Irony and Inner Death in Dante’s Inferno

Abstract

The Inferno highlights many categories of sins and varieties of pains yet it has another unifying theme. From the earliest descriptions of Christian monastic discipline to the Benedictine Rule and beyond, “inner death” inspired contemplatives to confront the hell that awaits them if they succumb to pride, give way to sloth (acedia), or lack humility. Scholastic theologians (e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure) developed the notion, and mendicant preachers brought it to laypeople like Dante Alighieri. Inner death has ironic force in the Inferno because it contradicts the inscription on the gates of hell: “Abandon all hope you who enter”. Yes, one must abandon all hope upon entering hell unless, through the cultivation of inner death, one does so “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (midway in the journey of our life—Singleton), while alive. Here is the irony; here is inner death. If living persons contemplate the consequences in hell of their faults in life, they transcend them and escape.

Introduction

From a midlife crisis lost in a forest to a glimpse of God in the heavenly rose, Dante’s Divine Comedy is a study in reversal. Descent leads to ascent, guilt to insight, despair or near despair to hope, fear to love. Paradox of this sort is not new in a religion that claims the conquest of death. As Christ’s own Resurrection is believed to prepare that of the human race, death itself would seem to take on a new meaning. The true difference between life and death appears only in the other world. As the saved transcend physical death and gain eternal life, only the damned suffer a real death that requires a new name. Revelation (20:14) and then Augustine call it “the second death”.1

Although seemingly concerned only with the afterlife, this paradigm psychologically affects the living, especially those who fear their own damnation. Students of Dante understand that his voyage through the otherworld teaches him how this works. Over decades scholars have stressed the roots of Dante’s thought in the theology of Thomas Aquinas or Augustine in addition to those he himself presents prominently, such as Virgil or Bernard of Clairvaux. But there is another model that informs this pilgrimage, one that draws on the psychology of fear, an introspective anticipation of hell well known to monastic thinkers of the previous centuries, one that overturns this fear and restores the sinner’s hope. This self-reflexive, imaginary exploration of hell reverses the threat addressed to those who enter.

Irony

The inscription on the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno features one of the most famous lines in European literature: “Abandon all hope, you who enter”. Yet Dante exits hell and ascends to heaven greatly enlightened. To consolidate several meanings listed in the American Heritage Dictionary 1973, it is this sense of irony, the hidden contrary of an explicit declaration, in particular when a result overturns an expectation, that I explore here.2

One might ask how an inscription apparently composed by a divine author, “my high Maker”, could be reversed. In one sense, any reader of the Divine Comedy knows the answer. Dante the pilgrim has help from Beatrice. In the Vita Nuova, Dante the poet tells us he will write another work to honor his beloved. Further, her name in Italian, taken literally, works out to “she who makes blessed”. Love devoted to such a being is surely a boon. Yet, in this paper, I offer another explanation, one drawing on centuries of introspective, contemplative, penitential tradition as it worked in Dante’s mind—or at least in his poem: the tradition of “inner death”.3 In brief, inner death is fear of the postmortem consequences of one’s sins. This fear exists already in the mind, soul, or conscience of the living sinner. Inner death is not merely a theme in the Inferno, it is a driving force because it contradicts the inscription on the gates of hell. Yes, one must abandon all hope upon entering hell unless, through the cultivation of inner death, one does so on the “cammin di nostra vita” (journey of our life), that is, while alive. The irony, the inversion of the gate’s prediction, comes from the cultivation of inner death.4 If living persons contemplate the consequences in hell of their faults, they transcend them and escape.

Inner death subjects a living person to hell’s torments in their conscience (heart, soul, mind). If the guilt that provokes these images of torment is not corrected, that suffering becomes eternal. Although inner death derives from fundamental Christian principles, the concept remains little explored. The phrase occurs in Gregory the Great’s Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, where the pope distinguishes the death that divides the soul from the body, “external death” (mors exterior), from the more serious death that divides the soul from God “inner death” (mors interior.)5 This nuanced view follows from the belief that Christ’s own resurrection prepares that of the human race and essentially conquered death. Gregory reasoned that since worldly pleasures and ambition can impede proper devotion, it is best to die to the world now, in order to live in the heavenly kingdom. To this end, Gregory announced: “The perfect life is the imitation of death”.6 Therefore, monks practice mortification. Those who reject this discipline fall prey to sin and die an internal death.7 Thus Augustine could say “With death in the heart, one is sent to Gehenna”.8

