3 Inferno 1–4
CHAPTER 3
Inferno 1–4
Before beginning our exploration of Inferno, let me say a few things about the poem in general, the structure of the poem, and then we can get into the first four cantos. In my preface, I mentioned the title of the poem. We refer to the poem as the Divine Comedy, but it should be just Comedy. That’s what Dante called it, and he called it Comedy for a number of reasons. The first reason is that it ends with happiness. It’s a story that begins with disorder, a catastrophe if you wish; the pilgrim is lost in the woods and then works himself out toward the light, toward the truth, toward God. In that sense “comedy” describes the thematic trajectory of the poem. It’s going from one condition to another, and from this point of view it’s literally the opposite of the tragic movement. In the tragic movement, you always have an initial state of cohesion or initial state of happiness that moves toward fatality or disaster.
The second reason for the title is stylistic. Dante calls it a comedy because he adopts the vernacular, first of all. The other possibility would have been writing it in Latin, in the language of philosophy and great cultural exchanges, but instead he uses the Italian vulgar language. It also means that stylistically he adopts a humble style. According to the ancient Greeks and Romans, there were three levels of styles. First, there is the high tragic style or the sublime style, which describes events involving kings, since style must have some kind of aptness to the situation that the story describes. Then there is a middle style or an elegiac style. And finally there is a low style, the style of comedy, the vernacular style, capable of encompassing all other registers, which Dante will adopt.
However, it is a somewhat peculiar implication for Dante to call a story like his a “comedy,” and the implication is that, in effect, he undercuts the idea of a rigid hierarchy of reality. For Dante, there is no neat separation of the high, the middle, and the low. That which is low and humble, such as the experience he is describing, an ordinary human being living around the year 1300 who manages to have this extraordinary experience of going up to see the face of God and coming back to the earth to tell us about it—it’s really a sign that the low can become high and the high can become low. Thus, the classical distinctions of which we read in the Poetics of Aristotle, which Dante did not know, or in Horace’s Poetic Art, which Dante did know, are illusory. That system is not the way that Dante wishes to proceed, so Dante has a number of aims that he’s pursuing in calling this text “the comedy.”
With regard to the formal structure of the poem, it’s divided into three parts: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each of them contains thirty-three cantos, with the exception of Inferno. Inferno has thirty-four cantos, which means there’s a separate one—Canto 1—plus thirty-three. They are neatly separated in that Canto 1 represents a kind of rehearsal. It’s a journey that fails. Dante’s real journey will begin with Canto 2.
The poem has one hundred cantos, but the basic unit of his narrative is the number three. In fact, it’s written in a metrical form called terza rima, a rhyme scheme that goes ABA, BCB, and so on. So, the number three is the fundamental symbolic number of division within this text. What is the reason for this? There is a key aesthetic reason that we find crystallized in a verse from the Book of Wisdom, “You O God, have created everything according to number, measure, and weight.” And the Divine Comedy has to duplicate the symmetry, the order, and the harmony that Dante thinks he sees in the universe. The poem is presented and introduced as a reflection of that superior, divine order of the universe and wants to be part of it. It’s ambivalent, both reflecting and aiming at metonymy: the part that wants to be attached to a larger whole.
These are some general concepts that will help you understand the pattern of parallelisms that we’re going to find within the poem. And I’ll mention one particularly important parallelism now. You should be aware that the poem has a linear structure from 1 to 100, and yet, within the tripartition of the poem—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—there are cantos that correspond to one another. Canto 6 of Inferno prefigures Canto 6 of Purgatorio, and both of them will in turn prefigure Canto 6 of Paradiso. This is also true of Cantos 10, 10, and 10, and so on; the pattern can be followed in a fairly systematic way. The poem is thus structured both vertically and horizontally.
With these general concerns out of the way, we can now begin with Canto 1, a very well-known canto that contains the general preamble of the poem. It begins:
Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there. I cannot rightly say how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way; but when I had reached the foot of a hill, there at the end of the valley that had pierced my heart with fear, I looked up and saw its shoulders already clad in the rays of the planet that leads men aright by every path. Then the fear was somewhat quieted that had continued in the lake of my heart through the night I had passed so piteously. And as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind which was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass that never left anyone alive.1
It’s a great beginning. It begins in a very extraordinary way, in the middle, for the beginning is the present reality of the pilgrim who finds himself lost. There’s more in that first line: “Midway in the journey of our life”—what is he saying? I think it’s fairly clear that the first conceit, the fundamental conceit, of the poem is that life is a journey, which means that we are always on the way. We just don’t know where we are going yet. Dante will find out soon, which means that we are displaced, and we are going to have a number of adventures. It means that we are not yet where we want to be. And in fact, Dante calls it our life. That possessive is his way of establishing that this is not yet a unique experience. It’s something we all share and something which might also concern us. We too are on the journey of life.
