in power in Florence. By 1290, however, the Guelphs had divided into two factions: the Whites (Dante’s party), who supported the independence of Florence from strict papal control, and the Blacks, who were willing to work with the pope in order to restore their power. Under the direction of Pope Boniface VIII, the Blacks gained control of Florence in 1301. Dante, as a visible and influential leader of the Whites, was exiled within a year. Dante became something of a party unto himself after his exile. His attitudes were, at times, closer to those of a Ghibelline than a Guelph, so much did he dislike Boniface. The pope, as well as a multitude of other characters from Florentine politics, has a place in the Hell that Dante depicts in Inferno—and not a pleasant one.

Despite the important historical context of the work, Inferno is far from merely a political allegory. Inferno is, for one, the exercise of an astounding intellect that handled writers such as Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, and Thomas Aquinas with ease and skill. Inferno is also a landmark in the development of European language and literature, for it stands as the greatest medieval poem written in vernacular language—the common tongue of a people. Critics spanning nearly seven centuries have praised its poetic beauty and

compass, virtually unmatched by any other medieval poem. Additionally, medieval Italy was home to scores of regional dialects; Dante’s use of his native Tuscan dialect in The Comedy helped to unify the Italian language, which is rooted in Tuscan more than in any other Italian dialect. Before Dante, major literary works were almost always written in Latin, the language of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church; no one had considered the vernacular capable of poetic expression of the caliber of Virgil’s Aeneid, for example. Dante acknowledges the seeming folly of such an attempt by entitling his masterpiece The Comedy (the adjective Divine, indicating the religious nature of the work, was added in the sixteenth century). Obviously, Dante’s choice to call his work a comedy does not mean that the poem is intended to be humorous. Rather, the word “comedy” refers to one of the two classical styles, the other being tragedy. Tragedy was the high style, the style of epics, with plots that flowed from a promising beginning to a destructive end. Comedy was the low style, the style of grotesque caricatures, with plots that flowed from an unhappy beginning to a happy end.

The title The Comedy is thus appropriate in two ways. First, the poem is written in the vernacular, which was considered appropriate only for a comedy. Second, the plot mirrors the flow of a classical comedy, progressing from the horrors of Hell to the joys of Heaven. Despite his seeming modesty, however, Dante was confident both that his poetry surpassed that of any other vernacular writer and that he could use the high, tragic style to perfection, as he had proved in Vita Nuova. The Comedy is not exclusively “high”

or “low”; rather, it is a truly universal work. It deals with one of the great questions of humanity: the existence of an afterlife and the consequences of our lives on Earth. For Dante, this question was worthy of calling upon philosophers and poets alike, and of utilizing every available style, as he does throughout Inferno.

1. Life

Dante was born in 1265 in Florence. At the age of 9 he met for the first time the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari, who became in effect his Muse, and remained, after her death in 1290, the central inspiration for his major poems. Between 1285, when he married and began a family, and 1302, when he was exiled from Florence, he was active in the cultural and civic life of Florence, served as a soldier and held several political offices.

Since the early thirteenth century two great factions, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, had competed for control of Florence. The Guelfs, with whom Dante was allied, were identified with Florentine political autonomy, and with the interests of the Papacy in its long struggle against the centralizing ambitions of the Hohenstaufen emperors, who were supported by the Ghibellines. After Charles of Anjou, with the blessing of the Papacy and strong Guelf support, defeated Hohenstaufen armies at Benevento (1265/6) and Tagliacozzo (1268), the Guelfs became the dominant force in Florence. By the end of the century, the Guelfs were themselves riven by faction, grounded largely in family and economic interests, but determined also by differing degrees of loyalty to the papacy and to Guelf allegiances.

In 1301, when conflict arose between the "Blacks," the faction most strongly committed to Guelf and papal interests, and the more moderate Whites, Pope Boniface VIII instigated a partisan settlement which allowed the Blacks to exile the White leadership, of whom Dante was one. He never returned to Florence, and played no further role in public life, though he remained passionately interested in Italian politics, and became virtually the prophet of world empire in the years leading up to the coronation of Henry VII of Luxemburg as head of the Holy Roman Empire (1312). The development of Dante's almost messianic sense of the imperial role is hard to trace, but it was doubtless affected by his bitterness over what he saw as the autocratic and treacherous conduct of Pope Boniface, and a growing conviction that only a strong central authority could bring order to Italy.

During the next twenty years Dante lived in several Italian cities, spending at least two long periods at the court of Can Grande della Scala, lord of Verona. In 1319 he moved from Verona to Ravenna, where he completed the Paradiso, and where he died in 1321.

Dante's engagement with philosophy cannot be studied apart from his vocation as a writer -- as a poet whose theme, from first to last is the significance of his love for Beatrice, but also as an intellectual strongly committed to raising the level of public discourse. After his banishment he addressed himself to Italians generally, and devoted much of his long exile to transmitting the riches of ancient thought and learning, as these informed contemporary scholastic culture, to an increasingly sophisticated lay

readership in their own vernacular.

This project was Dante's contribution to a long-standing Italian cultural tradition. His reading in philosophy began, he tells us, with Cicero and Boethius, whose writings are in large part the record of their dedication to the task of establishing a Latinate intellectual culture in Italy. The Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia preserve also the somewhat idealized memory of the Neapolitan court of Frederick II of Sicily (1195-1250) and his son Manfred (1232-66), intellectuals in their own right as well as patrons of poets and philosophers, whom Dante viewed as having revived the ancient tradition of the statesman-philosopher [Van Cleve, 299-332; Morpurgo]. Dante himself probably studied under Brunetto Latini (1220-94), whose encyclopedic Livres dou Tresor (1262-66), written while Brunetto was a political exile in France, provided vernacular readers with a compendium of the Liberal Arts and a digest of Aristotelian ethical and political thought [Meier; Imbach, 37-47; Davis (1984), 166-97].

But the fullest medieval embodiment of Dante's ideal is his own writings. In them we see for the first time a powerful thinker, solidly grounded in Aristotle, patristic theology, and thirteenth-century scholastic debate, bringing these resources directly to bear on educating his countrymen and inspiring them to pursue the happiness that rewards the philosopher.

2. Early Poetry

Though he evidently did not begin serious study of philosophy until his mid-twenties, Dante had already been intellectually challenged by the work of a remarkable group of poets, practitioners of what he would later recall as the dolce stil novo, in whose hands a lyric poetry modelled on the canso of the Provençal troubadours became a vehicle for serious enquiry into the nature of love and human psychology. A generation earlier Guido Guinizzelli (1230-1276) had puzzled contemporaries with poems treating love in terms of the technicalities of medicine and the cosmology of the schools, while celebrating in quasi-mystical language his lady's power to elevate the spirit of her poet-lover:

Splende in la intelligenzïa del cielo Deo crïator, più che ‘n nostri occhi ‘l sole; ella intende suo fattor oltra ‘l cielo, e ‘l ciel volgiando, a lui obedir tole; . . . così dar dovria, al vero, la bella donna, poi che ‘n gli occhi splende del suo gentil, talento, chi mai da lei obedir non si disprende.

[Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, 41-44, 47-50]

Translation: God the creator shines in the intelligence of heaven more than the sun in our eyes, and this [intelligence] understands her maker beyond the universe. Making the heavens turn, she submits to obey Him . . . So truly should the beautiful lady, when she shines on the eyes of her gentle [lover], impart the desire that his obedience to her never fail.

The Lady, exerting on her lover a power derived from the participation of her understanding in the divine, plays the role of the celestial intelligenze, who transmit the influence of the First Mover to the universe at large. The poet is thus caught up in a circular process through which his understanding, like theirs, is drawn toward the divine as manifested in the lady's divinely inspired radiance. For Guinizelli this exploitation of the idea of celestial hierarchy is perhaps only a daring poetic conceit. For Dante it will become a means to the articulation of his deepest intuitions.

Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's older contemporary and the single strongest influence on his early poetry, was renowned not only as a poet, but for his knowledge of natural philosophy. His great canzone, "Donna mi prega," which became the subject of learned Latin commentaries, deals with ideas commonly associated with the "radical Aristotelianism" or "Averroism" of his day. The purpose of this astonishing poem is to describe in precise philosophical terms ("naturale dimostramento") the experience of love.

For Guido there is an absolute cleavage between the sensory and intellectual aspects of the response to a loved object. Once the phantasma of the object becomes an abstracted form in the possible intellect, it is wholly insulated from the diletto of the anima sensitiva (21-28). This has seemed to modern commentators to imply an Averroist view of the intellect as a separate, universal entity

[Corti (1983), 3-37], and the lines which follow (30-56), where the vertú of the sensitive soul displaces reason and "assumes its function," presenting to the will an object whose desirability threatens a fatal disorientation, sustain this impression. Love is still the aristocratic vocation of the troubadours, and Guido acknowledges that noble spirits are aroused by it to prove their merit. But they work in darkness, for the force that moves them obscures the light of intellectual contemplation (57-68). The canzone is so exclusively an exercise in "natural philosophy," so centered on biological necessity, that consciousness itself is wholly excluded from consideration. The ethical dimension of love consists in the challenge its blind urgency presents to reason. "Nobility" is a matter of self-control, and the precarious happiness that such love affords has no ideal dimension.

Guido's influence on Dante was profound. But the Vita nuova, an anthology of Dante's early poetry interspersed with a narrative combining commentary on his poetic development with the history of his devotion to Beatrice during her earthly life, reveals a growing realization that his own conception of poetry and love differ fundamentally from Guido's. Like Guido Dante accepted love as being, for better or worse, fundamental to the noble life, and his early lyrics express a sense like Guido's of the internally divisive power of desire. But as the Vita nuova unfolds there is a gradual shift of focus: having failed to win his lady's favor by dramatizing his own sufferings, Dante resolves to devote his poetry henceforth wholly to praise of her [VN, c. 18.4-6]. The result of this new resolve is a canzone, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" ("Ladies who have intelligence of love"), which returns to the source of his inspiration and Guido's in the poetry of Guinizelli, and makes a wholly new departure. For Guido, the "heavenly" allure of the

lady is a deception perpetrated by the senses, all the more dangerous as the lover's gentilezza responds more fully to the attraction of her beauty and subjects itself to the "fierce accident" of passion. Dante, too, sees that the experience his early, tormented lyrics depict is "an accident occurring in a substance" [VN 25.1-2], but the "fiery spirits of love" which strike the eyes of those on whom his lady bestows her greeting are not just goads to desire:

E quando trova alcun che degno sia di veder lei. quei prova sua vertute, ché li avvien, ciò che li dona, in salute, e sì l'umilia ch'ogni offesa oblia. Ancor l'ha Dio per maggior grazia dato che non pò mal finir chi l'ha parlato.

[Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore, 37-42, VN 19.10]

Translation: And when she finds one who is worthy to behold her, he feels her power, for what she bestows on him is restorative, and humbles him, so that he forgets any injury. Moreover God has made the power of her grace even greater, for no one who has spoken with her can come to a bad end.

Pursuit of the lady's favor has become a test, not just of nobility, but of virtue. Her beauty is perfect, the fullest possible exampling of nature's power to reveal God's creative love. The climax of the Vita nuova occurs when Dante encounters Guido's lady, Giovanna, followed by his own Beatrice, "one marvel," as he says, "following the other" [VN 24.8]. At once he realizes that Giovanna's beauty, like the prophecy of the biblical Giovanni, is a precursor, heralding the "true light" of Beatrice, just as Guido's poetry of earthly love is finally a foil to his own celebration of the transcendent love revealed to him in Beatrice.

3. Philosophical Training

The philosophical content of the Vita nuova is minimal, a skeletal version of contemporary faculty psychology and a few brief references to metaphysics. But while finding his orientation as a poet Dante was also engaged in the study of philosophy, and spent "some thirty months" frequenting "the schools of the religious orders and the disputations of the philosophers" [Conv. 2.12.7]. This period must have included study in the Dominican school at Santa Maria Novella, where Dante could have learned logic and natural philosophy, and heard Fra Remigio de’ Girolami (d. 1319) expound a theology

based on Thomas and Aristotle [Panella; Davis (1984), 198-223]. Remigio, like Dante, read widely in classical literature of all sorts, and he was fond of drawing lessons in political and ethical conduct from his reading. For both Remigio and Dante, moreover, Thomas was primarily the author of the Summa contra Gentiles and the commentary on the Ethics, concerned, like Aristotle himself, to demonstrate the capacities of human reason as a means to truth.

