9 Inferno 30–34
CHAPTER 9
Inferno 30–34
As we conclude with Inferno, I’ll be talking about Dante’s tragic mode at the bottom of Hell. This tragic representation is a difficult enterprise, considering that this is a comedy. But that difficulty is somewhat mitigated because the tragic here is not an ending, not a final vision, but part of a larger discourse that Dante will develop, which is ultimately comical. He really has a comical vision, even of the divinity and certainly of the cosmos. There is a redemptive, happy, harmonious sense to the whole.
Another difficulty is that within the Christian vision that shapes Dante’s poem, it’s very difficult to locate the tragic: there is no such a thing as a Christian tragedy. And yet this issue may be just as nuanced, for within that Christian vision, we are always told that the only thing we know of God’s presence in history is the Crucifixion. There’s the story of the dying God, the story of the suffering of the divinity itself. It is not, once again, a final vision. So, there’s a theological problem that Dante has to confront and there is also a larger aesthetic problem.
The ultimate resolution to the tragedy problem involves language and Dante’s insight into what the tragic may be. To understand how this works, though, we have to look outside the text a little bit. Dante goes into exile in 1302. At that time, he had written only one book, the Vita nuova. It’s a lyrical poem, self-enclosed: it’s about the sense that the self is absolute, that love is an absolute itself and one cannot love “relatively.” It does not allow for the intrusion of anything within its own orbit and perimeter, and Dante finishes it off with a vision, realizing that he has to do other things in order to continue writing.
He doesn’t write much at that point, perhaps some songs. Instead he is involved in political life, in the footsteps of his teacher Brunetto Latini, and hoping that his life will really be very different from Latini’s. Ironically, it’s not better because it’s actually even more tragic than Brunetto Latini’s life; at least Brunetto Latini was politically involved in the history of Florence. He experienced exile, but he returned to Florence and could go on teaching Dante. He wrote encyclopedic texts, like the Trésor and autobiographical allegories about his life.
But when Dante goes into exile, the first thing that he writes is a treatise on language in Latin called De vulgari eloquentia. It’s a text written from the perspective of exile, very much like the Divine Comedy because Dante will never go back to Florence. The reasons why he writes this kind of text are very unclear, in part because he never finished it. He wrote two books of it, but we don’t even know how many he had conceived of writing. Let me give you a little bit of a summary of the text, and then you will see how it will reappear in the final cantos of Inferno, where in effect Dante rewrites it and gives a sense of the wholeness of this text and of why it could never have been finished. He starts very much in the manner of medieval treatises, from a metaphysical standpoint, from on high: What does human language do? Is language something human? And the answer that he gives is both yes and no. It is human because we are the only ones who can speak, though he makes room for certain animals that occasionally speak in a human voice and can be understood by human beings. He’s not talking about parrots; he’s talking about miraculous biblical scenes. He also notes that the angels do not speak, or at least they don’t use the language we do. They communicate with the other angels or with God intuitively. So, there is a reality that escapes the language that we use. Thus, the language is only human, and yet it’s not human at all because it’s actually a gift from God. This is the metaphysical premise of Dante’s treatise.
Who were the first people to speak? He says they were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. That’s biblical enough, it’s clear. What was the first language that they spoke? Hebrew. Dante asserts that Hebrew was the primal language, and he will even go so far as to say that Hebrew was never extinguished by the fall of mankind, for instance, or by the building of the Tower of Babel. Furthermore, not only does this primal language survive the story of Nimrod, it has never really disappeared. Dante takes, and I’m only qualifying the statement, what we would call an ahistorical viewpoint.
It’s almost as if Hebrew does not belong to the flow of history and the reality of the mutations to which all sublunary things are prone. I stress this fact because I’m going to return to it when I discuss Paradiso 26, where Dante meets Adam and blatantly changes his mind, as though something intervenes between the writing of the De vulgari eloquentia and the encounter with Adam, when Adam says that the Hebrew language he spoke completely vanished as soon as he ate the forbidden fruit. In other words, in Paradiso, Dante is ready to historicize the question of human language, unlike in the earlier treatise.