Then, in contrast to that idea, there is also an autobiographical focus. There is a stress of “I found,” “I came to myself within a dark wood,” and so on. This is going to be, much as in the Vita nuova, an autobiographical story. It can only be a personal story, but here the self is going to see the world and is going to see himself through the prism of the world. He will enter a public space.
The great difference between the Vita nuova, which we explored in the previous chapter, and the Divine Comedy is that the Vita nuova was destined to fail as a narrative, precisely because the protagonist is drawing us and drawing himself within the solitude and interiority of his own life, a life which was completely disengaged from the concerns of the outside world. The Divine Comedy starts with that kind of shipwreck, the shipwreck of other intellectual activities that he will describe at length, but then it heads in a different direction.
As soon as we read this first line, “I found myself in a dark wood,” traditional commentators will tell you that Dante is here in a state of sin, that the dark wood is really the condition of spiritual despair. He’s at an impasse; we know he doesn’t know where to go. I, however, feel that this allegorizing is a bit too easy, and we have no evidence for this interpretation in the poem yet. What we do know is that Dante is lost in a landscape that is terrifying. He is caught within it, and he’s clueless about how he got there. He knows one thing, though: he wants to get out of it.
But then he goes on about how hard it is, “so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there.” Suddenly, in a way the poem is already over. He’s now shifting from the narrative of events: I was lost in the dense, savage, harsh wood of the night. His gaze rends this night, tries to find a way out. He cannot see anything beyond himself, but then he immediately says that in order to tell the reader about the good he noted in the woods, he will first have to speak of other things.
So, right from the start we can see that the poem has a double narrative focus. The first focus is that Dante is going to tell us the story of a pilgrim who is caught in what we call the diachronic, the time-bound—a number of encounters which he cannot quite understand. As a result, he’s led by Virgil, as we’re going to find out soon, but he doesn’t fully comprehend what’s happening to him. Then there is the second focus, the poet who has seen it all and enjoys an omniscient perspective. The whole poem really moves around this double axis: the axis of a synoptic view of the poet who has become a poet because he had this experience as a pilgrim and who then tells us about this experience. That’s what I call a synoptic and omniscient narrator, and he is able to examine what the pilgrim did not know. There’s a kind of irony in this discrepancy between the diachronic viewpoint of the pilgrim and the synoptic viewpoint of the poet. It goes without saying that the structure is not that neat, that there are moments when one’s point of view will encroach upon the other. But this is the general idea.
The second movement of the canto begins, “I cannot rightly say how I entered it, I was so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way.” It’s a kind of torpid, lethargic lack of consciousness. His faculties are dormant. “But when I had reached the foot of a hill, there at the end of the valley that had pierced my heart with fear,” he continues, “I looked up and saw its shoulders already clad in the rays of the planet that leads men aright by every path.”2 Dawn breaks, and he looks up toward the sun, believing that natural sunlight is going to unveil to him the layout of the land so that he may find an escape route from this particular disaster.
If this were a Platonic narrative, the poem would come to an end right here because this is what happens in a Platonic narrative. You are in a cave, as in The Republic, you see nothing, only flickers of light, like being at the movies. They are simulations of the truth; they are projected on the side of the cave, and you mistake those shadows for realities. If you are really wise, if you are a philosopher, then you know that you can turn your head around and see where the source of true light is, and then you are saved. The whole experience of the cave is predicated on this premise: that knowledge saves you, that knowledge is virtue. And knowledge does save you to the extent to which it can heal what one could call the wounds of the intellect: ignorance being the wound that knowledge, learning, education, and philosophy can cure. Dante will find out very quickly that this idea is a false promise, that in many ways his own realities are going to be a little bit more complex than what one can find in manuals of philosophy about how we get saved and how we can save ourselves.