Dante cites a dozen works of Aristotle, apparently at first hand, and shows a particularly intimate knowledge of the Ethics, largely derived, no doubt, from Thomas [Minio-Paluello]. But his Aristotelianism was nourished by other sources as well. Bruno Nardi has argued persuasively that his attitude toward the study of philosophy also owes a great deal to the more eclectic Albert the Great [Nardi (1967), 63-72; (1992), 28-29]. In Albert he encountered a wide-ranging encyclopedism which included original work, experimental and theoretical, in natural science, and treated Aristotelian natural philosophy and psychology in the light of a neo-Platonism derived from Arabic philosophers and such Greco-Arab sources as the Liber de Causis, as well as the Christian neo-Platonist tradition of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Albert aimed to discover Aristotle's own meaning, with the help of Greek and Arab commentators who led him into disagreement with other Latini, including at certain points his pupil Thomas, and he asserts more than once that philosophy and theology are separate spheres of knowledge. It was doubtless this willingness to pursue philosophy on its own terms that appealled to Dante, who also sought to distinguish philosophical and religious knowledge without simply subordinating the former to the latter.

Albert's view of the procession of the universe from the "substantial light" of the divine intellect through the operation of a hierarchy of lesser intelligences is clearly perceptible in Dante's treatment of the cosmic intelligenze or sostanze separate in the Convivio [Conv. 2.4-5; Nardi (1992), 47-62]. It shows up again in his treatment of the growth of the human embryo, which seems to imply, not a sequence of animations by nutritive, sensitive and intellective powers, as for Thomas, but the continuous operation of a single virtus formativa, whose operation Albert compares to that of the prima intelligentia in the soul [De intellectu & intelligibili 2.2], and which is responsible not only for the development of the human creature but for effecting its union with an essentially external anima intellectiva [Boyde 270-79; Nardi (1960), 9-68; (1967), 67-70].

Albert is thus a likely conduit for seemingly Averroist elements in Dante's thought. He regards intellectual activity as the operation of the intellectus agens, through which the human soul is illumined by the divine Intelligence. Each soul possesses its own intellect, but this intellect is a "reflection" (resultatio) of the light of the primal mind, which thus, in effect, becomes itself the true agent intellect. Albert explicitly rejects the Averroist view of the active intellect as itself a celestial intelligence, a single, separate substance which actualizes in the passive intellect phantasms supplied by individual human minds. But he argues that only an intellect universal in nature can produce an understanding of universal forms. The intellect and the soul of which it is a function thus partake of the

character of the separate intelligences. Soul is not the actualizing essence of the human creature, as in Thomas, but is related to body through the mediation of its organic faculties. In itself, through its agent intellect, the soul is drawn to contemplate the intelligences which order the universe at large, is informed by them with the transcendent knowledge they manifest, and finally "stands" in the divine intellect. In this way certain men are enabled to fulfil the innate human desire for understanding and attain a natural beatitude, "substantiated and formed in the divine being" [Albert, De intellectu & intelligibili 2.2-12; Nardi (1960), 145-50].

That this fulfillment is attained through natural understanding, with no recourse to the theology of grace and revelation, marks a crucial difference between Albert and Thomas, who devotes several chapters of the Summa contra gentiles to a forceful refutation of the notion that final happiness as defined by Aristotle is possible in this life [SCG 3.37-48]. For Thomas the desire to know is one and the same at all levels, and philosophy, seeking the causes of things, is ultimately "ordered entirely to the knowing of God" [SCG 3.25.9] Dante's own position on this question is difficult to define precisely. The poet of the Paradiso is at one with Thomas on the value of philosophy as consisting finally in its power to prepare the mind for faith [Par. 4.118-32; 29.13-45], but he shares Albert's fascination with natural understanding, and in earlier writings his willingness to grant philosophy a "beatitude" of its own hints at a latent dualism in his thought [Foster (1965), 51-71; (1977), 193-208].

Dante was surely aware also of a "radical" Aristotelianism centered in Bologna, where masters influenced by and Boethius of Dacia were affirming the autonomy of human reason and its capacity to attain happiness though its own powers [Corti (1981), 9-31; Vanni Rovighi]. But these thinkers, too, were following paths first taken by Albert, and his influence, together with that of Thomas, is sufficient to account for the distinctive features of Dante's use of philosophy. Whatever the precise channels, Dante was unquestionably one of the most learned Italian laymen of his day, aware of the issues contested in the schools, and at home with the modes of discourse in which they were discussed.

But there is also an old-fashioned strain in Dante's thinking, an idealistic, Platonizing view of the mental universe which Siger of Brabant recalls not just the neo-Platonized Aristotle of the Liber de causis, but the more primitive encyclopedism of twelfth- century thinkers like Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille, poet-philosophers whose world view, inherited from late-antique neo-Platonism, was defined by the Liberal Arts and the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus [Vasoli, 83-102; Garin, 64-70]. In Bernardus' Cosmographia and Alan's Anticlaudianus, the unfolding of the secrets of nature by the enquiring mind generates an allegory of intellectual pilgrimage toward truth. Dante's experience of philosophy, though defined in more dynamic and sophisticated terms, is a version of the same journey. The experience of love becomes a means to self-realization, and an awareness of the hierarchy of forces operative in the universe at large, which makes possible an ascensus mentis ad sapientiam, to that "amoroso uso della sapienza" which enables the human mind to participate in the divine.

4. The Convivio

The record of Dante's thirty months of study, and the fullest expression of his philosophical thought, is the Convivio, in which commentary on a series of his own canzoni is the occasion for the expression of a range of ideas on ethics, politics, and metaphysics, as well as for extended discussion of philosophy itself. Dante describes the genesis of his love of philosophy, and reflects on the ability of philosophical understanding to mediate religious truth, tracing the desire for knowledge from its origin as an inherent trait of human nature to the point where the love of wisdom expresses itself directly as love of God.

Philosophy itself is the "love of Wisdom," and Dante's central metaphor for representing it is the poetic celebration of a noble lady, a donna gentile, an act which, like Guinizelli, he sees as involving the influence of cosmic powers. His poetry, "materiated" out of love and virtue [Conv. 1.1.14] comes into being because his nature is responsive to the influence of the "movers" of the universe, the intelligences, whose loving understanding determines "the most noble form of heaven" as they in turn respond to "the love of the Holy Spirit" [2.5.13, 18]. Their cosmic activity is a continual translation of understanding into love and natural process, and it is this which causes Dante to sing [2, Canzone, 1-9]:

Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, udite il ragionar ch’è nel mio core, ch'io nol so dire altrui, sì mi par novo. El ciel che segue lo vostro valore, gentili creature che voi sete, mi tragge ne lo stato ov'io mi trovo. Onde ‘l parlar de la vita ch'io provo, par che si drizzi degnamente a vui: però vi priego che lo mi ‘ntendiate.

Translation: You who by understanding move the third heaven, hear the discourse which is in my heart, and which seems so strange to me that I know not how to say it to others. The heaven which responds to your power, noble creatures that you are, draws me into the state in which I find myself, and so it seems that speech about the life I am experiencing is most appropriately addresses to you. Therefore I pray that you will understand me.

The intellective power or intendimento of the intelligences moves Dante to an utterance which only these same powers can fully understand. Thus there is a continuum, a process of circulazione which begins in the mind of God and descends through the work of the intelligenze to draw Dante's nature into that praise of the donna gentile which constitutes the fulfillment of his own nature, the highest expression of which his desire and intellect are capable [2.5.15, 18; 2.6.5].

Of the four books or trattati of the Convivio the first is largely a defense of Dante's decision to write his prose commentaries, as well as the poems they expound, in the Tuscan vernacular rather than in Latin. The second book provides a delineation of the Ptolemaic universe which the intelligenze govern, capped by a description of the Empyrean Heaven [2.3.8-11]:

. . . outside all of these [spheres, heavens] the Catholics place the Empyrean heaven, which is to say, "the heaven of flame," or "luminous heaven"; and they hold it to be motionless because it has in itself, with respect to each of its parts, that which its matter desires. This is why the Primum Mobile has the swiftest movement; for because of the most fervent desire that each part of the ninth heaven has to be conjoined with every part of that divinest, tranquil heaven, to which it is contiguous, it revolves beneath it with such desire that its velocity is almost incomprehensible. Stillness and peace are the qualities of the place of that Supreme Deity which alone completely beholds itself. This is the place of the blessed spirits, according to the will of the Holy Church, which

cannot lie. Aristotle, to anyone who rightly understands him, seems to hold the same opinion in the first book of Heaven and the World [i.e. De caelo]. This is the supreme edifice of the universe in which all the world is enclosed and beyond which there is nothing; it is not itself in space but was formed solely in the Primal Mind, which the Greeks call Protonoe. This is that magnificence of which the Psalmist spoke when he says to God: "Your magnificence is exaltled above the heavens."

The role of the Empyrean in thirteenth-century thought is equivocal. Some thinkers attempt to explain it scientifically, as a comprehensive cosmic principle, while for Thomas and Albert any such realm must be spiritual in nature, and can bear no natural relation to the astronomical universe, though both at times seem to grant it a certain influence on the natural order [Nardi (1967), 196-214; Vasoli, 94-102]. Dante's account reflects these uncertainties. He begins by citing "the Catholics," or orthodox belief, as authority for his account of this

"abode of the supreme deity," but then goes on to treat the Empyrean as a created thing, "formed in the Primal Mind," and as the motionless cause of motion in the physical universe. If God dwells in this place, the Empyrean resides equally in Him, and the universe at large is encompassed, causally and locally, by the Empyrean. Dante deploys the Aristotelian physics of desire to explain the relationship of the Empyrean to the lesser heavens, yet it is at the same time beyond space, a wholly spiritual realm where blessed spirits participate in the divine mind. Dante seems to emphasize this double status by mingling theological and philosophical language, and invoking Aristotle and the neo-Platonists side by side with the poet of the Psalms. In the Paradiso the problems raised here will be implicitly resolved by a brilliant recourse to the "metaphysics of light"; when Dante and Beatrice, emerging from the "greatest body," the crystalline sphere or Primum Mobile, pass on "al ciel ch’è pura luce, / Luce intellettual piena d'amore" [Par. 30.39-40], we know that we are at the precise point at which the bonum diffusivum sui that is God's love transforms itself to cosmic energy, "the love that moves the sun and the other stars." But poetry is perhaps the only means of defining this threshold [Bonaventure, Sent. 2. d. 2, a. 2, q. 1, c. 4; Thomas, Quodl. 6, q. 11, a. unicus 19].

Similar ambiguities appear in Dante's discussion of the intelligenze themselves. Since in governing the several heavens the intelligences engage in a kind of civil life, they must enjoy an active as well as a contemplative existence. But the latter is of a higher order than the former, and no single intelligence can partake of both. Influenced perhaps by Thomas's commentary, Dante imputes to Aristotle in the Ethics the view that such divine beings must know only a contemplative life [2.4.13; cp. Aristotle, NE 10.8, 1178b; Thomas, Exp. Eth. 10, lect. 12, 2125]. Dante's attempt to resolve the issue is oddly unpersuasive. He argues that the circular motion of the heavens, by which the world is governed, is really a function of the contemplative activity of the intelligences [2.4.13]. Here, as in the case of the Empyrean which they inhabit, we can see Aristotle's celestial movers undergoing a neo-Platonizing transformation, but Dante ends this stage of his discussion by noting that the truth concerning the Intelligences can not be fully grasped by our earthly understanding [2.4.16-17].

The second book concludes with an extended allegory in which the concentric "heavens" or planetary spheres are identified with the seven Liberal Arts, the "starry sphere" with physics and metaphysics, the Primum mobile with moral

philosophy, and the Empyrean beyond with theology. This synthesis of the natural and the intellectual universe expresses an ideal of education which harks back to the late-antique sources of twelfth-century Platonism, but which Dante has imbued with new life. His emphasis on the ordering function of moral wisdom, and on the happiness attainable through intellectual contemplation, reflects an engagement with the philosophical tradition, and a commitment to philosophy as such, which belong to the later thirteenth century. The final chapter of Book Two affirms the beauty that consists in seeing the causes of those "wonders" which, as the opening of the Metaphysics declares, draw us to philosophy.

The third book is perhaps the most important for the student of Dante's knowledge and use of philosophy. Its central theme is praise of philosophy's power, as "l'amoroso uso della sapienza," "the loving use of wisdom," to impart the highest happiness to those who love her, perfecting their natures and drawing them close to God, of whose majesty and wisdom her beauty is the expression. It is largely a meditation on love, understood as Dante's response, intellectual, poetic and psychological, to his enlightenment at the

hands of the beautiful lady whom he celebrates as Philosophy.

