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Lesson19: Hell |
What makes us unhappy? We read a treasure of wisdom gained from painful experience, Dante's Inferno (not forgetting the notes that help us to process the poem intelligently).
Left (Gustave Doré's
illustration for Inferno [1861]): Dante meets
decapitated
Bertrand de Born,
Image
left:
Left: mid-15th century image of Dante by Andrea del Castagno (Uffizi Museum, Florence).
"Allegory" literally means "other words." An interpretation of a poem or story into other words is an allegory.
polysemantic=
Dante transcends himself in Inferno.
Virgil lectures
Dante on the circle
and
Image left: section from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's romantic Paolo and Francesca (1855). Some 19th and 20th century readers saw Francesca as a heroine.
The compulsive behaviors that Dante describes in circles 5-6 are produced by the amygdala.
Left: a piece of the Parthenon frieze representing the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs. The contention of human and animal in man is an ancient theme.
In
Inferno's lowest
Left: Dante's meeting with his teacher Brunetto Latini (Dore's illustration). We must emphasize that this is a dream image of Brunetto. It is not how Brunetto really is or was; it is how Brunetto appears to Dante when Dante is not thinking wisely but using his mind maliciously to against Florence.
Left: Boniface VIII, early 14th century Gothic image sized extra-tall by Arnolfino de Cambrio (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, Italy).
Is intellect bothering you? Here's a tip. Take it from me. (Portrait of a Gentleman by Andrea del Castagno, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.)
Left: ancient Athenian Harpy, female counterpart to the beast-man centaur. Harpies haunt the Wood of Suicides (Inferno 13).
LOWER BRAIN: The compulsive behaviors are punished in circles 2-4.
MIDBRAIN: A special case of compulsion, anger, is punished in circle 5.
The
line between the anger compulsion and intended violence divides
the animal and human domains.
circle 8 (general fraud)
and circle 9 (personal fraud).
Left: circle 8, the first two furrows of Malebolge (pimps, seducers and flatterers) depicted in narrative painting by Sandro Botticelli (1506). Dante's self-righteousness is on display in the bottom circles of Inferno. |
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Humans are equipped not with one brain but several brains (or brain module complexes, if you prefer) that work together, more or less. Today's brain maps are probably less accurate than medieval world maps, but in crude outline our mental predicament is understood in terms of a triune brain:
These brains often coordinate our experience of the world by networking in seamless harmony with each other, but at times their views come into conflict and confuse us. For example, there are those moments of moral crisis when the animal within is aroused to indulge some thoughtless desire, but the frontal lobes intercept the impulse message and paralyze it with a proposed analysis. Despite its huge size advantage and relative cleverness (including its exclusive access to language), the cortex wins a high percentage of these disputes only in mature, healthy, trained individuals performing under low to moderately stressed conditions. At times a king but often only a pretender, the cortex spends enormous energy inventing fictions and rationalizations to explain its lapses in control. The devil made me do it! Everybody does it! Of course I knew what I was doing! It won't happen again! The multiplicity of the brain is a modern discovery in bioscience, but it is well expressed throughout cultural history. People clearly were haunted by conflicts between their upper and lower brains long before there was any neurological diagnosis of the problem.
Between our lower brains and the cortex above, communications primarily take place across a network of two-way, single lane pathways, where the message traffic going up can block and overpower the messages going down, at least temporarily. This efficient wiring helps to explain what the newspapers and history books often show: individuals very often lapse into unintelligent, unforeseeing states that result in terrible suffering for themselves and others. The first third of Dante's Inferno attempts to describe these painful compulsions which seem so avoidable from the detached perspective of rational hindsight. More originally, the rest of Inferno deals with a different, darker and more dangerous brain problem that Dante describes as malice. (See Virgil's discussion of circles 7-9, Inf 11:1-66.) The intellect that lets individuals limit impulsive behavior also enables premeditated murder, robbery, fraud, graft and many other entirely voluntary forms of hostility and deceit. Unlike non-cerebral animals, human beings consciously intend and devise harm to others, to themselves, and to the world in general. The cortex not only plans and executes this destruction; it cleans up the mess afterward by sanitizing the story. It makes excuses or justifications that explain away the horrors. It is fitting that guide Virgil and pilgrim Dante spend most of their time among the malicious intellects. In Virgil's clever brain, Rome's destruction of Greek civilization became the Aeneid, and in Dante's tortured logic the glorious imperialism of the Aeneid became an excuse to commit treason against republican Florence [recall Lesson 18]. Dante knew first-hand how intellectual dishonesty compounds unhappiness. He had covered up personal misdeeds, then shifted the blame to those who succeeded him after his fall. His unbending pride in exile ultimately led him to a rebellion that forever ended his chances of returning home. No wonder he could imagine that he had visited the foundations of unhappiness. Dante's fantasy world of popes and emperors, Guelphs and Ghibellines, friars and alchemists, dead prophets and courtly lovers is fascinating but initially strange, provoking the copious notes in which scholars have buried the text. Yet behind all of the Gothic detail of the poem lies a poignant personal confession and surprisingly insightful psychology.