So, Dante turns toward the light and then he fears this passion that he feels because it’s a passion of the soul, the fear that paralyzes him and his discernment. It literally stops him, and he does not know which way to go. But the overpowering passion at this point of the poem, which “had continued in the lake of my heart through the night I had passed so piteously,” has been quieted a little. It’s a dark night of the soul, and this is a spiritual experience coming to a head. The text proceeds, “And as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind which was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass that never left anyone alive.”3 The whole passage is replete with Neoplatonic language. He is talking about himself as if this experience were a flight of the soul or the mind. This is the idea that we have experiences that are purely intellectual, the kind of experiences that we can all find when we are reading a book, when we are studying, when we are thinking.
Yet, there is immediately a great shift that I want to focus on briefly. Dante has been talking about the flight of the mind as an experience of a shipwreck, and many epic stories begin in this way. Think of The Aeneid, the shipwreck of Aeneas on the shores of Africa as he is about to enter the city that Dido is about to build, an occasion that will bring him to a great revelation and a great love story with Dido. Here there’s no such relief for Dante. It’s the shipwreck of the mind, a mind that seems to be unable to define both his whereabouts and his destination. However, as soon as he does this, as soon as Dante understands that is what the problem is, he shifts the language from mind to body. He says, “After I had rested my tired body a little, I again took up my way across the desert strand, so that the firm foot was always the lower. And behold, near the beginning of the steep, a leopard light-footed and very fleet, covered with a spotted hide! And it did not depart from before my eyes, but did so impede my way that more than once I turned round to go back.”4
The intrusion of the body and the questions of what the body is and what it represents are the great difference between Neoplatonic narratives and Dante’s kind of experience. The body stands for the limit of purely intellectual journeys. The real journey that he has to undertake is the journey of mind and body, and the body stands for the irreducible historicity of one’s self. The body stands for one’s own reality, the passions. It stands for one’s own will. This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as the great intellectual adventure, which is one of knowledge, and Dante’s idea that the real problems are problems of the will. We may not know where we are, and we may understand that we are not happy with the situation in which we find ourselves, but we cannot quite solve these problems with knowledge alone because the problems here are problems of willing.
Let me present a simple explanation of the philosophical stances to which Dante is responding here. First, there is a Socratic scheme whereby all issues are issues of an intellectual sort. I know, and therefore I am virtuous. I know what justice is and the implication is that I’m just. That’s a false implication because if I ask all of my students to give me a definition of justice, they’ll all tell me something different: that justice is within the self, that justice is a way I relate to my family, or justice is a way I relate to the city, or justice is a way I take care of societal problems of the world in which I find myself. Dante will say that this is not knowledge of what justice is, that the definition of justice cannot make you just.
The other scheme that Dante opposes to this Socratic idea is one of the will. In the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes, “The good that I will do, that I do not do. The evil that I would not do, that I do” (7:19). He draws attention to the essential existential problem, the problem of the self. My will is divided against itself. I may know what to do, but I do not really know, and even if I do know, I am not sure that I will it. That’s the fatality of life. We all think we know what’s good. How many of us go around choosing and doing what we know is not good for us, what is not the best possible thing to do in terms of our judgment of our situation? So it’s the perspective of the will that becomes Dante’s perspective in coming to terms with the limitations of philosophy and intellectual knowledge.
We shall see that Dante talks about the will in a number of ways. In the last chapter, on the Vita nuova, I began to explain that for Dante the will is even better than an unwilling action, and yet the best experiences of life seem to be those that one does not want to happen, such as a dream, for instance. He certainly did not want the death of Beatrice, and yet he understands that as soon as he focuses on Beatrice as a figure, the real contingent historical figure of his love, then he has to give a direction to his own desires, he has to define his will. Already we have an anticipation of some of the problems of the will.
Now he will start exploring other such problems, both as they relate to the self, to the psychology of the character, and as they relate to politics, for instance to a vision of the world as an act of and the projection of our own wills. The world is the way we want it to be, and the people are, too. For the time being, though, Dante takes the will as his own perspective.
He finds out that he cannot go up the hill that he has seen. Three beasts, a leopard, a she-wolf, and a lion will block his journey, and so he’s going right back where he started. He’s back into the deepest despair possible because now there really seems to be no exit.