Early in the third book Dante cites the Liber de Causis: Every "substantial form" proceeds from the first cause, God, and participates in His divine nature according to its nobility [3.2.4-7; LC 1.1]. The human soul, noblest of all created forms, loves all things to the degree that they manifest the divine goodness, but desires above all to be united with God. Philosophy is the expression of this desire: Its "form" is "an almost divine love of knowledge" [3.11.13] which leads to "the spiritual uniting of the soul with what it loves" [3.2.3]. It is through philosophy that humanity perfects its "truly human or, better, angelic nature, that is to say the rational [nature]" [3.3.11], discovering in itself "that distinguished and most precious part which is deity" and "participating in the divine nature as an everlasting intelligence" [3.2.14, 19]. As such it mirrors the nobility, wisdom and love of the divine essence and its "loving use of wisdom" becomes by participation "marriage" with God [3.12.11-14].

All of this may appear sheer fantasy, but we should remember that the aim of philosophy as the Convivio pursues it is to attain, through natural reason, the greatest happiness of which we are capable in our earthly state. Such felicity is of course circumscribed by our mortality, and the Dante who can celebrate philosophical understanding as a quasi-mystical union with God knows at the same time that true union is granted only through grace, to a soul made receptive by the infusion of virtues which wholly transcend the workings of rational, natural virtue. For as Thomas says, the rational virtues "are dispositions by which man is fittingly disposed with reference to the nature by which he is a man. But the infused virtues dispose man in a higher way, and in view of a higher end; and also, it follows, with reference to some higher nature" [ST 1.2.110.3r]. This "higher nature" is of course the divine nature "through participation in which we are reborn in grace."

Dante acknowledges Thomas's distinction when he speaks of the soul after death as "more than human" [2.8.6], and asserts that to perceive God is not possible for our nature [3.15.10]. For both Dante and Thomas humanness is defined by the conjoining of soul and body, and human knowledge depends on the evidence of the senses [Foster (1965), 69-71; Thomas, ST 1.89a1]. Aristotle had similarly argued that a life of pure contemplation is beyond our strictly human capacity; we can live in this way only to the extent that we have in us "something divine" [NE 10.7, 1177b]. Thomas argues more subtly that the modus essendi of the soul joined to the body differs from that of the soul in separation; though they are the same in nature, the separated soul understands, not by means of sensory images, but "through species which it participates in by virtue of the divine light" [ST 1.89.1r]. In the meantime, as Dante acknowledges, there are truths which we can apprehend only as if in a dream, "come sognando," [Conv. 3.15.6; Nardi (1944), 81-90], and our desire for perfect understanding is necessarily limited, "proportionate to the wisdom which can be acquired here"; for to desire what is beyond the capacity of our intellectual nature would be ethically and rationally incoherent, a desire for imperfection rather than perfection of understanding [3.15.8-10].

But the Convivio continually strains against these limits. For Dante, first and foremost a poet of love, the experience of acquiring philosophical understanding has an important psychological component. By enabling us to analyze the

processes of perception, philosophy brings us into contact with the true nature of things, and for Dante, as Kenelm Foster observes, the slightest such contact could have a metaphysical value [Foster (1965), 59-60]: "It did not in one sense matter to Dante what the particular object of his knowing might be, since the joy of knowing it was already a foretaste of all conceivable knowledge and all joy; and this precisely because, in knowing, the mind seized truth. . . . once intelligence, the truth-faculty, had tasted truth as such, that is, its own correspondence with reality, it could not help desiring truth whole and entire, that is, its correspondence with all reality." At this point knowledge and the joy of possessing it combine to prepare the ground for faith. By explaining phenomena which without her guidance would merely astonish us, philosophy inspires us to believe "that every miracle can be perceived by a superior intellect to have a reasonable cause" [3.14.14]:

Our good faith has its origin in this, from which comes the hope that longs for things foreseen; and from this springs the activity of charity. By these three virtues we ascend to philosophize in that celestial Athens where Stoics and Peripatetics and Epicureans, by the light of eternal truth, join ranks in a single harmonious will.

Philosophy thus conceived can still be regarded as the handmaid of theology, but as Dante develops his philosophical ideal metaphorically in terms of the beauty of the Donna Gentile, it assumes a religious value of its own. Since the wisdom she embodies is the consummation of human self-realization, the Donna Gentile resides in the divine mind as "the intentional exemplar of the human essence" [3.6.6]. In desiring her we desire our own perfection, for she is "as supremely perfect as the human essence can be." When at this point Dante adds a reminder that nothing in our human experience can fully satisfy this desire, he seems to be acknowledging that what Thomas' Ethics commentary calls "the ultimate end of desire's natural inclination" is unattainable in this life, since it would require an understanding more complete than any human being can possess [Thomas, Exp. Eth. 1, lect. 9, 107; SCG 3.48.2].

But having provided this caution, Dante seems to ignore it, as if unable to resist the conviction that philosophy satisfies

our desire in a manner proper to itself. Everything naturally desires its own perfection, and for human beings this is "the perfection of reason" [3.15.3-4; cp. Thomas, Exp. Eth. 9, lect. 9, 1872]. But philosophy, as embodied in the Donna Gentile, is not just the consummation of natural understanding. For Dante, as for Aristotle, the human intellect as such is somehow more than human, and he is at times similarly unclear on the question of whether human beings can attain happiness through the exercise of virtue, and to what extent it is a gift of the gods [Foster (1977), 198-201]. Repeatedly he draws a distinction between merely human happiness and that attainable through grace, only to seemingly disregard it in subsequent discussion. Thus in the final chapter of the third

treatise he acknowledges the "strong misgivings" that one might have about the happiness attainable through philosophy. Since certain things -- God, eternity, and primal matter are named -- exceed the capacity of our intellect, our natural desire to know must remain unfulfilled in this life [3.15.7]. Dante answers this by affirming, as noted above, that the natural desire for perfection is always proportionate to our capacity to attain it; for to desire the unattainable would be to desire our imperfection [3.15.8-11]. Human happiness, then, consists in the attainment of Aristotle's "human good," through the exercise of the virtues. This is what Dante calls "l'umana operazione," and its end is the highest that human beings can attain through their own powers.

Yet philosophy offers the promise of more. The same chapter is climaxed by the vision of Wisdom as "the mother of all things," the origin of all motion and order in the created universe, guiding the quest of human wisdom by the light of the divine intellect. When the human mind is fully informed by philosophy, it would appear, it becomes virtually one of the intelligenze, who know both what is above them and what is below, God as cause and the created universe as effect [3.6.4-6]. Thus Dante can speak of our rational nature as our "truly human, or, to speak more exactly, our angelic nature" [3.3.11], as if it enjoyed a more or less mystical existence of a higher order as well as that of the "merely" human nature that pursues the active life of virtue.

The Liber de causis says that each cause infuses into its effect the goodness it receives from its own cause, or, in the case of the soul, from God [Conv. 3.6.11; LC 4.48]. When in gazing on the body of the Donna Gentile we behold maravigliose cose,

we are perceiving the effect of a cause which is ultimately God, and thus, Dante asserts [3.6.12-13]:it is evident that her form (that is, her soul), which directs the body as its proper cause, miraculously receives the goodness of God's grace. Thus outward appearance provides proof that this lady has been endowed and ennobled by God beyond what is due to our nature . . .

Thus in effect the Donna Gentile is the perfection we desire. Through her we experience the divine goodness, by an outflowing, a discorrimento which Dante glosses with a further reference to the Liber de Causis [3.7.2; LC 20.157], in terms of the hierarchical emanation of the divine goodness. In the quasi-continuous series of gradations that descends from angel to brute animal, there is no intervening grade between man and angel, so that some human beings are so noble as to be nothing less than angels [Aristotle, NE 7.1, 1145a]. Such is the Donna Gentile; she receives divine virtue just as the angels do [3.7.7]. She is a thing visibilmente miraculosa, ordained from eternity by God in testimonio de la fede for us [3.7.16-17; Foster (1965), 56]. Philosophy has "wisdom for her subject matter and love for her form" [3.14.1], and God, by instilling his radiance in her, "reduces" that love as nearly as possible to his own similitude [3.14.3; cp. Thomas, SCG 1.91].

Philosophy has clearly become far more than the means whereby human nature achieves self-realization, though this ideal continues to provide a framework for Dante's praise of her. She has assumed the status of Wisdom, sapientia, the divine mind as expressed in the order and harmony of creation. Her beauty can only be described in terms of its effects, like the separate substances and God Himself. The true philosopher "loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part of the philosopher, since she draws him to herself in full measure" [3.11.12]. Here we may recall Dante's account of how the swift motion of the Primum Mobile expresses its desire for total participation in the divinity of the Empyrean [2.3.8]. And it is in such terms that Dante ends his account of philosophy-as-wisdom. In the final chapter of the third treatise she is explicitly identified with the all-creating Wisdom of God [3.15.15], and Dante concludes in prophetic exhortation [3.15.17]:O worse than dead are you who flee her friendship! Open your eyes, and gaze forth! For she loved you before you existed, preparing and ordering your coming; and after you were made, she came to you in your own likeness in order to place you on the straight way.

The fourth treatise of the Convivio seems to have been written later than the first three, and it is markedly different in orientation. The principal theme of its canzone is the true nature of nobility. Introducing his prose discussion, Dante gives a curious account of how an interruption in his philosophical studies, caused by what the canzone calls "disdainful and harsh" behavior on the part of the Donna Gentile, provided an occasion for taking up this topic [4.1.8]: Since this lady of mine had somewhat altered the tenderness of her

looks at me, especially in those features at which I would gaze when seeking to learn whether the primal matter of the elements was intended by God -- and for this reasonI refrained for a short period of time from coming into the presence ofher countenance -- while living, as it were, in her absence, I set about contemplating the shortcoming within man regarding the above-mentioned error [i.e. a false perception of the bases of human nobility].

That God is the creator of prime matter was an article of faith, and Thomas had dealt decisively with the role of divine will and intellect in the creative act [SCG 2.20.7, 21-24]. That Dante should admit to having entertained doubts about such a question is perhaps a way of indicating his awareness of a danger inherent in his philosophical studies. Deeply concerned to affirm the dignity of reason and the truth embodied in material creation, he may have sensed himself idolizing the secondary powers in whose hierarchical circulazione he felt himself, as poet, to be in a special sense participant, and allowing these preoccupations to cloud his awareness of God's omnipotence. The anger of the Donna Gentile would then express his sense of a corresponding loss of focus, a failure to affirm her unique and transcendent role in the expression of the divine will.

Whatever the precise nature of the dilemma to which Dante alludes, the fourth treatise is marked by a noticeable shift away from metaphysics in the direction of ethics and rhetoric. Philosophical knowledge is redirected to the purposes of social and political life, and the treatise, while punctuated like the others by numerous digressions, pursues a single sustained argument. Dante begins by explaining that social order as a condition of human happiness, and that it requires a single governor whose authority embraces that of all particular governors and directs their several efforts to a single end [4.4]. After a long digression on the role of Rome in the providential design of human history, he turns

from political to philosophical authority, citing Aristotle as in effect the governor of the mind, "master and leader of human reason insofar as it is directed to man's highest work" [4.6.8]. He then proceeds to qualify both political and philosophical authority, justifying himself at length as he does so. Imputing to Aristotle the statement that "whatever appears true to the majority cannot be entirely false" [Topica 1.1, 100b? NE 1.9. 1098b?], he explains that this must be understood to apply, not to sense perception, but only to acts of the mind [4.8.6]. An emperor's authority, too, must be circumscribed; the art of ruling and the laws it creates cannot overrule rational judgment based on the laws of nature [4.9].

On this basis Dante proceeds to refute the view that nobility consists in wealth and ancestry, a view which he here attributes to Frederick II, "the last emperor of the Romans," and for which he will elsewhere cite Aristotle's Politics [Mon. 2.3.4; Pol. 4.8, 1294a]. Perhaps as significant as the arguments he musters to show the treacherous

nature of riches and the uncertain course of nobility from one generation to another is the assertion of Dante's own authority, as philosopher and citizen, that is implied by his elaborate apology for speaking as he does [Ascoli, 35-41]. The gesture nicely epitomizes the project of the Convivio, a vernacular discourse which defines for its lay audience the limits of political and scholastic authority, and affirms the autonomy and potential dignity of individual human reason.

