Love and Justice in Dante

“Justice moved my lofty maker: / the divine Power, the supreme Wisdom / and the primal Love made me/… Leave every hope, ye who enter!” (Canto 3 4-6,9) It is these contrasting words that greet Dante as he embarks on his pilgrimage into hell. It is these contrasting ideas with which students of Dante often struggle. Many feel that the Inferno is a work that shows God to be vindictive and spiteful; scholars who have studied Dante often struggle with reconciling this representation of God with the representation in the Comedy’s later sections, the Paradiso and the Purgatorio. This paper defends a two part thesis: Firstly, that the Inferno is often taught in an inappropriate context, portrayed in an inaccurate way and, as a result, often skewed or vilified. Secondly, when one does study Dante’s Inferno as a part of the whole Divine Comedy and carefully considers Dante’s words in their context, it becomes clear that Dante’s purpose was to highlight God’s love, power, wisdom, and justice with the ultimate goal of spiritually guiding his readers.

“American literary education absolutely mangles the Divine Comedy”-– bold words from Christian History assistant editor Elisha Coffman. Coffman goes on to argue that the Divine Comedy is frequently taught out of context; he points out that most anthologies print the Inferno, or large sections of it, and exclude the rest of the work. (Coffman) Dorothy Sayer’s own experience seems to reinforce this idea. She observed in a letter to Charles Williams that her own copy of the Comedy, handed down from her grandmother, was in three volumes, the Inferno tattered, the Purgatorio in good condition, and the Paradiso like new-— Inferring, of course, that while the Inferno had been read multiple times, neither she, her mother, nor her

When the Inferno is read without grounding in the appropriate and intended context, it is easy to misunderstand Dante’s purpose for writing. As Coffman put it, teaching or reading the Inferno isolated from the Purgatorio and Paradiso is like making a cross-country road trip and ending in Oklahoma City. “This treatment suggests that Dante's journey through the afterlife climaxes with his vision of Satan.” (Coffman) Naturally, being subjected to the work in a way that suggests Dante’s climax was in the epitome of suffering could mislead a reader as to Dante’s intentions.

Perhaps then it is no surprise that popular culture remembers Dante as the man who played God, who condemned his contemporaries to hell, and who then delighted in creating poetic punishments for them. This is not an accurate portrayal; Contrary to what many readers subjected to the Inferno in this way might be led to believe, Dante is not a “bitter curmudgeon gleefully assigning his friends to heaven and his enemies to hell” (Hein 10) and God is not presented as a vindictive or petty tyrant. Dante was required to play the role of Judge to create his work, but, as I will illustrate later, judgment is precisely the action he is attempting to purge the reader of through the Inferno. The Inferno, alone, is a tragedy, and tragedy according to Dante’s definition “awakens our pity, it does not allow us to be judgmental.” (Veith 110)

Once it is established that (1) it is common for Dante’s work to be studied out of context, (2) this is an inappropriate approach to take, and (3) this approach ultimately ends in a gross misunderstanding of Dante’s work, it is then necessary to propose a remedy for this problem. The task is to establish how context provides the correct perspective and, using our contextually accurate understanding of the text, examine what the text reveals to be Dante’s purpose and motivation. Dante’s chief purpose in the Inferno is twofold: to glorify God and to spiritually guide the reader.

When a student is able to remove the bias and preconceived ideas assigned to Dante and read the Inferno in the correct context, it is obvious Dante is calling Christians and Non-Christians alike to radical realizations. Scholars estimate that Dante spent over a decade writing the Divine Comedy, (Liukkonen) and years on the Inferno alone, so it is safe to assume he found the Inferno to be an important and necessary part of communicating his ultimate purpose.

“Before me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last.” (PG) These words on the very gates of the entrance to hell stand as a flashing signal to the reader that this is not a place of playful vengeance on the part of Dante, but a place as holy as the realms explored later in the Comedy. Arguably, a major Goal in the Inferno was to amplify God’s traits of mercy and love in the Purgatory and Paradiso, by contrasting with justice and power in the Inferno. Dante presents the love of God manifested in order and organization of the cosmos. (Hein 10) While it is true that Dante was treated unjustly by those he trusted and was ultimately exiled from the city he loved, the Inferno is not a book of malice and cruel judgment. Dante’s focus is not on “what happens when we die” but rather, on “how should we live in light of eternity” (Hein 10). Dante himself, in a famous letter to his Veronan benefactor Can Grande della Scala, described his purpose for writing The Divine Comedy as "it is an attempt to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and lead them to the state of felicity." (Biography) Dante’s concern is not with scaring his audience or exacting revenge but is on highlighting the ultimate justice of God with the purpose of leading the reader.

When we understand Dante’s motivation in writing the Inferno, and grasp the justness of hell, it becomes increasingly obvious that the Inferno has major implications in contemporary life. If the Inferno is about Love, Justice, Wisdom, and God’s Power, our biases towards the Inferno must crumble and we must come to the realization that just as Virgil led Dante and Dante led his culture, we must let Dante’s work lead us. Imbelli makes the poignant observation that the Inferno takes place during the Lenten season, and it is precisely this time that the church’s annual journey to a renewal of selflessness is at its most dramatic moment. Just as the Comedy was written about a man lost in a forest finding a way out, we also find ourselves in a dark wood of confusion and relativism and need to discover a pathway out. (Jones 10)

There are two ways in which Dante’s Inferno can spiritually guide the reader. First, Dante seeks to spiritually guide the reader by encouraging him to focus on God, not himself, and on glorifying God by mourning over his present condition, not by ego-centrically seeking out injustice. Secondly, to guide by philosophically presenting the gospel and through his words, presenting the enormous paradox of beauty present in evil.