One change that is fundamental to the rise of inner death occurs in hell’s new prominence, not to say aggressiveness, in daily life. If the only true death is damnation, and physical death leads the righteous to eternal life, then hell itself would seem to become less menacing. Yet the religious life requires humility. A humble contemplative considers himself or herself unworthy of heaven, indeed worthy only of hell. Thus, hell moves not away, but nearer. Indeed, hell becomes aggressive, capable of invading the living person, through the conscience. The unstated assumption in this view is the argument that the punishment for evading healthy discipline, for ignoring whatever might lead to hell, is to endure its rigors after death. This ladder, this discipline, ties centuries of monastic thought to the psychology of Dante’s Inferno.

For all the profundity of this penitential introspection, the idea of inner death did not retain the positive drive given to it by these monastic thinkers. Although we seek to understand those we study, we are not obligated to accept their thoughts for ourselves. Thus, we note the psychoanalyst, mystic, and diarist Carl Gustav Jung avoids this positive view of inner death. In The Red Book, an unfinished journal he began in 1913, death warrants exploration as the core of individuality. “He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus, the fear of death drives him toward singleness (Einzelsein). He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy, since in singleness he is one who becomes and has overcome death”.9 A few lines below, inner death is just that —a real death—and must be rejected. “I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away [from death] and sought the place of the inner life”.10 Although inner death did not become a permanent fixture in European thought, its influence on Dante was significant. Let us now return to its origins.

Jerome’s Dream. One clear entrée to the psychology of inner death comes in Jerome’s dream about the guilt he felt over his enthusiasm for Cicero’s Latin. He said, “I was taken in the spirit to the tribunal of the Judge. … When asked my identity I said I was a Christian, but he who presided said: “You lie. You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. …” As attendants whipped him at the judge’s command: “I was tortured more by the fire of conscience (than by the lashes) as I considered in my mind the verse (Psalm 6:5) ‘in hell (inferno) who will acknowledge you.’ To escape his beating, Jerome agrees that he would undergo torture (cruciatus) in the future if he should ever read pagan works again”. The bargain made, “I returned to the upper world” (revertor ad superos).11

During the dream, the judge sees inside Jerome’s heart. Simultaneously, Jerome sees inside himself three levels of the universe: the God of justice, the burning (with an intentional play on the fire of conscience), and the infernus of Psalm 6.5. The moment, therefore, is pivotal: having sensed the fire of hell in his conscience, Jerome abandons Cicero for Christ (this time for sure) and escapes to his sickbed and recovers.

Tristitia and Amaritudo: John Cassian. Another link between hell and the heart is found in Jerome’s younger contemporary John Cassian (c. 360–435) who, in the Institutes, cautions against the vice of sadness (tristitia) which, like sloth or acedia, is dangerous because it can lead to spiritual paralysis. One form of sadness is useful, however, in that it causes ascetics to examine their lives and to correct what is wrong (Inst. 9.10). Reflection on one’s faults moves one from fear to love.

And when this [humility] has been attained in truth, it leads … immediately to the love (caritas), which has no fear. It will lead by the higher stage (gradus), through which everything that you were not able to observe before without the burden of dread (poena formidinis), you will begin to accomplish effortlessly, as if naturally, not indeed by the contemplation of torment or out of any fear, but by the love of the good itself and by delight in the virtues.12

As we shall see, later commentators on the Benedictine rule, particularly Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, put humility in hell. So, almost 500 years later, does Dante!

Augustine. Augustine agrees that there is a positive side of tristitia, which he calls dolor animi,13 for he claims that when one experiences tristitia but is distracted by worldly affairs, one eventually experiences no more this salutary call to action, but, instead, “the grief of hell finds you” (inuenit te dolor inferni).14 Here, hell aggressively pursues the sinner. The fire and the worm attack the conscience now. Then, ignoring dolor animi leads to dolor inferni. In hell, the fire and the worm, both physical in Augustine’s view, afflict the body and indirectly affect the spirit so that it suffers a “sterile repentance”.15 After death, it is too late. That is why Augustine calls this burden on the conscience “a constructive dread” (terror utilis).16 One should have responded to sadness in life.