The later portions of the fourth treatise are grounded in another Aristotelian definition of nobility, as the perfection of a thing according to its nature [Conv. 4.16.7; Physics 7.3.246a]. The human expression of this perfection is virtue, moral and intellectual. Electing to address the moral virtues, as more accessible to a lay understanding, Dante begins by describing how nobility is implanted in the nascent soul as the seed of virtue, from which spring the two branches of the active and the contemplative life. The final chapters of the Convivio show how the virtues that stem from nobility can direct "the natural appetite of the mind," enabling it to evolve through love of them to the happiness which is the end of virtue [Conv. 4.17.8-9; NE 1.13, 1102a].

In the final stanza of the canzone analyzed in the fourth treatise, Dante addresses the poem itself as "Contra-li-erranti mia," "my song against-the-erring ones," and the final chapter of the commentary explains this as an allusion to the Summa contra gentiles of Thomas, written "to confound all those who stray from our faith" [Conv. 4.30.3]. By thus declaring himself the follower of so fine a craftsman, Dante suggests, he hopes to "ennoble" his own undertaking.

The Contra gentiles may seem an odd choice of model. Bruno Nardi considers that Dante had at most a superficial knowledge of this work at the time when he wrote the Convivio, and it is certainly the case that he is fundamentally at odds with Thomas over such specific matters as the origin of the soul, the role of the celestial intelligences in creation, and, more important, in claiming for philosophy the power to fulfil the human desire for knowledge in this life [Nardi (1992), 28-29]. On all of these matters Dante is closer to the position of Albert.

On the broader question of the nature of the human desire for knowledge, and the extent to which this desire can be fulfilled by the rational intellect, Dante remains, throughout the Convivio, sharply at odds with Thomas. The fourth treatise offers what we may take as his final word, as philosopher, on this question. Having dwelt at length on the insatiability of the base desire for riches, Dante addresses the question of whether our desire for knowledge, too, since it continues to grow as knowledge is acquired, is not similarly base. Dante begins his answer by asserting that "the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first given to it by nature, is to return to its first cause," and illustrates this proposition by the images of a traveller on an unfamiliar road, who imagines each house he encounters to be the inn he seeks, and the desires of youth, which focus first on an apple or a pet bird, then evolve to encompass love and prosperity [Conv. 4.12.15-16]. But while this may seem to evoke Thomas's view of a single desire which seeks to grow continuously toward union with God, Dante's point is that the path to fulfillment involves multiple desires and the attainment of multiple perfections [Conv. 34.13.2]:

For if I desire to know the principles of natural things, as soon as I know them this desire is fulfilled and brought to an end. If I then desire to know what each of these principles is and how each exists, this is a new and separate desire. Nor by the appearance of this

desire am I dispossessed of the perfection to which I was brought by the other, and this growth is not the cause of imperfection but of greater perfection.

Thomas can speak of the natural desire to know as a force like gravity, whose attraction intensifies as it approaches its object [SCG 3.25.13]. In contrast Dante's insistence on types and stages of knowing may seem almost perverse, a matter of emphasizing the stages of the mind's ascent rather than the desire that leads it forward from stage to stage. But what is at stake for Dante is the need to acknowledge human ends as having a definite value of their own, and this need will play an equally important role in Dante's other major philosophical work, the Monarchia.

Before leaving the Convivio, however, I would like to suggest a way in which Dante's citation of the Summa contra gentiles is, after all, an appropriate way of labelling his own undertaking. The Contra gentiles is unique among medieval summae in aiming to demonstrate, not just the compatibility of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics with revealed truth, but the extent to which the invisibilia Dei can be understood without recourse to that truth. In Norman Kretzmann's phrase it is "a risky tour de force" that actively engages unbelievers in metaphysical argument, and spends more time undoing mistakes than affirming Christian doctrine. Revealed truth provides a means of determining the topics to be discussed, and the harmony of natural demonstration with revelation is repeatedly noted, but the basis for demonstration is provided by Aristotle, and what the first three of Thomas's four books present is a case, not for Christianity, but for theism

[Kretzmann, pp. 43-53].

Dante seems to acknowledge the pioneering aspect of Thomas's undertaking. Like Thomas, he is testing philosophy, privileging Aristotle as a unique resource capable of helping him discover truth by natural means. Gauthier sees Thomas "nel mezzo del cammin" as he composes the Contra gentiles, adopting the position of the Aristotelian sapiens to reflect on his own ongoing work and justify it to contemporaries [Gauthier, 179-81]. Dante, too, is deeply concerned to define and justify his own position as a voice of wisdom for his contemporaries. The truths he affirms are encoded in his own poetry, rather than mysteriously embodied in Scripture, and he addresses a cultured but non-Latinate audience unschooled in philosophy. But in substituting the Donna Gentile of philosophical wisdom for Beatrice beata, the "authentic," salvific Beatrice who will reemerge as the voice of truth in the Commedia, Dante is establishing a relationship between secular knowledge and the truth that Beatrice embodies analogous to the relation Thomas establishes between philosophy and theology proper.

5. The Monarchia

The Monarchia is in its own way as idiosyncratic as the Convivio. Its purpose, foreshadowed in the discussion of empire in Convivio IV, is to demonstrate the necessity of a single ruling power, reverent toward but independent of the Church, capable of ordering the will of collective humanity in peace and concord. Under such a power the potential intellect of humanity can be fully actuated -- the intellect, that is, of collective humanity, existent throughout the world, acting as one. For just as a multitude of species must continually be generated to actualize the full potentiality of prime matter, so the full intellectual capacity of humanity cannot be realized at one time nor in a single individual [Mon. 1.3.3-8]. Here Dante adds his own further particularization of this Aristotelian doctrine [De Anima 3.5, 430a10-15], asserting that no single household, community, or city can bring it to realization. The ordering of the collective human will to the goal of realizing its intellectual potential requires universal peace [1.4], and this in turn requires a single ordering power through whose authority humanity may achieve unity and so realize the intention and likeness of God [1.8].

The basis of this argument for empire is evidently the first sentence of the Prologue to Thomas' literal commentary on the Metaphysics, where he declares that when several things are ordered to a single end, one of them must govern, "as the Philosopher teaches in his Politics" [Thomas, Exp. Metaph., Proemium; Aristotle, Politics 1.5, 1254a-55a]. For Thomas this is only an analogy, a way of introducing the theme of order as it applies to the soul and its pursuit of happiness. The passage he cites from the Politics is concerned only with the rudiments of hierarchy; the idea of "ordering of things to one end" is present only by implication, and Aristotle makes no attempt to develop its metaphysical implications. Dante, however, seems clearly to associate with Aristotle, or with Thomas' reference to Aristotle, the idea of "a political organization which leads in its way to ‘beatitudo’ for the whole human race" [Minio-Paluello, 74-77]. One may wonder if Dante's erroneous impression of the Aristotelian passage, which he cites directly with no reference to Thomas in both the Convivio and the Monarchia [Conv. 4.4.5; Mon. 1.5.3], is not a symptom of his intense need to draw the Philosopher into support of his view of world empire.

The second of the Monarchia's three books deals with the great example of Rome, describing the city's providential role in world history, largely by way of citations from Roman literature aimed at demonstrating the consistent dedication of Roman power to the public good, and the conformity of Roman imperium with the order of nature and the will of God. The third book deals with the crucial issue of the relationship between political and ecclesiastical authority. Dante argues on various grounds that power in the temporal realm is neither derived from nor dependent on spiritual authority, though it benefits from the power of the Papacy to bless its activity. These arguments consist largely in refutations of traditional claims for the temporal authority of the Papacy, but the final chapter makes the argument on positive grounds. Since man consists of soul and body, his nature partakes of both the corruptible and the incorruptible. Uniting two natures, his existence must necessarily be ordered to the goals of both these natures [Mon. 3.16.7-9]:

Ineffable providence has thus set before us two goals to aim at: i.e. happiness in this life, which consists in the exercise of our own powers and is figured in the earthly paradise; and happiness in the eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of the vision of God (to which our own powers cannot raise us except with the help of God's light) and which is signified by the heavenly paradise. Now these two kinds of happiness must be reached

by different means, as representing different ends. For we attain the first through the teachings of philosophy, provided that we follow them putting into practice the moral and intellectual virtues; whereas we attain the second through spiritual teachings which transcend human reason,

provided that we follow them putting into practice the theological virtues, i.e. faith, hope, and charity. These ends and the means to attain them have been shown to us on the one hand by human reason, which has been entirely revealed to us by the philosophers, and on the other by the Holy Spirit . . .

This is Dante's most explicit, uncompromising claim for the autonomy of reason, reinforced by the entire world-historical argument of the Monarchia and constituting its final justification for world empire. Dante here goes well beyond Augustine's sense of the stabilizing function of empire, and eliminates any hint of the anti-Roman emphasis in Augustine's separation of the earthly and heavenly cities. In the final sentences of the Monarchia the temporal monarch becomes, like the aspiring intellect of the Convivio, the uniquely privileged beneficiary of a divine bounty which, "without any intermediary, descends into him from the Fountainhead of universal authority" [Mon. 3.16.15]. Like the Averroistic reasoning of his earlier claim that only under a world empire can humanity realize its intellectual destiny, this crowning claim shows Dante appropriating Aristotle to the service of a unique and almost desperate vision of empire as a redemptive force. But whether we consider the world view of the Monarchia an aberration [D'Entreves, 51] or

take it as Dante's straightforward exposition of his views on the relations of secular and religious authority, its categorical definition of the twofold purpose of human life is impossible to explain away. In the Paradiso [8.115-17] as in the Monarchia, to be a "citizen" is essential to human happiness, and the idea of an imperial authority independent of papal control remained fundamental to his political thought.

6. The Commedia (The Divine Comedy)The Monarchia's crowning vision is not Dante's last word on the subject of human happiness, nor on the possibility of achieving happiness by natural means. The "earthly paradise" which

we attain for ourselves through philosophy is certainly not the paradise Dante the pilgrim will discover at the summit of Purgatory. To the philosopher the Commedia promises only the cold light and enamelled greenery of Limbo, the somber Elysium where Dante encounters Aristotle and the "philosophic family" who look to him as their master, living out an eternity, not of happiness, but of desire without hope [Inf. 4.111-20, 130-44].

The contrast expresses the difference in orientation between the Commedia on the one hand and the Convivio and Monarchia on the other. The Commedia is concerned always with the ultimate, eternal destiny of human life, with the transcendence, rather than the fulfillment of human understanding. When Beatrice at the summit of Purgatory utters prophetic words which "soar" far beyond Dante's power to envision her meaning, she explains that his limitations are those of "that school which you have followed," whose teachings are as far from the divine way as the earth from the Primum Mobile [Purg.

33.82-90]. The "school" in question is the study of philosophy as Dante had pursued and celebrated it in earlier writings. It is his training in this school that makes possible the luminous precision of the great doctrinal passages in the Purgatorio and Paradiso [Purg. 17.90-139; 25.37-87; Par. 2.112-48; 7.64-77; 13.52-78; 29.13-45; 30; 97-108], but it is a training that harbors the danger of rationalism and intellectual pride. In the Convivio God is the highest good, but remains the distant, unchanging focus of the aspiring mind. In the Commedia God assumes an active role as the dispenser of that grace without which the intellectual quest is futile:

Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia nostro intelletto, se ‘l ver non lo illustra di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.

[Par. 4.124-26]

Translation: I see well that never is our intellect satisfied, unless that truth illumines it beyond which no truth may soar.

Plot OverviewInferno opens on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300. Traveling through a dark wood, Dante Alighieri has lost his path and now wanders fearfully through the forest. The sun shines down on a mountain above him, and he attempts to climb up to it but finds his way blocked by three beasts—a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. Frightened and helpless, Dante returns to the dark wood. Here he encounters the ghost of Virgil, the great Roman poet, who has come to guide Dante back to his path, to the top of the mountain. Virgil says that their path will take them through Hell and that they will eventually reach Heaven, where Dante’s beloved Beatrice awaits. He adds that it was Beatrice, along with two other holy women, who, seeing Dante lost in the wood, sent Virgil to guide him.

Virgil leads Dante through the gates of Hell, marked by the haunting inscription “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE” (III.7). They enter the outlying region of Hell, the Ante-Inferno, where the souls who in life could not commit to either good or evil now must run in a futile chase after a blank banner, day after day, while hornets bite them and worms lap their blood. Dante witnesses their suffering with repugnance and pity. The ferryman Charon then takes him and his guide across the river Acheron, the real border of Hell. The First Circle of Hell, Limbo, houses pagans, including Virgil and many of the other great writers and poets of antiquity, who died without knowing of Christ. After meeting Horace, Ovid, and Lucan,

Dante continues into the Second Circle of Hell, reserved for the sin of Lust. At the border of the Second Circle, the monster Minos lurks, assigning condemned souls to their punishments. He curls his tail around himself a certain number of times, indicating the number of the circle to which the soul must go. Inside the Second Circle, Dante watches as the souls of the Lustful swirl about in a terrible storm; Dante meets Francesca, who tells him the story of her doomed love affair with Paolo da Rimini, her husband’s brother; the relationship has landed both in Hell.

