other side, he first who had been most unripe for doing it. The
Navarrese chose well his time; planted his soles upon the ground, and in
an instant leapt and from their purpose freed himself. Thereat each was
stung (with guilt); but he most who had been the cause of the mistake;
he therefore started forth, and shouted: 'Thou'rt caught!' But little it
availed (him); for wings could not outspeed the terror; the _sinner_
went under; and he, flying, raised up his breast: not otherwise the duck
suddenly dives down, when the falcon approaches, and he returns up angry
and defeated.
"Calcabrina, furious at the trick, kept flying after him, desirous that
the sinner might escape, to have a quarrel. And, when the barrator had
disappeared, he turned his talons on his fellow, and was clutched with
him above the ditch. But the other was indeed a sparrowhawk to claw him
well; and both dropt down into the middle of the boiling pond. The heat
at once unclutched them; but rise they could not, their wings were so
beglued. Barbariccia with the rest lamenting, made four of them fly over
to the other coast with all their drags; and most rapidly on this side,
on that, they descended to the stand; they stretched their hooks towards
the limed pair, who were already scalded within the crust; and we left
them thus embroiled." (XXII, 19.)
The grotesque, also, plays a part in the Inferno appearing not only in
the demons taken from classical legend and deformed into caricatures,
but also in the punishment of crimes, v.g. simony and malfeasance in
public office, regarded by our poet as malicious in themselves and
grotesque in their perversity.
Readers who regard the grotesque as a repelling element in the Inferno
may be surprised to learn that Ruskin considers this feature of Dante's
writings an expression of the highest human genius. The great English
critic writes:
"I believe that there is no test of greatness in nations, periods, nor
men more sure than the development, among them or in them of a noble
grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one
kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention or
incapability of understanding it. I think that the central man of all
the world, as representing in perfect balance and imaginative, moral and
intellectual faculties, all at their highest is Dante; and in him the
grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble
development to which it was ever brought in the human mind. Of the
grotesqueness of our own Shakespeare I need hardly speak, nor of its
intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of Æschylus and
Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will
be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order."
Dante's doctrine of punishment presupposes certain primary truths which
the Church proclaims today as she did in Dante's day. According to the
Florentine's creed, man must answer to God for his moral life because he
has free will. He cannot excuse his evil deed on the ground of
necessity. Even in the face of planetary influence and of temptation
from within, by his evil inclinations, and from without by solicitation
of other agents man has still such discernment between good and evil and
such power to make choice freely, that moral judgment with him is free.
"Who hath been tried thereby and made perfect," says Holy Writ, "he
shall have glory everlasting. He that could have transgressed, and hath
not transgressed and could do evil things, and hath not done them."
(Eccli., XXXI, 10.)
Against this doctrine of free will the sociology, the philosophy and the
medical science of the present day contend with a theory which minimizes
man's accountability for sin if it does not wholly excuse him as the
victim of heredity, environment or society. Literature also, as
reflected not only in the Greek tragedies but in the writings of authors
from Shakespeare to Shaw portray the evil doer as the victim of fate or
determinism.
Against all such theories and views Dante appears as the fearless,
uncompromising champion of the doctrine of the greatness of man in the
exercise of the divine gift of Free Will. His own life, showing how he
had won victory over the forces of poverty and persecution, is symbolic
of the glorious truth he would teach; viz., that man, endowed with free
will and animated with the grace of God, is master of his destiny and
cannot be defeated even by principalities and powers. So he tells us,
"And free will which if it endure fatigue in the first battles with the
heavens, afterwards if it be well nurtured, conquers everything."
(Purg., XVI, 76.) He makes Beatrice testify to the supremacy of the
will: "The greatest gift which God in His bounty bestowed in creating
and that which He prizes most, was the freedom of will with which the
creatures that have intelligence--they all and they alone--were
endowed." (Cf. Purg., XVIII, 66-73.)
But such a distinctive endowment may be the the curse of man if he fails
to use it rightly. Like Job, Dante insists that life is a warfare.
