4 Inferno 5–7
CHAPTER 4
Inferno 5–7
The drama that unfolds in Canto 5, ostensibly a drama of desire, stems directly from the crisis in the pilgrim’s mind in Canto 4 of Inferno. In what way? It is as if the experience of hubris, the celebration of one’s own power and prowess as a poet, now has to confront the consequences of that claim. Dante will come literally face to face with a reader of his poetry, one who understands his poetry in a way that was not necessarily the one intended by its author, one of the most famous women in literature: Francesca. But before we explore this drama, we need to set the scene.
Where are we located in Canto 5? We are in the second circle. We’re in the larger area of incontinence, and I should emphasize something about the moral topography of Hell before we consider what that means. What is the distribution of sins and sinfulness in Hell? For that matter, what is sin? For Dante, the will is the locus of sin. You cannot really sin intellectually; you cannot commit sins with your mind. Your mind can become an accomplice of the will, but it’s primarily in the will, in voluntary action, that you find sinfulness. So, the first thing we should note is that Hell’s geography depends on this conception of sin.
The shape of the soul for Dante is classical, ancient, Aristotelian. It’s figured as a triangle that has the will on the left side and reason on the right. Where the two faculties of the soul, which are like the two feet of the body, meet is referred to in the Middle Ages as synderesis, using a classical term. This is the area where free will is produced; in other words, in free will you have a conjunction of both will and reason, and that’s the beginning of the moral life. Only when your will is free can you start making decisions and getting engaged in the world around you.
Now the soul can also be further subdivided in a tripartite structure. At the bottom, we find the concupiscent appetites, which are what Francesca and the other sinners in “upper Hell” experience: lust, gluttony, avarice, prodigality. In the middle area, you have the sensitive appetite, which is the middle ground of Dante’s Hell—violence and the kind of bestiality that takes over the human mind. And then the third area consists of the rational appetites. The order—the geometry and geography—of Hell is patterned on this systematization of the soul, but in an inverted form.
Thus we find ourselves beginning in the area of concupiscence, the area of lust. It’s the area of the sinners who have inverted the hierarchical order of the reason and the will. They have invested pleasure with supreme lordship over the order of rationality. So, reason, though somehow dimmed, is always going to be used as a rationale to explain the passion of Francesca. I should mention a few details about the particular landscape that Dante evokes in this area. First of all, it’s a landscape of souls that go swirling around in a circular structure. You have to be careful as you read the poem, even about the directions of the pilgrim. For instance, which way is Dante descending into this spiraled Hell? When you move in a spiral, it’s very difficult to see if you’re going left or right, of course, but Dante goes out of his way to say that he’s always going left ward. And as soon as we get to Purgatory, he goes out of his way to tell us that he’s now going rightward, which is to say, that Hell is the inverted cosmos of Purgatorio.
The other important detail about the landscape involves the ancient symbolism of the circle. There are a number of ways of understanding direction in the Middle Ages. For instance, the linear direction implies that of human beings, who are caught in time and who are going toward some kind of purpose or precise destination. The angels, instead, are those who circle around the throne of God, so that the circle implies the plentitude and perfection of movement. Clearly, Francesca and the other souls here are caught in a whirl of love, and they enact a caricature of the circular, perfect movement of the mind and of the angels around the divinity. The spiral, here the movement of the pilgrim, combines line and circle and implies that Dante is proceeding in a circular fashion around the divinity, but he also has a purpose, an aim to reach. Francesca and Paolo, to the contrary, are swirling in endless circles, and they will never rest.
The fundamental principle behind this representation of desire is displacement, something that Dante valorizes greatly, revealing the ambiguity of Dante’s thinking. Desire is displacement because in this case Paolo and Francesca get nowhere, and yet it’s exactly this displacement that makes us aware that we are never where we should be, that our hearts are always out of place. It’s what Augustine says in The Confessions, which he begins by admitting his awareness that his heart is unquiet, and this disquiet renders the heart out of place. So, Dante is moving within the larger pattern of Augustine’s thinking about desire.
