8 Inferno 27–29
CHAPTER 8
Inferno 27–29
We turn now to Canto 27, which really ought to be read in conjunction with Canto 26, because here we have what I would call a countermyth to the story of Ulysses. There is a contraction of focus; there’s even a revision of the claims of epic grandeur that we have in Canto 26. Dante meets and becomes the interlocutor of Guido da Montefeltro, an extraordinary figure, a military and political leader who experienced a conversion. He became a Franciscan friar, and Pope Boniface VIII, whose name you may recall, summoned him. The pope was not someone that Dante really held in the highest esteem, but Boniface VIII, in an inversion of the relations between high priest and cleric, asks Guido da Montefeltro for some advice. We are dealing again with evil counselors, and the pope’s request is equally wicked: you are a great man of arms, so you have to teach me the strategies I should pursue in order to conquer and destroy Palestrina, a small town near Rome.
And so we enter into a Machiavellian world of counselors. It’s actually the language of Machiavelli avant la lettre; Machiavelli takes for himself the language that Guido uses. At one point Guido says his works were not those of a lion but those of a fox, and these are the two attributes that the perfect prince ought to have in Machiavelli’s most well-known work, The Prince. That is to say, the perfect prince is one who knows how to use strength, but also how to use slyness, when to be crafty and foxy and when to be violent and leonine. These two images clearly originate from Cicero—they are not Dante’s own invention—and it’s likely that Machiavelli got them from Cicero, as well as from this canto.
The connections between the two cantos extend well beyond their shared depiction of malevolent counselors, however. First of all, Canto 27 begins with a reference to the Sicilian bull, clearly a counter to the Trojan Horse of the previous canto: “As the Sicilian bull (which bellowed first with the cry of him—and that was right—who had shaped it with his file) was wont to bellow with the voice of the victim, so that, though it was of brass, yet it seemed transfixed with pain.”1 What is the story here? It’s a demotic, vulgar version of what happened to Ulysses. Ulysses is condemned to be held prisoner of the flames and the two tongues of fire, because he was a rhetorician, a philosopher, a Neoplatonist trying to persuade others of his ideas, and very proud of his success at persuasion until he gets caught by his own tongue. It’s the temptation of the artist himself; it’s Daedalus who builds the labyrinth and gets caught by it. It’s the story of the artist who becomes a captive of that which he himself constructed. Here Dante begins with a story of the Sicilian bull, the first victim of which was the artisan who made it. I think it’s clearly a way of reflecting on the scene that precedes it.
Suddenly, following this description, Virgil and Dante are interrupted by a voice that asks to talk with the one speaking Lombard, namely Dante. What an extraordinary little misreading of the language and rhetoric deployed in the previous canto, where Virgil goes out of his way to say Dante should not talk to these people, for they are Greeks, so Virgil should be the one to talk to them. But now, from the perspective of Guido da Montefeltro, they are no longer speaking some kind of Homeric, Attic Greek, but an Italian dialect. This shift demonstrates that language is not a question of the style you are using, for language always reveals some sort of inner essence. It shows you where you are in the ladder of values and the distance that you have from the world of truth, or the proximity that you may have to some self-complacency, as in the case of Ulysses. At any rate, the soul pleads, “If you are but now fallen into this blind world from that sweet land of Italy whence I bring all my guilt, tell me if the Romagnoles have peace or war; for I was of the mountains there between Urbino and the chain from which the Tiber springs.”2 As opposed to the lofty rhetoric of Ulysses, who speaks through the grandest generalities about the destination and the fate of human beings, here the language involves a deliberate diminution, a contraction of focus, as if it becomes local, the language of peace and war between neighboring towns. And then, as a way of adjusting the stylistic register, Virgil will tell Dante to converse with Guido, as he is Italian.
Once again, on the surface, the degrees of style and the laws of rhetorical decorum are always observed, and now the pilgrim will inform Guido da Montefeltro about the situation in Italy. Guido responds, “If I thought that my answer were to one who might ever return to the world, this flame would shake no more; but since from this depth none ever returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy.” This is a passage that you may recognize, since T. S. Eliot uses it as an epigraph, an epitaph actually, for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” What I want to emphasize here, though, at the level of style, is how Guido speaks: curses, hypothetical sentences, parenthetical remarks, not just a style that deliberately goes contrary to the smooth high style of Ulysses in the preceding canto. He says, “I was a man of arms, and then a corded friar, trusting, so girt, to make amends; and certainly my hope would have come full, but for the High Priest”—here is the curse against Boniface—“may ill befall him!—who set me back in my first sins: and how and wherefore I would have you hear from me.”3 We get another reference to birth, with which, as you know, characters start telling us their story. They tell of this birth, the first major event of their lives, and then of whatever happens next, whatever biographical account may be a descent from or a deviation from the promises that birth may have held.
