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VI

THE MORAL TOPOGRAPHY OF THE INFERNO1

HELL is a vast pit or funnel piercing down to the centre of the earth, formed when Lucifer and his angels were hurled down from Heaven. It lies beneath the inhabited world, whose centre is Jerusalem and Mount Calvary; its base toward the earth, and its apex at the centre. It is divided into nine concentric circles, the lower of which are separated by immense precipices circles that grow more narrow in circumference, more intense and horrible in suffering, until the last is reached where Lucifer is fixed in the ice at the earth's centre, at the farthest point from God, gazing upward in defiance towards Jerusalem, where his power was overthrown at the cross (cf. Inf. xxxiv. 106-126).

"There are two elements in sin," writes St. Thomas Aquinas: "the conversion to a perishable good, which is the material element in sin; and the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the formal and completing element in sin." In Dante's Purgatory the material element is purged away. In his Hell sin is considered mainly on the side of this formal element, its aversion from the Supreme Good; and its enormity is revealed in the hideousness of its effects. The

1 E. G. Gardner, Dante, Temple Classics, p. 92. Vide Dante's Cosmography, p. 236.

I. Incontinence

TABLE III.

CLASSIFICATION OF SINS IN THE INFERNO. (D.)

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i. Violent against others

ii.

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66 themselves and goods
66 God and nature

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ii. Antenora.

Treachery

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ethical system of the Inferno, as set forth in Canto xi., corresponds to Aristotle's threefold division of things to be morally avoided: Incontinence, Bestiality, Malice. Dante equates Bestiality and Malice with the Ciceronian Violence and Fraud, by which injury is done. Thus there is the upper Hell of sins proceeding from the irrational part of the soul, divided into five circles. The lower Hell of Bestiality and Malice is the terrible city of Dis, the true kingdom of Lucifer, in which, after the intermediate sixth circle, come three great circles, each divided into a number of sub-divisions, and each separated by a chasm from the one above; the seventh circle of Violence and Bestiality; followed by two circles of Malice the eighth of simple fraud, and the ninth of treachery. There is much dispute as to how far Dante further equates this division with the seven capital sins recognized by the Church. Although actual deeds are considered in Hell, rather than the sinful propensities that lead to them, it seems plausible to recognize in Incontinence the five lesser capital sins: Luxury, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth (though the treatment of this sin in the Inferno is questionable), and Anger; and to regard the whole of the three circles of the city of Dis as proceeding from and being the visible effects of envy and pride, the sins proper to devils according to St. Thomas, seen in their supreme degree in him whose pride made him rebel against his Maker, and whose envy brought death into the world.

VII

THE NATURE OF THE VERGIL OF THE

DIVINA COMMEDIA1

THE reasons which led Dante to choose Vergil for his guide were numerous. In the first place Vergil was Dante's favorite author and the greatest poet with whom he was acquainted. Being a great poet himself, Dante appreciated the art of Vergil in a way which no other man of the Middle Ages had ever been able to do, and looked on him as his master in style. He admired him further as the singer of the glories of Italy and as a poet of Italian feeling. It was through Vergil again that Dante had brought to maturity his lofty ideal of the Empire and all the elevated poetry which that implied; and in the formation of this ideal Vergil had served him not merely as theorist, but also as actual historical witness both by the subject of his poem and by the period to which it belonged. Then, by following the system of allegorical interpretation which was in vogue in the Middle Ages, Dante found in the Æneid just that account of the soul's progress toward perfection which was the subject of his own poem. Once more, in his conception of the relation between reason and faith and the power of the intellect, unenlightened by revelation, to

1 Vergil in the Middle Ages. Domenico Comparetti, trans. by E. F. M. Benecke. The selections are taken from chapter xv. (By permission.)

attain great truths, Vergil stood out preeminently among the great names of antiquity as the one who, according to mediæval ideas, appeared the purest and the nearest the Christ, of whom he had been, however unconsciously, a prophet. And finally, in the construction of his great poem, Dante derived the main idea and many of the details from Vergil, and made more use of him than of any other writer in the course of his work.

All this will, I trust, make it clear that the office of guide assigned by Dante to Vergil is a thoroughly genuine one, and that the choice of Vergil for this purpose is not, as is generally considered, a mere freak of the imagination determined by external causes, but has just as true a psychological reason as the choice of his other guide, Beatrice. And it is further necessary to bear in mind the essential fact that Dante's is a creative genius, not in the field of science, but in that of poetry, and that therefore, while admiring intellectual greatness in every form, if called upon to choose as his associate between a philosopher and a poet, he could not fail to choose the latter. Hence those with whom in his poem he spends much time are always artists and poets, such as Vergil, Statius, Sordello, Arnaldo, and Casella, while the five men di cotanto senno, whom he meets in Limbo, are all poets. It is as poet that he regards himself in the moments of his strongest emotions; this is his supreme merit, by which he hopes to obtain that return from exile al bell' ovile ov' io dormii agnello; and it is a poet's crown which he aspires to take in his bel San Giovanni, where first he was admitted into the Christian communion :

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