Victory is possible only by the right exercise of the will enlightened
by God. Defeat is sure if the will embraces sin. To Dante sin is not a
mere vulgarity or the violation of a social convention or "a soft
infirmity of the blood." "Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere
mind," says James Russell Lowell, "would have been the modern theory
which deals with sin as involuntary error." To Dante sin is the greatest
evil of the world--not only because it is the source of all other evils,
but because it is at once the denaturing of man--the damned are
characterized as "the woeful people who have lost the good of the
understanding" (Inf., III, 18), and it is also a defiance of God. Sin,
then, is Atheism--a rejection of God, with a conviction that pleasure or
happiness can be attained outside of God, independent of God and in
opposition to God. Apart from the inspired writers of Holy Writ it is
doubtful whether any other writer ever had such an awful sense of sin
and such a vivid vision of sin and its consequences as Dante has given
to the world in a picture which has burned terror into the thought of
man.
To show us that life is a warfare against sin, Dante gives us several
striking pictures of temptation and heavenly deliverance from evil. At
the very beginning of the Divine Comedy, we see his ascent to the
mountain of the Lord barred by Lust, Pride and Avarice represented by a
leopard, a lion, and a wolf. He is victorious over those enemies of his
salvation because Reason (Virgil) and Beatrice (Revelation) come to his
aid. Temptation is also exhibited in Ante-Purgatorio and that is the
more remarkable because both as a theologian and a poet Dante holds that
the present life is the end of man's probation and that as a
consequence, temptation is not to be encountered in the next life. Why
it is put forth in Ante-Purgatorio is explained by the theory that our
poet here nods, that he means, not the actual Purgatory of disembodied
spirits, but moral Purgatory, _i.e._, the present life wherein man,
striving upward, is attacked by temptation to keep him from the end for
which God created him.
Showing temptation in Ante-Purgatorio, the poet gives us a picture of
souls protected by two angels against the serpent. Here is the scene:
"Now was the hour that wakens fond desire
In men at sea, and melts their thoughtful heart
Who in the morn have bid sweet friends farewell,
And pilgrim newly on his road with love
Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far,
That seems to mourn for the expiring day":
A band of souls approach:
"I saw that gentle band silently next
Look up, as if in expectation held,
Pale and in lowly guise; and, from on high,
I saw, forth issuing descend beneath,
Two angels, with two flame-illumined swords,
Broken and mutilated of their points.
Green as the tender leaves but newly born,
Their vesture was, the which, by wings as green
Beaten, they drew behind them, fann'd in air.
A little over us one took his stand;
The other lighted on the opposing hill;
So that the troop were in the midst contain'd.
But in their visages the dazzled eye
Was lost, as faculty that by too much
Is overpower'd. 'From Mary's bosom both
Are come,' exclaimed Sordello, 'as a guard
Over the vale, 'gainst him, who hither tends,
The serpent.' Whence, not knowing by which path
He came, I turn'd me round; and closely press'd,
All frozen, to my leader's trusted side."
After describing an interview with one of the souls, the poet continues
his narrative:
"While yet he spoke, Sordello to himself
Drew him, and cried: 'Lo there our enemy!'
And with his hand pointed that way to look
Along the side, where barrier none arose
Around the little vale, a serpent lay,
Such haply as gave Eve the bitter food.
Between the grass and flowers, the evil snake
Came on, reverting oft his lifted head;
And, as a beast that smooths its polish'd coat.
Licking his back. I saw not, nor can tell,
How those celestial falcons from their seat
Moved, but in motion each one well described.
Hearing the air cut by their verdant plumes,
The serpent fled; and, to their stations, back
The angels up return'd with equal flight."
(Purg., VIII.)
A third picture of temptation is furnished by the episode of one of the
Sirens who appears first repulsive and then seems to the poet sweet and
alluring. Only when Virgil discloses her hideous nature does Dante see
how easily he might have fallen a victim to her wiles. He tells us that
in his sleep there appeared to him a woman with stammering utterance,
squinting eyes, deformed hands. "I gazed at her, and as the sun restores
the cold limbs made heavy by night, thus my look loosened her tongue,
then straightened her all out in a little while and colored her wan face
as love demands. When her speech was thus unbound she began to sing so
that I could hardly have turned my attention from her. 'I am,' she sang,
'I am sweet Siren who bewitch sailors by mid-sea, so full am I of charm
to hear. By my song I turned Ulysses from his wandering way. And
whosoever abides with me seldom departs, so wholly do I satisfy him.'