To return to the text, however, Dante begins this canto with a number of avian metaphors, and around line 30, he writes of a “hellish hurricane.” It’s the externalizing of the storm inside, which, “never resting, sweeps along the spirits with its rapine; whirling and smiting, it torments them.” It continues, “As their wings bear the starlings along in the cold season, in wide, dense flocks, so does that blast the sinful spirits; hither, thither, downward, upward, it drives them. No hope of less pain, not to say of rest, ever comforts them.” And then there are cranes. Finally, Dante asks Virgil, “Master, who are these people that are so lashed by the black air?”1
Following these aerial images we have an enumeration, another epic device. The epic is always driven by the desire for totality, to include all things within the compass of its representation. It always has the enumerative style, and now here we have a number of figures that Virgil points out, beginning with several queens who are founders of cities. Keep this status in mind, because one of the issues that Dante is raising in this canto is the relationship between eros and politics, pleasure and the city. What is the place of pleasure in the economy of the city?
But who are the queens in this list? One is the “empress of many tongues,” who “was so given to lechery that she made lust licit in her law, to take away the blame she had incurred.” The emphasis of the line is this lust becoming lawful, lust becoming public and accepted. We learn that this empress is Semiramis, of Assyria, “of whom we read that she succeeded Ninus.”2 The next one is Dido, who in many ways is Virgil’s invention in The Aeneid. Dante cannot but think about how Rome’s conquest would appear to be the result of the libido of power, and he’s playing with the idea that Rome, Roma here, is a boustrophedon. Boustrophedon is a Greek term meaning a reversal. Roma, as in a mirror, becomes Amor, and Venus is the mother of Aeneas. There is this idea again of an inner link between love and politics and the city. Virgil writes The Aeneid as a love poem, with an ideology of Rome based on desire.
Augustine will counter this conception of love by saying that it is not really love in these instances, but rather lust for power. The antagonism between lust and love becomes clear in Augustine. An African native but a Roman thinker, Augustine was really writing about and reflecting on the great myths of Rome. This is true in The Confessions, but it is especially true in The City of God, where he juxtaposes and opposes the earthly city, Rome, to the heavenly city, Jerusalem. He reflects on Rome as a city based on lust for power, and from that point of view, he considers it to be no different from any other empire. The Persian Empire, the Greek claims for empire, and so on, they’re all Rome, and they’re all part of a long sequel of violence and imperial fantasies. Dante is thinking along these lines, as well, and we shall soon see where that will take him.
Next on the list of queens is Cleopatra of Egypt, then Helen and the story of the fall of Troy. Then, finally, we find the story of Tristan and Isolde, which is a medieval invention. The presence of Tristan reveals that all the heroes and heroines of antiquity are viewed through the lenses of medieval romances. They may belong to the grand epics of the classical world, but Dante will see them through that optic of romance, the literature of desire. “And more than a thousand shades whom love had parted from our life he showed me, pointing them out and naming them.”3 Thus concludes the epic catalog.
Dante continues by describing his reaction to the catalog: “When I heard my teacher name the ladies and the knights of old, pity overcame me and I was as one bewildered.”4 Now this is really the first time that Dante introduces the notion of pity in the poem. And by the end of the canto, he is going to be overwhelmed by pity; he is going to faint after he hears the story of Francesca. He will be so overwhelmed that he will fall “like a dead body” falls. It’s sympathy, maybe it’s a little bit of self-recognition, maybe it’s a way of coming to grips with his own responsibilities. The point here is that Dante is reflecting, and will go on reflecting, on the relationship between pity and justice. Does justice require pity, or is there a kind of justice that can be pitiless, that has no place for compassion? Are the two necessarily antagonistic, or is there some meeting point between them? This is but the first time that he considers this idea of pity, the recognition that it could be him in that position.
