Inferno: Canto 4 -- Circle 1
Pilgrims,
We're at Virgil's home in hell, the circle in which reside the virtuous pagans, whom, Virgil declares, "were sinless. And still their merits fail,/ for they lacked Baptism's grace, which is the door/ of the true faith you were born to. Their birth fell/ before the age of the Christian mysteries,/ and so they did not worship God's Trinity/ in fullest duty. I am one of these" (34-9). Because the population of this level of hell is "sinless," meaning not guilty of having committed sins that would have caused them to be punished further down in hell with other pagans (like Odysseus in the 8th circle) they suffer nothing except a lack of hope. Had they been born under the light of Christ, they would have likely made it to heaven through purgatory long before, but it is not only their having been born under the light of Christ that could have saved them. Virgil, who died in 19 B.C. adds that a Great One descended shortly after his arrival (Christ's name cannot be uttered in hell even though, oddly, "christian" can be) and collected all the souls he sought fit to take with him into heaven -- these included Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, and others of the Hebrew tradition. To be one of God's chosen people wasn't extended to the rest of the world until after the New Covenant brought about by the Resurrection. As we progress further, we'll find that while it took being one of the elect to get into the Christian heaven, it took relatively little to get flung quite deeply into the Christian hell. In very subtle ways like this, Dante Catholicizes antiquity, for God is God always; even though God did not choose the pagans as his own people, this did not exclude their being his creation and subject to his eschatological system.
It is in this canto that Dante makes it known what he thinks of himself as a poet, including himself in the company of the immortal poets and swelling with pride that they would consider him one of their number. (He'll later likely be serving penance for that on the cornice of pride in Purgatory.) He doesn't name-drop gratuitously, though. Each of the five poets he names (including Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, Horace, and Homer) provides him with material for the later cantos. This introduction to them, then, is a kind of tribute to their being an inspiration for his work as much as it is a kind of challenge that he can surpass them all (which he'll boast about doing deeper in hell in statements like "Now let Lucan be still with his history/ of poor Sabellus and Nassidius,/ and wait to hear what next appeared to me./ Of Cadmus and Arethusa be Ovid silent./ I have no need to envy him those verses/ where he makes one a fountain, and one a serpent:/ for he never transformed two beings face to face/ in such a way that both their natures yielded/ their elements each to each, as in this case" (Inferno, Canto 25, 91-9)). To Virgil, he's indebted to the Aeneid. To Homer, the Iliad. To Horace, The Art of Poetry and the Epistles and Satires. To Ovid, the Metamorphoses. To Lucan, the Pharsalia. In the Citadel, he finds a person to whom he owes an even greater death for his Nicomachaen Ethics (which we'll read in Paradise) -- Aristotle, the master of those who know and the great medieval commentators on Aristotle, who happened to be Arabic, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Roschd), for it was largely through Arabic translations that the West had come to know again of Aristotle.
With the litany of thinkers, philosophers, and statesmen (including Aeneas and Julius Caesar, of whom Lucan's Pharsalia is largely concerned), we really are in a great place filled with the highest accomplishments of the human spirit divested of grace. The dazzling light of reason can only carry us so far, though, as will be made abundantly clear when Virgil is denied access to heaven (an idea with which we've already been made acquainted in the first canto, lines 115-19). Hail the greatness of human reason and, were we not in hell, I'd recommend we send a million thanks to God for it as we'll need it as we descend further below.
S.
We're at Virgil's home in hell, the circle in which reside the virtuous pagans, whom, Virgil declares, "were sinless. And still their merits fail,/ for they lacked Baptism's grace, which is the door/ of the true faith you were born to. Their birth fell/ before the age of the Christian mysteries,/ and so they did not worship God's Trinity/ in fullest duty. I am one of these" (34-9). Because the population of this level of hell is "sinless," meaning not guilty of having committed sins that would have caused them to be punished further down in hell with other pagans (like Odysseus in the 8th circle) they suffer nothing except a lack of hope. Had they been born under the light of Christ, they would have likely made it to heaven through purgatory long before, but it is not only their having been born under the light of Christ that could have saved them. Virgil, who died in 19 B.C. adds that a Great One descended shortly after his arrival (Christ's name cannot be uttered in hell even though, oddly, "christian" can be) and collected all the souls he sought fit to take with him into heaven -- these included Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, and others of the Hebrew tradition. To be one of God's chosen people wasn't extended to the rest of the world until after the New Covenant brought about by the Resurrection. As we progress further, we'll find that while it took being one of the elect to get into the Christian heaven, it took relatively little to get flung quite deeply into the Christian hell. In very subtle ways like this, Dante Catholicizes antiquity, for God is God always; even though God did not choose the pagans as his own people, this did not exclude their being his creation and subject to his eschatological system.
It is in this canto that Dante makes it known what he thinks of himself as a poet, including himself in the company of the immortal poets and swelling with pride that they would consider him one of their number. (He'll later likely be serving penance for that on the cornice of pride in Purgatory.) He doesn't name-drop gratuitously, though. Each of the five poets he names (including Virgil, Lucan, Ovid, Horace, and Homer) provides him with material for the later cantos. This introduction to them, then, is a kind of tribute to their being an inspiration for his work as much as it is a kind of challenge that he can surpass them all (which he'll boast about doing deeper in hell in statements like "Now let Lucan be still with his history/ of poor Sabellus and Nassidius,/ and wait to hear what next appeared to me./ Of Cadmus and Arethusa be Ovid silent./ I have no need to envy him those verses/ where he makes one a fountain, and one a serpent:/ for he never transformed two beings face to face/ in such a way that both their natures yielded/ their elements each to each, as in this case" (Inferno, Canto 25, 91-9)). To Virgil, he's indebted to the Aeneid. To Homer, the Iliad. To Horace, The Art of Poetry and the Epistles and Satires. To Ovid, the Metamorphoses. To Lucan, the Pharsalia. In the Citadel, he finds a person to whom he owes an even greater death for his Nicomachaen Ethics (which we'll read in Paradise) -- Aristotle, the master of those who know and the great medieval commentators on Aristotle, who happened to be Arabic, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Roschd), for it was largely through Arabic translations that the West had come to know again of Aristotle.
With the litany of thinkers, philosophers, and statesmen (including Aeneas and Julius Caesar, of whom Lucan's Pharsalia is largely concerned), we really are in a great place filled with the highest accomplishments of the human spirit divested of grace. The dazzling light of reason can only carry us so far, though, as will be made abundantly clear when Virgil is denied access to heaven (an idea with which we've already been made acquainted in the first canto, lines 115-19). Hail the greatness of human reason and, were we not in hell, I'd recommend we send a million thanks to God for it as we'll need it as we descend further below.
S.
posted by Sebastian Mahfood at 9:22 PM
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