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How would you rather spend a brief (or not so brief) eternity—continually whipping yourself into a rage of pushing, heaving, crashing gargantuan boulders into more boulders that your hateful, frenzied enemy has just launched at you? Or have your eyelids sewn to your cheeks with an iron wire while helping the person you most resent hold up massive blocks overhead, like a human Stonehenge?
I’ll have the chicken, please. . . .
Try this one: What if the pride and glory of the Middle Ages told you that you are already doing one of the above?
Un attimo, per favore; I shall return to this in a moment.
Most people know that Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote The Comedy—dubbed The Divine Comedy by a later Italian poet out of respect for Dante’s achievement—about a wanderer (also named Dante) swept violently into an epic journey (guided by Virgil) that descends into hell, rises through purgatory, and peaks in the throne room of the Triune God.
Sadly, cocktail party knowledge trails off before this, right after someone (I picture a college sophomore with intense eyebrows) pronounces the Inferno a dark, oh-but-it’s-good piece of literature . . . Dante’s greatest . . . no, I haven’t read the others, but geez, that Inferno. . . .
If I may interject: Please, before you say or think or read anything else about Dante (except for this post), get a recent, readable, respectable, parallel translation of at least the Inferno and Purgatorio, find someone who has read and loved and lived Dante’s journey two or three times already and is pining for more, and submit to that person, just as Dante the Pilgrim submits to Virgil. You may deviate from this person’s council at the same moment Dante does: when your soul is rent, your spirit broken, your heart whelmed by humility, and your mind mystified by the infinite reaches of God’s grace—grace as you had never conceived of it; grace even to the ungrateful; grace even to the unseeking; grace that touches even the damned. Only then will you be conditioned, like Dante, to pass through the flames. Only then may you loose your tongue. But let your words be few; you will find most of them inadequate anyway. And if Dante still seems dark to you, let it be because he holds himself and you and I in merciless contrast to a great light.
Per tornare, to return. . . .
What can be Dante’s purpose in prescribing punishments so violent as boulder-crashing and rock-carrying? Hot tears for one, icy tears for the other—through sutures, no less. And why the insinuation that fellows such as we, crawling between earth and heaven, might ignorantly be acting out one or both even now?
To show you your sin.
Throughout his Comedy, but most memorably in the Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante orders the nether and ethereal worlds by a set of laws containing profound revelatory power. (Even Paradiso, framed entirely by medieval astronomy, adapts a derivative of these laws.) Hell’s law is that of contrapasso, the extension of an infernal soul’s sinful desires into the afterlife. The law of contrapasso is named for its description by Bertran de Born, who carries his head eternally severed from his body, damned for unnatural violence: “Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso” (Inf. 28.141-142) [“Thus you may see / The rule of retribution work in me”]. Putting it differently, Capaneus the blasphemer bemoans this law when he cries, “What I was living, so am I still, dead!” In other words, one who lusts, gorges himself, envies, blasphemes, cheats, hates, or murders in this life should expect to do the same in death. This is not to say that one who blasphemes here is berated there; rather, he continues to blaspheme, to the nth degree, and to his own misery. Thus Bertran is forever violent as well as forever a victim (“for all who draw the sword die by the sword,” Matthew 26:52). Thus simonists (people who peddle the Gospel for profit) are stashed upside-down into holes in the ground (for in life, their desires were inverted from what they ought to have been). Thus the lustful tear through hell, like cyclones, attached at the waist to the object of their passion (for this was their soul desire in life). And thus gluttons lie on their backs naked, exposed, mouths eternally gaping at a deluge of rotten food and sewage, for their lives were but a shadow of this. By extending sins which we are prone to ignore, rationalize, or even romanticize, to their extreme or “pure” forms, Dante melts the gilding off their sordid cores.
This is how you can tell whether someone has read Dante’s Inferno in any meaningful way: if he has not, he will pronounce it dark. If he has, he will pause, look wistfully at the floor as if remembering something he had planned to forget, and, just as you are deciding to leave him in his awkward pensiveness, level his gaze straight at you and say, “Yes. I have read it. And its darkness mirrors my own.”