Through
misery to bliss Although it is a dream vision full of surreal images and fantastic turns of events, the Commedia is rational in structure overall. Each of its characters represents a general concept or category, and each of its narrative episodes is symbolic. Its 100 metrical songs ("cantos") are divided into three equal parts ("canticles" Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), and fractal-like, each stanza of each canto of each canticle is three lines long. Three simultaneous points of view (the pilgrim's, the several guides' and the narrator's) assure a constant detachment from the action and complexity of analysis. The poem's intellectual features serve one central purpose. As Dante explains in a remarkable letter to one of his patrons, young Can Grande "Big Dog" della Scala, the Commedia is designed "to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of bliss." (For excerpts from this famous letter, see Note 3 below. Can the poem work this meditative magic for you? See reading tips in notes 1 & 2 below.)
The Commedia combines all of these moods in one continuous and unified narrative, a story of Dante's pilgrimage from hell to purgatory to heaven at Easter season in 1300 AD. The Christian holiday works in the background of Dante's story, much as the Theseian festival adds depth to the Phaedo [Lesson 14], or as the Jewish Passover enriches the gospel accounts of Jesus' death. Dante's story is indeed an imitation of Christ [recall Christian imitation from Lesson 16]:
Curiously, however, Dante's imitation is presented in the surreal form of a dream vision: the poet is asleep, meeting the dead through incubation. If the pilgrimage is not literally or historically true, if it is illusory or fictitious as a dream, then how can it also be a serious imitation of Christ? Dante resolves this difficulty in his letter to Big Dog. The letter follows well established Christian traditions of Biblical scholarship in its explanation that there are four kinds of scriptural meaning: a historical level, plus three "allegorical" or hidden contexts--figural, moral, and anagogical. The poet illustrates these four kinds of meaning in the Hebrew Exodus, a story of particular relevance to his own exile.
In Dante's poem, the pilgrim follows the path of Christ (figural), he learns how to avoid suffering (moral), and Virgil and other guides show him the fate of souls after death (anagogical). In contrast to Exodus, however, the Commedia takes the anagogical meaning for the primary or literal one. This emergence of the anagogical to the surface of the story allows the historical level to be hidden down below among the allegories. Hence, the poem does not look much like autobiography, but autobiographical meaning is an intended context. The Commedia is a public poem with confessional secrets, many of which still can be extracted through interpretation because of the shards of historical information that remain for us to read of Dante's life. The general plan of Inferno To the extent that Dante succeeded in his polysemantic plan, his writing is both learned and self-absorbed, simultaneously objective and subjective. The characters met by the pilgrim in the Commedia illustrate general points of religious, moral and spiritual typology, but they are also reflections of Dante's own character.
The self-images in Inferno are of course negative, and progressively more negative as the descent
continues.
Inferno does not describe all of the types of depression that were known in Dante's period. For example, there's no circle of the slothful in Inferno, presumably because Dante did not worry that laziness was one of his bad habits. But the scope of coverage nonetheless is broad enough to describe no fewer than ten geo-poetic regions of the underworld: an outer belt of uncommitment plus nine descending circles of sorrow that are increasingly difficult for the pilgrim and the reader to pass. The first few circles (on sex, liquor, and money) are quick reads, but then the plot thickens as the poet turns to deeper problems. Circles seven and eight, concerning intentional violence and fraud, are especially labyrinthine as they are subdivided into multiple rings. At the foundation, in the pit of circle nine, where immobile Lucifer and his companions are frozen in a river of their own tears, the pilgrim learns that rebellion against God is the ultimate futility and source of all pain. Readers looking for a scary or eloquent devil are bound to be disappointed. The poet's striking image of Lucifer, weeping and powerless in his futile quarrel with the nature of reality, finally liberates the pilgrim from his fantasies that any good can come from evil. To simplify all of this infernal complexity, literary commentators typically describe the structure of the Inferno as tri-partite, with the inmates classified as the compulsive, the violent, and the fraudulent. These classifications are based on Virgil's general description of the underworld (Inf. 11:80) which, in turn, loosely follows Aristotle's ancient analysis of incontinence, brutishness and malice (Nichomachean Ethics 7:1). For students today, I believe that the three general disorders in Inferno are better described as the major dysfunctions of the triune brain [discussed above]:
Some notes on these three sources of unhappiness follow. An enlarged outline of Inferno appears at note 6 on this page below. Of course, readers should make their own outlines and summaries as practical ways to develop personal comprehension the poem.