Her lips were not yet closed when a lady, swift and holy, appeared at my
side to confound the other. 'O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?' she said
proudly; and he advanced with his eyes fixed only on this modest woman."
Virgil (Reason called by Conscience) comes to the rescue of the
entranced poet and reveals the Siren in all her foul ugliness. At that
Dante awakes from his dream more than ever convinced of the evil of sin
and its hideousness. (Purg., XIX, 9.)
Our poet, as we said, is firmly convinced that sin will be punished in
Hell. But where is Hell? Popular tradition attributing an infernal
connection with volcanic phenomena and moved by those passages in Holy
Scripture which describe Hell as a place to which the reprobate descend,
locates Hell in the interior of the earth. Dante not only follows this
tradition for his Hell, but he does what no other writer before or after
him ever did--he constructs a Hell with such rare architectural skill
that the awful structure stands forth in startling reality, visualized
easily as to form an atmosphere, and with a finish of detail that is
amazing. Covered by a crust of earth it is situated under Jerusalem and
extends in funnel shape to the very center of the earth.
How it got this shape is told by the poet. When Lucifer was hurled from
Heaven by the justice of God, he kept falling until he reached the
center of earth, whence further motion downward was impossible. At the
approach of Lucifer the earth is represented as recoiling and so making
the cavity of Hell. The earth dislodged by the cataclysm was forced
through an opening, a kind of nozzle of the funnel of Hell, to the
antipodes and it there emerged, forming a mountain, which became the
site of the Garden of Eden and Purgatory. The phenomenon made land in
the northern and water in the southern hemisphere. Here is the
description:
"Upon this side he fell down out of heaven
And all the land, that whilom here emerged
For fear of him made of the sea a veil
And came to our hemisphere; and peradventure
To flee from him, what on this side
Left the place vacant here and back recoiled."
(Inf., XXXIV, 121.)
The material structure of the Inferno is a series of nine concentric
circles--darkness brooding over the whole region,--with ledges, chasms,
pits, swamps and rivers. The rivers, though different in name and
aspect, appear to be one and the same stream winding its way through the
various circles. We see it first as the boundary of Hell proper and it
is known as the Acheron. It comes again to view in the fourth circle and
is called the Styx. In the seventh circle, second round, it emerges as
the red blood stream of Phlegethon. In the very depths of Hell it forms
the frozen lake of Cocytus. The circles of Hell, distant from one
another, decrease in circumference as descent is made--the top circle
being the widest. Galileo estimates that Dante's Hell is about 4,000
miles in depth and as many in breadth at its widest diameter. Its
opening is near the forest at the Fauces Averni, near Cuma, Italy, where
Virgil places the site of the entrance of his Inferno.
Dante's Hell in its moral aspect is Aristotelian. Sins are divided into
three great classes, incontinence, bestiality and malice. Incontinence
is punished in the five upper circles; bestiality and malice in the City
of Dis, lower Hell. More particularly stated, Dante's scheme of
punishment in the underworld, not considering the vestibule of Hell,
where neutrals are confined, is as follows: 1, Limbo; 2, The Circle of
Lust; 3, Gluttony; 4, Avarice and Prodigality; 5, Anger, Rage and Fury;
6, Unbelief and Heresy; 7, Violence; 8, Fraud; 9, Treason.
In regard to this plan of punishment three things are to be noted: (a)
Though generally following the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, here
Dante, in his conception of Limbo, differs from his master. Our poet's
Limbo, wherein are the souls of unbaptized children and others who died
stained with original sin, but without personal grievous guilt, is a
much more severe abode than that of the Angelic Doctor. The latter
teaches that Limbo is a place or a state, not merely of exemption from
suffering and sorrow, but of perfect natural happiness unbroken even by
a knowledge of a higher, a supernatural destiny that has never been
given. Dante's Limbo, on the other hand, represents the souls in sadness
brought about by their constant desire and hope never realizable, of
seeing God. They suffer no pain of sense, but they are baffled in their
endless yearning for the Beatific Vision. To quote Dante:
"There, in so far as I had power to hear,
Were lamentations none, but only sighs
That tremulous made the everlasting air.