In the Third Circle of Hell, the Gluttonous must lie in mud and endure a rain of filth and excrement. In the Fourth Circle, the Avaricious and the Prodigal are made to charge at one another with giant boulders. The Fifth Circle of Hell contains the river Styx, a swampy, fetid cesspool in which the Wrathful spend eternity struggling with one another; the Sullen lie bound beneath the Styx’s waters, choking on the mud. Dante glimpses Filippo Argenti, a former political enemy of his, and watches in delight as other souls tear the man to pieces.

Virgil and Dante next proceed to the walls of the city of Dis, a city contained within the larger region of Hell. The demons who guard the gates refuse to open them for Virgil, and an angelic messenger arrives from Heaven to force the gates open before Dante. The Sixth Circle of Hell houses the Heretics, and there Dante encounters a rival political leader named Farinata. A deep valley leads into the First Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, where those who were violent toward others spend eternity in a river of boiling blood. Virgil and Dante meet a group of Centaurs, creatures who are half man, half horse. One of them, Nessus, takes them into the Second Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, where they encounter those who were violent toward themselves (the Suicides). These souls must endure eternity in the form of trees. Dante there speaks with Pier della Vigna. Going deeper into the Seventh Circle of Hell, the travelers find those who were violent toward God (the Blasphemers); Dante meets his old patron, Brunetto Latini, walking among the souls of those who were violent toward Nature (the Sodomites) on a desert of burning sand. They also encounter the Usurers, those who were violent toward Art.

The monster Geryon transports Virgil and Dante across a great abyss to the Eighth Circle of Hell, known as Malebolge, or “evil pockets” (or “pouches”); the term refers to the circle’s division into various pockets separated by great folds of earth. In the First Pouch, the Panderers and the Seducers receive lashings from whips; in the second, the Flatterers must lie in a river

of human feces. The Simoniacs in the Third Pouch hang upside down in baptismal fonts while their feet burn with fire. In the Fourth Pouch are the Astrologists or Diviners, forced to walk with their heads on backward, a sight that moves Dante to great pity. In the Fifth Pouch, the Barrators (those who accepted bribes) steep in pitch while demons tear them apart. The Hypocrites in the Sixth Pouch must forever walk in circles, wearing heavy robes made of lead. Caiphas, the priest who confirmed Jesus’ death sentence, lies crucified on the ground; the other sinners tread on him as they walk. In the horrifying Seventh Pouch, the Thieves sit trapped in a pit of vipers, becoming vipers themselves when bitten; to regain their form, they must bite another thief in turn.

In the Eighth Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell, Dante speaks to Ulysses, the great hero of Homer’s epics, now doomed to an eternity among those guilty of Spiritual Theft (the False Counselors) for his role in executing the ruse of the Trojan Horse. In the Ninth Pouch, the souls of Sowers of Scandal and Schism walk in a circle, constantly afflicted by

wounds that open and close repeatedly. In the Tenth Pouch, the Falsifiers suffer from horrible plagues and diseases.

Virgil and Dante proceed to the Ninth Circle of Hell through the Giants’ Well, which leads to a massive drop to Cocytus, a great frozen lake. The giant Antaeus picks Virgil and Dante up and sets them down at the bottom of the well, in the lowest region of Hell. In Caina, the First Ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell, those who betrayed their kin stand frozen up to their necks in the lake’s ice. In Antenora, the Second Ring, those who betrayed their country and party stand frozen up to their heads; here Dante meets Count Ugolino, who spends eternity gnawing on the head of the man who imprisoned him in life. In Ptolomea, the Third Ring, those who betrayed their guests spend eternity lying on their backs in the frozen lake, their tears making blocks of ice over their eyes. Dante next follows Virgil into Judecca, the Fourth Ring of the

Ninth Circle of Hell and the lowest depth. Here, those who betrayed their benefactors spend eternity in complete icy submersion.

A huge, mist-shrouded form lurks ahead, and Dante approaches it. It is the three-headed giant Lucifer, plunged waist-deep into the ice. His body pierces the center of the Earth, where he fell when God hurled him down from Heaven. Each of Lucifer’s mouths chews one of history’s three greatest sinners: Judas, the betrayer of Christ, and Cassius and Brutus, the betrayers of Julius Caesar. Virgil leads Dante on a climb down Lucifer’s massive form, holding on to his frozen tufts of hair. Eventually, the poets reach the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and travel from there out of Hell and back onto Earth. They emerge from Hell on Easter morning, just before sunrise.

Character List

Dante -  The author and protagonist of Inferno; the focus of all action and interaction with other characters. Because Dante chose to present his fictional poem as a record of events that actually happened to him, a wide gulf between Dante the poet and Dante the character pervades the poem. For instance, Dante the poet often portrays Dante the character as compassionate and sympathetic at the sight of suffering sinners, but Dante the poet chose to place them in Hell and devised their suffering. As a result, if Dante the character is at all representative of Dante the poet, he is a very simplified version: sympathetic, somewhat fearful of danger, and confused both morally and intellectually by his experience in Hell. As the poem progresses, Dante the character gradually learns to abandon

his sympathy and adopt a more pitiless attitude toward the punishment of sinners, which he views as merely a reflection of divine justice.

Virgil -  Dante’s guide through the depths of Hell. Historically, Virgil lived in the first century B.C., in what is now northern Italy. Scholars consider him the greatest of the Latin poets. His masterpiece, the Aeneid, tells the story of how Aeneas, along with fellow survivors of the defeat of Troy, came to found Rome. The shade (or spirit) of Virgil that appears in Inferno has been condemned to an eternity in Hell because he lived prior to Christ’s appearance on Earth (and thus prior to the possibility of redemption in Him). Nonetheless, Virgil has now received orders to lead Dante through Hell on his spiritual journey. Virgil proves a wise, resourceful, and commanding presence, but he often seems helpless to protect Dante from the true dangers of Hell. Critics generally consider Virgil an allegorical representation of human reason—both in its immense power and in its inferiority to faith in God.

Beatrice -  One of the blessed in Heaven, Beatrice aids Dante’s journey by asking an angel to find Virgil and bid him guide Dante through Hell. Like Dante and Virgil, Beatrice corresponds to a historical personage. Although the details of her life remain uncertain, we know that Dante fell passionately in love with her as a young man and never fell out of it. She has a limited role in Inferno but becomes more prominent in Purgatorio and Paradiso. In fact, Dante’s entire imaginary journey throughout the afterlife aims, in part, to find Beatrice, whom he has lost on Earth because of her early death. Critics generally view Beatrice as an allegorical representation of spiritual love.

Charon -  A figure that Dante appropriates from Greek mythology, Charon is an old man who ferries souls across the river Acheron to Hell.

Paolo and Francesca da Rimini -  A pair of lovers condemned to the Second Circle of Hell for an adulterous love affair that they began after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.

Minos -  The king of Crete in Greek mythology, Minos is portrayed by Dante as a giant beast who stands at the Second Circle of Hell, deciding where the souls of sinners shall be sent for torment. Upon hearing a given sinner’s confession, Minos curls his tail around himself a specific number of times to represent the circle of Hell to which the soul should be consigned.

Pope Boniface VIII -  A notoriously corrupt pope who reigned from 1294 to 1303, Boniface made a concerted attempt to increase the political might of the Catholic Church and was thus a political enemy of Dante, who advocated a separation of church and state.

Farinata -  A Ghibelline political leader from Dante’s era who resides among the Heretics in the Sixth Circle of Hell. Farinata is doomed to continue his intense obsession with Florentine politics, which he is now helpless to affect.

Lucifer -  The prince of Hell, also referred to as Dis. Lucifer resides at the bottom of the Ninth (and final) Circle of Hell, beneath the Earth’s surface, with his body jutting through the planet’s center. An enormous

giant, he has three faces but does not speak; his three mouths are busy chewing three of history’s greatest traitors: Judas, the betrayer of Christ, and Cassius and Brutus, the betrayers of Julius Caesar.

Phlegyas -  The boatman who rows Dante and Virgil across the river Styx.

Filippo Argenti -  A Black Guelph, a political enemy of Dante who is now in the Fifth Circle of Hell. Argenti resides among the Wrathful in the river Styx.

Nessus -  The Centaur (half man and half horse) who carries Dante through the First Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell.

Pier della Vigna -  A former advisor to Emperor Frederick II, della Vigna committed suicide when he fell into disfavor at the court. He now must spend eternity in the form of a tree.

Geryon -  The massive serpentine monster that transports Dante and Virgil from the Seventh to the Eighth Circle of Hell.

Malacoda -  The leader of the Malabranche, the demons who guard the Fifth Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell. Malacoda (his name means “evil tail”) intentionally furnishes Virgil

and Dante with erroneous directions.

Vanni Fucci -  A thief punished in the Seventh Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell who prophesies the defeat of the White Guelphs. A defiant soul, Fucci curses God and aims an obscene gesture at Him before Dante journeys on.

Ulysses -  The great hero of the Homeric epics The Iliad and The Odyssey. Ulysses was a bold and cunning man who is now imprisoned in the Eighth Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell among those guilty of Spiritual Theft.

Guido da Montefeltro -  An advisor to Pope Boniface VIII, da Montefeltro was promised anticipatory absolution—forgiveness for a sin given prior to the perpetration of the sin itself. Da Montefeltro now suffers in Hell, since absolution cannot be gained without repentance and it is impossible to repent a sin before committing it.

Antaeus -  The giant who transports Dante and Virgil from the Eighth to the Ninth Circle of Hell.

Count Ugolino -  A traitor condemned to the Second Ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell. Ugolino gnaws on the head of another damned traitor, Archbishop Ruggieri. When Ruggieri imprisoned Ugolino and his sons, denying them food, Ugolino was driven to eat the corpses of his starved sons.

Fra Alberigo and Branca d’Oria -  Sinners condemned to the Third Ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell. Fra Alberigo and Branca d’Oria are unlike the other sinners Dante

encounters: their crimes were deemed to be so great that devils snatched their souls from their living bodies; thus, their souls reside in Hell while their bodies live on, now guided and possessed by demons.

Analysis of Major Characters

Dante AlighieriThirty-five years old at the beginning of the story, Dante—the character as opposed to the poet—has lost his way on the “true path” of life; in other words, sin has obstructed his path to God. The Divine Comedy is the allegorical record of Dante’s quest to overcome sin and find God’s love; in Inferno, Dante explores the nature of sin by traveling through Hell, where evil receives punishment according to God’s justice.

Allegorically, Dante’s story represents not only his own life but also what Dante the poet perceived to be the universal Christian quest for God. As a result, Dante the character is rooted in the Everyman allegorical tradition: Dante’s situation is meant to represent that of the whole human race.

For this reason, Dante the character does not emerge as a particularly well-defined individual; although we know that he has committed a never-specified sin and that he participates in Florentine politics, we learn little about his life on Earth. His traits are very broad and universal: often sympathetic toward others, he nonetheless remains capable of anger; he weeps at the sight of the suffering souls but reacts with pleasure when one of his political enemies is torn to pieces. He demonstrates excessive pride but remains unsatisfied in many respects: he

feels that he ranks among the great poets that he meets in Limbo but deeply desires to find Beatrice, the woman he loves, and the love of God. Dante fears danger but shows much courage: horrified by Hell, he nevertheless follows his guide, Virgil, through its gates. He also proves extremely emotional, as shown by his frequent fainting when he becomes overly frightened or moved. As the story progresses, Dante must learn to reconcile his sympathy for suffering with the harsh violence of God’s justice; the deeper he proceeds into Hell, the less the agonies of the damned affect him. Virgil encourages him to abhor sin and not pity the justice meted out to sinners; Dante must achieve this level of stringent moral standards before he may begin his journey to Heaven, played out in Purgatorio and Paradiso.Because Dante the character is a fictional creation of Dante the poet, the reader should remember that the character’s feelings do not always correspond to those of the poet. For instance, when Dante sees Brunetto Latini among the Sodomites in Canto XV, Dante the character feels deeply moved and treats his patron kindly and with compassion. But outside the poem, Dante the poet has chosen to condemn his former patron to damnation; by placing him among the Sodomites, he implies that Latini was homosexual, a vicious slur in fourteenth-century Italy. Indeed, on a general level, the kindness and compassion of Dante the character often contrasts with the feelings of Dante the poet, who, after all, has devised excruciating torments with which to punish his characters, many of whom are historical individuals with whom Dante was acquainted in life.

