FREE ESSAY ON THE INFERNO

THE INFERNO

On Good Friday 1300 AD, in Dante's thirty-fifth year, he goes astray from the straight
road into the Dark Wood of Error. Seeing the Sun (Divine Illumination) lighting the Mount
of Joy in the Distance, he attempts to climb up the mountainside but is blocked by three
beasts of worldliness: the Leopard of Malice and Fraud, the Lion of Violence and
Ambition, and the She-Wolf of Incontinence. When his hope is nearly lost, the shade of
the Roman poet Virgil (a symbol of Human Reason) appears to him. Virgil has been sent by
Beatrice in Heaven to lead Dante from error; he explains that to defeat the beasts it is
necessary to take the harder route through Hell (where sin is recognized), Purgatory
(where sin is renounced), then to Heaven to revel in the light of God. Dante accepts and
sets off with him. 
The Poets pass through the Gate of Hell (inscribed with the famous line, Abandon all hope
ye who enter here) and step into the Vestibule, where they see the torments inflicted on
the opportunists and those who took neither side in the Rebellion of the Angels. They are
not officially in Hell nor Heaven because their actions in life were not good enough or
bad enough to warrant a place in either. They must forever pursue a banner just out of
their reach while being stung by wasps; the blood and pus flowing from their wounds is
feasted upon by worms and maggots. (The punishments in Inferno always fit the crime. The
wasps signify the sinners guilty consciences and the worms and maggots, their moral
filth.) The Poets wish to be ferried across the river Acheron by the boatman Charon, but
Charon realizes that Dante is still living and refuses them passage until Virgil makes a
good argument for Dante's case. Charon reluctantly agrees, but Dante faints out of pure
terror and only awakes when he is on the opposite bank. 
Upper Hell, for those who committed the least serious sins, is made of five circles, each
containing fewer sinners and smaller than the one before it. The first of these is Limbo,
where unbaptized children and virtuous pagans are placed. Virgil is one of these souls,
who lived decent lives but died before Christ came (in Dante's mind, belief in Christ was
necessary to enter Heaven). They are not tormented but must spend eternity without hope.
Dante and Virgil tarry in Limbo to talk with other great poets of the ancient world.
(Dante must have had tremendous pride in himself to have imagined walking with Homer and
Ovid.) 
Entering the second circle, where the torments begin, the Poets are blocked by Minos, the
beast who judges the damned and condemns each soul to its proper level of Hell, but
Virgil convinces him to let them pass. (Dante fused pagan mythology and Christian beliefs
together in his Hell quite often.) They then see the souls of the carnal, swept around by
tempests much as they allowed their reason to be swept away by passion in life. Here they
meet Paolo and Francesca, who were murdered by Francesca's husband before they could
repent from their sin of adultery. After hearing their story, Dante faints again. 
Upon recovering, Dante and Virgil enter the third circle, where storms of stinking snow
and freezing rain fall and form slush under their feet. Cerberus, a three-headed dog,
guards the gluttonous souls and chews at them. One of the gluttons, Ciacco, a Florentine
like Dante, prophesizes Dante's later exile. (It becomes apparent later that the damned
can see far into the future but cannot see the events of the present. Thus on Judgement
Day, the last day, their powers will become useless.) 
The fourth circle is guarded by the monster Plutus but Virgil again manages to talk his
and Dante's way past him. (I assume that this means Human Reason can always outwit
anything hellish.) The circle is filled with souls of hoarders and wasters, who are
eternally at war with one another. They are in Hell because in thinking of nothing but
money they destroyed the light of God within them. 
It is now past midnight on Good Friday, and the Poets proceed to the fifth circle, the
Marsh of Styx. This is the last circle of Upper Hell. The souls of the wrathful attack
one another in the marsh and the souls of the sullen lie entombed beneath the slime. 
The Poets stand at the edge at the edge of the marsh and Phlegyas, the ferryman of Styx,
rushes across thinking they are new souls to torment and does not want to give them
passage when he finds out they are not; Virgil (once again) convinces him otherwise. They
are ferried to Dis, the capital of Hell, which marks the boundary between Upper and Lower
Hell. The gates of Dis are guarded by Rebellious Angels, whom Virgil is powerless against
(Human Reason alone cannot cope with Evil) and sends up a prayer for divine aid. 
