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To Hell, With Dante
Boundless, James Tonkowich, January 2008
For reasons now unfathomable, as a freshman in high school I read Dante's Inferno. Remembering little to nothing of that first journey through the horrors of Hell, I recently decided it was time to begin the great poem again. This time I wouldn't stop at the frozen center of Hell where Satan, immersed in ice, forever gnaws the great traitors — Judas, Brutus, and Cassius — but continuing on through Purgatory to Heaven. The Divine Comedy is strong medicine about sin, suffering, and salvation.
The Divine Comedy, as you may have guessed, is not a comedy in the sense that Seinfeld or The Simpsons are comedy. It's a comedy in the medieval sense (Dante lived from 1265 to 1321). While a tragedy is a drama with a tragic ending, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending. And the happy ending comes in spite of struggles, pains, and miseries along the way — three things that marked Dante's life.
Born in the prosperous Italian city of Florence, Dante was a great success and the young poet seemed destined to continuing literary, military, and political achievement. Then he publicly opposed Pope Boniface VIII for his expansionistic policies and his role in secular politics. He was accused of fraud and corruption and forced to leave his beloved city along with his family, wealth, and social position, earning himself a death sentence should he return. He lived the rest of this life roaming from court to court, from one patron to the next.
In the introduction to Hell Dorothy Sayers writes:
"He had lost love and youth and earthly goods and household peace and citizenship and active political usefulness and the dream of a decent world and a reign of justice. He was stripped bare. He looked outwards upon the corruption of the Church and Empire, and he looked inwards into the corruption of the human heart; and what he saw was the vision of Hell. And, having seen it, he set himself down to write the great Comedy of Redemption and of the return of all things by the Way of Self-Knowledge and Purification, to the beatitude of the Presence of God."
Like other allegories of redemption — A Pilgrim's Progress for example — it is set as a journey and Hell begins with the lament of a wanderer.
Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. (I.1-3)
The next morning, he spies the mountain of God in the distance and begins the long trek out of the valley. But as he labors uphill, three beasts bar his way. They are a leopard "nimble and light and fleet," a lion "head high, with ravenous hunger raving," and a wolf:
"... gaunt with the famished craving
Lodged ever in her horrible flank,
The ancient cause of many men's enslaving. (I.49-51)
The three beasts represent three categories of sin. The leopard is self-indulgent sin for which the lustful, the gluttonous, hoarders and spendthrifts, and the wrathful suffer in the outer circles of Hell. The lion is violent sins, the second major division of Hell comprising circles for those who committed violence against reason (heretics), against neighbors, against self (suicides), and against God, art, and nature. Finally the wolf is sins of fraud, that is, of willfully deceiving others: seducers, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves, deceivers, and, in the lowest part of Hell, traitors.
These categories are roughly analogous to the three types of sinners we meet in Proverbs: the self-indulgent simpleton, the self-centered fool, and the malicious mocker.
Continue reading at boundless
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