Benedict. For the specific image of a ladder, like the one that Satan’s body becomes, it is necessary to turn to the Benedictine Rule and its anonymous source, the Rule of the Master. According to the RM, “the disciple scales the first step of humility on the ladder to heaven if, always placing the fear of God before his eyes so that he may ever flee complacency and always be mindful of all that God has commanded, he always turns over in his mind how Gehenna burns those who despise the Lord by their sins and that which eternal life has prepared for those who fear God”.17 Let the Benedictine Rule sum up:

Therefore, when the monk has ascended all these steps of humility, he will soon attain that perfect love of God which expels the fear through which all he had previously obeyed not without dread he will begin to accomplish without any effort, as if naturally, out of long training, no longer from the fear of Gehenna, but from the love of Christ, and from that good training itself and from delight in the virtues.18

The core of this analysis is Cassian’s, but the Master and Benedict explicitly call the process an ascent and Gehenna/hell, the source of the fear without which one might not turn to Christ.

Isidore of Seville (560–636) forged a crucial link between patristic psychology and the spiritual torments of Gehenna. Though Cassian had explained that acedia (sloth) and tristitia (sadness) would lead to hell, Isidore declared them, or their subordinate disorders like bitterness (amaritudo), characteristic of the spiritual state of the damned in hell. In his Sentences he said: “The punishment of the damned in Gehenna is twofold: tristitia burns the mind, and fire burns the body”.19

Smaragdus and the brush with hell. This function of amaritudo was important also to Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, a little-known but increasingly well studied figure active in the reforming circle of Benedict of Aniane and at the courts of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. He was made abbot of Castellion in 800 and of Saint-Mihiel on the Meuse in 814 and lived until past 825.20 In conjunction with the reforming synod of Aachen of 817, he wrote what is considered to be the earliest surviving commentary on the Benedictine Rule.21

Smaragdus blended his understanding of amaritudo into “affliction” (afflictio), a condition of the mind in repentance and a condition of the damned in hell. When the affliction of the guilty soul brings repentance it does not become eternal anguish (cruciatus). Instead, “affliction in thought cleanses the mind as quickly as mental iniquity pollutes it”.22 Those who spurn affliction in life suffer anguish (cruciatus) forever. Thus, Smaragdus introduces the paradox of humility: “The more precious one is to oneself, the baser he is to God; the baser he is to himself on account of God, the more precious he is to God”.23 The point of this apparent self-deprecation emerges when Smaragdus comes to the worm of Psalm 21:7 (“But I am a worm, and no man”). As the first shall be last, so the vile worm feeds on the wood and becomes pure. “The worm seems to be more humble and more vile than all the beasts. But the worm feeds on a Wood [of the Cross] that proves to be purer the frailer it is. To this the monk may be compared, for the more he is despised and considered weak and vile, the holier and purer he is before God”.24 By means of this allegory, Smaragdus shows that the descent of humility into abjection reverses itself and ascends. It is at the moment of recognizing one’s fitness for damnation that one attains humility and heaven opens up. A dynamic descent. As Smaragdus put it: “let us humble ourselves for glory”.25 In the pursuit of humility, one must consider oneself not only liable to damnation, but virtually damned. The worm serves also as a model of humility and brings the monk to the lip of hell. This confrontation with hell is an important aspect of inner death.

In his exposition, Smaragdus puts the approach to hell, at least in contemplation and in the sense of self-accusatory guilt, so close to the approach to heaven that his Ladder of Humility resembles a parabola. It descends downward, in negative territory, through self-abasement to a certain point, the moment of believing oneself fit only for hell, when, crossing the zero axis, all that had been negative becomes positive, and what had been a descent becomes an ascent. This image would trace the account of the passage from fear to love expounded by Cassian and reiterated by the Master and Benedict. We shall see the relevance of this figure as we consider Dante’s Inferno where, at the pit of hell, the turn on Satan’s thigh, which represents another bottoming out from the lowest conceivable pit, results in progress. But first, let us continue our sketch of inner death itself.

