The memory of what is irrevocably lost is the true meaning of Hell in The Divine Comedy.
Dante Alighieri is considered as the Father of Italian Poetry.
The poetry of the Comedy is immortal. It is an unequaled phenomenon, as well as a brilliant work of art.
Written in the vernacular (Italian) rather than in Latin of medieval authors this fruit of his imagination, (through a poetic journey,) thus ushered in the flowering of the Romantic Language which took place in the Renaissance, 600 years ago.
The plot of the Comedy is simple. The poet, narrator, wandering lost in the woods on Good Friday in 1300, meets the spirit of Virgil (who acts as his guide) — the greatest of Latin poets and author of Aenid.
Despite the universality of the Divine Comedy, with its great theme of man’s search for salvation, the poem can be read on one level as an impassioned partisan discourse on Italian politics in the 13th century.
All of Dante’s bitterness and indignation come out of his poetry: many of the souls he meets on his journey are local figures, enemies he curses.
The Inferno is vivid. Dante’s genius as a poet allows us to feel pity for many of the tormented souls, although it is clear that their own actions have brought them through the gates of hell.
No literature paints such a detailed picture as Dante presents in the Comedy. Its geography is explicit, the punishments and rewards of its inhabitants scrupulously based on their behavior, which brought them to damnation.
In the Inferno, there is a diatribe against Italy’s proud Florence and her ungrateful people — filled with greed and corruption that should be punished, if not burned to the ground. The clergy’s greed of material goods.
He was also outraged by the endless strife and rebellion against imperial authority.
The story of Paolo and Francesca are the best-known and most pitied of all Dante’s damned souls.
A tale that is simple, as it is also tragic.
One day, while reading the French Romance Lancelot du Lac, they fell in love. But the lovers were surprised and killed by the angry husband.
In hell, they are condemned to be swept away perpetually in the “infernal storm.”
Although the husband’s act was a “crime of honor,” justified and to be proud of, it is the ill-starred couple, defiantly and hopelessly in love, even after death, which aroused Dante’s (even the readers’) compassion.
Dante’s Inferno would seem economical with fire. There are no flames that shoot up from the abyss, plunging toward the center of the earth.
Only four categories of sinners are punished by fire: the heretics are buried in fiery arcs; the violent against God, confined on dry, sandy oil in which flames rain slowly and continuously; the simoniacs, fixed in narrow holes, head downward, their soles licked by flames; the counselors of fraud, imprisoned within the tongues of flames.
Eternal ice and cold torment the gluttons, whipped by hail and snow. Those guilty of anger are caught in the mud of the Stygran marsh; the traitors, in the icy grip of Cocytus.
The other torments are imaginative and horrible, bordering on the grotesque. The thick river of blood in which homicides are immersed; the twisted cursed trees in which souls of suiciders moan.
But if fire was scarce in Dante’s Inferno, there is no shortage of devils. There are herds of them medieval demons: horned, fanged hairy, armed with whips or hooks.
Thousands had to be dispersed so that Dante and Virgil could pass, horned demons with large scourges who pitilessly belabored backs of the damned, forcing them to run a breathless, endless race.
The worst demons literally have Evil claws. They are, by implications, the extensions of the offspring of evil. They guard the barrators, those who trafficked public offices and authority for profit.
Dante’s imagination gave free rein among these.
They had tusks like hogs protruding from their mouths on either side, grinding their teeth, rolling their eyes in their eagerness to strike the damned souls.
All are armed with drag hooks, which tear the flesh off their victims. All vent their ferocious glee with rude gestures and noises.
Even more hideous are the demons who dominate the chasms of the sower of scandal and schism, guard and executioner, wielding a sword with which they viciously mutilate the damned passing by. Thus, we see raised amputated hands, swinging severed heads by the hair, like a lantern.
This cold horror paves the way for the encounter with the three-headed Lucifer, The Emperor of the Realm of Sorrow, who is immersed up to his chest in the icy river of Cocytus.
The perpetual flapping of his bat-like wings raises an icy wine, which freezes the river Cocytus for eternity, while his three monstrous mouths tear and bite the three greatest sinners of antiquity.
According to Dante, Brutus and Cassius, the traitors of the Caesar’s Roman Empire and Judas Escariot are the betrayers of God.
The worse torment of all, shared by every damned soul, is the consciousness of having lost God with a certainty that is confirmed by the inscription over the threshold of the “doleful city…Hell.”
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
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