Dante: Inferno

I am the way into the doleful city,
I am the way into eternal grief
I am the way to a forsaken race.

Justice it was that moved my great creator;
Divine omnipotence created me,
And highest wisdom joined with primal love.

Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I shall last eternally.
Abandon every hope, all you who enter. (Inferno, Canto III, 1-9)

Such is the inscription over the gate to hell. Inferno is the first part of a three part poem that describes, roughly, the state of souls after death, seen through the eyes of Dante the Pilgrim and reflected upon later by Dante the Poet (both are the same person, the Pilgrim being the character of the story, the Poet being the narrator, and both, of course, being a fictional version of the real-life Dante who authors the work). The first part tells of the state of evil souls suffering in hell; the second, of the penitence of souls in purgatory, and the third of blissful souls in heaven. The objective of the journey is an attempt to educate Dante the Pilgrim as to the nature of sin and punishment as well as faith and absolution so as to allow him to save himself from the tortures of hell. As such it is, in a way, the story of a man's development, from the Dante "in a dark wood, / for I had wandered off the straight path" (Inferno 1:2-3) to the Dante who is a true Christian and a man destined for heaven.

While the poem goes into countless subjects and questions, such as the truth of theological concepts and the status of the world at the time (which Dante wrote on in treatises such as "On Monarchy"), it is this journey towards salvation that can probably be seen as the centerpiece of the poem, the objective towards which the Pilgrim must invariably move and the measure by which his progress is compared. In the Inferno his struggles with himself are presented perhaps most visibly in his shifting views on punishment, the central vocation of hell.

The issue in Dante's views of punishment revolve around a very faith-centered issue: God's justice. The Christian God must be absolutely just; therefore, everything he does and everything he allows must itself be just. The objection one first hears to this claim is the "good God, bad world" problem: if God is just (or good, as it is more typically put), why does he let bad things happen. This problem comes into much greater relief when the issue of hell comes up, one that you don't hear too much anymore, perhaps with good reason: if God is just, how can it be okay to punish someone with eternal torment? How is that possibly good?

The answer, strictly speaking, is because God says so. God is omnipotent. But that, of course, is not satisfactory. Traveling throughout hell, the Pilgrim finds himself confronted by this very same issue, as he sees the punishments of sinners first-hand. Some of them are quite creative, too: hypocrites, for example, wear cloaks of gold outside but lead inside, reflecting their inner dishonesty (Canto XXIII). There are rivers of fire and pitch, lakes of ice, tortures of disease and injury of all kinds. Dante more than once feels for sinners he knew or who experienced more dreadful suffering:

So may God grant you, Reader, benefit
From reading of my poem, just ask yourself
How I could keep my eyes dry when, close by,

I saw the image of our human form
So twisted - the tears their eyes were shedding
streamed down to wet their buttocks at the cleft. (Inferno, 20:18-24)

If you can't tell the punishment, these sinners have their heads twisted around 180 degrees.

Virgil, the famous Latin poet and Dante's guide through hell, wastes no time in chastisement:

"So you are still like all the other fools?

In this place piety lives when pity is dead,
For who could be more wicked than that man
Who tries to bend divine will to his own!" (Inferno, XX:27-30)

Dante also has his victories, in the sense that he gains a grasp of the appropriateness of punishment, and on reflection as the Poet he praises the punishment meted out by God:

O just revenge of God! How awesomely
You should be feared by everyone who reads
these truths that were revealed to my own eyes!

One, therefore, must take the position of faith, even in the face of eternal punishment, for to make judgments as to whether someone should be pitied for reason of God's judgment is to assume that one can judge God, which Virgil chastised in the previous quotation. Later, in the Purgatorio Virgil makes a more explicit remark about knowledge:

Madness it is to hope that human minds
can ever understand the infinite
that comprehends Three Persons in One Being.

Be satisfied with quia unexplained,
O human race! If you knew everything,
no need for Mary to have borne a son. (Purgatorio, 3:34-39)

"Three Persons in One Being" refers, of course, to the trinity, and the final statement tells us that faith in Jesus supplants the total knowledge we hope to achieve on our own, which we cannot do due to human imperfection. And so, once again, this all turns of faith, faith in God's omnipotence as well as his sense of justice.

One thing to be kept in mind, and that the poem in a sense demonstrates, is that just what we should have faith in exactly is a more difficult matter. Does one accept the Catholic creeds? But those were made by men. Does one follow the Protestant Principle, and follow what one gets out of the Bible? But we would expect that to be shaped by one's own experience. Dante's own work is a reflection of his life; most of the people he meets are politicians and friends from the Italy of his time, and his moments of proclamation reflect the vices and difficulties of thirteenth century Florence. Thus the problem of faith still seems to be a problem. When I come to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling I will be able to take this line of thought to much greater lengths. That shall come in the future. Perhaps soon, but when is still unsure.