VirgilThe only character besides Dante to appear all the way through Inferno, Virgil’s ghost is generally taken by critics to represent human reason, which guides and protects the individual (represented by Dante/Everyman) through the world of sin. As befits a character who symbolizes reason, Virgil proves sober, measured, resolute, and wise. He repeatedly protects Dante from hostile demons and monsters, from Charon to the Centaurs; when he appears powerless outside the gates of the city of Dis in Canto VIII, his helplessness appears very ominous, signifying that Lower Hell offers far darker dangers than Upper Hell. Virgil’s reliance on the angelic messenger in this scene also symbolizes the fact that reason is powerless without faith—an important tenet of Dante’s moral philosophy and one that marks Inferno as a Christian poem, distinct from the classical epics that preceded it. In the fullest sense of the word, Virgil acts as Dante’s guide, showing him not only the physical route through Hell but also reinforcing its moral lessons. When Dante appears slow to learn these lessons—such as when he sympathizes with sinners or attempts to remain too long in one region of Hell—Virgil often

grows impatient with him, a trait that humanizes this otherwise impersonal shade.

Dante the character and Dante the poet seem to regard Virgil differently. Dante the character regards Virgil as his master, constantly swearing his admiration for, and trust in, him. Dante the poet, however, often makes use of Inferno to prove his own poetic greatness in comparison to the classical bards who preceded him—including Virgil, who lived more than a thousand years before Dante. In Dante’s time, Virgil, the author of the Aeneid, was considered the greatest of the Roman poets. As with many of his other classical and mythological appropriations, Dante’s inclusion of Virgil in his poem denotes both an acknowledgment and appreciation of classical tradition and, to some degree, a form of bragging on Dante’s part: for while he respects Virgil enough to include him in his work, he also suggests that his poem subsumes Virgil entirely.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Perfection of God’s Justice

Dante creates an imaginative correspondence between a soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment he or she receives in Hell. The Sullen choke on mud, the Wrathful attack one another, the Gluttonous are forced to eat excrement, and so on. This simple idea provides many of Inferno’s moments of spectacular imagery and symbolic power, but also serves to illuminate one of Dante’s major themes: the perfection of God’s justice. The inscription over the gates of Hell in Canto III explicitly states that God was moved to create Hell by JUSTICE (III.7). Hell exists to punish sin, and the suitability of Hell’s specific punishments testify to the divine perfection that all sin violates.

This notion of the suitability of God’s punishments figures significantly in Dante’s larger moral messages and structures Dante’s Hell. To modern readers, the torments Dante and Virgil behold may seem shockingly harsh: homosexuals must endure an eternity of walking on hot sand; those who charge interest on loans sit beneath a rain

of fire. However, when we view the poem as a whole, it becomes clear that the guiding principle of these punishments is one of balance. Sinners suffer punishment to a degree befitting the gravity of their sin, in a manner matching that sin’s nature. The design of the poem serves to reinforce

this correspondence: in its plot it progresses from minor sins to major ones (a matter of degree); and in the geographical structure it posits, the various regions of Hell correspond to types of sin (a matter of kind). Because this notion of balance informs all of God’s chosen punishments, His justice emerges as rigidly objective, mechanical, and impersonal; there are no extenuating circumstances in Hell, and punishment becomes a matter of nearly scientific formula.

Early in Inferno, Dante builds a great deal of tension between the objective impersonality of God’s justice and the character Dante’s human sympathy for the souls that he sees around him. As the story progresses, however, the character becomes less and less inclined toward pity, and repeated comments by Virgil encourage this development. Thus, the text asserts the infinite wisdom of divine justice: sinners receive punishment in perfect proportion to their sin; to pity their suffering is to demonstrate a lack of understanding.

Evil as the Contradiction of God’s Will

In many ways, Dante’s Inferno can be seen as a kind of imaginative taxonomy of human evil, the various types of which Dante classifies, isolates, explores, and judges. At times we may question its organizing principle, wondering why, for example, a sin punished in the Eighth Circle of Hell, such as accepting a bribe, should be considered worse than a sin punished in the Sixth Circle of Hell, such as murder. To understand this organization, one must realize that Dante’s narration follows strict doctrinal Christian values. His moral system prioritizes not human happiness or harmony on Earth but rather God’s will in Heaven. Dante thus considers violence less evil than fraud: of these two sins, fraud constitutes the greater opposition to God’s will. God wills that we treat each other with the love he extends to us as individuals; while violence acts against this love, fraud constitutes a perversion of it. A fraudulent person affects care and love while perpetrating sin against it. Yet, while Inferno implies these moral arguments, it generally engages in little discussion of them. In the end, it declares that evil is evil simply because it contradicts God’s will, and God’s will does not need further justification. Dante’s exploration of evil probes neither the causes of evil, nor the psychology of evil, nor the earthly consequences of bad behavior. Inferno is not a philosophical text; its intention is not to think critically about evil but rather to teach and reinforce the relevant Christian doctrines.

Storytelling as a Way to Achieve Immortality

Dante places much emphasis in his poem on the notion of immortality through storytelling, everlasting life through legend and literary legacy. Several shades ask the character Dante to recall their names and stories on Earth upon his return. They hope, perhaps, that the retelling of their stories will allow them to live in people’s memories. The character Dante does not always oblige; for example, he ignores the request of the Italian souls in the Ninth Pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell that he bring word of them back to certain men on Earth as warnings. However, the poet Dante seems to have his own agenda, for his poem takes the recounting of their stories as a central part of its project. Although the poet repeatedly emphasizes the perfection of divine justice and the suitability of the sinners’ punishments, by incorporating the sinners’ narratives into his text he also allows them to live on in some capacity aboveground.

Yet, in retelling the sinners’ stories, the poet Dante may be acting less in consideration of the sinners’ immortality than of his own. Indeed, Dante frequently takes opportunities to advance his own glory. Thus, for example, in Canto XXIV, halfway through his description of the Thieves’ punishment, Dante declares outright that he has outdone both Ovid and Lucan in his ability to write scenes of metamorphosis and transformation (Ovid’s Metamorphoses focuses entirely on transformations; Lucan wrote the Pharsalia, an account of the Roman political transition and turmoil in the first century b.c.). By claiming to have surpassed two of the classical poets most renowned for their mythological inventions and vivid imagery, Dante seeks to secure his own immortality.

Thus, Dante presents storytelling as a vehicle for multiple legacies: that of the story’s subject as well as that of the storyteller. While the plot of a story may preserve the living memory of its protagonist, the story’s style and skill may serve the greater glory of its author. Although many of his sinners die a thousand deaths—being burned, torn to bits, or chewed to pieces, only to be reconstituted again and again—Dante emphasizes with almost equal incessancy the power of his narrative to give both its subjects and its author the gift of eternal life.

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Political Arguments

An unquestionably significant part of Dante’s aim in writing Inferno was to offer a large-scale commentary on the political nightmare of fourteenth-century Florence, from which he had recently been exiled. He makes his assertions in various ways. First, he condemns political figures with whom he disagreed by scattering them ruthlessly throughout Hell. Second, because Dante sets the action of Inferno several years before the years in which he wrote it, he can predict, as it were, certain events that had already taken place by the time of his writing. He issues these seeming predictions via the voices of the damned, apparently endowed at death with prophetic powers. In these souls’ emphasis on the corruption and turmoil of the so-called future Florence, Dante aims pointed criticism at his former home. Third, Dante asserts throughout the poem his personal political belief that church and state should exist as separate but equal powers on Earth, with the former governing man’s spirit and the latter governing his person. Thus, in his many references to Rome, Dante carefully mentions both its spiritual and secular importance.

The poem’s arresting final image provides another testament to the equal importance of church and state: Lucifer chews both on Judas (the betrayer of Christ, the ultimate spiritual leader) and on Cassius and Brutus (the betrayers of Caesar, the ultimate political leader). Treachery against religion and against government both warrant placement in Hell’s final circle. While Dante emphasizes the equality of these two institutions, he also asserts the necessity of their separation. He assigns particularly harsh punishments to souls guilty of broaching this separation, such as priests or popes who accepted bribes or yearned for political power.

Classical Literature and Mythology

Although the values that Inferno asserts are decidedly Christian, on a thematic and literary level, the poem owes almost as much to Greek and Roman tradition as it does to Christian morality literature. Dante’s Christian Hell features a large variety of mythological and ancient literary creatures, ranging from the Centaurs to Minos to Ulysses. He even incorporates mythological places, such as the rivers Acheron and Styx. In addition, Dante often refers to and imitates the styles of great classical writers such as Homer, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil himself. He therefore attempts to situate himself within the tradition of classical epics while proving that he is a greater writer than any of the classical poets.

Dante incorporates this ancient material for other reasons too, including the simple fact that mythological elements contain much dramatic potential. More important, however, Dante includes mythological and classical literary elements in his poem to indicate that Christianity has subsumed these famous stories; by bringing many religious strands under one umbrella, Dante heightens the urgency and importance of his quest—a quest that he believes necessary for all human beings.

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

It is impossible to reduce the iconic complexity of Inferno to a short list of important symbols. Because the poem is an overarching allegory, it explores its themes using dozens, even hundreds, of symbols, ranging from the minutely particular(the blank banner chased by the Uncommitted in Canto III, symbolizing the meaninglessness of their activity in life) to the hugely general (the entire story of The Divine Comedy itself, symbolizing the spiritual quest of human life). Many of the symbols in Inferno are clear and easily interpretable, such as the beast Geryon—with the head of an innocent man and the body of a foul serpent, he represents dishonesty and fraud. Others are much more nuanced and difficult to pin down, such as the trio of creatures that stops Dante from climbing the sunlit mountain in Canto I. When reading Inferno, it is extremely important to consider each element of the poem according to how it fits into

Dante’s larger system of symbolism—what it says about the scene, story, and themes of the work and about human life.

Perhaps the most important local uses of symbolism in Inferno involve the punishments of the sinners, which are always constructed so as to correspond allegorically to the sins that they committed in life. The Lustful, for example, who were blown about by passion in life, are now doomed to be blown about by a ferocious storm for all of time. Other major types of symbols include figures who represent human qualities, such as Virgil, representative of reason, and Beatrice, representative of spiritual love; settings that represent emotional states, such as the dark forest in Canto I, embodying Dante’s confusion and fear; and figures among the damned who may represent something more than merely their sins, such as Farinata, who seems to represent qualities of leadership and political commitment that transcend his identity as a Heretic in Hell.

Images of Dante's Inferno in ArtJoan Taber Altieri

Dante Alighieri's Commedia was written in the language of the people of Italy, which "existed in every city of the peninsula, but was present in none." (Cf. Gensini, 171-2). Although he has fallen in and out of literary fashion several times during the past seven hundred years, his work has continued to fire the vision of countless artists from Giotto to Botticelli to Michelangelo to Rodin to Delacroix to William Blake to today's Tom Philipps. Dante enriches every canto of the Commedia with vibrant imagery, colorful detail, and allegorical clouds: he is lost in the dark wood, threatened by a "grim she-wolf--whose leanness seemed to compress all the world's cravings"; (Pinsky's Inferno, I, 49-50) he witnesses Cerberus's three mouths yawning, "his reptile body aquiver in all its members" (Pinsky's, Inferno, VI, 21-2); and beholds the suffering of the hypocrites in the fifth bolgia where "painted people. . . wear leaden cloaks that are gilded. . . so that the eye was dazzled."(Pinsky's Inferno, XXIII, 54-8) Dante tells the stories of kings, of lovers, of popes, of everyman all the while leaving no doubt as to the temporality of earthly pleasures and privileges. Mythological gods share their infernal abode with others whose historicity gives credence to their own very real existence. If Dante's terza rima is the literary device that unites the poem and propels its action, then the common suffering and very human frailties of those who inhabit the poem are the nectar that attracts and holds the reader's attention. His poetry is not passive enough to remain within the confines of the written word; his stories are too evocative to avoid expression by other artists in other media.

Inferno Canto I, The Dark Wood

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la via diritta era smarrita.

[Midway through our life's journey / I found myself in a dark wood/ for the straight way was lost.]

