A Sightseer’s Guide to the "Inferno"
On failed plans, Dante's knickknacks, and a tour through "Inferno".
Here I am, then, nearing the end of my month of re-reading Dante’s Inferno, and here we are, also, with a retraction of something I wrote in the previous edition of this column. I suppose I should know better than to set down my intentions in writing, especially in a public forum, because nothing ensures the failure of a plan like its confident articulation before the fact.
(I once pointed out to my wife, while watching some heist film, that if the characters in a movie ever tell you their plan before it happens, you can be 100% confident it won’t work out. Since then my wife jumps up and points like Leo in that meme1 every time a film reveals a plan ahead of happening, and she whispers, somehow loudly, The plan’s not going to work! Every single time.)
Last month I wrote about my intention to focus more on the architectural structure of Inferno and less on its interior design — its elegant phrasing, evocative ideas, Virgil’s snippy put-downs whenever Dante rushes him — and I’ve definitely paid more attention to the house than its wallpaper this time around. Except that the gorgeous writing and pithy aphorisms aren’t wallpaper; they’re more like Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Yes, there’s a ton of important history about the Apostolic Palace, and all of that is deserving of our attention, but it’s not like the artwork inside is a bit of decoration meant to spruce the place up. To say that either Michelangelo’s work or the Sistine Chapel itself is more important than the other is to miss the point. And probably to be a real bore at that one party you’re invited to, before people realise they shouldn’t invite you to any others.
This also means I have to disagree with the eminent Dorothy L. Sayers, who translated my edition of Dante and wrote a compelling commentary. As I mentioned last month, she wrote in her introduction:
“If we ignore the theological structure, and merely browse about in [The Divine Comedy] for detached purple passages and poetic bits and pieces we shall be disappointed, and never see the architectural grandeur of the poem as a whole.”
She made her case too strongly. Yes, you’ll miss out on far too much if you “ignore the theological structure”, but you certainly won’t be disappointed, as she claims, even if all you get out of the poem is its “poetic bits and pieces”. These are Dante’s poetic knickknacks, after all, not a bargain basement assortment of fridge-magnet slogans.
Besides, it’s often in close assessment of the details that we build up our blueprint for the whole schema. A building is made up of bricks. Or, I guess, concrete or wood or metal, but I’m trying to make the point that everything big is made out of smaller things and that grandeur can emerge from the minor. That’s why my motto for re-reading Inferno this time around is:
Look close and think big.
So, today I want to show you some of what I saw as I made my way through Dante’s Hell. At the time of writing, I’ve reached Canto XXIII, and there will be a conclusion to this project in the next edition of this column. Here, I hope to offer a reading guide for your own journey into a great poem, a kind of travelling companion pointing excitedly at the wonderful things he’s seeing.
I should make and underline one final point: there is no substitute for actually reading Inferno. You really do need to read it for yourself because, to borrow Dante’s phrase, “The wondrous truth outstrips my staggering pen.”
A Sightseer’s Guide to the Inferno
Canto II
We learn that Beatrice (who, in life, had been Dante’s love and, in death, resides in Heaven) has sent Virgil to guide Dante out of the dark forest he wakes in at the start of the poem:
“But though — go thou! Lift up thy voice of gold;
Try every needful means to find and reach
And free him, that my heart may rest consoled.”
Virgil can be read as representing Art — from literature to music — so Beatrice sending him to help Dante out of his terrible situation makes her the image (perhaps the first) of a dear friend gifting a book or an album to someone suffering. The next time I drop off a book at the sickbed of a friend to cheer them up with its story, I’ll think of her telling Virgil to “lift up thy voice of gold”.
Canto III
I felt like Dante was pointing the poetic finger of condemnation right at me in this canto, where we pass through Limbo and meet the unfortunate souls whom Virgil describes as “that caitiff angel-crew”:
“Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him
Were faithful, but to self alone were true.”
I am someone who sounds very much like a Christian in my speech and looks like one in much of my action (“against God [I] rebelled not”) but who cannot place his final faith in the Christian deity (to Him [I am not] faithful”).
However, I was immediately relieved of my discomfort when Dante then called out a whole other class of person: the souls that rush endlessly after an aimlessly whirling flag. Perhaps they represent our modern sense of FOMO, as we rush after every shiny new thing, trying to keep up with the glut of content on streaming services and social media and journalism and articles on Substack (actually, don’t worry about that last one, okay?) because we are “stung and goaded” by the worry that “in doing anything definite whatsoever, [we] are missing doing something else”.
But I have another, stronger, theory about these aimless souls that I’ll spell out in the next edition of this column.
Canto VII
This one opens with this strange line:
“Papè Satan, papè Satan aleppe.”
Having basically no clue what that could possibly mean, aside from a very dubious intuition that Dante here is calling the Devil “Dad”, I turned to the trusted endnotes and learned that many people have tried “to interpret this cryptic remark, but none of them is very convincing”. Sayers then says it’s probably some kind of Satanic invocation and adds, with an endearing shrug, “and it is as well to leave it at that”.
My first reaction to this was alarm: if the academics can’t figure this stuff out, what chance do I have? That quickly turned to comfort: even the experts don’t get all of this, so it’s fine for me to pass over certain trickier bits and think, Maybe one day. Not every knot needs to be untangled right now. That was rather freeing.
This canto also manages to prophesy what we today call our “culture wars”. In the fourth circle of Hell, we read that the “incompatible and equally selfish appetites” (Sayers’ phrase) of different people collide with each other — they are “thronged and pressed / This side and that, yelling with all their might … They bump together … bawling their rude refrain”.