But then he sees something: “When I was ruining down to the depth there appeared before me one who seemed faint through long silence. When I saw him in that vast desert, I cried to him,” and these are the first words that Dante the pilgrim will speak in the text, “‘Have pity on me whatever you are, shade or living man!’”5 The words “Have pity on me” are taken from King David in Psalms, so he’s prostrating himself, and I stress this because the Davidic voice will constitute an important strain in this narrative. How does Dante talk? That’s one of the ways, and we shall see how it appears again further along in the poem.
To return to the text, Dante has seen the three beasts, but we don’t know what they are. Are they sins? Are they dispositions to sins? They are animals, and therefore they stand for animal projections of our desires, of his desires, and that’s all we can tell about them. Then he meets a figure, and it’s unclear if it’s a shade or a man. He’s dramatizing what medieval thought and literature called the land of dissimilitude, the land of an unlikeness. He finds himself in a world where things are not what they seem, where there seems to be a disparity between signs and their meanings, and part of his effort is thus to literally stitch back together this break between symbols and what they represent.
At any rate, his first meeting is with this figure by the name of Virgil, who will become his guide. He’s the author of The Aeneid, but how he presents himself is crucial: “‘No, not a living man, though once I was,’ he answered me, ‘and my parents were Lombards, both Mantuans by birth. I was born sub Iulio,’” meaning “under Caesar,” which is true, “although late.” He is giving us an autobiography, a presentation of his life, his historical circumstances, and his works. He gives us a sense of how he came into this world and what his life amounted to. This is what it all comes down to, this is really the sense of my birth, and he speaks about his own birth. But then he will turn away from himself, turning his attention instead to Dante, his interlocutor: “I lived at Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of the false and lying gods. I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Iliam was burned. But you, why do you return to such woe? Why do you not climb the delectable mountain, the source and cause of every happiness?”—meaning the mountain of Purgatory that will take him to Eden, where all things started, according to the biblical version of cosmology.6
Dante will respond, “‘Are you, then, that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broad a stream of speech?’ I answered him, my brow covered with shame. ‘O glory and light of other poets, may the long study and the great love that have made me search your volume avail me! You are my master and my author. You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor.”7 As a teacher, I can say that every teacher would love, years after the students have been studying with the teacher, to receive this kind of great acknowledgment: how I remember your teaching. We can call this move on Dante’s part the rhetoric of capturing the benevolence of the interlocutor. It’s clear that the exchange involves the recognition of Virgil as a poet, but Dante is doing more than meets the eye with this praise of Virgil.
Virgil, as the poet of The Aeneid, clearly crafted the story of a grand epic journey. But that’s not how he was known in twelfth-century Europe, in the culture immediately preceding Dante’s time. Virgil, more than as a poet, was known as a philosopher. He was a Neoplatonic philosopher, one who had written a poem wherein the substance was not the fiction about the burning of Troy and the subsequent journey of Aeneas as an exile looking for a new land with his father on his back and his son Ascanius by his side. Rather, it had serious philosophical depth. The Aeneid was a way of acknowledging that poetry is capable of providing philosophical illumination. What was the philosophical message? I call it Neoplatonic because it was very much like what the Neoplatonists thought of The Odyssey at that time: the Neoplatonists, the allegorists, viewed it as a metaphor for the journey and the experience of the soul. It was the story of the soul that goes away from the point of origin, one’s home, the place where one can find oneself somehow, where one is familiar and comfortable. Ulysses leaves Ithaca, goes to Troy, goes through life, and then he has to purify himself in order to go back. In so doing he traces a Neoplatonic circle back to the point of origin. And the Neoplatonists do the same thing with The Aeneid. Fulgentius in the sixth century, and Bernard Sylvester and John of Salisbury in the twelfth, write about The Aeneid as the story of a hero who is born in Troy and then goes through the stages of life. Each book represents a stage of life: childhood, youth, maturity, with all the temptations of the flesh that happened with Dido, and then Aeneas arrives in Italy, plans to build a new home there, and that’s the sixth book. They would never really bother reading the other books.