Guido contends that his actions “were not those of the lion, but of the fox.” This is the Machiavellian language we mentioned before. We are moving into the secret halls of power, where big deals are struck, where plans for the destruction of cities are made, where the pope will ask secret advice from his counselor, who “knew all wiles and covert ways, and plied the art of them.”4 I have to remark that Canto 26, which opens with the image of Florentine thieves, also makes use of a language of concealment and covertness. The image harks back to the canto of the thieves (Inferno 25). The resonance suggests a subtle bond between thievery and speech: Ulysses the master rhetorician is possessed by language; more generally, the language for thievery (26.39–41) conveys the insight into the furtiveness of language. Also, Dante in that canto spoke of the sun through a periphrasis, to say that it was hidden, that sinners are concealed from its sight in the tongues of fire. The language in these cantos is that of manipulation, of political stratagems and machinations, and in Canto 26 it becomes highlighted and made visible to us.
Guido’s autobiography continues: “When I saw myself come to that part of my life when every man should lower the sails”—as if he were another mariner like Ulysses—“and coil up the ropes, that which before had pleased me grieved me then, and with repentance and confession I turned friar, and—woe is me!—it would have availed. The Prince of the new Pharisees, having war near the Lateran—and not with Saracens or with Jews, for his every enemy was Christian, and none had been to conquer Acre, nor been a merchant in the Soldan’s land—regarded neither the supreme office and holy orders in himself, nor, in me, that cord which used to make its wearers leaner.”5 Now we are truly moving within the halls of what we would call the Vatican today, but at the time it was known as the Church of St. John the Lateran, which was the residence of the bishop of Rome. And it was famous then, as it is famous now, for the frescoes about Constantine’s Donation to Pope Sylvester.
The whole issue of the temporal power of the papacy is glimpsed and underscored throughout this scene between Guido and Boniface. Boniface asks counsel of Guido, in an extraordinary caricature of the holy office, offering him an absolution before even the commission of the crime: “Let not your heart mistrust. I absolve you here and now, and do you teach me how I may cast Penestrino to the ground. I can lock and unlock”—the new Peter—“Heaven, as you know; for the keys are two, which my predecessor did not hold dear.”6 This is the famous story of Celestine V, who gave up the office of the papacy and who stands even in the historical recollections and scholarship of today as the embodiment of a figure who understood, maybe a little too dualistically, that drama always arises between power and holiness. The two forces, for Celestine, were really incommensurable, and it was impossible to create a dialectic between the two, so he gave up. Dante refers to him with a little bit of harshness for not being heroic enough to withstand the tide of corruption and deciding instead to retreat to a contemplative life.
Nor does Guido withstand the tides of corruption. He continues, “Thereon the weighty arguments pushed me to where silence seemed to me the worst, and I said”—and this is the advice he gives, spectacular in its simplicity—“‘Father, since you do wash me of that sin into which I now must fall, long promise with short keeping will make you triumph on the High Seat.’”7 Guido finds the request irresistible, especially because he has been guaranteed absolution, so he can do whatever he wants. So, there is not just a coercion of Guido, but also a kind of pleasure that he feels in committing the evil he will perpetrate. What does his advice mean? Make promises and plan not to keep them. Go and tell the people in Penestrino (Palestrina) that you are going to respect them, that you are going to make them rich, whatever you want to tell them. Then, of course, as soon as they open the gates of the city, don’t keep any of these promises.
This is a restatement of a famous text about rhetoric that in the Middle Ages was thought to be Cicero’s but is not really his. This rhetorical treatise, like many other treatises, is based on one premise, namely that rhetoric is the art of making the city and the citizens agree in order to keep the city going. In a properly governed city, promises are made and are always observed. It’s a way of explaining rhetoric in moral terms. What Dante is saying here is that those dictates, those kinds of propositions, can easily be turned around, and they are being turned around in practice.