• John the Scot Eriugena and the restoration of nature

Hell as seen by the ninth-century John the Scot is so exclusively internal that he denies it a physical, external location. It is tristitia suffered in the conscience that makes hell. “Each one will either receive rewards or pay penalties internally, in one’s own conscience”.26 This inner hell brings John very close to Origen of Alexandria, for whom an inner burning was central, but key differences emerge.27 John instead focuses on tristitia. He considers tristitia the Latin term for Hades, which he defines as the deprivation of pleasure (deliciarum privatio), and therefore the essence of hell.28 “Those who diligently examine the nature of visible and invisible things are not able to find the place of tortures except in the deprivation (egestate) of the libidinous will of evil humans and angels, [in the desire] for the things which they loved intemperately, out of which [desire] arises tristitia. It is from [this] defect and privation by which the irrational desires [appetitus] of rational souls are tortured either in this life or the next …”.29 Note how tristitia can occur equally in the afterlife or this one. The torments then exist in the same conscience, depending on its condition, anytime, but in no external, physical place. Thus, although the guilty conscience is the primary affliction of the damned, it exists also among the living —as tristitia.

In John’s theory, the loves of the damned remain within the earthly cares those souls chose for themselves. They do not attain that super-excellence made possible for humankind by Christ’s redemptive action. The direction of their hearts never changes, and, because they continue to yearn for false goods, their punishment is frustration. The desires of the damned are their torment and they are nothing. They have no existence; therefore, at the end, nothing sullies the universe and hence, “the dignity of the divine image is … restored”.30 Thus what happens to the damned is not the punishment (non … luat) of sinners, but a cleansing of the universe and a restoration of the divine image in the individual, in human nature, and in the cosmos.

It would appear, then, that we have come full cycle, back to Origen, except that John does not restore the sinners to goodness, there is no reincarnation, and sinners remain eternally frustrated. They are not tormented; they experience only lack (egestas). By positing a redeemed and a non-redeemed level of reality, John avoids the circularity that made Origen’s theory of restoration incompatible in the West with Christian eschatology and its emphasis on the Last Judgment.

Although John the Scot was not a monk and it was he who abandoned the physical hell, Augustine had not been a monk, and Isidore of Seville may not have been, yet both of them wrote a monastic rule. Still, the monastery was a perfect setting in which contemplatives might accept the challenge to self-scrutiny demanded by the call to humility and tristitia.

But before looking in more detail at the Inferno, we should note that the tradition of inner death does not stop in the ninth century, nor is it confined to the monastic environment. Indeed, the greatest of Mendicant thinkers who, indeed, taught theology at the University of Paris in the generation before Dante, explored the inner torments of hell in detail as they prepared their students to teach in regional schools or to preach in churches and town squares. Their analyses draw on the sentence in Isaiah 66: 24, “Their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched”. And, following Mark 9: 43–48, they apply that curse to the torments of Gehenna, hell. To appreciate Dante’s psychological interpretation of hell, it is important to underline the contrast between Thomas and Bonaventure. It is fascinating to see how much Dante draws on both the external discipline that Thomas says the fire imposes on the soul of the damned and the internal discipline that Bonaventure says the synderesis (a higher moral principle) imposes on their conscience.

Thomas Aquinas (ca 1225–1274). In typical scholastic manner, Thomas distinguishes between the fate of the damned before and after the Resurrection and Last Judgment. Before, the body and soul are separate; after, they are reunited. Although the circumstances surrounding the separated soul in the interim period and the body after resurrection are dramatically different, Thomas employs a similar distinction to account for the soul’s suffering at both times.

In his Disputed Question on the Soul, Thomas asks how the material fire of hell could harm the separated soul, which is totally spiritual. In either case, the soul “is subjected to corporeal things in the lowest and most abject place”. The soul, he says, does not suffer physically as wood burns in a fire, but from “interior sadness … in as much as it is held back, by fire of this sort, from its inclination or will”.

Even though corporeal fire must affect the resurrected body differently after the Resurrection, Thomas employs the same distinction he used to describe the action of fire on the separated soul. There are two types of passio or suffering, he says. The first is the passio of nature, in which the form of one thing is received into another. The second is the passio of the soul, in which the intention of one thing is received like a similitude in another. This is the way images (similitudines) are received in the air and in the eye. The passio of the soul occurs spiritually—independent of any physical process. Now after the day of judgment, the motion of the heavens will cease and there will be no further passio of nature, but the passio of the soul will continue and in this way the bodies of the damned will also be affected by the material fire of hell, that is, by the means that he calls “suffering in the manner of the soul” or “passio quae est per modum animae”.31 And this reception is similar to that “by which the soul [now, in the interim before the Last Judgment] receives the images of things”.32