So, The Aeneid was viewed as a philosophical text illustrating the pattern and the movement of life. It was telling us that we all, like Aeneas, are born here, but with care and prudence we can reach the Promised Land. Dante changes this interpretation by insisting that Virgil is a poet. He replaces the philosophical promises with the idea of poetry, in the belief that poetry is better than philosophy, for philosophy stumbles against its own limits: it cannot quite reach the depths, the heights, and the enlightenment it seeks and that make it so that happiness or the safe harbor is within reach of everybody. And Dante believes that it says nothing at all about the reality and the individuality of his life. Poetic language is, for him, the language that addresses these issues, and therefore poetry here is seen as a version of history. You are the writer, he says to Virgil, who wrote the poem dealing with Roman history. Poetry and history deal with the world of contingency and not the world of universal, and therefore potentially empty, promises. That’s the great new interpretation of Virgil that Dante is advancing.
For these reasons Dante calls Virgil his master and a great sage and all that. And Virgil tells him, “This is very simple. You must take another road. You are going the wrong way.” This is what I referred to as the idea that Canto 1 is a rehearsal of the whole poem. It tells the story of a journey that fails because that’s not the way Dante is supposed to go. You find yourself lost, and what do you do? You try to go quickly up to your destination. You climb up the hill, and you think you can make it. No, no, no. Virgil asserts that Dante has to go a different way. He may reach the same point, the same destination, the world of justice, the vision of God, the idea of love, the good as he calls it, but he must go down to get there. Dante has to go through the whole spiral, through the horrors and the suffering of Hell, through Purgatory, in order to be able to reach the beatific vision. The way up is down, and this reversal marks the difference between philosophical presumption and the notion of a spiritual Christian humility that he has to pursue and wants to pursue. So now, at last, the journey may begin, and “then he set out and [Dante] followed after him.”8
That’s the end of Canto 1, and so we come to Canto 2. When are we, though? If this has to be a historical, reducible, and essentially biographical experience, Dante has to be very careful. He will give us the time, the precise time and place of this experience. The poem starts on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300. Dante’s experience is thus an imitation of the experience of Christ, because Dante will also emerge to the light of Purgatory on Easter Sunday.
But Dante is not yet ready to attempt this extraordinary journey. He questions why he should be the one to venture forth. “Poet,” he says, “you who guide me, consider if my strength is sufficient, before you trust me to the deep way. You tell how the father of Sylvius went, while still mortal, to the immortal world”—meaning Aeneas, and then Virgil also speaks of Paul. “But I,” Dante asks, “why do I come there? And who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.”9 First of all, these are the imaginative coordinates for Dante’s own journey: Aeneas, the hero who brings about the foundation of Rome, and Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, who also goes to Rome and who was the spiritual domain of the Church. But who is he? That’s the first question Dante must answer. I’m not Aeneas, I’m not Paul, so who am I? This whole part of this story is to find out who he is, and part of this journey is to find out if he can bring some degree of redemption and clarity to the world with his poem. He really believes in this “salvific” role of his own voice, though not without irony, not without discouragement, not without a sense that this may indeed be a proud arrogant kind sort of posture.
Yet, this whole idea about self-understanding is immediately countered by a reflection on his divided will. I want to cite this thematically: “And like one who unwills what he has willed and with new thoughts changes his resolve, so that he quite gives up the thing he had begun, such did I become on that dark slope, for by thinking on it I rendered null the undertaking that had been so suddenly embarked upon.”10 It would take me too long to give you a sense of an appropriate gloss to these lines. They are lines about the limitations of willing. Dante begins by claiming the importance of the will in the act of knowledge and we do see that he is so aware of it. Some might say that Dante’s a voluntarist, but Dante doesn’t believe in philosophy and intellect, not quite. He believes that the two faculties of the soul, intellect and will, are like the feet of one’s body. If you really want to walk fast and safely, you have to use both. Similarly you have to use both the intellect and the will. So, as soon as he claims the importance of the will, which the Socratic experience had somehow neglected, he begins to reflect about the limitations of the will. What are the limitations? One is that the will can be divided against itself. The second is that the will needs something to regulate it because I can will anything, so how do I order what I will? The third limitation of the will is that I can never really go faster than my own will. I’m its prisoner. If the will is weak and slow and divided, that’s what I am. I can’t go past some of the difficulties it creates. Thus, when he asks in Canto 2 the great question of who he is, he sheds light on the first internal issue that he must cure, namely the divided will.
