Dante's Inferno, Virgil, Terza Rima, and the miracle of the stars

The Banquet, Renaissance; Ed. 2

Dear All and Sundry,

Welcome to today’s Banquet! Here’s what’s on the Menu today:

• Traveling observations

• The Stars, an end in themselves

• How to choose a guide to the afterlife

• The poetic structure most like a side-scrolling video game

• Ranking sins, or Why flattery is worse than fornication

And we’ll be talking about Dante’s Inferno the whole way! So have a seat, and enjoy!

The Little Things

When I speak with those recently returned from a foreign country, I am struck by an experience that occurs fairly often, and perhaps you, dear Sundry have been struck by it, too. Almost as soon as the sojourner has finished discussing his itinerary, he begins cataloguing differences—this invariably includes among the vast lacunae of culture, creed, custom and costume, the minutiae: “They have strange signs on the pavement that show where to stand in an earthquake,” one recently returned from Mexico remarks.  “I was too afraid to try the bidet,” says another who visited France. I found my cousin, when he visited from Portugal taking pictures of the squirrels in our backyard. “We only see them in zoos,” he explained.

As we continue our adventure into the divine Comedy, keep an eye open for the things that set Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise apart. For Dante, the subtle difference can be as important as the obvious one; indeed often it is more so. He is shocked when he sees the distress of those punished by being lashed and whipped across the dark air by tornados, but more shocking to us is how it is taken as a commonplace there—Paolo and Francesca explain their particular eternal turbulence as if it were an inconvenience one simply had to live with, like seasonal wildfires in the Australian bush, or the Texas heat. Sinners may chafe against their punishment, and decry its justice, but they are still strangely native to their circle. Some act of the will in their prior life has made them so. Hopefully none of the circles we encounter on our way down make you, dear Sundry, feel at home.  

More subtle is the dark air itself. The entire time he is journeying through hell, Dante the pilgrim is deprived of any heavenly light. It is only when he emerges at the end of the Inferno, that he is able to appreciate anew the great gift of the stars. We do not need the fantastic visions of the Webb telescope to possess this wonder—our limited view with the naked eye is enough.

There is a delightful poem by Nikolai Morshen entitled ‘Stars’, translated from the Russian by Richard Wilbur which concludes:

Ah, to select a theme that once for all
Would captivate all men without exception –
Saint, atheist, hero, coward, freeman, thrall—
And then to realize one’s high conception
On the night’s canvas with a dot, just one.

What artist would not own himself outdone?

So important to Dante are these “dots” we are meant, or even called, to look up at in wonder, that the poet underscores the point by conspicuously ending the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise with same word: stella.

Inferno-The Beginning

One of the most obscure of the entire Comedy, the first canto establishes the terza rima, (which we will return to) and the character of Dante the pilgrim, both of which will be cornerstones of the entire work. Still, it betrays some traces of Dante the poet finding his own voice in the project he has embarked upon. Later cantos will be more immediately literal, though the other exegetical approaches that he mentions in his letter to Can Grande Della Scala will of course be present. Here, however, the literal seems less in the foreground than the allegorical.

The three creatures he encounters-the leopard, the lion and the she-wolf- can be variously interpreted, though the source seems to be Jeremiah 5:6.

idcirco percussit eos leo de silva lupus ad vesperam vastavit eos pardus vigilans super civitates eorum omnis qui egressus fuerit ex eis capietur quia multiplicatae sunt praevaricationes eorum confortatae sunt aversiones eorum

which the KJV renders “Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased.”

What is clear is that these three creatures, whether they symbolize the world, flesh and the devil, or greed, avarice, and pride, or the political forces of Florence, the Papacy and the Empire, are obstacles in Dante's way up the mountain, (a pre-figuring of Purgatory).

Unable to climb, and more and more lost in the "selvaggia oscura" Dante is rescued by a spirit, the soul of Virgil the epic poet.

Finding ourselves wandering a dark and confusing wilderness, stalked by beasts, we might offer a prayer for a guide, someone to help us. Who would you wish for, dear Sundry?