In book 2 of De vulgari eloquentia, Dante takes the treatise in an entirely different direction. He stops talking about the grammar of language, how language is ordered. Instead he talks about rhetoric and almost becomes a theorist of poetry and style. He explains, for instance, his three styles of writing poetry, which you may recall: the high style, the middle style, and the low style, or the style of tragedy, the style of elegy, and the style of comedy. He suggests that style should never be thought of as pure ornamentation. Dante implies that style is rather a mode of knowledge. He says there’s a high style for high reality, a middle style for the middle reality of the mixed world, and so on; but what he really means is that if you want to understand those who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy—the fisherman, for instance, or clowns—you cannot treat them with the same decorum with which you treat the king. Kings speak differently, using the sublime kind of language. The style is tied to a specific exchange of ideas.
Dante also describes his theory of the canzone, which is the greatest poetic lyrical form and a way of bringing out the music of language. He is responding to a poetic revolution that had taken place in Sicily, at the court of Frederick II. Prior to that time, the Provençal poets would compose poetry and accompany their poems with the lute, the famous Provençal poets’ instrument. The Sicilians, instead, divided those two modes. It was possible to write poetry in and of itself, without the accompaniment of music, in the persuasion that the art of poetry was the effort to bring out the inherent harmony of the language.
Dante discusses themes, too. What are the great themes of poetry? I alluded to that when I explained the background of Bertran de Born because Dante says Bertran de Born was the greatest writer of war poetry. Other important themes include the rectitude of the will, which is to say a sense of the ethical, and, of course, love. Then he ends with a great definition of poetry as the art that combines music and rhetoric. And that’s all we have of the De vulgari eloquentia.
To return to the Comedy, then, since I’ll be talking mainly about tragedy and language, I want to emphasize how much Dante retrieves of the De vulgari eloquentia here. There’s a deliberate pattern of references, a retrospective view of his past, of some failure of his. He asks himself what was so impossible to accomplish about a particular task that he realized it was impossible to accomplish. These assorted connections between Dante’s treatise on the vulgar tongue and the cantos of lower Hell will only become clearer as we proceed.
Where are we, by the way? These are the cantos of the lower Hell, in the general area of fraud. In Canto 11, where the ethical map of Inferno is provided, Dante distinguishes between the sins of fraud and the sins of treachery. Treachery is a subdivision of fraud because fraud can be found in rhetoricians, falsifiers in general, flatterers, and so on, but treachery is worse than that, and that’s where we are now, in the realm of treachery. The treacherous sinners are those who engage in a deceptive violation of the trust others place in them, which is not necessarily true for all fraudulent people. Someone can perpetrate a fraud against you without knowing you or having anything to do with you. The question of treachery instead implies what Dante calls the erasure of the bonds of love because it involves one’s friends, family, country, or hosts. Those who sin in this fashion annihilate all possible ties within a community, between the self and others.
As such, treachery is the language of nothing. It’s a way of saying that nothing matters, that there’s no such thing as a true attachment to another person. It’s a severing of the self in the domain of pure arbitrariness. I may be above everything or perhaps below everything, but I certainly have no attachments to anything around me. And without attachments, without exchanges, there is no language at all.
So, Dante enters Canto 30, and he’s talking about two experiences that define the tragic mode. First, he speaks of “the time when Juno was wroth for Semele,” a mistress of Jupiter.1 He’s talking about the tragic text The Thebaid, in which the gods themselves within the classical world seem to have been wounded by exactly the same mad passions that drive human beings to destruction. This is Juno, who cannot die but who will suffer from the same passions as Semele or any other mortal. There’s a language here of the tragic and the mythopoeic, with a classical theology being tied to it. Then we get the story of the Trojans again and, even farther along, the Ovidian story of Myrrha, a young woman who is inflamed by incestuous passion and impersonates somebody else in order to be able to sleep with her father. This is all part of the “tragic perimeter” of these cantos.
The defining tragic story here, however, is that of Sinon, who is an impersonator and a falsifier who convinced the Trojans to bring the infamous Horse within their walls. You don’t really have to know a lot of Italian to know that Dante with this name is punning on sì-non, “yes-no.” This man is the very representation of the falsification of personality. The tragic is thus tied to a sense of self-contradictory identity, people who do not know exactly who they are or whether they may take on another figuration or the reality of somebody else. This idea of ambiguity is already betrayed by Sinon’s name, which truly serves to emphasize the connection between madness and tragedy.