And this arose from sorrow without torment,
Which the crowds had, that many were and great,
Of infants and of women and of men.
To me the Master good: 'Thou dost not ask
What spirits these may be, which thou beholdest?
Now will I have thee know, ere thou go farther,
That they sinned not; and if they merit had,
'T is not enough, because they had not baptism,
Which is the portal of the Faith thou holdest;
And if they were before Christianity,
In the right manner they adored not God;
And among such as these am I myself.
For such defects, and not for other guilt,
Lost are we, and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.'"
(IV, 25.)
(b) Our poet represents a soul as punished but for one sin, though it
may be guilt-dyed by its having broken all the commandments. Even so, it
is placed in one particular circle wherein a certain sin is punished and
we are not told that it passes to other circles. In explanation of this
we have only to remember that Dante, for our instruction, is showing us
object lessons of evil, types of certain sins. Judas, for example, whose
name is synonymous with traitor, is exhibited as suffering in the ninth
circle, the circle of treason, the poet taking no notice of other sins,
v.g., sacrilege, avarice, suicide, of which the fallen apostle may have
been guilty. Furthermore, Dante as a master psychologist and moralist
would teach us the lesson that the evil doer may come to damnation
through one sin if that acquires such an ascendency over his will as to
become a capital sin or predominant passion of his life. Then the
besetting passion is the father of an innumerable progeny of evil. This
is seen (Purg., XX, 103) in the case of Pygmalion, whose predominant
passion, avarice, made him a traitor, a thief and a parricide.
(c) Let us not be surprised that Dante is so lenient in the punishment
of carnal sinners. He assigns a lighter punishment to the unchaste than
to the unjust. Back of his plan is a sound theological doctrine. Guilt
is to be estimated not simply from the gravity of the matter prohibited
to conscience and the knowledge that one has of the evil, but more
especially from the malice displayed by the will in its voluntary
choosing and embracing the evil. Now impurity, it is held, is often a
sin of impulse. It springs from concupiscence, a common human
inclination, wrong only when there is inordinateness. Then though a man
freely consents to the temptation and thereby commits a grievous sin,
his will generally is not overcast with perversion or affected with
malice. That being so, Dante in assigning punishment for sins against
the virtue of purity is moved by the thought that such sins deserve a
milder punishment in Hell, because they may be oftener surprises than
infidelities.
To make known the nature of the particular sin he depicts Dante shows us
the evil in various phases. First of all it is personified in repulsive
demons, the guardians of the circles of Hell. At the very entrance,
sits, symbolizing the evil conscience, the sinners' judge "Minos
horrific and grins. The ill-born spirit comes before him, confesses all
and that sin-discerner (Minos) sees what place in Hell is for it, and
with his tail makes as many circles round himself as the degrees he will
have it descend." (Inf., V, 2.) In the circle of Gluttony, the sin is
symbolized by the three-headed monster Cerberus, "who clutches the
spirits, flays and piecemeal rends them."
Plutus, the ancient god of riches--"a cursed wolf"--commands the circle
of Avarice. Phlegyas, who in fury set fire to Apollo's temple, is head
of the circle of Anger. Symbolizing remorse, the three Furies, in the
semblance of women girt with green water snakes, with snakes for hair,
and the Gorgon Medusa, representing the heart-hardening effect of
sensual pleasures, are found on the fire-glowing towers of the City of
Dis, Inner Hell. In the seventh circle presides Minotaur, half-man,
half-bull, the symbol of bloodthirsty violence and brutal lust.