“I would wish for a saint, or my father, he always knew his way out of a jam. Or my best friend with his best hunting rifle.”

Alas, dear Sundry, Dante gets none of these; he gets the ghost of Virgil.

In a poem filled with surprises, we may ask ourselves why Virgil, the pagan poet of Imperial Rome, writer of the Aeneid, the Eclogues, and the Georgics, is randomly haunting these obscure woods. It turns out, it isn’t random at all- Virgil is just the guide Dante needs, and he is there at the very special behest of another.

Why Virgil?

This is the question, teachers and students. Why Virgil?

Virgil is the perfect guide for at least four reasons:

1)Virgil is the Italian poet of Empire-he is a fellow patriot, a lover of the land that nurtured him, and he will see Rome in its role as the cradle of Empire. It will be St. Luke who, also knowing Virgil, will portray Rome in the Acts of the Apostles, as the cradle of the church.

2)Virgil is the poet of Piety-the war between the will of man and the will of God is universal. Just wonder, dear Sundry, in our own day, is there a difference between those who are guided by their own appetites and those who are guided by an external authority?

3)Virgil is a poet who has also envisioned the afterlife. Intriguingly, he is a guide to Dante the poet as well as Dante the pilgrim…

4)Virgil is the poet whom grace inspired to “foretell” the coming of Christ in his fourth Eclogue. This was a common medieval interpretation of the work, and though contemporary scholarship does not claim that kind of authority anymore, who knows if in actuality God did not work through Virgil? As we will discover, in this work and others, many are the myriad intricacies of God’s Providence.

Could there have been another chosen that would have as aptly represented the moral poetic, imaginative capacity of the human mind at its height unaided by Revelation? It is hard to imagine.

Virgil explains that Beatrice, the woman who in life inspired Dante to write his Vita Nuova, and who, now in heaven looks down on him, was moved to descend into Hell, and fetch Virgil, knowing of Dante's allegiance to his poetic and political mentor, since nothing short of divine intervention and a pilgrimage through the afterlife will be sufficient to save Dante’s soul.

The important thing to note here, besides that the three holy ladies (Mary, St. Lucy, and Beatrice) seem to counterbalance the three vicious beasts, is that Beatrice makes Virgil a very interesting promise.

What good can be offered the damned? She offers him fame in heaven—that his name will be mentioned before the throne of God. This is a fame that would be eternal, as opposed to the fleeting mortal, worldly fame that the damned would still - ‘enjoy’ might be going too far - but that other souls in Hell still certainly retain.

Terza Rima

Let us return for a moment to the form of the poem. It is written in a unique interlocking rhyme scheme of three-line stanzas specifically invented for the purpose of this work. It proceeds A, B, A; B, C, B; C, D, C; etc.

It is a demanding rhyme scheme with an ineluctable forward motion. (Yes, dear Sundry, just like the original Super Mario Bros. games, with its side-scrolling screen.)

It is ideal for a poem with such a trinitarian nature-and inevitably recalls us to the sustaining power of a trinitarian God, a power that also undergirds the three realms we are about to visit.

Ranking Sins

Whenever I taught the Inferno, I began with a list of ten sins that I would give the students in random order. The students would then have to rank the sins in order of severity. By polling the class, we would come up with a ranking that represented the thinking of the class generally. We would then review Dante’s ranking of the same sins. It is important to note here that as Dante the pilgrim descends into the Inferno, the sins he encounters get progressively worse. Dante is ranking his sins from least to most severe. It was always amusing to see the students’ shock, even anger, at some of his placements. Why are sins of lust placed so high? Why is violence less sinful than flattery? (Yes, dear Sundry, there are sins deep in the Inferno that even “good” souls like us commit, and commit with some frequency.)

I would not explain Dante’s reasoning to the students, as I will not explain it to you. In both cases it is better to experience Dante first, and pay attention to his own reasonings. Nothing provoked the students to read as surely. Now they had to read. Now they had skin in the game.

And I hope, now, so do you!