Further echoes of the De vulgari eloquentia appear in Canto 31, where Dante meets the giants. The language Dante encounters here is nothing more than an amalgam of strange sounds. Every commentator will tell you that Dante’s using gibberish here. Nobody knows what it means. These are the words: “‘Raphèl maì amecche zabì almi,’ the fierce mouth, to which sweeter psalms were not fitting, began to cry. And my leader towards him, ‘Stupid soul, keep to your horn and with that vent yourself when rage or other passion takes you. Search at your neck and you will find the belt that holds it tied, O soul confused: see how it lies across your great chest.’ Then he said to me, ‘He is his own accuser: this is Nimrod, through whose ill thought one sole language is not used in the world. Let us leave him alone and not speak in vain, for every language is to him as his is to others, which is known to none.’”2 And then Dante goes on to meet a number of other giants.
But why does Dante mention giants at all, either here or in the De vulgari eloquentia? There is a way in which the De vulgari eloquentia is written from the viewpoint of Nimrod because what Dante wants to do is something exactly like what Nimrod attempted. Nimrod wanted to combine all the possible languages, and the effort resulted in Babel and the confusion of tongues. He wanted to build a tower whereby human beings could reach heaven, the other side of the incarnational Word that joins heaven and earth. One is a descent, the other the pride of ascent. Nimrod wants to occupy a superior perspective; that’s what his being a giant means. He aims at a perspective from which he can see the whole of the world around him and then transcend the world of contingency. The theological response is that you can’t transcend by means of pride. You do it with humility. There is an undeniable connection between pride and perspective.
The De vulgari eloquentia is also a text of perspectivism. Perspectivism simply means the presence of various viewpoints, all of which one somehow manages to control or to know. In Dante, this is the way that the entire Inferno is written, for as we know, Dante uses all possible styles. He uses the courtly language and rhetoric of Francesca, the legal language of Pier della Vigna, the language of the schools, of Brunetto Latini, and the language of the prophets. He uses all perspectives. The whole of the Divine Comedy is such a perspectivist story.
Some might argue that I am using a language that doesn’t belong to Dante’s own culture. That would be a very legitimate objection because when we talk about perspective, we usually think about the revolutionary language of fifteenth-century art. Actually, there was a certain knowledge of perspective earlier than Dante, but even if they did not have a theory of perspective, they certainly had the practice of perspective. Perspective is usually tied to art, and we usually link it with a figure like Alberti, a fifteenth-century theorist of art who wrote a treatise called De pictura (On Painting) in 1436, in which he theorizes about what other painters were doing. What is perspective for Alberti? It simply means the discovery that the mode of representation practiced in the Middle Ages really lacked depth, and the belief that the world of appearance and the world of reality coincided in some way. Perspective means that the world that I see shifts and changes according to the position that I, the spectator, occupy in the field of vision. It also implies the possibility of manipulating the space that we witness as a particular space. We can change it according to distance, according to the laws of the eyes, the position of the eye, according to the hour of the day. These Renaissance men admitted that they were only going to be able to give a sense of the appearance of things, not of their reality. That’s the revolutionary thought behind perspective.
Dante uses this perspectivism—which, I repeat, means a way of assembling various points of view—because he believes that he really has collected a variety of vantage points. He’s in exile in 1302, he has been traveling all over Italy, and he thinks that he can forge the vernacular language of Italy. In the De vulgari eloquentia, for instance, he writes about the proximity of the Romance languages. He says that the way in which French, Provençal, Spanish, and Italian are connected involves a single particle: the way we use a single sound, like sì, to make an affirmative statement. This is how the families of languages have been knit together.
Dante is also continuing to respond to the story of Nimrod. The line that everybody thinks doesn’t mean anything—“Raphèl maì amecche zabì almi”—actually does have meaning if you look at it carefully. It is an imperfect anagram of a Hebrew line from the Psalms, and a reference to “sweeter Psalms” in the following lines implies that Dante is giving up his source. The line in the psalm, Psalm 22, is “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.” These are the words that Jesus utters on the cross, “Father, Father why have you forsaken me?”
So Dante is using Hebrew because, as he said in the De vulgari eloquentia, Hebrew is an inverted, twisted language as used by of the builder of the Tower of Babel, a language we are not supposed to understand, and yet, he indicates here, behind all the confusion there is still something intelligible. Specifically, it’s the tragic moment of the Crucifixion, where the Son feels that he is completely abandoned and that the whole divine order is no longer responsive to him. It is a moment of theological despair. As a result, Dante is, I think, telling Nimrod obliquely that had he not been so stupid he would have known that by using this kind of language, he could have reached heaven.