Virgil's fear is made worse by the presence of Three Infernal Furies (symbolizing
remorse). He calls on Medusa to turn them into stone, tells Dante to turn away and shut
his eyes in order not to glimpse this evil, and even places his own hands over Dante's
eyes. Sudddenly a Heavenly Messenger approaches, proceeded by a great storm (symbolizing
God's power). He throws open the gates of Dis and then returns to Heaven. The Poets are
now free to enter the sixth circle, wherein the souls of the heretics (specifically,
those who denied the belief in the immortality of the soul) are entombed in iron tombs
heated by fires. These tombs will be closed forever on Judgement Day and the heretics
will be sealed forever in a death within a death. 
The Poets continue through the sixth circle, where they meet one Farinata degli Uberti
(who would have been a political foe of Dante's had he not died a year before Dante's
birth), with whom Dante discusses politics, and his friend Guido Cavalcanti's father
Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti. 
They reach the inner edge of the sixth circle and find rubble that was formerly a cliff
but which was destroyed in the great earthquake that shook Hell when Christ died. The
stench that arises from the seventh circle is so powerful that they seek shelter behind a
tomb to accustom themselves to the smell. Virgil uses this time to describe the divisions
of Lower Hell. 
It is now two hours before sunrise on Holy Saturday. (Virgil is somehow able to track the
motion of the stars, which cannot be seen in Hell as they are a symbol of God's shining
hope and virtue.) 
While descending the rocks, Virgil manages to trick the Minotaur, who tries to block
their way. The souls of the violent against neighbors are wallowing in a river of blood
inside the seventh circle. Many tyrants and war-makers are punished here. Centaurs patrol
the river and menace the Poets as they try to pass, but Virgil convinces Nessus the
Centaur to bear them across. 
Nessus deposits them in the second round of the seventh circle, the Wood of Suicides.
Their souls have been trapped in trees whose leaves are chewed off by Harpies, causing
them to bleed. Other souls of the violent against themselves are chased through the Wood
by packs of dogs who tear them to pieces. 
In round three of the seventh circle, blasphemers (the violent against God), sodomists
(the violent against Nature, the child of God), and usurers (the violent against Art, the
child of Nature and thus the grandchild of God) are scalded by rains of fire on a plain
of burning sand. (The unnatural rain is a fitting punishment for their unnatural
actions.) 
Dante walks along the banks of a rill flowing across the plain and converses with Ser
Brunetto Latini, whose writings Dante greatly admired and from whom he learned numerous
literary devices. 
When the Poets come within hearing distance of the waterfall that lunges from the seventh
into the eighth circle, three Florentines rush over to Dante and begin speaking of
Florence's present tate of degradation. At the top of the waterfall Dante removes a cord
from his waste and drops it over the edge, signalling the approach of a great monster. 
The monster is Geryon, the Monster of Fraud, who will fly them down the cliff. As Virgil
negotiates for their passage, Dante examines the souls of the usurers. He sees them
crouching on the edge of the burning plain with purses (bearing the coats of arms of
prominent Florentine families) hanging from their necks. Returning to Virgil, he mounts
Geryon's back with him and they fly around the waterfall and down the cliff. 
Geryon deposits them in the eighth circle, Malebolge (Evil Ditches) which consists of ten
bolgias (ditches/pockets); those guilty of simple fraud are punished therein. Stone dikes
running from ditch to ditch will serve as bridges on which the Poets can cross them. The
first bolgia contains the souls of panderers and seducers, eternally driven by lashes
from horned demons. The souls of the flatterers are sunk in excrement. 
The souls of simoniacs (those who corrupted the Church by making a profit from it) are in
the third bolgia, jammed upside-down inside tube-like holes in the ground with fire
scalding the soles of their feet, and are jammed farther into the holes as new sinners
arrive to take their places. (Baptismal fonts in Northern Italy were constructed
similarly in Dante's time, and by making a mockery of baptism the simoniacs are punished
likewise.) Dante (good Catholic that he is) makes a heated denouncement of these sinners,
and afterwards is carried up a ledge to the fourth bolgia by Virgil. 