And with pity in his heart he says to Virgil, “Poet . . . willingly would I speak with those two that go together and seem to be so light upon the wind.” He doesn’t talk to any of the major classical figures. He chooses two ordinary people from his own time, from the area near where he eventually went to live, Ravenna. Virgil responds, “‘You shall see when they are nearer to us; and do you entreat them then by that love which leads them, and they will come.’ As soon as the wind bent them to us, I raised my voice, ‘O wearied souls! come and speak with us, if Another forbid it not.’ As doves called by desire, with wings raised and steady, come through the air, borne by their will to the sweet nest, so did these issue from the troop where Dido is.” Again we find the presence of Dido and with it the other possibility of Rome: Virgil is writing about the great battle between Carthage and Rome as two ways of choosing a civilization, two ways of experimenting with cities. And finally Paolo and Francesca arrive, “coming to us through the malignant air, such force had my compassionate cry.”5
Now Francesca speaks, “O living creature, gracious and benign, that goes through the black air visiting us who stained the world with blood.” She died, by the way, at the hands of her husband, who caught Francesca and his brother Paolo in a tryst, so that’s why that allusion to the blood is there. “If the King of the universe were friendly to us,” she continues, “we would pray Him for your peace, since you have pity on our perverse ill. Of that which it pleases you to hear and to speak, we will hear and speak with you, while the wind, as now, is silent.”6 Then she begins a description of her life and where she was born. Most of the narratives in Inferno begin with this idea of birth. We saw that in the case of Virgil and we see it once more in the case of Francesca. They begin with birth for a number of reasons, but primarily because birth is for Dante the event that could potentially impart a different direction to the world, or that could end in nothing, as in the case of Francesca.
She then starts to talk about her city in terms that clearly contrast with the movement of the souls caught in the storm. She implies that what she really wants is rest: “The city where I was born lies on that shore where the Po descends to be at peace with its followers.”7 Here we have an image of stability in a city she has lost.
Next we have three tercets in Italian that all begin with the word amor, love, love made into a kind of transcendent divinity. This love is the great subject of Francesca’s experience: “Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart, seized this one for the fair form that was taken from me—and the way of it afflicts me still. Love, which absolves no loved one from loving, seized me so strongly with delight in him that, as you see, it does not leave me even now. Love brought us to one death.”8 What is she saying here? First of all, she’s actually quoting some important works of literature. The first line, “Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart,” is a quotation from one of Dante’s sonnets in the Vita nuova, mentioned in chapter 2. Dante writes, “Love and the gracious heart are a single thing,” using the poetics of the sweet new style. He tells us that “one can no more be without the other / than can the reasoning mind without its reason.”9 Francesca clearly intends to flatter the sensible authorship of the poet himself. It’s part of a seductive strategy that she uses.
The second image—the ideas that love does not allow anyone who loves to return to his or her previous state and that love is reciprocal—comes from the so-called rules of love that Marie de Champagne dictates in book 3 of Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love. The first rule: “Marriage is no real excuse for not loving,” which is a way of saying that adultery is the law of courtly love. Rule two: “He who is not jealous cannot love.” Seven: “When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor.” Eight: “No one should be deprived of love by the very best of reasons.” And nine: “No one can love unless one is impelled by somebody else’s love,” which is the line that Francesca mentions. Francesca imagines herself as a courtly love heroine. She lives in the world of kings; she’s in the court of the king of love, and thus these rules of love in The Art of Courtly Love apply to her.
But what is she saying by quoting these rules? What Andreas, first of all, does by having these rules of love and thereby reducing love to an art is acknowledge that love is the most transgressive and disruptive of all experiences. As a result, it needs to be formalized. Love needs to be contained. It may be made part of a game, as is perhaps the thrust of Andreas Cappellanus’s thinking, or part of an acceptable ceremony, which is a possible reading of what is happening here. Francesca falls completely, squarely within this tradition of believing that she lives in a world of love where there is no possible resistance to love. In effect, these tercets about love, love, and love are meant to cast love as a transcendent force that no one can really withstand—or that Francesca, at least, cannot withstand. She is abdicating the power of her will to the irresistible, omnipotent, presence of this love. It’s part of a strategy of not acknowledging any responsibility for her actions, of finding an alibi instead. She’s telling Dante that his works and the works of Andreas Cappellanus were filters of love, that they were to blame for what happened between her and her brother-in-law. It’s a way for Dante to show Francesca’s blindness to the reality of her situation, as well as an unwillingness on her part to give up that which is really the defining trait of sin: habit. Sin is sin in the measure in which it has become a habit, a way of clinging to an action and refusing to acknowledge that there may be an alternative to it.