Then there is a case of perspectival confusion. Dante is far away, and he mistakes the giants for towers, a reference to a famous town that still exists. If you go on the highway near Siena, you can still see Monteriggioni’s towers, which is what Dante sees when he thinks that the giants are towers, because he lacks the correct perspective. In perspective, you see according to the distance between you and the object. This is the basic mathematics, the geometry that rules and sustains the theory of perspective.
But even after establishing his perspective, Dante has other problems to consider. At the outset of Canto 32, he writes, “If I had harsh and grating rhymes, as would befit the dismal hole on which all the other rocks converge and weigh, I would press out more fully the juice of my conception; but since I do not have them, it is not without fear that I bring myself to speak; for to describe the bottom of the whole universe is not an enterprise to be taken up in sport, nor for a tongue that cries mamma and daddy. But may those ladies aid my verse who aided Amphion to wall in Thebes, so that the telling may not be diverse from the fact. O you beyond all others misbegotten crowd who are in the place whereof it is hard to speak, better had you here been sheep or goats!”3 Here Dante rehashes what I have called the ineffability topos. You may recall from the beginning of Canto 28 that Dante talked about a sort of parodic, inverted form of the sublime because the horror of what he was witnessing was such that he could not find the words and metaphors to describe it.
This is a variant of that conceit, but here Dante is looking for a style rather than specific words. There must be a unique style for this particular reality, and he starts by saying that he cannot go on using the language of familiarity. He cannot use words like babbo and mamma, the language of the child, because he is encountering the treacherous souls who have betrayed their families, so there is a tragic resonance surrounding that little motif of his. This scene cannot be told in the familiar language of the everyday because these sinners have betrayed all of that. It’s possible that it cannot be told at all, because in this area of treachery and fraud, words and deeds do not necessarily belong together. So he appeals to Amphion and the building of Thebes. Once again, we find the tragic story of Thebes, and Dante is also indirectly alluding to something that he himself has written. Amphion was a poet who moved stones with the power of his language, a version of Orpheus who placated and tamed the savage beasts within our hearts, and Dante wants to emulate him. The fact is that Dante had written some “stony rhymes,” rime petrose, and with the retrospective view established here, he realizes that the only style adequate to this infernal reality is the style of the poems he wrote during a time in his life when he was crazy for a certain donna petra, or “stone lady,” who would change him into stone. Dante needs to return to and restore this stony style to depict justly the frozen iciness of Hell. There is no burning fire in lowest Hell, only cold, hard ice.
That ice is on full display at the end of the canto: “We had already left him when I saw two frozen in one hole so close that the head of the one was a hood for the other; and as bread is devoured for hunger, so the upper one set his teeth upon the other where the brain joins with the nape. Not otherwise did Tydeus gnaw the temples of Menalippus for rage than this one was doing to the skull and the other parts. ‘O you who by so bestial a sign show hatred against him whom you devour, tell me the wherefore,’ I said, ‘on this condition, that if you with reason complain of him, I, knowing who you are and his offense, may yet requite you in the world above, if that with which I speak does not dry up.”4 To me, this is the most unbearable scene of Inferno, the cannibalization, one human being eating another. This is a truly tragic representation. And we are approaching a moment where silence envelops all possible representations. It’s something that is not altogether capable of being stated. Dante places us at the boundary between speech and what cannot be said.
This liminal exchange follows at the outset of Canto 33: “From his savage repast the sinner raised his mouth, wiping it on the hair of the head he had spoiled behind, then began, ‘You will have me renew desperate grief, which even to think of wrings my heart before I speak of it. But if my words are to be seed that may bear fruit of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw, you shall see me speak and weep together.’” These lines are clearly an echo of Inferno 5 and Francesca’s language there. But the language of love has become a language of hatred because Ugolino can’t distinguish them, and that’s part of his tragedy. Dante is echoing Francesca and her romance with Paolo in order to explain the hatred and blindness of Ugolino, who lacks any perspective on himself and on the world around him. He then continues, “I do not know who you are, nor by what means you have come down here; but truly you do seem to me Florentine when I hear you.”5 The focus is now on language, which is a part of the process of getting to know and understanding the Other. This soul may know the inflections of the Florentine dialect, but there’s still no possible communication between the two of them.