Finally, we find out what happened to Guido when his life came to an end. St. Francis arrived, and there was a little rivalry between Francis and the devil, fighting over the soul of Guido. Francis loses, and Guido is, of course, placed here in Hell. I mention these details because you will see that Dante picks up a genre of medieval disputation later in Purgatorio. There is a canto where Dante meets Guido’s son, because in this poem fathers and sons do not necessarily belong in the same moral space, and sons do not necessarily follow in the footsteps of their fathers. You will see how Dante echoes this whole scene, which is a prefiguration of things to come.
Before we arrive in Purgatory, however, we must enter the most tragic section of the Divine Comedy, from Canto 28 to the end of Inferno. These cantos will tell us what Dante thinks of tragedy and how he envisions the tragic. After all, he calls the poem a comedy, so what is the role and the place of the tragic in a comedy? Is there room for the tragic vision here? The point, as we will repeatedly see in the following cantos, is that the tragic is never the final vision. The essence of tragedy for Dante is always linguistic; it has to do with issues of the inherent ambiguities of language, the impossibility of decoding and deciphering what is being said by one particular statement as opposed to another.
It is certainly language and tragedy that we find in Canto 28, where Dante encounters the figure of Bertran de Born, a Provençal poet whom Dante actually greatly admired. In Dante’s treatise on language, the De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular), Dante singles out Bertran de Born as a great poet because he knew how to write the most difficult genre. He knew how to rhyme and how to write war poems. This is really the most difficult type of poetry, aesthetically very difficult to sustain, and Bertran de Born was a genius at it. But in Canto 28 Dante places him among the so-called makers of discord in Hell.
This difficult canto begins with a reflection on war and a reference to ineffability: “Who could ever fully tell, even in unfettered words, though many times narrating, the blood and the wounds that I now saw? Surely every tongue would fail, because of our speech and our memory which have little capacity to comprehend so much. Were all the people assembled again who once in the fateful land of Apulia bewailed their blood shed by the Trojans, and those of the long war that made so vast a spoil of rings—as Livy writes, who does not err—together with those who felt the pain of blows in the struggle with Robert Guiscard, and those others whose bones are still heaped up at Ceperano, where every Apulian was false, and there by Tagliacozzo where old Alardo conquered without arms; and one should show his limb pierced through, and another his cut off, it would be nothing to equal the foul fashion of the ninth pouch.”8 What sort of metaphor is this? We could call it the adoption of the so-called ineffability topos. It’s a poetic device, where the poet admits the difficulty, or even impossibility, of describing a particular reality. This ineffability involves the sublime; it usually has to do with, let’s say, the vision of God. Whoever has seen God, whatever mystic may have had a vision, they always fall into the contingency of language that cannot quite grasp the sublime quality of what they have seen. Dante now deploys the same device for the world of evil. It is as if Hell now has its own sublime quality that is a parallel and counter to that which Dante will witness in the divine spectacles at the top of Paradise. Even in Hell, language cannot quite be adequate to the reality it wants to represent. Dante wants to describe the whole of Hell, but all the dismemberments of bodies from old wars cannot come close to what he has seen in this realm. The questions that arise in the face of this ineffability topos will only become further complicated and nuanced in the unfolding of the canto.
In the midst of all this language of the ineffable, however, there is also a little detail, a reference to Livy, a Roman historian. His voice and his authority are considered unquestionable. Livy cannot make mistakes. Livy and his fellow historians are unerring in their accounts of what they have seen, but somehow the poetic voice is not the same thing as the historian’s voice. You can see this tension in the first few lines of the canto. But then it comes to a close with a different form of poetic reflection; Dante is describing something altogether different in the meeting of Bertran de Born. He says, “I stayed to view the troop, and saw a thing that I should be afraid even to relate without more proof.”9 We encounter the threat of the ineffable once again. The poet feels the difficulty of representing the extraordinary quality of what he has seen.
But he goes on: “Conscience, the good companion that emboldens a man under the hauberk of feeling itself pure, reassures me. Truly I saw, and seem to see it still, a trunk without the head going along as were the others of that dismal herd, and it was holding the severed head by the hair, swinging it in hand like a lantern, and it was gazing at us and saying: ‘O me!’ Of itself it was making a lamp for itself, and they were two in one and one in two.”10 He uses strangely mathematical language to describe the divided body of Bertran de Born, a maker of discord who is being punished by having his own body divided from itself. Two is one, and one is two, a mathematical language that implies the impossibility of equality here. This is exactly the language that he used for the metaphor earlier in the canto, with the description of all the battlefields and all the dead people, limbs accumulated one on top of the other. Dante’s using once more an expression of quantity to make us question whether there is some rationale in the disparity of one being two. He claims not to have the answers. He claims that only God knows.
