The Divine Comedy 1: Hell (c.
1314) by Dante
Recommended by Louise
‘I hope Thatcher rots in
hell,’ is something I’ve heard, or read on the internet, a good few times this
week.
When she was in office,
people wished her expelled. When she was alive, people wished her dead. Now
that she is dead, people wish her eternal torture. Hearing the concept of hell so
frequently and fervently invoked helped me reflect on Dante’s epic poem
(although it certainly didn’t help me to process my emotions about Thatcher). This
week, at least, it seems post-Christian secular Britain is still willing to
condemn a sinner to eternal damnation.
I think it’s Dante who is largely
responsible for the tenacity of hell in popular culture. While I remember a bit
of Satan-chatter in the New Testament, the place itself remained largely unexplored
territory. It’s probably Revelation that comes closest, at least in terms of
vivid imagery – and Revelation’s not about hell per se (let alone about any kind of narrative coherence). Yet Hell, in contrast to Revelation’s angry
gibberish, makes a great deal of logical sense. Dante codifies and classifies
hell, finds a place and an inventive method of torture for every kind of sin, and
also allows its inhabitants to explain their actions and experiences. He makes
hell easy to visualise, natural to fear, and tempting to want people you hate
to end up there.
The story – the very
deftly-paced story – of Hell is that
Dante, aged thirty-five and spiritually adrift, is led by the Classical poet
Virgil through the complicated (de)meritocracy of the damned. We gawp with
Dante at sights such as he finds in the fifth circle (where the Wrathful
dwell):
At
fisticuffs – not with fists alone, but with
Their
heads and heels, and with their bodies too,
And
tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.
(Canto
VII, 112-14)
At its simplest level, Hell is a travelogue, a cheap holiday in
other people’s misery.
But simplicity can’t be
levelled at Dante for long. He didn’t write about hell to amuse or horrify with
shocking descriptions. He didn’t even write to warn against straying from God. The Divine Comedy is ranked among the
greatest achievements of all humankind because it is such a profoundly lyrical
reflection on reason – and particularly on reason’s relationship with the soul,
and then with that soul’s relationship with God. It was thus inevitable that Hell led me to slice open to my own
innards: my morals, my relationships, my trespasses. Yes, Dante writes from
within a Christian worldview, but I found Hell
have intense resonance outside of it, too. Free will and consequence, the
nature of spiritual fulfillment, the transience of life: they’re not questions
we spend nearly enough time on these days.
Still, that’s not to say Hell is only that, either. Another reason Dante wrote was to comment on
contemporary Italian politics and, it seems, air some grievances against people
he didn’t like. Who wouldn’t? You’re writing about hell, chuck a few enemies
into the pit. From what I gather about the Florentine situation of the time, it
was a ridiculously complicated mix of petty family squabbles and genuine class
struggle, elevated to murderous severity because of the power each faction
wielded. The pope and the odd French monarch sticking their respective oars in didn’t
help, either. Reading Hell in a week
led to no more than a superficial consideration of all this, but one story particularly
struck a chord, down in the ninth circle of hell in the region of Antenora, a
place reserved for traitors to their country.
Here, we meet Count
Ugolino, a double-dealer between the factions, who had been imprisoned on earth
with his (innocent) sons. The confined Ugolino relates to Dante how he heard his
cell door being nailed up; he then realised he and his sons would starve to
death.
I gnawed at both my hands for misery;
And they, who thought it was for hunger plain
And simple, rose at once and said to me:
‘O Father, it will give us much less pain
If thou wilt feed on us; thy gift at birth
Was this sad flesh, strip thou it off again.’
(Canto
XXXIII, 58-63)
Ugolino watches his sons
die. He ends his tale by saying ‘famine did what sorrow could not do’. The
commentary says this line is a reference to Ugolino’s death, but (thanks, Night Of The Living Dead) I think
Ugolino meant that he ate his sons’ corpses. Who knows? Nevertheless, the sad
story of Ugolino – where wrong begat wrong begat tragedy begat tragedy – is naught
but frantic horror, whatever his region of hell, purgatory, paradise, or earth.
Contributing much to my
enjoyment of Hell was Dorothy L.
Sayers’s scholarly, and waspishly witty, commentary. Of an earlier Dante work
(the Vita Nuova), she writes
If we only had that book to go upon, we might suppose
that from his tenth to his twenty-fifth year [Dante] did nothing except
circulate sonnets among the intelligentsia of Florence, and moon his tearful
way from one emotional crisis to another.
Actually, I can imagine Dante’s
recommender, Louise, saying something very similar. For Louise’s intellect is
sharper than Sheffield steel. She and I have been acquaintances for a while,
but I’d say it’s only really over the last year that we’ve become proper
friends. Writing this now, I realise how little I actually know about her, but
that’s okay; actually, it’s exciting, because I discover something new every
time we meet (and it’s always something dead interesting, too). I do know that
she has true personal grace, a strong backbone, and the gravitas of a Wilkie
Collins heroine. It’s really not a surprise that’s she’s recommended me my most
highbrow book to date.
Just as with Louise, there’s
obviously a (hell of a) lot more to discover in The Divine Comedy. After all, it has inspired cultural heavyweights
from Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Chris de Burgh (I’m assuming ‘Don’t Pay The
Ferryman’ is about crossing the infernal river Acheron, rather than being a
mandate to defraud P&O). So, I can think of little way to sum Hell up; it’s better to just quietly
exit, murmuring the lines that made me clutch hands to face in awe.
There
the mere weeping will not let them weep,
For
grief, which finds no outlet at the eyes,
Turns
inward to make anguish drive more deep;
For
their first tears freeze to a lump of ice
Which
like a crystal mask fills all the space
Beneath
the brows and plugs the orifice.
(Canto
XXXIII, 94-9)