If we were to name the rhetorical genre that Dante deploys here, it is what critics call a dramatic monologue. Ugolino speaks without pause as he tells us the story of his life the way he sees it, and therefore he does not expect, nor does he get, any response from his apparent interlocutor. In this way Ugolino can fictionalize himself, and furthermore, he believes that his perspective, the way he fictionalizes himself, will become reality. Dante entices Ugolino to do exactly that because he knows that such behavior is unavoidable in Hell, where the dead really believe that they can just tell their stories and others are going to believe them. They deceive themselves into thinking that the reality they construct will be everybody’s accepted reality. This is one of the issues that we are going to confront repeatedly in this canto.
So, Ugolino’s biographical moment begins. He says, “You have to know that I was Count Ugolino, and this is the Archbishop Ruggieri.”6 What an extraordinary line. It contains what we call attributes, or titles, and a crucial shift in verbal tense. Ugolino takes control of time by switching from the past tense to the present: “I was Count Ugolino, and this is the Archbishop.” This rhetorical move implies that the object of his hatred is unalterable and timeless, while Ugolino himself has a history. And yet Ruggieri, that object of his hatred, is exactly what goes on defining him in the present. There is the secular and the sacred, if you wish: Guelphs and Ghibel-lines, with the idea that Ugolino had really betrayed his side. A Guelph became a Ghibelline, and a Ghibelline became a Guelph. In a certain sense, then, he represents a recapitulation of all the satanic sins we have seen so far in Inferno.
Ugolino continues his autobiographical tale, explaining that he was put as a prisoner in a tower, which we are meant to understand as a reference to other towers, like the Tower of Babel. Ugolino’s particular tower was called the “tower of hunger,” for reasons that will soon become evident. There he has a dream, and the mistake he makes is to think that the dream is going to come true. And the dream is this: “This man appeared to me as master and lord, chasing the wolf and the whelps”—the word Guelph comes from “wolf,” Guelph and Ghibellines—“upon the mountain for which the Pisans cannot see Lucca.” He has this vision of destruction, the mutual destructions of the wolf and the hunter. And he awakens to his crying children, awaiting food that will never come, for the tower is being boarded up. He responds stoically to their doom: “I did not weep, so was I turned to stone within me. They wept.”7 However, shortly thereafter, we note a movement here between the horror of this tragedy and the tenderness, the pathos of it, primarily because Dante uses the diminutive Anselmuccio to refer to Ugolino’s small child Anselmo.
But then the horror strikes again: “My poor little Anselm said, ‘You look so, father, what ails you?’ I shed no tear for that, nor did I answer all that day, nor the night after, until the next sun came forth on the world. As soon as a little ray made its way into the woeful prison, and I discerned by their four faces the aspect of my own, I bit both my hands for grief. And they, thinking I did it for hunger, suddenly rose up and said, ‘Father, it will be far less painful to us if you eat of us; you did clothe us with this wretched flesh, and do you strip us of it!’ Then I calmed myself in order not to make them sadder. That day and the next we stayed all silent: Ah, hard earth! why did you not open? When we had come to the fourth day Gaddo threw himself outstretched at my feet, saying: ‘Father, why do you not help me?’”8 I don’t think it’s farfetched to hear behind this child’s question an echo of the prayer of Jesus on the cross that we discussed a few cantos back. There is a way in which the violence inflicted on Ugolino’s children seems to repeat or reenact the great drama of the Christian sacrifice.
Inevitably, one by one, the children perish before Ugolino’s eyes, and “I took me, already blind, to groping over each, and for two days called them after they were dead. Then fasting did more than grief had done.”9 Ugolino sees no more and thus lacks perspective. He no longer has any distance from anything, nor can he tell things apart. As a result, that final sentence—“fasting did more than grief had done”—is an extraordinarily ambiguous line, for we really cannot know with certainty what he is saying. According to Rodin, for instance, who will base a sculpture on this tale, the story is that Ugolino ate his own children. He yielded to his appetite, the urging of hunger, rather than to grief. But he may be saying something else. Maybe he’s saying that fasting had more power than grief, that he died of hunger rather than from his grief. We don’t know, and I think that part of the tragic mode that Dante is trying to convey to us is that we are left without a definitive answer. According to Borges’s reading of this canto, Dante wants to leave us in suspension, to believe that it’s possible that Ugolino may have eaten the children, but maybe he didn’t. I think that Borges is right, that we are not supposed to be able to tell, that the ambiguity of that line is never going to be quite resolved. It’s going to remain forever unknowable.