And then we come to Canto 3, in which Dante crosses the gate of Hell, with its famous warning that scares him quite a lot. On the other side Dante meets the first sinners of the text, the so-called neutral angels: “And I, my head circled with error, said, ‘Master, what is this I hear? And what people are these who seem so overcome by pain?’ And he to me, ‘Such is the miserable condition of the sorry souls of those who lived without infamy and without praise. They are mingled with that base band of angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but stood apart.’” These are the angels who, during the great cosmic battle between God and the satanic forces with which the world begins, just became spectators. In other words, Dante begins his vision of Hell by dramatizing that which to him is the most serious of sins: being disengaged, not taking sides in the belief that you can wait and see what the outcome is and then you can take a side. He responds to them by saying that “these have no hope of death,” that “mercy and justice disdain them. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on.”11 He won’t even name them because to name them would be to bring them into reality, and the neutrality is a sign of the way in which they de-realize the world. They reduce the world to a pure show of their own, for their own spectatorship.
He goes on from here, and the second action in Hell is that he boards the ferry and sees Charon, who will transport all the souls. Dante gives an extraordinary description of this figure and the souls on his boat: “As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call. Thus they go over the dark water, and before they have landed on the other shore, on this side a new throng gathers. ‘My son,’ said the courteous master, ‘those who die in the wrath of God all come together here from every land; and they are eager to cross the stream.’”12 I really want to focus on this image of the dead souls as autumn leaves. It’s an image that Dante takes straight from The Aeneid, though Virgil himself had taken this image from Homer. In book 6, Virgil describes the descent of Aeneas into Hades, and there he waits and sees the souls waiting for metempsychosis, a term that refers to the reincarnation of souls. The souls are waiting to be reincarnated, and then they will come back, in an endless cycle.
Dante changes the thrust of Virgil’s image, because Virgil has a Pythagorean understanding of existence, that is to say, the idea that life is a continuous circle, Plato’s wheel of becoming. There is nothing really unique about us because we die, and then we can wait for the reincarnation of our soul. Death in Virgil is an elegiac experience: it’s never really tragic and cannot be tragic, because it lacks that edge that comes from the perception that something particular and special has been happening to the world because I am here, and will disappear. Dante changes this idea of circularity that we have in Virgil, where you die and yet you can come back because, just as leaves fall in the autumn, you can wait for the spring when leaves very much like those that have just fallen will return. Dante instead focuses on the uniqueness of every leaf. For Dante, our souls are like leaves, but a leaf can be described as a soul only if you insist on its own uniqueness and the fact that it will never return. In formal terms, this means that Dante is replacing the notion of epic circularity that you find in the classics with a linear novel. The life of human beings is best described formally by a novel, in the sense that we are caught in a journey. It’s unique, and it will reach its destination, whatever that may be.
Of course, as soon as Dante reveals a linearity to his text, he immediately enters into a circle, the garden where he begins Canto 4. Dante comes to Limbo, a word that comes from the Latin limbus, which means “the edge.” So, he comes to an area of Hell that is really outside of Hell. In fact, it’s very much like the Virgilian afterlife of the virtuous. It’s described as a garden, one of three or four gardens that we find in the text, and it acts as a sort of prefiguration of the earthly paradise and gardens in Purgatory, as well as of the world of Paradise, where the city Jerusalem is also described as a garden. Such a place is often called a locus amoenus, an idyllic place, a term that belongs very much to the world of epic, in which there is always the story of a hero who reaches this idyllic, bucolic place in order to be able to relax. It’s the place of the breakdown of the errancy of the hero, of the adventurous spirit, and it always reveals (or maybe it’s just the irony inherent in these literary structures) that whenever heroes seem to look for a break from the quest by reaching the garden and relaxing, that’s where they find out that they are in the most dangerous situation. Whenever you think that you are safe, and there’s the running cool water of the river, there’s the shade, there’s the fragrance of the landscape, that’s exactly when the snake will appear. That’s exactly when the enemy will be capable of reaching you and overwhelming you. These are all places of temptation, and that’s what happens here.