Dante looks up from the darkness of the forest; he sees a beautiful mountain and decides to walk toward it. But each attempt is blocked by a beast: first a leopard, then a lion, and finally a wolf. As he is about to be beaten back for the last time, a shade in human form appears. He is Virgil who "at first seemed to fade as though from long silence."(Pinsky's Inferno, I, 47-8) He quickly regains a healthy verbosity and explains to Dante that he has been sent by three ladies of Heaven to help Dante out of the wood and on to the straight path to salvation, which begins not at the entrance to Hell, but at its exit. And so begins the decent that has intrigued, confounded, and inspired generations of admirers, imitators, interpreters, artists, donkey drivers, and even women (Cf. Il Convivio, I. Also, Gensini, 170, 175.).

Hell for Dante is both real and allegorical. It is situated in the center of the earth directly under Jerusalem and is shaped like a huge upside-down cone made up of nine circles where the dead have come to wallow in various degrees of eternal misery. Hell is the state of the soul after death. It is the Last Judgment, but, it is not God's judgment; rather, it is the souls themselves who choose to enter this chasm. Dante and Virgil arrive in the Vestibule of Hell, or Limbo, which is home to Virgil and ancient figures such as Noah, Aristotle, Plato, Ovid, and others who were born before the coming of Christ. They proceed to the banks of the river Acheron where the demon Charon tirelessly transports

endless batches of sinners to mainland Hell. It is here that we read the warning, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

Perhaps the most famous Last Judgment is the fresco by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Like Dante's Inferno, it abounds in misery and grotesqueries. But, according to Nassar, "the Charon-Minos scene is also the only scene in the Last Judgment directly related to Dante's poem." (Nassar, 18.) The scene, on the lower right of the fresco, represents Charon beating an entangled, miserable crowd of sinners as they attempt to disembark from his boat:

Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie; batte col remo qualunque s'adagia.

[There demon/ Charon beckons them, with his eyes of fire; / crowded in a herd, they obey if he should summon, / and he strikes at any laggers with his oar.] (Pinsky's Inferno III, 109-11)

One sinner holds the sides of his face, his mouth contorted with horror; another dives head first out of

the pile of human refuse; two others seem to sprint, air-born, from the boat, while others are crushed under the rush of the damned to begin their sentences. Charon's ears are long and rise up like a dog's from the sides of his dark and grimacing face. His eyes are great round circles with two black irises that contain not a hint of light. His body, like that of the sinners, is extremely muscular, but, unlike the symmetrical musculature of Michelangelo's David, it is unnaturally contorted and coarse. His right foot, placed on the edge of the boat to give him balance as he swings his oar, is foreshortened to the point that it might well be a hand grasping the boat, for the toes are extremely long, with a wide, prehensile spread. No one looks back. The sinners are spilling out of Charon's boat, not so much to escape his blows, but because they are impatient to enter eternal misery.

'Figliol mio,' disse 'l maestro cortese, 'quelli che muoion ne l'ira di Dio tutti convegnon qui d'ogne paese;   e pronti sono a trapassar lo rio, ché la divina giustizia lì sprona, sì che la tema si volve in disio.

['My son, the gracious master said to me, / 'those who have died beneath the wrath of God, / all these assemble here from every country; / and they are eager for the river crossing / because celestial justice spurs them on, / so that their fear is turned into desire.'] (Mandelbaum's Inferno, III, 131-6).

Charon was a well-known character in Greek mythology who was brought to the Inferno from the Virgil's Aeneid:

Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave un vecchio, bianco per antico pelo, gridando: 'Guai a voi, anime prave!'

[And here, advancing toward us, in a boat, / an aged man--his hair was white with years-- / was shouting: 'Woe to you, corrupted souls!']

Quinci fuor quete le lanose gote al nocchier de la livida palude, che 'ntorno a li occhi avea di fiamme rote.

[Now silence fell upon the woolly cheeks / of Charon, pilot of the livid marsh, / whose eyes were ringed about with wheels of flame.](Mandelbaum's Inferno, III, 83-5. 97-9 )

There is an engraving (ca. 1587) by Federico Zuccaro at the Uffizi in Firenze in which Charon is beating a group of sinners crammed together on his boat. He is naked and two horns grow from his forehead; sparse hairs sprout in all directions from the back of his head. Charon appears to be much more massive and much taller than the sinners, and the oar with which he beats them is at least three times his own size. The motif is believed to have been copied from Michelangelo. (Nassar, 57 -- print on pg. 65). In the foreground, we see Virgil standing over Dante, who has fainted from the horror he has witnessed.

La terra lagrimosa diede vento, che balenò una luce vermiglia

la qual mi vinse ciascun sentimento;   e caddi come l'uom cui sonno piglia.

[Then, the earth of that grim shore/ began to shake: so violently, I shudder / and sweat recalling it now. A wind burst up / from the tear-soaked ground to erupt red light and batter / my senses--and so I fell, as though seized by sleep.]

William Blake's "Vestibule of Hell and the Souls Mustering to Cross the Acheron" is a masterful rendering of Dante's vision. The spirits of the Uncommitted, those who had lived "sanza 'infamia" and "sanza lodo" [without infamy or praise], are assembled in the foreground. Since they had expressed no opinions and fought for nothing during their lifetime, they are not welcome in Heaven and they are rejected even by Hell.

Instead, they are doomed to an eternity thrashing about in the winds of Hell's lobby, enduring the stings of wasps and hornets. A long queue of souls emerging from their earthly tombs begins on the horizon line of the left side of the watercolor; it winds across the sky to the right and down again to the banks of the Acheron. Charon has just deposited a boatload of souls and is sailing back to the Vestibule to pick up another. The print has no relief, no peaceful corner, and no central focus. The sinners are crushed into every corner of the picture creating a claustrophobic effect; the sky is blackened and the frieze of hell-bound sinners seems to press down onto the horizon, compressing the atmosphere, and underscoring the aloneness of each doomed character while assuring the viewer that there is no possible escape from this Hell. Just as Dante's rhymes and images interlock, so do Blake's images and incidents interlock in the Vestibule of Hell. Among the lost souls are kings and paupers, generals and foot soldiers, men and women from every stratum of society. Freccero observes that the characters in Dante's Inferno are all given equal treatment based, not on their earthly status, but on their most grievous sin.

There is movement in Hell, but here movement is circular. The formation of sinners curving around, over, and below the horizon in Blake's "Vestibule" never changes, never ends. We know that the condemned will enter Charon's boat and we know that they will be ferried across the river to await Minos's judgment, but they have not embarked on a journey; rather they remain locked in their individual and collective eternity where there is no real movement, no change, no hope. Blake has recreated this enmity between movement and stagnation, which is not unlike a dream in which the dreamer tries to escape some horror only to find himself paralyzed.

Michelangelo's Minos has the same massive, coarsly-defined musculature as that of Charon. The two figures, one in the boat and the other on shore, are the sentries whose presence imprisons the crowd of entangled souls: no one dares to defy Charon's authority and no one may pass Minos without obeying his judgment call. Minos occupies an interesting place in Michelangelo's fresco, for if the fresco were to be read as a book (i.e., in Western literature), Minos would be the last word. Indeed, Minos is the last word, for once the sinners have reached the shores of Hell, his tail encircles his body as many times equal to the circle in Hell to which each doomed spirit must go. In Michelangelo's fresco he has just sent a sinner to the second circle of Hell; this is the circle of the incontinent, guarded by Minos himself.

Blake's watercolor of Minos allows him to reign at center stage. His hair cascades down his back and down the steps before his throne of flames. His white beard is forked; his right hand is raised in the same gesture of judgment as that of

Michelangelo's Christ in the Last Judgment; in his left hand he grasps a large spear. But his appearance is not quite as daunting as Dante's description of him:

Stavvi Minos orribilmente, e ringhia: esamina le colpe ne l'intrata; giudica e manda secondo ch'avvinghia.

[There stands Minos horribly, and grinning: / he examines the guilty who enter; / then judges and dispatches them with his coiling tail.]

His mouth is open, but not in a grin; instead, it is full-lipped, softly ugly and pliable. His body, like Michelangelo's Charon, is thick, asymmetrical, and graceless. The figures who surround him in their various states of helplessness function only to attest to his powers. Nevertheless, they effectively represent Dante's oxymoronic stagnant movement. None move of their own volition. Indeed, the painting's energy seems to come from Minos himself, but even he is bound to his throne (which is not mentioned in the Inferno); the only movement is the circular motion of his tail as he remands each sinner to his final state of wretchedness.

Dante understood that all art is the translation of a vision, and he discussed the unavoidable "discrepancy between [the author's] words and his vision."( The idea is not restricted to literature, but to all expressions of art. Dante's description of Minos is but a translation of his vision of this demon judge; and he must contain his description of him within the confines of the terza rima. Just as the position of a figure in a painting is vital to its success, so the position of a word is vital to the success of a poem. Look at the placement of orribilmente between the words stavvi and ringhia. Here Dante is using an adverb to define both "to be" and "to grin." Minos is there horribly; and the word's proximity to "grin" implies that he also grins horribly.

Inferno, Canto V: Paolo and Francesca

Canto V recounts the tale of Francesca and Paolo, whose story is so sad that Dante faints after hearing it. Francesca had been tricked into marrying Giovanni Malatesta, but she was in love with his younger brother, Paolo. One day Giovanni discovered them making love and he promptly murdered them. Their spirits were sent to the Circle of the Incontinent to spend eternity bound together, helplessly tossed about by a whirlwind. According to Nassar, "the Paolo and Francesca episode has been the theme for illustrations, art, and music far more than any

other Dantean motif." Blake's engraving depicts numerous pairs of lovers, some asunder and others locked together, as they are blown out of a river up into a large swirl. The Pilgrim Dante has fallen into a faint and Virgil stands over his body. Behind Virgil there is a huge sun in the center of which two lovers sit side by side. But, despite the sun, the sky is black. We are reminded of Francesca's lament: " Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria." [There is no greater sorrow / than to recall times of happiness / in wretchedness.]

When Francesca tells her story, Dante's style shifts to that of medieval love poetry. A number of artists have captured that style in their portrayals of the doomed lovers. Gustave Dore's 1861 engraving depicts Francesca and Paolo surrounded by a myriad of couples blown through the darkness as Dante and Virgil look on. Their embracing bodies are supported by a flowing cloth, which certainly did not appear in the Inferno. Ary Shaeffer's 1834 oil similarly clothes the lovers. In Dante's Inferno, the doomed spirits are naked, but Francesca's speech, i.e., her diction and her interaction with Dante, allows her to reveal a humanness that nakedness often strips away. She is clothed and protected by her words; thus, her nakedness is not apparent. Schaeffer's and Dore's use

of drapery to protect and uplift Francesca and Paolo has the same effect of recalling both their humanness and their vulnerability.

Many critics perceive a certain ambiguity in the fact that Francesca and Paolo have been confined to Hell by Dante's pen, and yet the sadness of their plight makes him swoon. Klonsky is not alone in his condemnation of the frequency with which Dante sentences his friends and relatives to eternal doom:

Item, Cavalcanti . . . . is condemned to be roasted eternally in one of the fiery tombs . . . for having believed, as an Epicurean, that the soul dies with the body. Item, in the seventh circle . . . Dante recognizes his once revered teacher and counselor, the statesman-poet Brunetto Latini, and greets him with: 'Are you here, Ser Brunetto?' . . . surely one of the most profoundly moving and yet disingenuous lines in literature, since, after all, it was Dante himself who put him there.

Yet, it must be noted that there are two Dantes in the Commedia: Dante the pilgrim, who is descending into the pit of Hell to begin a journey to salvation; and Dante the poet, who explains that Hell's denizens have one thing, and only one thing, in common: their refusal to accept responsibility for their earthly deeds. In the case of Francesca and Paolo, the book made them do it. For this reason, every depiction of them during their lifetime includes the famous story of Lancelot that brought about their downfall. Let Francesca tell it:

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse; soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto. . . . Quando leggeremmo il disïato riso esser basciato da cotanto amante, questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,   la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante. Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

[Once day, to pass the time, we were reading / about Lancelot and how he was overcome by love; / we were alone and suspected nothing. . . . When we had read how the desired smile / was kissed by such a lover, he (Paolo), who will never be separated from me, / trembled as he kissed me on the mouth. . . . That day we read no more.]

