Inferno, Translated by Jason Baxter
I do not know if late medieval Italy was more wicked than our age, but the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) thought that his time was apocalyptically evil. Italy, once a cultivated “garden” of order and justice, had become a blasted moral wasteland, a dark, thorn-infested, noxious wood, lacking fruitful vegetation, like some heath out of King Lear. [1] Beaten-down Italy (Inf. 1:106) was now a “widow” (Purg. 6:112–13), bereft of all but a few genuine acts of love and heartfelt virtue. Italy was morally devastated, an apocalyptic desert, haunted by demonic beasts. What the prophet Jeremiah had spoken in elusive and enigmatic words was now becoming plain and evident to all who were not a part of the corruption themselves:
O Lord…Thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; Thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction…. Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces. (Jeremiah 5:3–6)
Indeed, the moral devastation of Italy had rendered it a land more loathsome than any imaginary landscape populated by the dreamiest ancient poet with the most horrific mythological monsters. Classical writers had written inventively about deserts infested with all kinds of terrible “chelydri, jaculi, and phareae, / and also cenchri and amphisbaenae,” but none of these mythological landscapes had “so many venomous beasts or ones so evil” as what Italy now produced (Inf. 24:86–88).
And this is the nightmarish reality that Dante portrays himself waking up to at the very beginning of his great poem, and it is this awakening, this startling realization, that causes him anxiety, shortness of breath, and physiological panic just to narrate it:
Midway along the path that makes for us a life
I found myself in the midst of a dark wood.
Yes. The true way was lost. 3
And, ah! It is so hard to speak of it—
this wood, untamed and harsh and wild—
that in my mind, even now, my fear returns.6
So bitter…death is hardly worse.
But to treat the good I found there
I will speak forth the other things I saw.9
I cannot well recall how I came there…
I was so full of sleep at that time,
that I had wandered off from the true way.12
Unlike other allegorical poems of his time (for instance, the Roman de la Rose), Dante’s poem is not a dream. Indeed, the sickening realization is that he is no longer dreaming, even though he wishes he were (cf. Inf.30:136–141). The dream was pretending that everything was all right.
And so, Dante the Prophet, Dante the Preacher, Dante the Decrier of Sin, throughout the whole of the Comedy, blasts, abuses, excoriates, and decries the corruption and the falsity of the wealth-obsessed, pleasure-seeking elites of his world. And he does it city by city:
O, Pistoia! Pistoia! Why don’t you resolve
to burn your city down to ashes? Last no longer?
In doing evil, you far surpass your ancestors. (Inf. 25:10–12)
He says this after talking to a man of violence, the bloodthirsty Vanni Fucci, who had introduced himself to Dante as one who was more pleased to live the life of a beast than a life fit for humans: “Just like the bastard I was. I’m Vanni Fucci, / the monster! Pistoia was a fitting lair” (24:125–26).
Later, Dante will turn to Pisa: “O, Pisa! Shame of all who live within / the lovely countryside where people say sì.” He then prays that Pisa’s enemies will be stirred to “build a wall and shut the Arno’s mouth, / so every single one of your people drowns!” (33:79–84). At another point, a wealthy career politician, Venedico Caccianemico of Bologna, is made to confess that it was he who had tricked a young girl “to yield to the Marquis’s will” (18:56). He protests: “But I’m not the only Bolognese who weeps down here: / it is the opposite! This place is…full of them” (18:58–59). Toward the end of Inferno, Dante wonders: “O Genovese: you are a people foreign / to every courtesy and full of every vice: / why have you not been scattered throughout the world?” (33:151–53). But he saves the best for his hometown! With infinite scorn he congratulates Florence on being so competitive in this great sporting match of evil:
Rejoice, Firenze, since you are so great!
and so you spread your name abroad: through all of hell!
Among the thieves I found five of
your citizens: this brought me shame.
Is this your plan to climb up to the highest ranks? (26:1–6)
In the Bible, when God wants to destroy Sodom, Abraham bargains with the Lord, ultimately persuading him to spare the debauched city if there were yet just ten righteous men. Medieval Florence, like ancient Sodom, cannot even produce that discounted figure:
“Just men? There are two. They are not heeded.
Pride, envy, and avarice: those are
three sparks which set all hearts on fire.” (Inf. 6:73–75)
In Dante’s eyes, the elite of his world were obsessed with enriching themselves, gorging on wealth and pleasure. Sometimes, they got what they wanted by hurting people or issuing unjust laws, but even more often, they used trickery and propaganda and fraud, presenting the face of a just man while hiding their scorpion tails (see 17:10–12). Secretly, with a wink and a nod and a cute little smile, they sold public assets or government services to private buyers in dark back rooms (see Inf. 21–22). They created private wealth by minting false coins, stonily indifferent to the fact that this would devalue currency and crush the poor, whose money would become worthless (Inf. 30). They lied and falsified legal documents to get inheritances (Inf. 30); they acquired girls and turned them into whores (Inf. 18); they devised secret military strategies which were guaranteed to secure victory, at any human cost (Inf. 27). And what caused Dante just as much sorrow was that the Church was in league with the wealthy elite because the clerics, just like the abusive power-mongers in secular society, itched and lusted for decadent amounts of luxurious wealth (Inf. 7). Even the great monastic houses had been spoiled!