When she finishes, Dante entertains her arguments and asks for more information:
When I answered I began: “Alas! How many sweet thoughts, what great desire, brought them to the woeful pass!” Then I turned again to them, and I began: “Francesca, your torments make me weep for grief and pity; but tell me, in the time of the sweet sighs, by what and how did Love grant you to know the dubious desires?” And she to me, “There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness, the happy time; and this your teacher knows. But if you have such great desire to know the first root of our love, I will tell as one who weeps and tells. One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, suspecting nothing. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet and took the color from our faces, but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the longed-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, kissed my mouth all trembling. A Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it; that day we read no farther in it.” While the one spirit said this, the other [Paolo] wept, so that for pity I swooned, as if in death, and fell as a dead body falls.10
And that’s the end of the canto. It’s an amazing story she tells, and the first thing to notice here is that this is a story of reading. She reads, they read, one day they were reading for delight, and that’s probably one of the concerns that Dante has. How should we read if we read for delight? Is there some other way of reading?
More specifically, she’s reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, a story of adultery at court. Lancelot is the secret lover of the queen, clearly out of the desire to supplant the king, Arthur. There’s a triangle here, a triangle of desire, and Francesca will imitate this triangle. The story of Lancelot, like all the stories Chrétien de Troyes, begins on one of the great feasts of Christianity, which are the Ascension, Easter, the Pentecost. And the heroes are sitting around boasting about themselves. Not one of them is doing anything heroic, but they all talk about how great they were. It’s a little bit like a parodic version of the argument between Ulysses and Ajax in one of the last books of The Aeneid, where they talk about who is the hero worthy of inheriting the arms of the great Achilles, based not on their present prowess but on what they once were. Thus, in the story of Chrétien, the idea is that the heroic age is over and done with. The whole romance explores the reasons why the heroic age may have come to an end.
Why did it come to an end? The secret love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. When the story starts, they’re all sitting around drinking ale and talking, and a mysterious figure comes from the outside and kidnaps the queen. The knights don’t move, and everybody’s expecting Lancelot to get up and go to rescue the queen, but he won’t out of fear that the secret affair that he has with the queen will be discovered.
That hesitation, that moral hesitation of Lancelot’s, is the emblem of the fall from aristocratic virtues. There is now the intrusion of a temporal wedge between the thought and the action, and furthermore Lancelot would have to go on that famous cart of shame, exposed to the ridicule of the whole town, before he could really even attempt to rescue the queen. If you think about it, then, Chrétien is already reflecting on the crisis of the city in terms of private passion. Something is really gnawing at the heart of the city, and it’s the inability to distinguish between the public and the private, an inability aptly demonstrated in Canto 5 by Francesca.
Dante is exploring reading here, so Francesca is reading the text of Lancelot and lapses into an imitative strategy of reading. She wants to be like the heroine about whom she is reading. She refuses to take an interpretative distance from this specular image; she wants to feel like a queen. She also thinks Paolo can be like Lancelot, and this pattern of mirroring is what we call the mimetic quality of the text, to use the term of René Girard, who has written about this question of the imitative structure of desire. Between us and the object of desire there is always a mediator, and in this case the mediator is Lancelot for Paolo, and Guinevere for Francesca.
But there’s more to this story. For instance, you cannot read the story without thinking about how Dante frames the experience of Francesca with the language of time. If you glance at the text, you will see just how many references there are to time. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness, the happy time” (emphasis mine). Then she starts talking about her adventure: “One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot,” and then “that day we read no farther” (emphasis mine). It’s all about time, about the question of time as an experience, but why is Francesca represented in this way? Why is her story presented in terms of time?
