Canto XII

I’m making progress with Dante, and I have a major discovery to report: his book (poem, whatever) isn’t called The Inferno. It’s called Inferno. At least that’s what it says on the cover. Also, Inferno isn’t the name of the whole book. It’s the first of three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The whole work is The Divine Comedy. I never knew why copies had The Divine Comedy above Inferno on their covers. I figured maybe the book’s name was something like The Inferno – The Divine Comedy. I did not check. I did not care.

I’ll have to stop writing “The Inferno.”

More big news: the entire book is called The Divine Comedy, not because it’s full of laughs and features a transvestite who worked with John Waters, but because it has a happy resolution. In Dante’s time, the word “comedy” didn’t have anything to do with humor. It was used to refer to stories that didn’t end in disaster.

Now I don’t feel so bad about missing all the punch lines.

I’m enjoying the book a great deal. My perception may be distorted; it may be that virtually any book would seem enjoyable after Confessions. I won’t question it. It’s nice to be able to read without a timer to force me to keep going.

I continue to be befuddled by Dante’s infatuation with Greeks and Greek culture. Dante was a religious fanatic, so you would think he would have been on the outs with the Greeks. Christianity arose from the religion of the Hebrews, not the Greeks. There is a huge gulf between Jesus and, say, Socrates. The gulf between Judaism and Hellenism is well known. The contrast should be obvious to anyone who has read the Bible and Symposium (note how I didn’t call it “The Symposium“; I’m learning).

My questionable understanding of the history of Western thought goes like this: the Greeks stole some ideas from Egypt, and they developed them pretty well. The Romans stole all the ideas the Greeks had and improved them somewhat. Then Rome fell, and it was as if Europe had its Internet connection unplugged for about a thousand years. Not much happened.

Presumably (I will guess), people like Dante didn’t have a whole lot of post-Roman thinkers to get excited about, so they were Greco-Roman fanbois. They must have had powerful motivation to excuse and promote the ancients, since there wasn’t much else to work with.

The morals and customs of the Greeks and Romans were revolting by Christian standards. You would think Christians would have made a better effort to distance themselves from ancient perverts and warmongers; you would think they would have tried to generate their own culture.

Well, I guess they sort of did. That would be the Renaissance. After Dante died.

Pagan thought apparently had a very strong grip on Christian Europe. That’s unfortunate. Like the annoying old guy said to Jeff Bridges in the movie about Preston Tucker, “You can’t have Falstaff and have him thin.” You can’t have Greek geometry and architecture without getting tainted by the Greek ethos. Dante got hit pretty hard. His hell is full of characters taken from Greek pantheism: gorgons, centaurs, Cerberus, furies, Nia Vardalos…how can a serious Christian claim Yahweh stocked his hell with false gods he hated?

Dante’s hell has levels. The “good” damned are at the top, in what is known as the vestibule. To steal boldly from Gary Larson while splitting an infinitive, they are not the damned; they’re the danged. Their punishment, though eternal, is light.

Their ranks include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and so on. Below that, you have people who committed sins of “incontinence.” I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not that kind of incontinence. Good thing, because they’re uphill from the rest of the people in hell. It just means they sinned because they were weak. These people are gluttons and so on. They aren’t cold-blooded sinners who simply prefer to sin.

The lower you go, the worse the sins are. The murderers boil in a river of blood. A few floors below that, there was probably an area for drivers who cut into long lines of traffic instead of waiting their turn. Or people who put gum on the undersides of restaurant tables.

Dante put people he didn’t like in hell. In one unintentionally funny passage, he encounters a guy named Filippo Argenti. This man’s crime: belonging to a family that fought with Dante’s family. He’s in hell, he’s being tormented for eternity, and he has no hope of relief. Dante should feel pity, right? No way! He tells Argenti he hopes he stays there a good long time and suffers even more!

Right there, I think Dante proved he had a poor grasp of Christianity. Feeling no pity for a person in hell is completely unchristian. Being glad a person is in hell and hoping for worse punishment: that’s nuts. A real Christian would be afraid God would send him a little punishment of his own, in order to teach him compassion. When you take pleasure in other people’s suffering, in a way, you make yourself out to be God. On top of that, you show a very poor understanding of your own situation. You deserve hell, too.