Fraud is typified by Geryon, having the face of an honest man and the
body of a dragon. Further down giants are seen, emblematic of the
enormity of crime. At the very lowest point of Hell is Lucifer, "emperor
of the Realm of Sorrow." A gigantic monster, he is imprisoned in ice
formed from rivers which freeze by the movements of his bat-like wings
flapping in vain efforts to raise himself. To him, as to the source of
all evil, flow back all the streams of guilt. As he sinned against the
Tri-une God, he is represented with three faces, one crimson, another
between white and yellow, and the third black. (XXXIV, 55.)
Not only by such terrible monsters, but by the environment of the
condemned sinner, does our poet reveal the hideousness of sin. To
mention only the three great divisions of Hell, the abodes of
incontinence, bestiality and malice, we find in murky gloom the
incontinent whose sin had darkened their understanding. In the City of
Dis, red with fire, are the violent and the bestial, who in this life
had burned either with consuming rage or unnatural passion; in the
frozen circle of malice are those whose sins had congealed human
sympathy and love into cold, calculating destruction of trust reposed in
them.
But it is principally by depicting the intellectual, the moral and the
physical sufferings of the damned that Dante would teach us the nature
of sin. To depict physical sufferings the poet was under the necessity
of creating provisional bodies for his damned. Without such a poetic
device the souls of the reprobate before the resurrection of their
bodies cannot be conceived to suffer physically, since they lack the
senses and organs of pain. So Dante pictures the damned united to forms
shadowy yet real, palpable and visible. They sometimes lose the human
semblance and assume more sinister shapes, grovelling as hideous
serpents, bleeding and wailing from shrubs and trees, or bubbling in a
slushing stream.
In such forms the souls are seen in punishment fitting their sin, on the
principle that "by what things a man sinneth by the same he is
tormented." (Wisdom XI, 17.) The unchaste because they allowed their
reason to be subjected to the hot blasts of passion are now driven by "a
hellish storm which never rests; whirling and smiting, it vexes them."
(Inf., V, 31.) The gluttonous howl like dogs as hail and rain and snow
beat down upon them and Cerberus attacks and rends them. The misers and
spendthrifts to whom money was king, now are occupied in rolling huge
stones in opposite directions. The wrathful, all muddy and naked, assail
and tear one another.
The sullen are fixed in slime and gurgle a dismal chant. The materialist
and the heretic, whose existence, Dante holds, was only a living death,
are confined in blazing tombs. Murderers and tyrants are immersed in
boiling blood.
With poetic justice, suicides are represented as stunted trees lacerated
by the beaks of foul harpies. The violent lie supine on a plain of dry
and dense sand, upon which descend flakes of fire like "snow in the
Alps, without a wind." Usurers--should we call them profiteers?--suffer
also from a rain of fire and carry about their necks money bags stamped
with armorial designs. Thieves, to remind them of their sneaking trade,
are repeatedly transformed from men into snakes, hissing and creeping.
Hypocrites march in slow procession with faces painted and with leaden
cloaks all glittering with gold on the outside. With such realism does
Dante declare the nature of sin and its inevitable consequences.
Let us now accompany Dante through the Underworld. The scene opens at
dawn in a dark and tangled wood. Dante, the type of humanity, is unable
to ascend the Hill of the Lord, as we said before, because his way is
barred successively by a leopard, a lion and a wolf, representing the
passions of life. Virgil (Reason), sent by Beatrice (Revelation), offers
to conduct the poet by another road. It is a way which leads through
Hell and Purgatory. Through the heavens Beatrice herself will be the
guide. Descending through the earth the two poets come to the Vestibule
of Hell. On the gate appears this inscription:
"Through me you pass into the city of woe
Through me you pass into eternal pain
Through me among the people lost for aye
Justice, the founder of my fabric, moved
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest wisdom and primeval Love
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
It may be said in passing that in these nine lines Dante attains an
effect for which Milton, with all his heavy description of the gateway
of Hell, labors in vain. Contrast with the Florentine's the words of the
author of Paradise Lost:
"Hell bounds high reaching to the horrid roof
And thrice three fold the gates: three folds were brass,
Three iron, three of adamantine rock.
Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire,
Yet unconsumed. Before the gate there sat
On either side a formidable shape," etc.
Not by gigantic images which only astonish the reader, but by words
which burn into the brain and leave him dismayed, does our poet drive
home his thought.