Dante arrives in this particular locus amoenus, and he sees the great poets, all virtuous heathens. He enumerates the characters, scientists, and philosophers from the Greek and Roman world, but he puts them a little at the edge of the scene. They really don’t seem to have much impact on the situation here. But then the drama heightens when he notices the classical poets from Homer to Horace to Ovid: “‘O you who honor science and art, who are these that have such honor that it sets them apart from the condition of the rest?’ And he to me”—Virgil is speaking here—“‘Their honored fame, which resounds in your life above, wins grace in Heaven, which thus advances them.’ Meanwhile I heard a voice which said, ‘Honor the great Poet! His shade, which had departed, now returns.’ After the voice had ceased and was still, I saw four great shades coming to us, in semblance neither sad nor joyful.”13 As befits Limbo, it’s clearly like life here. That’s what the afterlife is in Dante’s conception, an extension of what we choose to do on this earth. If you really think that the beauty of life is having endless seminars on aesthetics or poetry, as these poets do, that’s what your afterlife is. You sit down on the grass and go on talking about beautiful things.
Virgil then describes these shades to Dante: “Note him there with sword in hand who comes before the other three as their lord. He is Homer, sovereign poet; next is Horace, satirist; Ovid comes third, and Lucan last’”—a famous epic poet whom Dante will again celebrate in Purgatory. “‘Since each shares with me the name the single voice has uttered, they do me honor, and in that they do well.’ Thus I saw assembled the fair school of that lord of highest song”—Homer—“who, like an eagle, soars above the rest.”14
The irony, of course, is that he’s blind and the eagle has such sharp vision, but Homer’s is an inner vision. He’s blind because he’s looking inward in order to know what the song he is to sing will be about.
Dante continues, “After they had talked awhile together, they turned to me with sign of salutation, at which my master smiled; and far more honor still they showed me, for they made me one of their company, so that I was sixth amid so much wisdom. Thus we went onward to the light, talking of things it is well to pass in silence, even as it was well to speak of them there.”15 Here is Dante. He inscribes himself in the history of Western poets, and he counts himself as sixth among them. We could say a number of things about what they are talking about. He says that he can’t say. We can easily infer, however, that they talk about poetry, about their craft. This is the way Dante’s imagination works, so that the reader has to pull together things that don’t seem to be described.
Still, we know they are in the garden, and there’s a kind of self-absorption about this setting. There is a kind of self-enclosure about this kind of poetry. It’s a little scene that reflects on what the spiritual condition may have been like, but what is the most surprising and what constitutes the temptation of the scene for the pilgrim’s own spiritual pilgrimage is that he claims to be “sixth amid so much wisdom.” Do you see how this is jarring? Dante is going downward for redemption. He is descending in humility, and yet now he talks with a poetic voice that elevates itself. There seems to be a kind of discrepancy between the two, and that’s the great temptation of Dante, to believe that poetry is better than philosophy, that poetry is like history. It’s a form of hubris, and we’ll explore it in more depth in the next chapter, since Canto 5 proves to be an extended reflection on the dangers of such a claim and the responsibility of writing poetry.
Ultimately, then, Canto 4 reveals a generic ambiguity to the Comedy. I have been defining the poem as novelistic vis-à-vis the circular structure of the “eternal return” and reincarnation of the souls encapsulated in the great Virgilian notion of what an epic is, and Dante will continue mixing his genres. As soon as you formulate something, Dante has a way of under-cutting that formulation.
Canto 4 ends with a miniature representation of the epic quality of this text. It enumerates all the souls that Dante can see, in a manner similar to the scene in The Iliad where Helen numbers all the Greek ships for Priam: “There before me, on the enameled green, the great spirits were shown to me, so that I glory within me for having seen them. I saw Electra with many companions, among whom I knew Hector, and Aeneas, and falcon-eyed Caesar armed. I saw Camilla and Penthesilea; and on the other side I saw King Latinus, who sat with his daughter Lavinia. I saw that Brutus who drove out the Tarquin, I saw Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia; and by himself apart I saw Saladin. When I raised my eyes a little higher, I saw the Master of those who know, seated in a philosophic family . . . Socrates . . . Plato . . . Democritus . . . Diogenes”—all the Greek philosophers and then Orpheus, Cicero, Linus, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy.16
Here we have a version of the classical encyclopedia—all of the knowledge is gathered here—and yet Dante has a way of saying that traditional encyclopedias have something wanting about them. They never tell you how you can really educate yourself. They never describe the process of education. Epic enumerations like this one always imply the wish of a narrative to encompass the whole of reality, as encyclopedias aim to do. The intellectual reality of it, though, is that enumerations, simply by being enumerations, imply that no totalization is possible. There is always something that escapes the formal ordering that the encyclopedias want to reach. There is always something left unsaid.