Modern culture shares many of the false ideals and vices of the Greeks. Dante’s ideas were powerful enough to reform a corrupt nation and may have the potential to sculpt reformers in our own society. Dante was the first major canonical writer to completely shatter the classical and mythological ideas of hero, quest, and the afterlife and replace them with distinctively Christian ideas. (Hein 10) The Comedy encourages people to examine their lives, but were it not for the contrast of the Inferno this message would not be nearly as strong. “Whereas the souls in Dante’s hell are still obsessed with their lives on earth… nourishing their old hatreds, the souls in heaven see their former lives with a sense of amused detachment.” (Veith 104) Modern society is obsessed with a tragic view of life, psychoanalyzing each other to death and paying money to nourishing hatreds-- all while refusing to step back and view life with a healthy detachment from self-centeredness. Refusing to look at the image Dante is presenting and see it for the truth it is: We use ego-centric, self glorifying standards to judge our actions, but Dante shows us that God counts

For students studying the Inferno, particularly studying the Inferno without the appropriate context, the poetic focus on suffering and judgment may present a problem. Good poetry is intrinsically beautiful, as the Inferno undisputedly is, but the fact that the Inferno is an intrinsically beautiful work should present a problem to a reader: how can hell be beautiful? Common sense tells a reader that ultimate, eternal suffering should be stomach turning, not beautiful or awe-inspiring. The reason hell can be presented as beautiful is because Dante’s vision of hell is built upon the primal source of beauty: God. Although hell is horrifying and terrifying, Dante has carefully woven together beautiful classical themes and the beauty of ultimate truth and justice. This is not the first time an author has struggled to unite ultimate beauty with ultimate suffering. In the Inferno, Dante approaches perhaps his most fundamental biblical theme of the entire work: the same struggle of the gospel writers, the struggle to convey the ultimate beauty and sorrow of the Cross of Christ with words, the struggle to pen the inexpressible, the Eucatastrophe. Veith calls this idea of the problem of beauty in the paradoxical environment of utter tragedy and suffering the “problem of laughter.” (101) “Dante uses metaphor and allegory much as Jesus did to describe the Kingdom of God.” (Jones 10) While no one is moved to tears of laughter by the Inferno, it can be inferred from the character Dante’s reaction at seeing certain people in hell that on some level there can be rejoicing at the image of hell-- rejoicing that evil has received its due payment and God has acted with the justice he has promised. Dante pities some of the characters in the Inferno while others he punishes further. Dante’s judgmental reaction is similar to the reaction any human would have in hell; deeming some worthy of pity and others not. It is this judgmental nature that Dante seeks to highlight. Dante is careful to point out through Virgil’s gentle guiding that feeling pity for these souls is not a righteous feeling. Each sinner in hell has been judged by a fair and flawless standard and is paying the just price that was set forth for their sin. An observer in the Inferno who feels pity, then, is not feeling such as a reaction to injustice, but is feeling pity because their heart is not in full submission to God. As Imbelli argued, the Inferno, then, is not the place for tears of mercy. Because hell is just and righteous, the only appropriate tears in the Inferno are tears for the condition of ones own soul. (Imbelli) Although Dante presents the stories of the condemned in a way that sometimes makes us stop and pity them, the inscription on the gates of hell should reinforce the truth that it is we who need to change, and accept justice rather than pity those justly condemned. (Hollander 33)

When Dante's Inferno is read within its intended context, the meaning and purpose behind such a dark section of the Comedy become much more clear. As long as the Inferno is taught without the appropriate context, it will remain to be misunderstood and vilified. Without an understanding of the context which Dante intended it is impossible to correctly understand the Inferno. However, when this work is presented as a part of the larger body of the Divine Comedy, the reader is able to examine the work from the correct perspective and see Dante's purposes: to glorify God by magnifying his power and justice (thereby amplifying his mercy and love in later books), and to guide the reader spiritually and morally.

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Imbelli, Robert P. “Dante’s Tears and Lenten Transformation.” America Vol 174 Issue 10, 3/23/96-3/30/96: 22-23. Available from Academic Search Elite [database online]. EBSCOhost. Accessed 21 April 2003. <http://search.epnet.com>.

J.H. “Dante’s Inferno: Creative and Cruel.” 1997. Digital Dante. April 24. 2003 <http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/papers/dicac/>.

Jones, Andrew. “Books & Culture Corner: Lie Is Beautiful." Christianity Today. April 17. 2001: 10.

Liukkonen, Petri. "Books and Writers: Dante Alighieri. 2003. <http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dante.htm>.

Sayers, Dorothy. “I Still Don’t Know How He Does It." Christian History. Spring. 2001: 18.

Veith, Gene Edward Jr. Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature. Crossway Books. Wheaton, Illinois. 1990.

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