Dante's Inferno

The wise, kind, brave, virtuous, and altogether lovable Virgil is Dante’s idol, his inspiration, and his guide. Virgil often takes on a parental role: Dante calls him both “father” and “mother,” and Virgil more than once scoops Dante up like a baby to carry him out of trouble. But Virgil’s wisdom has its limits. His classical belief in the supreme importance of individual heroism does not make room for the necessary divine grace to get Dante through Hell.

Virgil’s afterlife in Limbo reflects his character. He is essentially the best possible human one can become without the grace of God. To be such a person is to live a life of eternally unsatisfied longings: “[W]ithout hope, we live in desire” (4.42). Virgil’s fatal inability to recognize God in no way prevents him from being a legitimately admirable figure; his influence on Dante is both poetic and spiritual.

The beautiful Beatrice only makes a brief appearance in Inferno, but she is foundational to the Divine Comedy in more ways than one. Dante first met Beatrice when they were children in Florence, and fell profoundly in love with her, though they only met a few times over the course of their lives. His entire poetic career centered on his desire to sing her praises, and his seminal La Vita Nuova is all about his search for a poetic style fit to record Beatrice’s beauty and virtue—a style that comes to fruition in the Comedy. Beatrice becomes, for Dante, an image not only of perfection, but of his own soul: a glorious twin spirit who reaches out to him from beyond the grave as he reaches out to her. Her very name means “blessed,” and love for her is indeed a blessing for Dante, opening the gates of Heaven itself.

Francesca appears in one of the most famous episodes of Inferno. Out of all the people in the dank, whirlwind-filled circle of Lust, Dante chooses to speak not to a big name like Cleopatra or Dido, but to Francesca and her lover Paolo—participants in a sordid local scandal. Paolo silently weeps while the courtly, eloquent Francesca describes how they met their fate: She was married to Paolo’s brother, but she and Paolo fell for each other while reading Arthurian legends together. Her husband caught them in bed and slaughtered them both.

Francesca’s story is a story of misreading. Not only does she make a fatal error in not finishing the book they are reading—a book that tells of the disaster resulting from the adulterous romance between Lancelot and Guinevere—she and Paolo misread each other, normal everyday folks, as romantic figures in a grand legend. Francesca makes the literally fatal error of looking for transcendent love not in God, but in the boy next door: a source that will always, in the end, disappoint her.

Farinata is a Ghibelline warlord, famous for his pride and skill, and known as the unlikely savior of Florence for refusing to allow the city to be destroyed after the bloody battle of Montaperti. His haughty greeting to Dante demonstrates his priorities: Even in Hell, he is mostly interested in aristocratic ancestry and the endurance of his legacy. He appears rising out of a tomb in the circle of Heresy, like a parody of Christian resurrection iconography; he is doomed by his inability to believe in any eternity beyond his own fame. He is also stuck with an unlikely roommate: Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, the father of Dante’s friend Guido and a dyed-in-the-wool Guelph (that is, a member of the other side of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict that raged through Europe in Dante’s lifetime). It turns out that political divisions on earth do not make much difference in the afterlife. Farinata’s pride, ancestry, and allegiances are meaningless in eternity, where the important division is between those who recognized divine grace and those who did not.

Gruesomely imprisoned in a bleeding tree, Pier della Vigna speaks for the circle of the suicides. His tale is piteous. Believed to have betrayed his master, the Emperor Frederick—to whom he was deeply loyal—he was imprisoned, tortured, and blinded; eventually, he beat his own brains out against a wall. His punishment for having rejected human life is to be reduced to the level of vegetable life: He rejected a life given to him by God, and believed his relationship to his earthly master was of more import than his relationship to his heavenly one.

Dante puts his old teacher Brunetto Latini in the circle of sodomy, running about on burning sands in a hail of fire. Latini was a scholar, a poet, and a father figure who encouraged and inspired his young pupil. His position in the circle of sodomy suggests that his support was tainted. In this instance, it is not that homosexuality is sinful in and of itself; indeed, when Dante reaches Purgatory, he finds penitent souls on the terrace of Lust kissing each other regardless of gender. Rather, it is that sodomy—any sexual act without reproductive potential—is fruitless and so was Latini’s teaching. Latini’s error is in placing all his hopes and dreams in earthly fame and skill. When he encourages Dante to follow his star, he is thinking of the wrong star; whatever happens on earth, no matter how spectacular, always comes to an end. Latini is in Hell because of a fatal misunderstanding about the relative value of life on earth versus life in eternity.

Ulysses is one of many Greek mythological figures Dante meets in Hell, and the canto where he appears is one of the most famous and influential in the whole Divine Comedy. With a stirring story, the eloquent and charismatic Ulysses explains his position in Hell, where he is trapped in an eternal tongue of flame. After he returned home from his years of wandering, he got bored, and convinced his men to go out adventuring again. They travelled past the limits of the known world but were shipwrecked just as they came within view of Mount Purgatory—a land they would never reach. Ulysses is an attractive figure, which is part of what damns him. His mistake is in trying to go beyond human limits and abandoning what is rightfully his—his home and his family—in order to do so. His eternal imprisonment in a tongue of flame is a horrific parody of the divine flames that appeared over the Apostles’ heads at Pentecost: He has used the gift of eloquent speech to lead others not to the truth, but to their doom.