And then Bertran finally speaks: “See now my grievous penalty, you who, breathing, go to view the dead: see if any other is so great as this!” He is the first character in Hell who complains that the punishment inflicted on him is beyond all justice, that there’s no proportionality between the punishment he receives and the crime he has committed. Bertran proceeds to explain: “And that you may carry news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, he who to the young king gave the evil counsels. I made the father and the son rebel against each other. Ahithophel did not more with Absalom and David by his wicked instigations. Because I parted persons thus united, I carry my brain parted from its source, alas! which is in this trunk. Thus is the retribution observed in me.”11 Why should Bertran de Born bear a visible mark of division on his body? To his mind it is too “grievous.”
The idea of a punishment in Hell is that a punishment is the prolongation of what one has chosen to do in this life. You did not believe in the mortality of the soul, so you are always going to be dead after death. You choose to create division, and you are divided. This is the justice that regulates this world of Hell. The word Dante uses for this retribution is contrapasso, which means “a counterpart” or “countersuffering.” There is a fair correspondence between what you have done and what you are going to suffer. In a sense it’s close to but not quite equivalent to the idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
The whole point of this canto is that Bertran de Born divides father and son and thereby violates a fundamental principle of political theology. A great medieval historian, Ernst Kantorowicz, wrote a book called The King’s Two Bodies that asks what a king really is. According to Kantorowicz, a king always has two bodies, the visible body that we all have and a mystical body of royalty. They used to say in the Middle Ages, and perhaps we still do, “The king is dead, long live the king.” The king never dies precisely because he has two bodies. He may die as an incumbent, but the office of the king always remains. So, by dividing the father from the son, Dante has Bertran de Born breaching the unity of the mystical body of the king. The two, father and son, are really one.
The other metaphor that is behind all this, which we already traced in the canto of Ciacco, is the idea of the body politic, the idea that the city is constructed like a body, with an organic set of correspondences. There’s no difference between patricians and plebeians; they’re all part of one organic unified whole. That is true for the body politic, from a Roman point of view, but it’s also the principle of the mystical body of the Church. Saint Paul, in the Letter to the Ephesians, refers to the church as the mystical body of Christ, and the state becomes a secular counter to and extension of this mystical body. We are all parts, some of us thumbs, others toes or hair, in this body of Christ. In Canto 28 you have a political focus on Rome, but also a reference to Muhammad. There are a lot of people who find it absolutely odious that Muhammad should be placed in this area of Hell, and the only argument that one can make on behalf of Dante is that Muhammad was actually a member of the Church who created a schism, which is different from heresy. The heretics are those who do not believe in certain tenets of the doctrine. The schismatics are those who want to divide it. So, whether of church or state, division is at the heart of all the images in Canto 28 of Inferno.
Where does Dante’s idea of justice come from? How does it work? Dante is aware of the great commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics by Thomas Aquinas. He keeps Aristotle and Aquinas and their discussion of justice in mind as he writes. Dante is clearly a poet of justice. He truly believes the whole point of his quest is to establish some degree of justice in his soul, to try to find justice in the city, and to probe the possibility of some universal justice, as opposed to Lucretian ideas of anarchy and chaos in the cosmos. In that way, there can be some continuity between the outer and the inner worlds. Thus, it makes sense that he would consider the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas on these matters.
What is their idea of justice? They usually discuss two types of justice: retributive justice, which is the one that we have in Hell, but also distributive justice. Is Dante aware of both? Yes, for it’s impossible not to think of the representation of the Wheel of Fortune in Inferno 7 as anything other than a case of distributive justice, which must follow an arithmetical model. That is to say, if someone has five of something and you want to establish justice, you take some away from the one who has five and give them to another one who has zero and thereby create a kind of equality. Equality is always the aim of distributive justice. In retributive justice, things are a little bit different because—and Aquinas reflects on this, though it is not at all a concern of Aristotle—if I say “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” am I really establishing justice, or am I just doubling the offense that has been perpetrated? If someone plucks out one of my eyes, and I do the same to whoever has damaged me, am I restored to my original state? No, that doesn’t happen. So how can we even consider retributive justice? Aquinas, and here also Aristotle, admits that it’s always very difficult to find exact counterparts between crime and punishment. If a clown were to slap the king, it’s not enough for the king to slap the clown back, because there is also the violation of the office involved, which can never quite be restored simply by having the king slap the clown back. Both Aristotle and Aquinas say that’s why money was invented, so that one can repay wrongs in other forms, with other punishments.