They stand on the bridge over the fourth bolgia and gaze upon the souls of fortunetellers
and diviners. In life these people wished to see into the future through forbidden
methods, so their heads are placed backward on their shoulders - they can never see in
front of themselves and can only walk backwards through eternity. 
In the fifth bolgia are the souls of the grafters, sunk in boiling pitch and guarded by
demons who tear them with grappling hooks if they dare to rise above the surface. These
demons present the only physical danger to Dante during his journey (some have surmised
that this is due to the fact that Dante was exiled from Florence on false charges of
grafting). Virgil hides Dante behind some rocks while he negotiates with the demons
leader, Malacoda, and is guaranteed passage to the next bridge, as the one intended to be
crossed lies shattered. When two of the demons are tricked into the pitch by a couple of
wily sinners, a rescue is organized by the remaining demons while Dante and Virgil take
advantage of the confusion to sneak away. 
Fearing pursuit by the demons, the Poets slide down the bank of the sixth bolgia to hide.
There they see the souls of the hypocrites moving slowly round a narrow track, weighted
down by outwardly beautiful robes that are actually made of lead. (Excellent symbolism
here - in life their outward appearance was that of bright holiness, but now their
consciences bear the weight of their ugly, terrible guilt.) 
The Poets find that Malacoda lied to them about the existence of the bridge and are
obligated to climb up the opposite bank to exit the seventh bolgia. They walk the length
of the bridge across the seventh bolgia and observe the souls of the thieves. These souls
are trapped in the coils of reptiles who bind their hands behind their backs and pierce
their veins. Some sinners appear to Dante as humans, others as reptiles; he watches as
one of the reptiles latches itself onto one of the humans and exchanges forms with him. 
The eighth bolgia contains the souls of the evil counselors - those who abused their
God-given gifts for evil purposes - who are completely engulfed in flames. Dante speaks
to a flame and finds that the souls of Ulysses and Diomede, soldiers in the Trojan war,
are contain within and listens to the story of Ulysses's last voyage. He then speaks to a
lord of Romagna, discussing its tragic state of affairs. 
The Poets continue to the ninth bolgia, where they see the sowers of discord. Because in
life they separated what God had intended to be united, they are hacked at and torn apart
by a demon bearing a bloody sword. They are divided into three classes: sowers of
religious discord (Mohammed is chief among these), sowers of political discord, and
sowers of discord among kinsmen. 
Virgil hurries Dante onto the bridge over bolgia ten, where they observe the falsifiers.
These souls are subjected to various kinds of corruption (disease, filth, darkness,
stench) as they corrupted society in life by their falsifications. They are divided into
four classes: alchemists (falsifiers of things), evil impersonators (falsifiers of
persons), counterfeiters (falsifiers of money), and false witnesses (falsifiers of
words). Dante observes two of the falsifiers quarrel with one another until he is
reprimanded by Virgil. 
The Poets approach the Central Pit, which contains Cocytus, the final circle of Hell. The
Pit is guarded by half-buried Titans, placed here because they symbolize earthly passions
that men must strive to overcome. One of the Titans helps the Poets by lowering them to
Cocytus in the palm of his hand. 
Cocytus is a frozen lake and the souls guilty of treachery against those to whom they
were bound by special ties are frozen to varying degrees within. This ice is divided into
four concentric rings: Caina (named for the biblical Cain, it contains the souls of the
treacherous against relatives), Antenora (for the treacherous to their country, named for
the Trojan who betrayed his city during the Trojan war), Ptolomea (named for Ptolemaeus
Maccabeus who murdered his father-in-law, for the treacherous to guests and hosts), and
Judecca (named for Judas Iscariot, reserved for the treacherous to their masters). Satan
himself is in the very center, beating his huge wings in a vain attempt to free himself
from the grip of the ice. He has three hideous faces (a mockery of the Holy Trinity) and
chews a sinner in each of his mouths - Judas, Cassius, and Brutus. 
To exit Hell, the Poets climb down Satan's hairy flanks until they pass over the center
of gravity and emerge at the Mount of Purgatory on the other side of the world to finally
gaze at the stars.