Dante felt that after centuries of donations from aristocratic patrons, traditional monastic houses had become too powerful, too rich, not unlike modern private universities that have endowments of billions of dollars and own logging companies in South America. They were compromised. Their abbots and priors were the sloughed-off, superfluous spare heirs of aristocratic households. And thus the monastic houses were ripe fields, with plentiful harvests, and too few demonic workers to bring it all in. Or, as one of the demons says: “I got me one of the elders of Saint Zita! / Shove him down on in and I’ll go back for more! // Because up there, it is a land of plenty!” (Inf. 21:38–40).
But how did all this happen? How on earth did we get here?
Like many of his contemporaries, Dante believed that he was living at the most critical inflection point of all history, a time of intense spiritual awakening but also of fervent diabolical opposition. In this, the great Florentine poet seems to have been strongly influenced by the vision of history being spread, evangelically, by the so-called Spiritual Franciscans, those Franciscans who were radically committed to a severe and austere poverty in the tradition ascribed to Francis and Francis’s first followers, like Brother Giles and Brother Leo.[2] Dante might even have heard the sermons of the two most charismatic and learned leaders of the Spiritual Franciscans of his day—Peter John Olivi and Ubertino da Casale—who were preaching and teaching at the Franciscan studium in Florence between 1287 and 1290; that is, when Dante was still in his impressionable twenties.[3]
Peter John Olivi and Ubertino were able to write and preach with such charismatic intensity because they had been inspired by the now-obscure but then-famous Calabrian Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), who had arrived at a strikingly original reading of that most enigmatic book of the Bible, the Apocalypse of St John. According to Abbot Joachim, history, like a symphony with different tempos, can be divided into three great movements, and these three movements can then be further subdivided into seven stages. In this way, the whole of history can be read as a reflection of the operation of the Trinity (three stages) but also unfolding within the created world, of the “seven days” of history.
The first age was the Age of the Father, “in which mankind lived under the Law until the end of the Old Testament.” The Second Age was the “Age of Grace,” and began with the New Testament dispensation. The Third Age was the “Age of Contemplatives,” under the special inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and it began with St Benedict. “This age would see the rise of new religious orders to convert the whole world and usher in the Ecclesia Spiritualis (the Spiritual Church).”[4] The first great age was paternal, one of law and fatherly discipline, and ran from Adam to the Patriarchs and then on to the Prophets and up to John the Baptist. The second age was inaugurated by the earthly ministry of Christ, and in it the clergy played a special role. But in the Third Age, the Age of the Holy Spirit, contemplatives—viri spirituales (“men of the spirit”)—would be given a special spiritual role. If Benedict was the “Adam” of the Third Age, then Bernard of Clairvaux (Joachim, like Bernard, was a Cistercian) was its Moses. This meant that Joachim was his age’s John the Baptist, who could point forward to a yet unknown alter Christus (“second Christ”), who would be the Angel of the Sixth Seal, as prophesied in Apocalypse 6:12).
And for a while, it really looked as though all of this might come to pass. Just a few years after Joachim’s death, a dream-haunted heir to a unknown Umbrian merchant’s fortune inexplicably lost interest in the family business, his social status, and the unlimited easy pleasures on offer to the ultra-rich. The strange young man began to run away from his father, hiding out in dilapidated churches in the Umbrian countryside, until their crucifixes began to speak to him and issue him orders about reform and repentance. Thus, Francis from Assisi came to the conclusion that only a life spent in literal obedience to Scripture would possess spiritual value. For too long, the Church had been engaged in the delicate and subtle interpretation of Scripture. What we needed now were Christians who obeyed and loved with alacrity, not more subtle theologians! And thus Francis threw himself into a life of grinding poverty and literal obedience to the commands of the Gospels: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast” (Mt 19:21). And so he did.