This sad and bitter crew circle endlessly round like “Charybdis”, a mythical maritime monster who caused whirlpools. It’s in this sense that Dante most directly references the beast, its whirlpools representing the futile circling of these damned souls. But a little extra-textual reading reveals that in Greek mythology Charybdis is paired with another sea monster, called Scylla, much as the condemned in this circle of Hell antagonise their opposites. They gave rise to the idiom between Scylla and Charybdis, which means being stuck between two opposing yet equally dangerous options and attempting to find a safe route between them. Such is the task of the (often silent) majority finding our way through the fractious factions of our culture wars.
This kind of antagonistic pairing is what Sayers calls “community in perverted form”, where “irrational appetites are united, after a fashion, by a common hatred, for the waging of a futile war”. A futile war is the best phrase I’ve heard yet for the excesses of the woke/anti-woke battle. And while it’s a union of sorts, Sayers warns us that “community in sin is unstable: it soon disintegrates into an anarchy of hatred, all against all”. This should be a warning to the soldiers of the culture wars, whose most extreme elements condemn everybody who isn’t ardently in their narrow camp.
One more from this canto:
“God’s justice! Who shall tell the agonies,
Heaped thick and new before my shuddering glance?
Why must our guilt smite us with strokes like this?”
For the first time, Dante comes as close as he will to directly questioning the moral architecture of the Hell he believes in. Of course, the question is rhetorical, and if an answer is insisted on, the first two words of the stanza provide it (however unsatisfyingly to those of us who take a metaphorical or annihilationist view of Hell): our guilt smites us with strokes like these because God makes it so.
Canto XIV
Speaking of what Hell actually is and what (and who) sends us there, in this canto, Capaneus (an arrogant warrior from Greek mythology) tells Dante,
“That which in life I was, in death I am.”
In life, Capaneus scaled the wall of a city his army was attacking, the whole while taunting the gods for not being able to stop him. Finally, Jupiter (romanised in Inferno to Jove) struck him down with a thunderbolt; he fell from the wall ablaze and landed in a burning heap below. Here in Hell, he lies forever burning in sand, cursing Jove and thus not enjoying a single moment of reprieve from the rain that might otherwise have soothed the flames. He’s suffering the torment in death he brought on himself in life, or, as Virgil puts it:
“No torment save thine own hot rage could be
A fitting cautery to thy rabid sore.”
This is much closer to a vision of (a metaphorical) Hell that I understand — indeed, that I, like all humans in our condition, have experienced first- and second-hand. Sayers puts it this way:
“[Hell is] the condition to which the soul reduces itself by a stubborn determination to evil, and in which it suffers the torment of its own perversions.”
C. S. Lewis put it similarly:
“It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”
And I’d put it: Our worst behaviour is our own Hell, and there’s no need to wait for death to go there.
Canto XVIII
Here, we meet “the flatterers”, whose torment is being eternally “plunged in dung”, smeared in an excrement that literalises the cultural waste they produced in life. As one of these condemned souls admits in shame (with rather worse than egg on his face):
“The flatteries I spewed out apace
With tireless tongue have sunk me to this state.”
Reading this, I thought of those today who use their platforms to flatter tyrants and amplify the untruths of demagogues. MI thought of Tucker Carlson fellating Putin on his podcasts, doing the tireless work of propagandising the indefensible. I have many qualms with the concept of Hell, but the prospect of such cretins covered in crap for the rest of time rather warms me to the idea.
Incidentally, Sayers’ commentary on this section brought to mind something other than spin doctors and rabble-rousers:
“[The flatterers] especial weapon is that abuse and corruption of language which destroys communication between mind and mind. Here they are plunged in the slop and filth which they excreted upon the world.”
The word “slop” made me instantly think of those inflicting AI degeneracy on us — all those “shrimp Jesus” pictures and other brain rot. It would be nice to think that what comes around goes very much around for those digital polluters.
Canto XX
Dante deals in double meanings throughout The Divine Comedy, some of which my own mind could work out, others of which would have barely had single meanings without Sayers’ commentary. There’s a fascinating one in this canto that I needed Sayers to reveal. Virgil asks “who’s wickeder than one / That’s agonized by God’s high equity”? She tells us that this rhetorical flourish means, simultaneously, that few are worse than the sinner being punished and that few are worse than the person who criticises God for inflicting the punishment on the sinner.
I caught one of these double meanings earlier in Canto XVI, where Virgil tells Dante that there will come a future day “when thou shalt rejoice to say ‘I was’.” I take this to mean the obvious — that one day the present tense (“I am in Hell”) will become the past (“I was in Hell”), and he’ll be grateful that it’s behind him. I also read in it the slightly less intuitive idea that, while he might want nothing more right now than to get the hell out of Hell, he will later appreciate what he’s learned from the experience, enough to be grateful that he was, once, in Hell.
This concern with what good can be taken from his experience shows in what he tells us his hopes are for our reading his poem. In the very first canto, he says that even though his memory of Hell “stirs the old fear in the blood”, he nonetheless '“gained such good” that he feels compelled to write about it for others.
This perpetual knowledge of his reader feels remarkably postmodern, predating many of the tropes of the twentieth century movement by about 600 years. Not only does he step outside of the poem to acknowledge that he’s writing this from a later time, he also uses a ton of pastiche in his anarchic borrowing from various Christian theologies and non-Christian mythologies, and he opens Canto XX with a fourth-wall break that would make a Deadpool movie blush:
“New punishments behoves me sing in this
Twentieth canto of my first canticle,
Which tells of spirits sunk in the Abyss.”
In that same canto, he even addresses us directly as “Reader”:
“And, Reader, so God give thee grace to glean
Profit of my book…”
Reader, you’re in for quite a ride.
I’ll bring this journey into the INFERNO to a conclusion in the next edition of Notes on a Reading Life.