Dante expresses the tragic nature of these events in an apostrophe against Pisa. “Ah, Pisa,” he writes, “shame of the peoples of the fair land where the sì is heard, since your neighbors are slow to punish you, let Capraia and Gorgona shift, and make a hedge for Arno at its mouth, so that it drown every soul in you!”10 The sì offers another little echo of the De vulgari eloquentia. And yet, in the moment when Dante is dealing with treachery, the most nihilistic of all sins because it means that you declare null and void any bond that you may have with others, he uses an affirmative word. To me, the irony is glaring here, since he suggests a possible affirmation, when in fact there is no hope for one. What follows is really the kind of language that Ugolino had used before the tragedy, when he begged the earth for an earthquake, so that the earth might open up and swallow all of them. Dante appropriates this language out of horror, the terrifying realization that he is himself enmeshed in the same sort of tragic spectacle. He suddenly sees that the whole realm of Hell could actually be just an apocalyptic ending to the world he knows.
But the most tragic event of all is spelled out shortly thereafter: “For if Count Ugolino had the name of betraying you of your castles, you ought not to have put his children to such torture.” In other words, this has been the crucifixion of innocence. “Their youthful years, you modern Thebes”—Pisa is the new Thebes, the scene of a new Thebaid that we have been witnessing just now—“made Uguccione and Brigata innocent, and the other two that my song names above.”11 The tragic nature of this occurrence is visible in the very presence of the Christological language in this canto, because the sacrifice of the cross means one thing and one thing only: now that all violence is finished and we have found a voluntary scapegoat, who says that we’re all innocent and that he is the guilty one, we are redeemed, we are made innocent once again. The story here, reenacting and echoing the story of the cross, seems instead to announce the futility of that sacrifice. Retrospectively, Dante suggests that that sacrifice was just another one of the many senseless acts of violence that punctuate human history. Of course, this is not the end of the poem, but it’s certainly the most desperate part of the poem, because Dante comes to believe that the law of history and the law of the world are truly tragic. And there is something absolute about them, something not quite escapable.
And so it is with true tragedy that Dante enters the final canto of the first part of his Comedy. Canto 34 is where Dante meets Satan. The encounter with Satan is, first of all, the source of the incredible coherence to the whole movement of Inferno, because, as you may recall, the story of Inferno began with the neutral angels, those who had been sitting, watching the spectacle of the disruption of the cosmos at the time of the Lucifer’s rebellion against God. And now it ends with Lucifer, so it really has an angelic, cosmic proportionality to it.
The other thing that I have to say about Dante’s depiction of Satan is that those of you who are readers of Milton and know what a brilliant rhetorician Lucifer is in Paradise Lost will be disappointed by Satan’s silence here. In fact, T. S. Eliot, who wrote a commentary on this issue, recommends that first-time readers of the Divine Comedy skip Canto 34 because it’s so strange that Lucifer doesn’t speak. The problem, though, is that Eliot had probably never read the De vulgari eloquentia. Satan is not supposed to speak, according to Dante’s treatise on language, because he’s one of the angels (who do not use human language), and, more importantly, because he represents evil defeated.
From this point of view, Canto 34 stands in radical, sharp contrast to Canto 33. In Canto 33 we saw the sovereignty of evil. It was as if it were allengulfing, hovering over all of reality. Here, we witness exactly the opposite, how Satan becomes a reified, dumb object and actually an instrument for the pilgrim’s ascent. It’s only by going along the body of Lucifer that the pilgrim can proceed. It’s the only means by which he and Virgil can turn themselves upside down and finally reemerge into the light. It’s the only way out of Hell.
The rest of the canto deals with a cosmological argument about the origin of Purgatory. Dante offers up an astonishing poetic myth. The myth that he invents is that when Lucifer fell at the time of the grand angelic disruption, the first rebellion against the Deity, the earth retreated out of fear at the approaching of this fallen angel and reemerged on the other side of the hemisphere, the southern hemisphere. That was the beginning of Purgatory.
Thus, an evil act is connected to a chance for redemption. In Dante’s cosmos, there is no evil that cannot be utilized to the ends of the good. The real defeat of evil occurs when evil becomes a stepping stone over its own threshold, allowing one to reach the purgatorial island.
How does Dante’s voyage through Hell conclude? The last line of Inferno is: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,” “and thence we issued forth to see again the stars.”12 There is a remarkable love of symmetry in Dante’s poem, as each canticle will end with that same word “stelle”—stars, stars, and stars. So, each canticle ends with us looking up, reminding ourselves where we are, longing for the stars in the distance. And we, like Dante, can only shift our perspective and journey onward beneath that endless expanse.