Bonaventure (1221–1274). Whereas Thomas explains the metaphysics of how material fire can affect a spiritual substance like the soul and thus cause pain, his contemporary Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, is more interested in the inner consciousness of the damned and makes a metaphor of the impact of the worm on the conscience. Grief follows from a distinction between two forces at work, like the opposed jaws of the worm’s bite. Above is the external, inerrant, universal moral principle called the synderesis. Below is the conscience of the sinner, a defective and personal force responsive to the will. When the will moves against the synderesis without changing, the resultant tension executes the bite from the jaws of the worm that Isaiah and Mark said “shall not die”. Bonaventure explains:

The bite of grief comes from the meeting [concursus] of two movements which [either] support [obviare] or oppose [resistere] each other. In humans, these two movements are the natural will [i.e., the synderesis] and the deliberative will [the conscience], since both move. These meet [concurrere] in the bite of grief when the conscience indicates that something which has been done is not just. And they oppose [obviare] each other when the natural will [that is, the synderesis] detests what is unjust while what is unjust pleases the deliberative will. And so [the natural and the deliberative wills] oppose [obviare] each other when each is active in its own function, in such a way that the one, [illa, the former] that is, the natural will [the synderesis], efficaciously detests that which is not just, while the other [ista, the latter, that is the deliberative will, the conscience], adheres immutably to it [that is, to that which is unjust].33

In Thomas, the providential workings of the cosmos oppress the rebellious. In the end, the heavens will cease their motion, the elements will divide, and all that is base will sink to the pit and confine rebellious souls beneath the dregs of the world. Thus, the sinner’s soul is oppressed “by divine power” (virtute divina), subjected to an inferior substance, the fire, which “confines” it “as if in a place” [quasi in loco]. By contrast, in Bonaventure, it is less the weight of the cosmos or the external, physical fire than the worm of conscience that eats away at the soul of the damned. When the conscience knows that the will has erred, the synderesis agrees and there is a painful cooperation between the two moral principles. But when the conscience followed the erroneous, personal will against the immutable force of the synderesis, the two jaws collide causing another kind of pain. Infernal suffering in Thomas comes from physics, in Bonaventure from psychology.

Dante draws on both these ideas: the vortex of hell’s architecture illustrates Thomas’s cosmic design; the Pilgrim’s emotional reaction to what he sees illustrates the progress of his moral growth, as, at first, he identifies with the sinners and, in the end, he inflicts pain and cooperates with the divine justice he has come to understand. A sampling of key moments in the Inferno illustrates Dante’s inner death, the benefits of his penitential introspection, his journey through hell. At the same time, Dante’s moral progress contrasts ironically with the inscription on hell’s gate. Understanding Dante’s inner death and its place in a millennium-long tradition of monastic reflection inverts the inscription over hell’s gates in Canto 3. According to the psychology of inner death, the message is not “Abandon all hope you who enter here” but “Abandon all hope unless you enter here”. One must first enter hell and review one’s sins, category by category, as Virgil reminded the Pilgrim in Canto 11, and, as the poem takes us through the bolgias, one step at a time.

Against this thesis it could be argued that ironic inversions are the work of the reader not the author. The sign over hell’s entrance is certainly not a welcome mat. In fact (since we are considering centuries of tradition), the institutional church and, in the century preceding Dante’s poem, the mendicant friars had been urging exactly what I argue Dante was doing: encouraging conscious reflection on one’s sins. From awareness came contrition, then confession and satisfaction—all encompassed in the sacrament of penance. The only damning sin is one left unconfessed. To confront one’s faults, as recommended by centuries of contemplatives using terms like tristita, terror utilis, amaritudo, is to escape hell. Did the layman Dante know that? He says so himself in Canto 1 (line 8). He had abandoned the true way, experienced fear, and found the memory of his experience at that moment of fright “bitter”(amara). Yet good came out of it as he wishes to explain, to trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai (to explain the benefit that I found there).34 He plants the seed of Canto 34 in Canto 1. Just as the end hides in the beginning, so the outer appearance-experience of the damned displays their inner state. The inversion completes the retaliation, making the punishment resemble the crime —a pattern that Dante calls contrapasso. To anticipate a key argument that correlates ironic inversion with contrapasso, let us consider how in Canto 26 the Pilgrim and his Guide view the flames that look like fireflies swarming through the valley. There, Virgil explains the universal law of ungoverned passion, how the inner force that has driven a person for a lifetime becomes, in hell, external, visible, not a passion, not a metaphor, but a flame. And so: “They each wrap themselves in that which makes them burn” (catun si fascia di quel ch’elli è inceso).35 Just as Jerome had suffered more from the fire in his conscience than from the lashes on his back, the inner life and inner pain prevail. Inversion rules the person, dead or alive, and structures Dante’s afterlife.

