Dante’s Inferno

1. Dante’s Inferno Canto III

2. Canto III • Virgil leads Dante up to the Gate of Hell • They read a foreboding inscription that includes the admonition: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” • As soon as they enter, Dante hears innumerable cries of torment and suffering. • Virgil explains that these cries emanate from the souls who did not commit to either good or evil, but who lived their lives without making conscious moral choices. • Therefore, both Heaven and Hell have denied them entrance. • They must now reside in the Ante-Inferno, within Hell yet not truly a part of it. • Flies and wasps continually bite them and writhing worms consume the blood and tears that flow from them. • The souls of the uncommitted are joined in torment by the neutral angels –those who sided neither with God nor Satan in the war in Heaven.

3. Canto III • Virgil leads Dante to a great river called Acheron, which marks the border of Hell. • A crowd of newly dead souls wait to be taken across. • A boat approaches with an old man, Charon, at its helm. • Charon recognizes Dante as a living soul and tells him to keep away from the dead. • After Virgil informs him that their journey had been ordained from on high, Charon troubles them no longer.

4. Canton III • Charon returns to his work of ferrying the miserable souls, wailing and cursing, across the river into Hell. • As he transports Virgil and Dante across, Virgil tells the frightened Dante that Charon’s initial reluctance to ferry him bodes well; only damned souls cross the river. • Suddenly, an earthquake shakes the plain; wind and fire rise up from the ground, and Dante, terrified, faints.

5. Analysis: Canto III • In the first line of the inscription above the Gate of Hell in Canto III, “through me you enter into the city of woes,” Hell is described as a city. • This description gains support in the portrayal of Hell’s architecture; it is walled and gated like a medieval city. • The idea of cities figures significantly in the Inferno, and Dante’s treatment of them situates his poem both historically and theologically. • Historically, large cities had begun to plan an increasingly important role in European social and economic life in the high Middle Ages.

6. Analysis: Canto III • Dante portrays Hell as a city in large part because to a thinker in the early fourteenth century, any substantial population would have suggested a city. • In the theological sense, the Inferno’s treatment of cities belongs to the great tradition St. Augustine’s City of God. • In the City of God, the forces of charity, kindness, and love bind people together.

7. Analysis: Canto III • Those who have lived metaphorically in the City of God go to Heaven. • In the City of Man, each citizen acts in his own self-interest and thus preys on his neighbor. • Those who lived in the City of Man go to Hell • The souls of those who would not commit to either good or evil in life now must remain at the outermost limit of Hell – closest to Heaven geographically, yet undeniably still a part of Hell.

8. Analysis: Canto III • Because these souls could not be made to act one way or another on Earth (moral choice is what gives action meaning), hornets now sting them into action. • Throughout the poem, many of the souls of the uncommitted (those in Hell) are made to act out a grotesque parody of their failures on Earth.

9. Analysis: Canto III • Through Canto III, the geography and organization of Dante’s Hell generally conforms with medieval Catholic theology, particularly the views voiced by the thirteenth century religious scholar Thomas Aquinas. • Aquinas held that pagans who lived before Christ and led virtuous lives could have a place in Heaven. • As the architect in his own Hell, Dante shows less sympathy, automatically damning those who failed to worship the Christian God, regardless of their virtue. • The punishment that Dante creates for them is to know finally about the God of whom they were ignorant when they were alive.