In effect, I think Francesca has one great passion, and that passion is to do away with time. She’s expressing the desire that her prior happiness, a fleeting moment, may last an eternity. Or she may be expressing the insight that one moment of happiness is well worth an eternity of pain. Or maybe she’s just saying that it’s not too bad that the love story that I had only lasted the briefest possible time. At any rate, what this shows is primarily that Francesca not only abdicated choice and not only thought that her own will was powerless vis-à-vis the irresistible force of this transcendent idea of love, but above all, she has betrayed the order of necessity and time. Her passion violates the order of time. From this point of view, Dante is forced to reflect upon his responsibilities as an author when he’s confronted with the reader. What have I done? What have I written? What I wrote has been understood in a way that is not necessarily the one that I intended, according to the meaning that I meant to assign to the Vita nuova. Dante has to reconsider the impact he has on his readers.
These concerns continue to figure into Canto 6, which is not unlike what we have been describing here. Whatever Dante has found out about passion, about desire, about the world of appetites, and whatever he has decided about himself and the meaning that this may have for him as a poet, he will use these discoveries as the premise for other concerns raised in Canto 6, a more political canto. He now aims to find out how authentic his earlier findings may be. He moves into a public realm, from the world of the court, the private world of Francesca, to the world of the city, of Florence, where we are still talking about incontinence but in a different form.
Here we find the question of gluttony and politics.
His entrance into the circle of the gluttonous begins, “At the return of my mind which had closed itself before the piteousness of the two kinsfolk that had quite overwhelmed me with sadness, I see about me new torments and new tormented souls, whichever way I move and turn about to gaze.”11 First of all, I find the presence of the word mind in line 1 very suggestive. Canto 6 is all about bodies, about gluttonous souls who were once bodies and who cared only about their bodies. Dante uses as a counterpoint to these souls the question of the mind, as if the sin of these gluttonous individuals was the sin of not thinking of their minds, for the mind is seen as a necessary complement to the presence of bodies. The word mind, in Italian mente, comes from the Latin mens, or “measure.” The mind is that which measures, which gives a sense of the measure of our own desires. We are asked to measure what is missing in the prevailingly biological reflection of Canto 6, a reflection about the biology of politics. Normally we have the pride of minds when we think about all the megalomaniacs in politics, but here it’s really a question of politics in terms of the inexhaustible appetites of bodies.
The mythological figure that presides over the political bodies of this canto is the three-headed dog, a monstrous animal whose voraciousness and many mouths hint at the canto’s themes. The landscape is stinking under an endless rain, a tellingly repulsive form of waste and food. Dante sets the scene: “As the dog that barking craves, and then grows quiet when he snaps up his food, straining and struggling only to devour it, such became the foul faces of the demon Cerberus, who so thunders on the souls that they would fain be deaf. We were passing over the shades whom the heavy rain subdues, and we were setting our feet upon their emptiness, which seems real bodies.”12 This is a great description and figuration of gluttony, bodies that are always empty now. They are punished to be empty, to exist as empty forms, and they only seem to possess real bodies.
One of these empty entities sits up and says, “O you that are led through this Hell . . . recognize me if you can: you were made before I was unmade.” This is Ciacco, a name that means “pig,” his nickname in the streets of Florence. Dante answers him, “The anguish you endure perhaps takes you from my memory, so that I do not seem ever to have seen you; but tell me who you are, who are set in a place so grievous and who suffer such punishment, that, if any is greater, none is so loathsome.” And Ciacco says to Dante, “Your city”—he is talking about Florence, and his use of “your city” rather than “our city” suggests that Ciacco views himself as not really occupying a place within Florentine society—“which is so full of envy that already the sack runs over, held me in it, in the bright life. You citizens”—once again the distance of Ciacco from the city of Florence—“called me Ciacco: for the ruinous fault of gluttony, as you see, I am broken by the rain; and I, in my misery, am not alone, for all these endure the same penalty for the same fault.”13 So, in this passage we are given the sinner’s stance on the city, but we do not yet know Dante’s position.
The basic conceit in this canto is that of the city and the body. In the classical world the typical conceit involved the correlation between the soul and the city, but for Dante this is a soulless city. The only way to talk about it is to tell the story of the city as a body, as a corporate structure. Some of you may recall that in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the title character makes a similar speech about the city and the body. But this image really goes back to a Roman historian whom Dante absolutely loves: Livy, who wrote a famous book about the foundation of Rome.
