In the second circle, Dante is distraught by the cruelty of the punishment he observes. There, he encounters the souls of the lustful, including the legendary Tristan and Isolde and the historical Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo.
In the remaining seven circles of hell, Dante and Virgil observe punishments that are so grisly that sinners are reduced to grotesque conditions. These inspired the frescoes depicting the final judgement day that the painter Giotto painted around the walls and ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. There, men with moneybags hanging round their necks flick off flames, just as dogs shoo away insects in summer.
In the next, the circle of the fraudulent, Dante and Virgil encounter popes guilty of simony or the selling of church services. Having inverted the moral order, they face an eternity buried upside down with their heads in the trenches. Only their legs can be seen from above, waving around frantically.
In the ninth circle, the pilgrims see the Count Ugolino chomping on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri , the punishment for treachery. In reality Ugolino conspired against his party, the Ghibellines, to bring the opposing Guelfs to power. Dante chose to call his poem a comedy commedia in Italian because it ends happily. Before the Paradiso and its triumphant ending, the pilgrim must make his way through Inferno and Purgatorio , the first two parts of the poem.
If Inferno, rather than Purgatorio or Paradiso, retains the strongest grip on our collective imagination, the best explanation for this is probably the simplest—the sinners of literature tend to be far more memorable than the saints. By leaving the speaker of the poem nameless, Dante encourages the reader to identify with him. Throughout the poem, Dante holds these two aspects of the pilgrim in tension with one another—on the one hand, his status as an individual with a particular past and a unique consciousness, and, on the other, his status as a kind of Everyman.
This tension between the specific and the exemplary is even more pronounced in the sinners the pilgrim encounters. Each of them is associated with a specific sin and therefore plays a symbolic role, yet each is based on a real historical figure. As the pilgrim moves through the successive circles of Hell, each circle inhabited by more offensive sinners than the previous one, his reactions to the sinners and their stories evolve.
Again, Francesca and Ugolino are telling examples. In Canto V, Francesca tells the pilgrim how reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere caused her and Paolo to submit to their desire for one another. Francesca has told her story so as to elicit his sympathy, and she succeeds.
The pilgrim sees her not as one of countless souls guilty of lust and deserving of their places in Hell, but as an individual whose present suffering is more affecting than the knowledge of her past sin.
So too might the reader react to Francesca. Count Ugolino tells the story of being imprisoned along with his children for betraying his political allies; all of them die of starvation.
Before they die, however, his children offer Ugolino their flesh as food. Whether he takes up their offer before he dies himself is not entirely clear, but his punishment is to gnaw at the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, the ally who in turn betrayed him.
Like Paolo in Canto V, Ruggieri never speaks. He seems less focused on the personal details of the stories they tell than on the sin itself. This could be due, in part, to the fact that the gravity of the sins increases as he descends; but it could also be because he has come to see their punishments as just. Yet the power with which Dante renders the stories and suffering of the souls in Hell seems contrary to persuading the reader that the absence of mercy with respect to these souls should not be questioned.
This kind of awareness on the part of the damned would have prevented their sinning in the first place. Virgil resides in Hell only because he lived before Christ. But this view of sin and punishment raises an important question: Of what value is forgiveness? The pilgrim does not keep his promise, but he made it knowing he would drop below the ice anyway once his journey resumed. The pilgrim may have overcome his feelings of pity for the sinners in Hell by the end of Inferno, but it would be hard to argue that he has completely overcome unrestrained emotion.
Virgil can only lead the pilgrim into Purgatory. It remains for Beatrice, representing love, to lead him to Paradise. You should receive instructions for resetting your password. When you have reset your password, you can Sign In.
Please choose a screen name. This name will appear beside any comments you post. Your screen name should follow the standards set out in our community standards. Screen Name Selection. Only letters, numbers, periods and hyphens are allowed in screen names. Please enter your email address so we can send you a link to reset your password.
Your Comments. Sign In Sign Out. We reserve the right to remove any content at any time from this Community, including without limitation if it violates the Community Standards. We ask that you report content that you in good faith believe violates the above rules by clicking the Flag link next to the offending comment or by filling out this form.
New comments are only accepted for 3 days from the date of publication. Subscriber Only. Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox: ticking the boxes. What should any one of us be expected to do to avert climate catastrophe? The Divine Comedy is a fulcrum in Western history. It brings together literary and theological expression, pagan and Christian, that came before it while also containing the DNA of the modern world to come.
A poll of writers and critics, Stories that Shaped the World, was published in May. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Stories that shaped the world Literature. Share using Email. By Christian Blauvelt 5th June To Hell and back Dante narrates The Divine Comedy in the first person as his own journey to Hell and Purgatory by way of his guide Virgil, the poet of Roman antiquity who wrote the Aeneid, and then to Heaven, led by his ideal woman Beatrice, a fellow Florentine for whom he felt romantic longing but who died at a very young age.
The turn of the spheres These are stunning images, but made all the more powerful by the language in which Dante chose to convey them: not Latin, the language of all serious literary works in Italy to that point, but Florentine Tuscan.
0コメント