How does Dante reinterpret their stances on justice? First, it is crucial that Dante thinks about this fundamental problem of justice, which is the aim of the ethical structure of the poem (in Inferno, in particular), through the poet, through Bertran de Born. It’s Dante himself who has just been announcing the impossibility of finding through language the right metaphor, the exact correspondence between a reality and its representation. What Dante is doing is telling us how arbitrary his own judgments in Hell are. He acknowledges that the way in which punishments and crimes are related is never quite reliable.
To make this clearer, I turn to the very beginning of Canto 29 because it works as a retrospective gloss on the problems that I’ve been trying to explain in Canto 28. Dante will enter the world of the falsifiers, those who are engaged in diabolical, unnatural mutations, personifications, and impersonations, but before he gets there, he has to get past the last canto. The narrative economy of each canto being what it is, Dante usually comes to the end of a canto and closes off with that particular sin or that particular sinner. This is an exception. Dante enters Canto 29, but the situation he has been describing in Canto 28 keeps reappearing. It worries him somehow.
Dante cannot stop looking back at what he has seen: “The many people and the strange wounds had made my eyes so drunken that they longed to stay and weep; but Virgil said to me, ‘What are you still gazing at? Why does your sight still rest down there among the dismal maimed shades? You have not done so at the other pits. Consider, if you think to count them, that the valley circles two and twenty miles; and already the moon is beneath our feet. The time is now short that is allowed us, and there is more to see then you see here.’”12 Once again we get numbers, arithmetical language. Why this particular measure? One great reader of Inferno, who actually began his career as a commentator of Dante, was Galileo, the scientist. He tried to find out what the actual size of the whole of Inferno was, just by using this little detail that Dante gives, the radius, and he comes up with the idea that Hell is as large as the city of Florence, which may be a mathematical proof or just his own joke. I’ll leave it to you to decide.
The real reason for the constant backward glancing comes later. Dante says, “Within that hollow where I was but now holding my eyes so fixedly, I believe a spirit of my own blood laments the guilt that costs so dear down there.” Dante knows that a relative of his is in this den of Hell. But Virgil tells him to move on, that he saw the soul “point at you and fiercely threaten with his finger, and I heard them call him Geri del Bello,” but Dante was too distracted to see him. Dante responds, “The violent death which is not yet avenged for him by any who is partner in the shame made him indignant; wherefore, as I judge, he went on without speaking to me, and thereby has he made me pity him the more.”13
It’s fairly clear: Dante meets a kinsman of his who has been killed, and that death is unavenged and is going to stay unavenged. Dante is overwhelmed by pity and compassion, but he does not promise that he’s going to go out and take revenge against the killers of his relative, Geri del Bello. He is redefining the notion that justice is a doubling of the crime. The idea of justice as revenge, as a way of establishing a precise similarity, is what Dante is giving up here completely. This is the beginning of Dante’s worrying about the nature of God’s justice, worrying about the arbitrariness of his own claim of authority in describing these very issues. He commences a tone of uncertainty, of doubt.
But that’s not the only facet of Dante’s text. As we know, he’s also capable of taking on a prophetic voice, so that he appears as the one who has, by a singular grace of God, been chosen to explore the world in the beyond, which is captured and understood in the most physical and direct way. So, these two voices are simultaneously present, and I think that is really the poem’s primary source of tension. Dante is both a prophet and a poet aware of the arbitrariness of his own construction. He’s a poet-theologian and a poet-allegorist. In many ways, this duality makes the poem the actual experience of a pilgrimage. That is to say, the judgment you give of the realities that Dante is representing can reveal yourself to you: who you are and where you are. It’s a way of shifting away from a journey guided by the voice of a master, who can tell you how things are, to an interpretative journey in which you decipher the text and constantly involve yourself in the story. This story, which is Dante’s journey, can turn out to be your journey, too. Dante wants you to tell your own story. His conception of justice and his questioning of that same conception make you his equal. Justice, indeed.