Reptilian compulsions The young pilgrim Dante who tours hell is not the creator but the creature of his "Master" Virgil. Both of these characters are the creatures of Dante the poet who writes the comedy, detached from Franchesca (Inf 5:70), Ciacco (6:34), Argenti (8:31), Farinata (10:22) and the other sufferers in Inferno, even when the pilgrim or Virgil sympathizes with them. The pilgrim's respect and fondness for Virgil are apparent in both Inferno and Purgatorio, but the poet Dante's point is that in the grand scheme of things Virgil's place is in limbo, like other ancients who passively await the arrival of help that never comes. Virgil knows a lot about suffering and the desire to overcome it, but he does not know happiness. Although the historical Virgil had a real Roman Emperor to celebrate, and a great empire through which to become famous, this extraordinary political opportunity did not make him happy. Because Dante similarly has dreamed of becoming the poet laureate of the new Holy Roman Empire [as described in Lesson 18], Virgil's expertise in suffering and remorse make him an outstanding guide to disabuse Dante of his illusions. However, Dante somehow must surpass Virgil, from whom he has learned his art, if he is to accomplish the intent of the Commedia, to lead his readers to the state of bliss. Virgil's primary lesson for young Dante is the profoundly simple one that happiness is a state of mind, not a product of external circumstances. The sufferers in Inferno do not recognize their own free will. Like zombies or automatons, they are drawn to Acheron, the river of sorrow that drains to itself all who see themselves only as products or creatures.
The depressed are not despised by God or predestined to suffering, but that is how they misunderstand their condition. Virgil knows that they suffer voluntarily; "they yearn to be here," as he explains. Self-destructively imagining themselves as victims, they do not see that there is any way out of their pain. They believe that their Creator has imprisoned them in torture chambers from which there can be no escape. In place of true judgment, or proper exercise of intellect, they accept a preposterous fantasy of doom. Minos lashes them with his reptilian tail. This passive victim syndrome is shown in its simplest forms in the compulsions of circles two through four (cantos 5-7) where souls are driven by wind, beaten down by rain, or caught like video game figures in repeating loops of pointless conflict. For these unhappy souls, the pursuit of sex, food and money (both the spending and hoarding of money) is frustrating because obsessive, ungoverned by rationality. Virgil takes his analysis (Inf. 11:80) from the description of incontinence in Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics 7:1), where an incontinent person may know better than to be so self-indulgent but nonetheless fails to moderate the unintelligent impulse for food, sex and other pleasures. Unhappiness results because the reasoning mind acknowledges the problem but views itself as defeated and helpless to control behavior.
The pilgrim swoons with sympathy upon hearing Francesca's story, for it parallels his own. This passionate younger Dante is the lyricist of courtly love whose Vita Nuova (1295) records his longing for young Beatrice Portinari, even after her marriage and death. The pilgrim has been enticed into Inferno only because he imagines that Beatrice pities his suffering and is summoning him to her in the afterlife (Inf 3:94). Francesca is a porn image of Beatrice; her silent partner Paolo is a reflection of unhappy, passive Dante caught up in futile obsession for a body that does not exist.
Mammalian Emotions
Violence, according to Virgil's guide Aristotle, can be another type of "incontinence," another compulsive disorder. This accords with modern understanding: violence sometimes indeed is as involuntary as the blink of eye. Our brain structure explains how this can be. The sophisticated cortex is relatively slow in its recognition and analysis of danger, so we are equipped with a subcortical emergency response system, the much faster but more primitive amygdala, that can seize control of our behavior when an unanticipated threat suddenly appears, especially when we are stressed out. In taking its shortcuts, the hardwired logic of the amygdala sometimes errs in threat assessment and response, and the actor recognizes the mistake only after cortical control has been restored. This two-brain defense system is the biological basis for laws defining involuntary manslaughter as a lesser crime than premeditated murder; homicide law doctrines of mens re or intentionality reflect the underlying neurology. When driven by the amygdala, actors are not in their right minds, from the point of view of the cortex, and they may be remorseful for the harm they cause by their rash behavior. Francesca's husband may have been driven to manslaughter by his amygdala, though Francesca assumes that he intended to murder her and deserves to be punished in the lowest part of hell. As a danger response mechanism, the amygdala is the seat of both aggression and terror. It is the basis of the irrational fight-or-flight response to stress noted in literary representations of behavior as early as Homer's Achilles [recall Lesson 3]. In Inferno, Dante's River Styx marks this region of uncontrolled fight and flight. Its fog limits visibility, and swamp gas anesthetizes judgment. Crazy fighters brawl on the surface while terrified flighters hide on the bottom. Failing to lead on this part of the journey, the guide Virgil does not check the pilgrim's bad instincts. An irrational demon Phlegyas is the boatman for this river tour. On the Styx, the pilgrim greets a non-threatening Fillipo Argenti with undeserved blows (Inf. 8:31) and then helplessly cowers in terror before demons that appear to guard the City of Dis (Inf. 8:64). These uncontrolled reactions allegorize Dante's past irrationality when he picked the wrong quarrels to fight and to fear, mostly to fear. The pilgrim's relapse into anxiety at Dis recalls the opening of the poem, when he retreats from Mt. Happiness because of the phantom leopard, lion and she-wolf that he imagines there. With the benefit of hindsight and rational analysis, the mature Dante understands that, years earlier, he helped to get himself exiled from Florence by inventing some enemies and failing to stand up against others.
