If you’re looking for “Dante, Part 1”, well, there isn’t any. I’ve never written a piece on the master of disgust, as Professor Artz, and, apparently, no one else, called him in my freshman year at Oberlin. But I alluded to Dante in my recent discussions of such ignoble figures as Dan Drezner, David French, and Ross Douthat, and also David Brooks, who disapprove of Donald Trump but aren’t sure if assassination of high government officials is such a bad idea, at least as long as they’re Muslim and, you know, “bad guys”. Dante, in his visit to Hell, rather famously found a large crowd outside the Gates to the nether regions, folks who, the Roman poet Virgil, his guide, explained, were “the souls of that inglorious crew who lived unhonoured, but from guilt kept clear.” Vergil further explains that, since these souls refused to choose between good and evil in life, they remain hung between life and death forever after:
No hope of death is to the wretches known;
So dim the life and abject where they sigh
They count all sufferings easier than their own.
Of them the world endures no memory;
Mercy and justice them alike disdain.
Speak we not of them: glance, and pass them by.
The Inferno, Canto III, lines 46-51, translation by James Romanes Sibbald
I remembered this passage well enough to find it, but I didn’t remember a further riff on this theme, which Dante seems to have grafted onto traditional Catholic theology for his own purposes, which actually comes a few lines earlier in the poem:
Mingled they are with caitiff angels, who,
Though from avowed rebellion they refrained,
Disloyal to God, did selfish ends pursue.
Heaven hurled them forth, lest they her beauty stained;
Received they are not by the nether hell,
Else triumph thence were by the guilty gained
Unless you know the “full story”, this takes a little unpacking. Although the Catholic Church didn’t invent the whole notion of Hell and Damnation, the idea of where Hell came from was a bit of a conundrum. Did God create Hell because He knew ahead of time that Adam and Eve wouldn’t obey His commandments, so that He’d have a place ready for them? That didn’t seem to “fit”, somehow, so the notion of rebellious angels was invented, though that doesn’t really make sense either, but, well, no matter. Perhaps I’m, um, wrong, but it’s certainly my impression that Dante himself invented the fate of neither Heaven nor Hell and in particular put a third class of angels, not loyal to God but also not loyal to Satan, the “caitiff” angels, in Mr. Sibbald’s translation (which apparently dates from 1884), who do not actually go to Hell because otherwise the damned rebellious angels could take pleasure in the fact that they suffered no more for their rebellion than did those who did nothing wrong, though also nothing right.
Well, the point I’m actually getting to is that Dante’s point really has nothing to do with theology but rather everything to do with Italian politics. Dante was famously booted out of Florence, for, basically, getting on the wrong side of a power struggle between Pope Boniface VIII and the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which is why Dante tells us in Canto XIX of the Inferno that Boniface VIII will end up there in a few years (since Dante’s journey takes place in 1300 and Boniface didn’t die until 1303, Dante has to rely on the ability of the dead to see the future and explain it to him—since they are out of time they can see it whole). Dante bitterly resented those who stood aside and let his banishment happen, and it is no wonder that when he sees the number of those outside Hell he says “I could not have guessed that death had undone so many.”
It doesn’t seem to bother Dante that he is implicitly placing himself in the position of the rebellious angels, perhaps because everything on earth is “backwards”, so that, in Heaven, the last shall be first and the first shall be last, the exilers exiled, and the exiled welcomed home.
Afterwords
It seems that both Dante and Machiavelli, another Florentine exile, who lived about two centuries after Dante, wrote their famous works only because they found their hopes for a high-level political career completely blocked. Anyone who is familiar with Dante’s poem knows of his “obsession” with “Beatrice”, with whom he fell in love, as he tells us, when he was nine and she was seven. In “La Vita Nuova”, Dante describes his love for Beatrice, who died in her early twenties (they were both married to other people, naturally, and quite likely never had anything resembling a “serious” conversation) as defining his life. After writing a few poems immediately after her death, “I resolved to write of her no more, until I could write of her as no man ever wrote of woman before, as she doth well know.” But an unknown scribe at Wikipedia suggests that in a later work, still preceding the Comedy, Convivio (the Banquet), Dante says that he has put aside his youthful loves to concentrate on “Lady Philosophy”. In the Comedy itself he seems to have combined the two.