In Dante Rossetti's watercolor in three panels, Paolo and Francesca are locked in an embrace; the book lies open between them. We are reminded of Francesca's angry words: "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse" [That book--and its author--was a pander!"] In the second panel, Dante and Virgil walk hand in hand, grim-faced through the darkness of Hell; they are

looking to the left, for in the nether world there is no other direction, except down. The third panel places the couple in Hell, but it fails to convince the viewer of the horror of eternal suffering. Instead, the hail storm only frames their weightless, fully-clothed bodies that float unharmed within an invisible, protective bubble. Paolo, who can only weep in Dante's Inferno, wears a halo that remains untouched by the tempest.

Blake succeeds in portraying the hopelessness that reigns in Hell. The motif of the whirlwind appears in a number of Blake's watercolors and engravings of the Inferno. "The Angel Crossing Styx" recalls Canto IX in which Dante and Virgil are prevented from entering the City of Sorrows, or Dis, where hellish Hell begins. This is one of the rare occasions in Hell where Virgil's powers of reasoning are not enough to ensure the safe passage of the poets, and a divine messenger must rescue them from the demon's clutches.

Come le rane innanzi a la nimica biscia per l'acqua si deleguan tutte, fin ch'a la terra ciascuna s'abbica,   vid' io più di mille anime distrutte fuggir così dinanzi ad un ch'al passo passava Stige con le piante asciutte.

[As frogs confronted by their enemy, / the snake, will scatter underwater till / each hunches in a heap along the bottom, / so did the thousand ruined souls I saw / take flight before a figure crossing Styx / who walked as if on land and with dry soles.]

The whirlwind appears again in Blake's "Jacapo Rusticucci and His Comrades," but this

time it encompasses almost the entire engraving and contains only three of the spirits confined to the Circle of the Violent.

[Ah me, what wounds I saw upon their limbs / recent and old, of the incessant flames]

Ricominciar, come noi restammo, ei l'antico verso; e quando a noi fuor giunti, fenno una rota di sé tutti e trei.

[As soon as we stood still, they started up / their ancient wail again; and when they reached us / they formed a wheel, all three of them together.]

Feuerbach painted a portrait of Francesca in profile, gazing at the open book on her lap, her thoughts on the beautiful Paolo sitting next to her. It is a touching portrayal, rich in color, with strong diagonal lines that bring the viewer's eye from the youthful, flawless faces of the young people down to the book and up again to their faces. Paolo's left hand is poised under his chin ready to fall on Francesca's slender hands. There is no hint in this romantic portrayal of the sorrow to come. In Amos Cassioli's richly hued painting of the lovers, the book has just fallen from Francesca's hands and lies upside down, ignored, on the floor. Paolo and Francesca are lost in their physical and emotional oneness.

Inferno, Canto XXXIII, Count Ugolino

Just as Paolo and Francesca are locked together for eternity, so are two other figures in Hell: Count Ugolino and his executioner, the Archbishop Ruggieri. And just as the story of Francesca and Paolo has inspired the production of soft, romantic portraits of love, Ugolino's story has inspired portraits of horror. Robert Cimbalo is said to have fixed "the stamp of witty literalism" in his 1984 mixed media portrayal of Ugolino munching on the back of Ruggieri's neck.

La bocca sollevò dal fiero pasto quel peccator, forbendola a' capelli del capo ch'elli avea di retro guasto.

[Pausing in his savage meal, the sinner raised / his mouth and wiped it clean along the hair / left on the head whose back he had laid waste.]

Aldo Greco's 1974 sculpture of the Count surrounded by his sons is poised in that nebulous zone between horror and humor. His figures, in various poses of pleading and desperation, look like petrified flesh, or Claymations frozen in an instant of time. Humor and horror are not unrelated in life and, certainly, have more than a passing relationship in the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno. We meet Caccianemico (literally, Enemy Hunter) who justifies his pimping activities by observing, "I'm not the only one." There is Alessio Interminei who is submerged up to his head in a lake of excrement because, during his lifetime, his tongue could not stop its flattery. And Dante could not refrain from

reminding the reader that even priests are not without sin:

E mentre ch'io là giù con l'occhio cerco, vidi un col capo sì di merda lordo, che non parea s'era laico o cherco.

[. . . I saw deep down in the fosse / people immersed in filth that seemed to drain / from human privies. Searching it with my eyes / I saw one there whose head was so befouled / with shit, you couldn't tell which one he was--layman or priest.]

In Canto VIX, Dante and Virgil discover Pope Nicholas III "planted like a fence post upside down." Nicholas mistakes Dante for Pope Boniface VIII, and is surprised at his early arrival in Hell: "Se' tu già costì ritto, Bonifazio?" [Are you here already, Boniface?"]. In Canto XX, the spirits of soothsayers and astrologers walk with their heads on backwards, and are forced to gaze continuously at their kidneys so that their "eyes' tears fell to wet the buttocks of the cleft."

As we descend lower into the Inferno, spirits lose their human qualities, become more and more beastly, and finally assume a demonic semblance. In Canto XXI, we meet demons whose names, loosely translated into English, are Nasty Dog, Bad Tail, Hog Face, and Snarley Head. By Canto XXV, the spirits have indeed lost the essence that made them human and suffer an eternity metamorphosing in and out of monstrous shapes, being ripped apart by demons, and floundering in the boiling blood that forms the River Phlegethon. Here, humor loses some of its protective powers, but never is it entirely relinquished in the bowels of Hell.

Ugolino and Ruggieri are traitors confined to the icy bolgia of the Ninth Circle. Some critics believe that Ugolino cannibalized his children and for this reason is doomed to dine on Ruggieri's skull for all eternity. But, Dante does not state this. Indeed, it is unlikely since, by Ugolino's own admission, he groped over his children's bodies for two days after they had died, calling to them: "And then hunger had more power than even sorrow had over me."Two-day-old dead flesh exudes a protective stench that is paradise for maggots, but persuasive enough to repel even the starving Count. He simply died.

It has been suggested that Ugolino's sons were images of Dante's own sons whom he was forced to abandon when he was exiled from Florence. "These were the voices that Dante himself heard in the long nights."

Padre mio, ché non m'aiuti?

[My father, why don't you help me?]

Delacroix is one of many artists who capture the tragedy of the children and even make us forget that Ugolino had betrayed not only his party, but his own nephew. In the darkness of the prison cell, a dim light from the tiny barred window falls across the prostrate figures of Ugolino's sons. Two appear to have died, and one stretches out his arm to his father, who sits with his knees tucked up to his chest, his head resting on his arms; he is too weak and too crushed to move. The four figures form a pyramidal bond at the bottom left quarter of the painting. Except for the window at the upper left, the rest of

the painting reveals only shadowy tones of gray.

Ugolino and Ruggieri were real people, as were Francesca and Paolo, Pope Boniface and Nicholas, Sordello, Simon Magus, and all Dante's human characters. While Dante delivered them from the obscurity that eventually buries all but a few mortals, other artists have taken them beyond the confines of the written word into a world of tangible color, texture, and three-dimensional stone. Nevertheless, without Dante's poem, which is both modern and ancient, timeless and timely, historical and mythological, literary and visual, it is certain that they would not have been reborn by Rodin's chisel, Delacroix's brush, or Blake's burin. All must bow to Dante's inspiration.

The Commedia is an adventure in which the reader can see his own reflection time and time again. Thus, it is the story of all humanity, from its lowest levels of bestiality to its highest intellectual and spiritual realization. But Dante's poem is not just a poem; it is a sculpture that moves; it is a painting whose colors are tinted with all gradations of gray, from the deepest black to the brightest, sun-kissed reds, blues, and yellows. The story continues to be told and retold in translations, paintings, sculpture, and music. The Commedia transcends time, defies literary dissection, and enriches itself each time it is brought to life in a new medium. While Dante's great gift to humankind is his Divina Commedia, each fresh rendering of the poem is humankind's gift to the poet.

Dante’s Inferno – some questions

CANTO I:

* At what point in Dante's life does he "lose his way" on the path of righteousness?

* When Dante tries to travel upward toward the beautiful mountain and leave the dark valley behind, what animal blocks his path at first?

* When Dante tries to go around that beast, what second animal appears and blocks his path?

* When he tries yet again to get around that second beast, what third animal blocks his path?

* Dante then sees a spirit in the desert, and asks this spirit for help. This spirit offers to guide him through Hell. Who is Dante's guide through hell? Why does he make a suitable guide for Dante?

* Where have we seen this spirit-guide character before as a historical figure?

* Virgil claims that he has been exiled in this location because he was rebellious to the laws of "That Emperor who

reigns above." Of whom is Virgil speaking?

CANTO V :

* In Canto V, they meet the judge who assigns sinners to various places in Hell. What is this judge's name?

* What does this judge do with his tail to indicate how far down in Hell the sinner must go?

* What does Virgil tell to Minos in order to convince him to let Virgil and Dante pass?

* How are illicit lovers ("carnal malefactors") punished in their ring of Hell? Who are some of these famous lovers?

* When Dante wants to speak to some of the lovers, Virgil says he can call them down by imploring them "by [XXX]." By what force or name does Dante implore the lovers to come down? Why is that appropriate, given the

nature of their sins?

* The lover that speaks with Dante in Canto V says she has "stained the world incarnadine" through her sins. What

does she mean, and how does this relate to Christian beliefs about the forgiveness of sins?

* According to Francesca, what was she reading when she first gave into desire?

CANTO IX:

* In Canto 9, Dante and Virgil approach the city of Dis at the center of hell. They encounter the Three

Furies or Erinyes here. What are these three beings? (Consult a mythological dictionary, encyclopedia, or look

online for this information.)

* What physical actions do the Three Furies take as they confront the two pilgrims Virgil and Dante? What do

those gestures and actions suggest about their state of mind?

* Why does Virgil turn Dante away and cover his eyes as the Medusa approaches? Why is he so afraid of her?

* Who opens the gates to Dis so that Virgil and Dante can enter? What tool does he use to push open the doors?

* How does the Angelic messenger react to the air in Hell as he breathes?

* In lines 110-120 of Canto 9, we hear what structures make up the city of Hell. What structures are visible everywhere with flame scattered between them?

CANTO XXXIII: * In Canto 33, Dante and Virgil encounter Ugolino frozen in ice. What is Ugolino eating?

* How did Ugolino and his sons die in Pisa?

* How does Ugolino spend all eternity? What is his food?

* What does Dante promise to Friar Alberigo in hell? How does he fulfill his promise? (trick question!)

* What is Friar Alberigo's body and Ser Branca d'Oria's body doing while their souls are in hell? Who or what

does Alberigo claim is controlling these bodies?

CANTO XXXIV:

* What is the temperature like in the center of hell?

* When they cross over past the fog of freezing mist, Dante sees something he first thinks is a giant windmill. What is this windmill in actuality?

* What is the source of the cold winds in hell that rhythmically blow outward from the center ring?

* Describe Satan's body and appearance. What are some of his distinctive features in The Inferno?

* What three things does Satan snack on?

* When Virgil and Dante run between Satan's beating wings, Virgil stops and puts his feet on the ceiling and appears to turn upside down. What happened that allowed him to do this astonishing feat, and how is this connected to their location at the center of the earth?

* When Dante looks upward/downward to gaze at Satan, what does he see that horrifies him? Why is this funny?

Quotations for Identification

(Be able to identify what work these quotations come from, what the author is, what character (if any) is speaking, and briefly

comment upon the quotations significance or importance in the work:

A: Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost. / . . . I cannot repeat how there I entered, So full was I of slumber at the moment / In which I had abandoned the true way."

B: "Now, art thou that Virgilius and that fountain / Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech?" / I made response to him with bashful forehead. / . . . / Thou art my mastaer, and my author thou, / Thou art alone the one from whom I took/ The beautiful style that has done honor to me."

C: More than a thousand ruined souls I saw, / Thus feeling from before one who on foot / Was passing o'er the Styx with soles unwet. / From off his face he fanned that unctuous air, / Waving his left hand oft in front of him / And only with that anguish seemed he weary. / Well I perceived one sent from Heaven was he. . .

D: And one of the wretches of the frozen crust / Cried out to us: "O souls so merciless . . . Lift from mine eyes the rigid veils, that I may vent the sorrow which impregns my heart / A little, e'er the weeping recongeal /. . . / But hitherward stretch out thy hand forthwith, / Open mine eyes;"--and open them I did not, / And to be rude to him was courtesy.

E: The Emperor of the kingdom dolorous / From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice; / And better with a giant I compare / Than do the giants with those arms of his/ . . . What a marvel it appeared to me, When I beheld three faces on his head!

F: I lifted up mine eyes and thought to see / Lucifer in the same way I had left him; / And upward I beheld him hold his legs. / And if I then became disquieted, Let stolid people think who do not see / What the point is beyond which I had passed.