These false assumptions help the pilgrim begin to recognize the errors of his own anger and fear. As a former exile who returned to Florence by conquering the city with the military aid of outsiders, Farinata shows Dante that if he impulsively fights his way back into Florence then, like Farinata, his violent homecoming will earn him the enmity of the Florentines; foreseeably, his family will be endangered if he becomes unable to protect them. (Dante's wife and children were not exiled with him; apparently due to her family connections with Black Guelphs, they remained in Florence, in possession of valuable property.) Cavalcante's mistaken fear about his son Guido is a reminder that, as city magistrate, Dante had exiled Guido and others to prevent a possible spread of violence, but this preventative act actually created the enemies who eventually prosecuted Dante and forced his exile. Indeed Guido (Dante's fellow poet, to whom Vita Nuova had been dedicated) became sick after a few months in exile, and died soon after his recall to Florence in August 1300; no doubt Dante was blamed. Dante's punitive peace-keeping and later threats to make war on Florence were ill considered and counter-productive. Instead of finding security, he slept on a bed of fire where he saw that his impulsive actions had ruined his chances of returning home.
Human Malice:
Hostility Beyond Dis lies a third river, a manmade Channel of Blood guarded by a dysfunctional Minotaur and a herd of armed centaurs. These beast-men mark the psychological dividing line between the midbrain and the cortex. Their ambivalent behavior is represented by the belligerent centaur Nessus, barely socialized enough to ford the channel and carry the pilgrim across from the animal to the human side (Inf. 12:49). But arrival on the shores of stronger intellect is not the end of suffering. The places of intentional violence and other forms of malicious behavior still lie ahead on the pilgrim's tour, and that's about two-thirds of the total lines of Inferno, a proportion roughly equal to that of the cortex to total brain mass. Bestial imagery does not disappear entirely in these lower circles. In the ditch of thieves in the eighth circle, for example, the crooks Buoso and Cianfa have between them only one body that is human in form; their other body form is reptilian. Since both thieves want the human body, the reptilian thief is always taking it and casting off his reptile body onto the rival (Inf. 25: 34). Another beastly outlier is the clever centaur Cacus who is smart enough to make his living by stealing cattle, though not wise enough to avoid stealing them from strong-armed Hercules (Inf. 25:1). Nevertheless, despite such occasional cases of half-wittedness, circles 7, 8 and 9 are focused primarily on the intellect's creation and support of unhappiness, a corrupt condition of mind that Dante calls malice. As Virgil analyzes it at the opening of canto 11, malice can take the form of hostility (as shown in circle 7) or fraud (circles 8-9), These two types correspond to the Achi | ||
In
fourteenth century Italy, educated people knew the complexities of mind
sufficiently well to
go along with Dante's descent into bestial hell
and ascent into intellectual heaven. When
the pilgrim Dante enters through hell gate and wonders where he is, his guide
Virgil tells him that
they have come to the place of "sorrowful people who have lost the good of
intellect" [il ben de l'intelletto] (
An original student of poetic traditions, Dante understood that
The
images begin with those that have
grand literary
pretensions, those who imaginatively engage in adulterous affairs, those who drink too
much, and those who are obsessed by money--all of these weaknesses
being the least of Dante's problems, in his
self-analysis. The portraits then darken into reflections of those
who are angry and violent, as Dante certainly must
have been in the
combative world of Florentine power politics, but there's worse to follow below. The final images are the most
unhappy, depicting those who scheme
to betray their
cities, neighbors, families and friends, as Dante regretted that he had done in the
most dismal moments of his life.
The poet visits the shadows, as Odysseus and Aeneas had gone before
him, to gain perspective on himself, but this time the disclosure is
intimate, and by pre-modern standards very shockingly so. 
The most famous victim in
this part of Inferno is the unrepentant adulteress
The most famous episode
in this part of Inferno is the pilgrim's
timid encounter in the City of Dis at the fiery tomb of