I decided to check out the Cliff’s Notes for Inferno. For some reason, Cliff puts his notes online, and you can read them for nothing. Not sure how this works out to be a good business model. Cliff says a lot of the stuff in Inferno is allegory and symbols. I’m not sure whether this enriches the experience or merely clutters it with drivel that comes from the imaginations of academics trying to justify their existence.

Example: Dante’s story starts in the woods. He has lost his way, and he’s wandering around. Cliff claims this means he has fallen off the path of Christianity, and that he needs to find his way back. Maybe it’s true. Maybe not. Now that Dante is dead, we can make up stuff like this all day long, and no one can call us on it.

It reminds me of something someone told me about James Joyce’s Ulysses. Supposely, scholars took the first edition and drew all sorts of conclusions about its quirks. If you buy the a newer edition, it may have the old pagination in it, so you can go back and look at the amazing discoveries scholars made on this or that page. I was told that when the book was revised, it turned out a number of things scholars had commented on were actually typographical errors, and that they had nothing to do with Joyce’s intentions.

Funny story; one hopes it’s true.

What a horrible book. I got three hundred pages in before I realized the story was never going to start.

I assume I’m right about that. If someone tells me it started on page 301, I’ll be upset.

I tend to think Inferno is just a good yarn that performs the same function as a political cartoon. Dante had an axe to grind, so he wrote a book which essentially said God backed up all of his pet peeves.

Dante never went to hell, and he knew nothing about hell. His doctrine was bizarre, and his incorporation of material from a false religion seems heretical. Nonetheless, his story is sobering. Somewhere, hell exists, and people we know are there right now. Many of the famous people Dante mentions are there. Inferno is wrong on the facts, but it’s still a chilling picture of existence without hope.

A while back, I came across the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on TV, and as always, I was struck by the shocking badness of it. It’s one of the worst movies ever made; you can’t even enjoy watching it for its incompetence. It’s like Catch-22 with Alan Arkin. Nearly unbearable. I then bought a copy of the old BBC TV version and watched it, and I enjoyed it a great deal. It was immensely superior.

The disks had special features on them, and some of the material dealt with the author, Douglas Adams. He died in 2001. I watched the disks and looked around the Internet. I learned that Adams hated Christianity. According to his own words, he was a “radical atheist.”

I started thinking about that, and I realized he was in hell. I could be wrong; I can’t call the front desk in hell and ask for him. Maybe he managed to pray right after the sudden heart attack that killed him. But the odds against his salvation are overwhelming. So here I was, enjoying and admiring his work, laughing and feeling lighthearted, and the man behind it all, at that very moment, was being tormented in flames, surrounded by vile creatures that mocked him. With no hope of relief.

I had been planning to buy new copies of his books, but thinking about him in hell soured me on that idea.

Who is with him? I don’t know, but I can make some solid guesses. Christopher Hitchens. Henry Miller (one of my favorite authors when I was young). Hunter S. Thompson. Prince. Michael Jackson. Gene Roddenberry. George Carlin, whose work I admired until I was about fifteen. Muhammad Ali.

When I say “with him,” I don’t mean they’re sitting at the same table in hell’s mythological bar; the one people like to say they prefer to heaven. The one where everyone dresses like a biker and listens to AC/DC while downing free drinks. I don’t mean they have companionship. I mean they’re in the same realm of torture and despair.

It’s good that Dante makes us think about the possibility of eternity without hope. It’s also good that he reminds us that murder and theft aren’t the only sins. He has punishments for gluttons, angry people, the sullen, and liars. In 2016 America, we think we’re entitled to be fat, mean, and dishonest. We have forgotten the whole list of things God hates. We don’t try to be good, but if we did, we wouldn’t know how. These days I pray to God to show me how to live, because I’ve never seen anyone who actually knew how God wanted us to act. I have no role models. I used to think I did.

I guess I’ll be done with this book by the end of the week. I hope Bocaccio will have shown up by then. Eventually I’ll have to face the twin horrors of Cervantes and Dostoevsky, but at least I won’t have to deal with Toni Morrison.