One of the stories that Livy tells is that of the famous civil war in Rome between the patricians and the plebeians. The plebeians, the workers, are tired of what is happening in the city. They are doing all the work, but they have few of the pleasures coming from living in the city, so they decide to secede. They retreat to the Aventine Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, and the city is paralyzed, as you can imagine, so the patricians send an emissary, a man by the name of Menenius, to convince the plebeians to return to the city. Menenius manages to do this by telling the plebeians a famous fable. He explains that when you have a body, the hands work, the mouth enjoys and savors the great pleasures of foods, and the stomach can be full, but in truth whatever they produce and take in and ingest, they redistribute to the rest of the body, to the hands, the feet, and so on. In this sense the city is like a body, organized around a corporate structure. The plebeians are convinced by the comparison, and they go back to recompose the order of the city. This is the fundamental structure here.
Does Dante believe in the corporate structure of the city? Can it really hold together? I submit to you that he no longer believes in this conception of the city. When you read the canto you notice that all the body parts are literally littering the city. The nails, the hands, the heart, the beard, the hair, the mouth—they’re all mentioned, and they’re spread all over, as if to imply the impossibility of constituting these body parts into an organic unified totality.
Another issue that is being raised here is the question of civil war, a topic always at the center of Dante’s political thought. Dante responds to Ciacco, “Your misery so weighs upon me that it bids me weep. But tell me, if you can, what the citizens of the divided city”—this is still Florence—“will come to; and if any one in it is just; and tell me why such discord has assailed it.” An amazing image, discord, because it’s a musical metaphor, but the word comes from the “heart”; discord makes the heart the receptacle where all these jealousies destroying the city are located. Ciacco replies, “After long contention they will come to blood, and the rustic party will drive out the other with much offense. Then, through the power of one who presently is temporizing”—meaning the pope—“that party is destined to fall within three years, and the other to prevail, long holding its head high and keeping the other under heavy burdens, however it may lament and feel the shame. Two men are just, and are not heeded there. Pride, envy and avarice are the three sparks that have inflamed their hearts.”14
Dante follows this description of civil strife with a street scene in Florence, in which he asks about some other characters in the city: “I would have you instruct me further, and make me a gift of further speech: Farinata”—who will appear in Canto 10 of Inferno—“and Tegghiaio, who were so worthy, Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca, and the others who set their minds on doing good, tell me where they are and give me to know them, for great desire urges me to learn whether Heaven soothes or Hell envenoms them.”15 One should note, first and foremost, the language of gluttony throughout this passage: sweetness, bitterness, pleasant, unpleasantness. This language runs through the canto and links together gluttony and politics. The men of such worth, though, where are they? They were so set on doing well in the city, but now they may be in Hell.
What Dante is dramatizing is the distance between human perspective, the judgments that we make as human beings, and the divine judgment on the dealings and doings of these famous people; there is a discrepancy between the way they are judged here on earth and the reality of the worth and value of these people. They’re farther down in the fire, and different faults weigh them down to the depths. What an extraordinary metaphor, the weight, the burden of sin, but it’s really an image that goes back to the question of gravity. When you want to talk about the weight that we carry within us, the gravity we have within us, that gravity is love. There’s a passage in The Confessions of Augustine where Augustine says that he wants to exemplify why some people go up and other people go down, and he says it’s like the gravity of objects around us. You drop a stone, and the stone goes downward on account of its own gravity, its own specific weight. A fire, he says, goes upward on account of its own specific weight. For humans, love is our gravity, and whether we go up or down depends on the direction of our desires.
So, this conversation with Ciacco provides a sense of all the resonances of this canto, but at the heart of it all, there is primarily the question of civil war, between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, between patricians and plebeians. Dante sees the whole of history—Roman history, whether he is going to read Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Greek history, the story of Oedipus and Eteocles and Polynices—from the point of view of civil war. In his Monarchia, for instance, a treatise about the desirable form of a universal confederation of states under one emperor, Dante considers the needed unity of all states, very much patterned on the Roman Empire. In fact, the Roman Empire becomes the model for this kind of unification that forms the basis of Dante’s political vision. In effect, Dante sees history as a satanic form of civil war. So harsh is he about the realities of cities that you begin to wonder how and if he can elaborate a constructive theory of politics.