In Canto 5, the offended husband’s sword pins the cheating lovers together forever to mark the unrelenting lust that brought them to their sin. Caught forever in flagrante delicto but, for that reason, they are suspended merely in the memory of a pleasure they will henceforth lack. Inner drive and outer sign are fixed forever. There is irony, therefore, in the contrast between the immobility of sin marked by the sword and Dante’s own, downward but forward progression. Still, at this early stage in his journey, the poet who has himself experienced unfulfilled love, empathizes with the suffering pair and, as he understands the correlation between their sin and their fate, he faints. This contemplation of the linear relationship between passion in the sense of a driving, vicious emotion, and passion as the fate that sinners endure—passively (from patior)— is the essence of inner death.

Canto 26. Whereas a single moment of surrender might encapsulate Paulo and Francesca’s surrender to their adulterous longing, but the sword signifies their eternal immovability, the fireflies in the dark valley of Canto 26 indicate the biographical, psychological linearity of inner death. If the hellish hurricane (la buffera infernal, 5. 31–32) punishes the excessive sex drive of all in the second bolgia, Francesca’s account gives it concrete individuality. In Canto 26, by contrast, the universal drive emerges last, as Odysseus explains how he and Diomedes exploited the human thirst for knowledge and betrayed their crew’s safety to push them beyond the Straits of Gibraltar into unknown waters to their death. What better symbol of betrayal than his conspiracy with Diomedes to steal the Palladium, that sacred statue, guardian of Troy? What better symbol of an inner drive than Odysseus, ten years en route to home? How, then is this ardor punished? By self-entrapment.

A nocturnal view of a valley glowing with what appear to be fireflies yields many flames each containing a human soul at once imprisoning and burning them in the very drive that put them in hell. The idea of being wrapped in that which makes us burn epitomizes Dante’s eschatology. From the horizontal perspective, the outer condition reflects the inner nature of the soul. From the perspective of inner death, however, the temporal dimension is far more important. The correspondence of external physicality to internal character is not only lifelong, it is eternal. And it is eternal because it was life long. There is also a third, reflexive dimension, stated twice in one line. “They each wrap themselves” refers to the external appearance of the punishment, whereas “in that which makes them burn” refers to the inner “ardor” (Inf. 26.97). What is crucial about this reflexivity is that it requires the free will by which Dante says humans choose their passions, indulge them, refuse to confess or reject them. For that reason, this formulation also has a biographical dimension. This is the continuity of inner death: the faults pursued in life, if unchanged, become the fates endured in hell. Thus, in Dante’s view, we not only wrap ourselves in that which makes us burn, we determine the judgment that conditions both our physical suffering and the moral judgment that comes when a person dies and, again, at the Resurrection. As Guido da Pisa, a contemporary of Dante, who wrote a commentary in Latin on the Divine Comedy, put it: “If indeed someone burns with the evil ardor of lust, greed, envy, or anger, it is fitting that these show their corresponding effects externally, that is in the flesh and in death”.36

Continuity, fixity, consistency: these words describe the fate of sinners who are damned, the impenitent. Not so for Dante himself. As he pursues his journey, he learns the nature of divine justice. As he surmounts the stone ridge that overlooks the valley where the fireflies pass, he immediately understands what he is seeing. Although it is his guide who utters the line we have been examining, the Pilgrim replies (and we must note), “It was already clear to me that it was so” (26. 50–51). Dante is learning. His understanding grows as will become clear further on. For now, let us note that another constant in this tale is the progress of penitential introspection.

As noted above, John the Scot Eriugena already observed this connection between inner drive and eternal fate. “Those who diligently examine the nature of visible and invisible things are not able to find the place of tortures except in the deprivation of the libidinous will of evil humans and angels, [in the desire] for the things which they loved intemperately, out of which [desire] arises tristitia. It is from [this] defect and privation by which the irrational desires [appetites] of rational souls are tortured either in this life or the next … ”.37 What Eriugena calls desires are the fires of passion that, inside and out, then and now, enflame the suffering souls in the meadow of Canto 26.

