Dante has physical weight and is not a shade like Virgil. Yet Virgil can pick him up bodily. Nor do Virgil and Dante feel the punishments as they pass through them, although the intensity of Dante’s reaction to the sins he observes may also tell us something about the sins the poet feels are most typical of his own life and about the sins he most hates.

Hell is reserved for the real hard cases, and there is no reason to waste compassion on them—something Dante the Pilgrim must learn. Even though the principle is not enunciated until the canticle is about to come to a close, the punishments everywhere in Hell reflect the fact that they are either appropriate to the sin or, in some cases, are poetic reflections of the sin itself. The lustful (canto V) are driven by the winds of passion but held in an eternal (and therefore) hellish embrace. Hypocrites (canto XXIII) wear a heavy cloak of lead gilded by gold, just as their hypocrisy was covered by a golden tongue. Suicides who renounced their bodies (canto XIII) now have their bodily shapes torn apart. Flatterers (canto XVIII) who made their way figuratively by ample applications of their tongues to the objects of their flattery are now immersed in human excrement, produced by the same posteriors they so obsequiously kissed to further their nefarious causes. Dante’s graphic depictions of the sins in Hell tell his readers a great deal about the nature of evil, but they also reveal much to us about natures of the characters we encounter in the afterlife. A person’s sins may summarize his or her natures.

Reading the Inferno: A Few Caveats

An encounter with the Inferno (not to mention the rest of the epic) requires serious thought and work. This is a classic for which footnotes are essential, and the bibliography provides a number of works that will assist the reader in understanding this incomparable work. Few works of imaginative literature so richly reward the effort required to read them. In the first place, putting aside the erudition and information that gives the reader a better understanding of the poem, Dante’s Inferno is first and foremost a poem, a work of the imagination of one of the world’s most gifted poets, and not a treatise in theology. It is an adventure story, focusing upon a man named Dante. Thanks to his good connections in Heaven with his former love object, a woman named Beatrice who is now dead but residing in glory in Paradise, Dante receives assistance from above to visit the afterlife in order to escape the dangers to his soul. The character Dante (Dante the Pilgrim), who will eventually become the author of the poem (Dante the Poet), requires a guide. Beatrice sends him the classical poet Virgil, who resides in the Limbo of the virtuous pagans (one of Dante’s most ingenious poetic inventions). These are privileged people who have not received Christian baptism. Normally, such individuals would not be saved, but since so many of the virtuous pagans are great poets Dante admired, Dante arranges things in Hell in such a way that they are saved in spite of the doctrines of the Catholic Church. They have been saved because of the human significance and ideals expressed in their literary works. Through the course of the journey that takes Dante and Virgil through Hell, an entire universe unfolds before our eyes. How best may we interpret this universe?

The first and fundamental thing to remember about the Inferno is that Dante the Pilgrim, the traveler, must not be confused with Dante the Poet. The Poet describes this journey from the vantage point of having completed it and having reached Paradise, while the Pilgrim lacks the knowledge the Poet has acquired. The reader of the poem is thus placed in the same position as the Pilgrim. As the journey progresses, the Pilgrim begins to learn, and it is the Poet’s hope that the reader will learn along with the Pilgrim. There will be moments when the perspective of Pilgrim and Poet will diverge. In most cases when this occurs, the reader will probably initially share the reactions of the Pilgrim. In the nineteenth century, Romantic readers of the Inferno valued Dante above all for the pathos they found in the passages where Dante the Pilgrim expressed his pity for the damned. The Romantic discovery of Dante viewed him as the master of the poetry of sentiment. Accordingly, Romantic readings of the poem made heroic figures out of the lustful Francesca da Rimini (canto V), the heretical Farinata degli Uberti (canto X), and the silver-tongued Ulysses (canto XXVI).

Dante the Pilgrim certainly is impressed by such people and is fascinated by his conversations with them.