On this matter Dante does not agree with Virgil, nor does he agree with Virgil’s greatest critic, Augustine, in The City of God. For Virgil, Rome is the providential empire, an empire that can unify the whole world. Augustine writes against Virgil and says even Rome is part of the history of violence. Dante comes along and pulls together within the Divine Comedy the idea of Rome and the necessary empire and the idea of civil war. What is it that connects them? Dante’s argument is the following: Virgil is right to believe in the unity of all mankind, in a stoic idea that we all live in a “cosmopolis,” a city of the world where we all find a place. And Augustine is right to claim that the empire is built on libido and lust. They are both right, and yet they are both wrong, precisely because they contradict each other. What Dante says in response to Augustine is that if there is no empire, then we are living in a world of disorder and lawlessness. The empire becomes the necessary remedy to the evils of the civil war. The civil war is the condition where my own brother, my own neighbor, can become my enemy. Augustine does not acknowledge this reality. It’s the famous Christian response to the historical evil of empires: let me retreat into myself and find within myself some kind of comfort and some kind of shelter. And Dante will say that’s not enough, because you may have retreated into yourself but the civil war will still reach into you.
And thus the movement from Canto 5 to Canto 6 of Inferno is a movement away from the internal world of desires that seem to be so private and personal to the outside world. As I said, Dante has to go outside of himself to test the authenticity of his discoveries in Canto 5. Canto 6, the political canto, will reveal that there is no comfort zone of one soul in the world, that the inner world is necessarily part of the outside world, and that the outside world will encroach upon and enter into the inner world. The terms for this kind of movement between the inner and the outer come from Virgil and Augustine, Virgil with the idea of the defense of the empire, Augustine with his undermining of the notion of the necessity of the empire. Dante will continuously attempt to harmonize the two visions, and he will ultimately endorse the idea of the empire, aware that that’s the best (and only) response to the tragedy of civil wars.
Now we move from the warring masses to Canto 7, the only canto without individualized sinners. Here Dante meets the avaricious and the prodigals, and there’s no individual figuration for them. It is as if these sins became an anonymous, and therefore a more collective, kind of problem, which he represents in terms of the countermovement of Scylla and Charybdis, and here we have the great figuration of Fortune as a woman turning the Wheel of Fortune while blindfolded. Dante uses the image to illustrate how the avaricious and the prodigals can turn against each other. And he asks how this can be possible. He asks why we are so attached to the things of the world.
Dante explains that God “for worldly splendors . . . ordained a general minister and guide who should in due time transfer the vain goods from race to race, and from one to another blood, beyond the prevention of human wit, so that one race rules and another languishes, pursuant to her judgment. . . . She foresees, judges, and pursues her reign, as theirs the other gods. Her changes know no truce. Necessity compels her to be swift, so fast do men come to their turns. This is she who is much reviled even by those who ought to praise her, but do wrongfully blame her and defame her. But she is blest and does not hear it. Happy with the other primal creatures she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss.”16 It’s Fortune at the wheel, but this is a figuration that in many ways needs some explaining.
How can Dante believe in God as Fortuna? How can he refer to this pagan deity, Lady Luck? How can he live in a world of providentiality, where fortune is an intelligence of God? Fortune is blindfolded, yes, but there is still an intelligence, there is still a will and a meditation behind her turning of the wheel. Furthermore, there is a reason why Canto 7 begins with an allusion to the great war in heaven, to the primal struggle between the angels that disrupted the order of the cosmos. In other words, Fortune is for Dante the divinity that rules over this sublunary world of corruption. She is a minister only within the world of the fall.
But what can we do about Fortune? What is up will inevitably come down, in an endless rotation of her wheel. We are always precariously poised on the curve. We are never quite stable in our own achievements. Dante implies that the only way to conquer fortune is to give up one’s attachment to the things of this world. Thus, Canto 7 offers multiple means of avoiding a contradiction in terms with regard to fortune and divine providence, while grappling with several of the weighty issues raised in the preceding two cantos.