In this, Francis and his followers felt they were walking in the footsteps of the ancient Christian monks of the desert, whose lives and sayings were enjoying a comeback in late medieval Italy, even being translated from ancient Latin into medieval Italian (known as the “vernacular”).[5] Like the desert fathers, Francis wished to lead the so-called vita apostolica (“apostolic life”)—a life of literal poverty in imitation of the earliest Christians who had, it was assumed, imitated the Lord himself. Francis, as portrayed in The Mirror of Perfection, did not want his followers to have houses (the order, in the early days, lived in mud and waddle huts), lavish churches, or books. You could have a robe, a belt, and underwear. And sandals. But only in case of proven need. No barns for grain. No wine. No bank account. He didn’t even want his followers to own copies of the Psalter or the Gospel! He wanted them to live the Gospel, not gloss it. And yet, this absolute commitment to the most literal obedience to the Gospel led to the paradox of the Franciscan way: the unflinching choice of grinding poverty and radical obedience led to an unexpected exuberance.
Bonaventure paints for us such a moment of paradox. Once, when traveling along a country road, Francis was attacked, beaten, and robbed, he responded in this way: “When [the thieves] went away, [Francis] jumped out of the ditch, and brimming over with joy, in a loud voice began to make the forest resound with the praise of the Creator of all” (Life, II.6). [6] Getting robbed means approaching poverty ever more perfectly, and embracing poverty means disencumbering yourself of all but the inner treasure. And possessing the inner treasure is the secret source of joy. According to Francis, when you let go of everything, then, paradoxically, you come to possess it all. In the language of medieval theology, Francis gained intelligentia, that deep understanding buried in the most remote regions of the soul, that experiential knowledge that only comes from union with the “form of forms” himself (see below). And when Francis achieved that insight, he also gained the ability to listen in on the inner song of the world, to hear the secret hymn of praise inarticulately groaned by all creation: “All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that You have made, And first my lord Brother Sun…. How beautiful he is, how radiant in all his splendor!”[7]
Although Joachim died before the formation of the Franciscan order, it wasn’t difficult for later Franciscans—like Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi, and Ubertino da Casale—to apply the Joachite prophesies retrospectively to Francis and the Franciscan order. For them, St Francis was clearly the Angel of the Sixth Seal, and they spread this news with evangelical zeal: the world had now come into the sixth stage, the penultimate age, in which the Church was on the verge of undergoing a radical purification, sloughing off the worldly possessions that had hampered her zeal in previous ages. It would be a time in which those who claimed to be Christian would actually prefer the inner treasure of the presence of Christ to worldly goods. The whole Church would soon be made up of viri spirituales! The Church was about to enter the Sabbath Age! Such was the preaching Dante might have heard in Florence as a young man.
But along with so much hope, there was a kind of counter-prophecy made at the time: the rise of the viri spirituales would be accompanied by a period of intense conflict, because the Angel of the Sixth Seal would be counterattacked by the Beast with Seven Heads, the Antichrist of the Apocalypse, who would prowl throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Dante agreed. Employing a not-so-delicate metaphor, the poet accused the papacy of having pimped the Church out to secular rulers, in an act of spiritual adultery (see Inf.19). Rather than leaving the ordering of secular society to the lawful and just rule of the father of Europe (the Holy Roman Emperor), the papacy had engaged in an infinite number of intrigues, especially with the ambitious French crown. But to really get a handle on all this, you have to go back several hundred years before Dante, since to talk of Guelphs and Ghibellines is a little like explaining Republicans and Democrats to your French friend: you’d have to go back to Lincoln and the Whigs and the Agrarian Party for him to make any sense of it all.
This is an excerpt from Jason M. Baxter’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno
Notes:
- For Dante’s description of Italy as a nasty, unclean selva, see his prose treatise On Vernacular Eloquence, known by its Latin title, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I.15.
- For a brief introduction to the century-long debate over the Franciscan order that took place within the order itself and within the Catholic Church, see Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 70–78.
- For the influence of the Spiritual Franciscans on Dante, see Charles Till Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), 239–44; Davis, “Poverty and Eschatology in the Commedia,” in Dante’s Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 42–70; Dabney Park, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: What Dante Says about Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Matthew of Acquaspart, and Ubertino da Casale,” in Dante Studies 132 (2014): 267–312; and Nicholas Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and Papacy in the “Commedia” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- Quotations in this paragraph come from Lydia Schumacher, “Joachim of Fiore,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). See also Bernard McGinn’s classic The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: MacMillan, 1985); and for the viri spirituales, see McGinn, “Apocalyptic Traditions and Spiritual Identity in Thirteenth-Century Religious Life,” in The Roots of the Modern Christian Tradition, ed. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 1–26, 293–300.
- See Carlo Delcorno’s introduction to his brilliant edition of Domenico Cavalca’s translation of the Latin vitae patrum into medieval Italian: Cinque Vite di Erimiti (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1992), 11–72.
- “Life of Francis,” in Classics of Western Spirituality: Bonaventure, trans. Ewert Cousins (Paulist Press, 1978), 177–328.
- “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” St Francis of Assisi: An Omnibus of Sources, ed. Marion A. Habig, 4th ed. (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1991), 130–31.