So far, Dante’s progress has been of understanding and emotional satisfaction. He sees his rivals, perpetrators of evil, punished and relates to their fate. But more is required to complete his progress. In Canto 33, he himself takes action. Here, he sees sinners frozen in ice, another symbol of sin’s fixity. Although they are all guilty of betrayal, different sinners have different postures. The first victims in Canto 33 have their heads turned down. Springing as much from their hearts as from their eyes, their tears feed the ice and augment their pain. By contrast, farther on, the sinners’ heads face upwards. Their inverted eyes contain the tears that freeze in their sockets to intensify at once and forever both guilt and pain (33. 96). Thus, Dante encounters Fra Alberigo, but he does not know who it is. To learn the sinner’s name, he promises to remove the ice from his eyes. Fra Alberigo’s name alone and the means of his betrayal (“the fruits of the evil garden”) is enough to identify his treason—no need to tell the story. Between us, dear reader, he feigned forgiveness of an old intra-family offense even as he harbored a grudge for years, and then arranged the murder of his own kinsmen. Thus, he is punished for treachery. He complains that he is paid in spades for his crime (“dates for figs,” as the friar puts it. 33.120). At this point, two things happen which return us to inner death.

Although the living Pilgrim knows that Fra Alberigo is still alive, he questions to be sure. Yes, the villain confirms and explains. Once someone commits a betrayal such as mine, a devil immediately takes over their body for as long as they would have lived but their soul, like mine, suffers immediately down here (33. 129–132). This arrangement exemplifies inner death. Here, without the guilt and the conscious atonement, the repentance that normally characterizes inner death, the evil human soul is replaced by a matching demon that maintains the semblance of that person’s life (up) in the world, while the damned soul suffers in the ice nearly at the pit of hell. In this case, repentance is too late, but failure to repent is the essence of damnation, so the parallel or continuity that constitutes inner death remains. If imagining the pains of hell in life brings change, one escapes hell. If not, it comes. If the sin goes beyond a certain level of gravity, as in the case of Fra Alberigo, hell comes even before death. The soul goes immediately to hell; a devil possesses the traitor’s body. The counterfeit life animated by a devil matches the real, early damnation of the soul, in hell before physical death.

If eternal punishment can be exacted in advance, even before death, the connection between hell and life is clear. Now knowing almost the full extent of hell, the Pilgrim himself internalizes this lesson in what follows. In return for Dante’s promise to remove the ice from his eyes, Fra Alberigo reveals his identity. Even after the murderer reminds the poet of his promise, Dante refuses and walks away. He betrays the betrayer. In explanation, Dante the author, not the pilgrim en route, states: Cortesia fu lui esser villano (33.150). So, here, at the penultimate stage of his tour through hell, Dante becomes courteous (cortese) out of his hard-earned comprehension of divine justice and so he betrays the betrayer Fra Alberigo since “it was loyal to be disloyal to him” (cortesia fu lui esser villano).38 To betray the betrayer was to align himself with the Lord’s court (corte) and so to become courteous (cortese), loyal to the Lord. Guido da Pisa, interprets this line with reference to an Italian proverb: “Whoever honors a villain dishonors God”.39

So now we are back where we started. The ironic paradox of Dante’s experience is that, as he journeys through a hell populated by damned souls fixed eternally in fates characteristic of their sins, he himself makes progress. Far from abandoning hope, he gains knowledge. We have studied three experiences. At first, he faints out of sympathy for Paulo and Francesca skewered by the sword that trapped them in flagrante delicto. Later, when he saw the fireflies in the meadow, he understood without asking, and says as much to his guide, that they were trapped in their passions. He understood, and Virgil confirms, that the fires that burn them visibly on the outside had long since burned them from within. The consistency of this pattern teaches Dante the justice of infernal punishment so that, by the time he meets Fra Alberigo, when his outrage at the villain’s notorious offense drives him to take action, he conforms to the practice of his Lord and betrays the betrayer in the manner of the heavenly court.

The Turn. Fra Alberigo betrayed members of his own family, those who, by birth, had every right to expect his fidelity. There is only one worse category: those who betray their lords. Thus, in the lowest reach of hell, Dante discovers Satan frozen in the ice, himself the overthrown insurgent against his creator and Lord of the universe. In each mouth of his three heads, however, is one of three historical rebels against their lords: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. Thus, in Canto 34, after considering the very worst category of offense, betrayal of one’s lord, “It is time to leave, for we have seen everything” (è da partir, ché tutto avem veduto 34, 69).40 “Everything” means evil of every type outlined in Canto 11.

The Pilgrim now follows Virgil downward, consistent with their path so far, but then they make a U-turn and face upward tracing a parabola. Dante thinks he is returning to hell. In fact, he is escaping from it. Through this inversion, negative turns to positive and progress is no longer descent through despair but ascent through hope. “By such stairs as these” says the Mantuan guide, “we must depart from so much evil” (per cotali scale … conviensi dipartir da tanto male” (82–84). These stairs, the tufts of Satan’s fur, function like the rungs on the ladder of humility in the rules of the Master and of St. Benedict, where, the more you descend, the more assured your ascent.

Virgil explains: “You passed the point to which all weights are drawn from every part” (110–111). Virgil turned not only at the physical but at the moral center of the universe. In Canto VI (86), Virgil announced, “Different faults weigh [sinners] down toward the bottom”, into the pit to which they sink according to the gravity of their sin. Satan is the gravest sinner in the greatest depth. To him all evil falls, from him all evil emanates. He pierces the world at its navel, the center of the equator separating the two hemispheres. At this point, Virgil calls Satan’s fur a ladder. They are at the bottom, ready to reverse course as in the slogan of Smargadus, “Let us humble ourselves to glory” (humiliemur ad gloriam). Thus, Virgil and his pupil trace a parabola at the nadir of evil, the precise point toward which all evil tends, but where reform begins. Cassian had described this transition as a progression from humility to a higher stage of charity that has no fear. That step, from fear to love, Dante took from the thigh of Satan to the shore of Purgatory as he passed from the negative northern hemisphere to the positive southern hemisphere.

The dynamic is by now familiar. The external flame of the fireflies corresponds to the inner fire that has always tortured these souls. But, centuries earlier, John the Scot Eriugena had said this torture comes from the frustration (egestas) these souls experience from lack of what they have intemperately desired. Similarly, the U-turn, or more precisely the parabola, that Virgil and Dante trace on Satan’s side recapitulates the bottom of the ladder of humility imagined by the Master and Benedict, the point where, as Smaragdus of St. Mihiel put it, knowledge of hell’s imminence and immanence pivots a soul towards redemption. It is where humility inspired by reflecting on hell becomes the attraction between God and the newly conscious soul. The biblical origin for this idea is 1 John 4.18: “Perfect love drives out fear”, and we see fear as an element in Dante’s pilgrimage from the beginning.

Dante’s inner death foreshadowed. “The turn” on Satan’s thigh at the end of Dante’s Inferno explicitly describes the parabola of inner death, but the opening also anticipates this monastic model. In Cantos 1 and 2, the poet describes the pilgrim’s disorientation. He finds the straight way (la diritta via) lost (smaritta) (1.3). He acknowledges his own responsibility, averring “I had left the true way” (La verace via abbondonai) (1.12). In the monastic reflection of nearly a millennium, that fear would clearly be the fear of hell, fear of the consequence of confusion, disorientation, and the weight of guilt. Thus, the Master and Benedict had made fear of God and fear of hell the first step in the ladder of humility. When, in Canto 2, Beatrice visits Limbo to request Virgil’s errand, she confirms the diagnosis. “My friend finds his way so impeded on the desert slope that from fear (per paura) he has turned back.” (2. 61–63).41 She urges Virgil to help. “And I fear that I may already be too late if he has already gone so astray” (E temo che non sia già sì smarrito/ch’io mi sia tardi al soccorso levata,” 2. 64–65). Thus, Beatrice confirms Dante’s self-diagnosis in identical terms. The way is lost, he is frozen in fear, he has gone astray. The repeated terms are key to the ladder of humility. Dante also knows this ladder. Only after descending through hell’s circles in conscientious review of every type of sin were Virgil and the Pilgrim able to ascend the flank of Satan. Even at 900 years’ distance, one recognizes Cassian’s analysis of acedia. It is Benedict’s ladder of humility Dante the poet borrows to explain the parabola that separates the hemispheres of negative and positive, despair and hope. The irony in Dante’s Inferno is the discovery of hope in hell.