Serpents And Sins: Punishment, Piety, And Vigilance In Dante’s “Inferno”
A psychoanalytic exploration of the nature of evil
“The path to paradise begins in Hell.” — Dante Alighieri
What is the true nature of punishment? How do we contend with the reality of evil? Can humanity find redemption amidst its horrors?
Dante Alighieri's “Inferno” is the first part of the epic poem “The Divine Comedy,” written in the early 14th century.
Dante was one of the most influential literary minds in history, and his epic poem is a masterpiece of psychoanalytic insight.
The story begins with Dante lost in a dark woods. In his despair, he is visited by the ancient Roman poet, Virgil. Virgil explains that Dante has been chosen to undertake a divine journey, where he will gain insight into his own life and the nature of sin and salvation.
In order to complete his spiritual quest to reach paradise, he will first have to venture through Hell.
We accompany Dante as Virgil guides him through the 9 circles of the Inferno. Along the way, Dante meets various historical and mythical figures of the past and provides commentary on their moral failings.
The poem is a symbolic and psychological exploration of sin, punishment, and redemption. Each circle represents a different sin and its contrapasso, or counter-punishment.
Below I explore 3 important lessons from the poem that are developed further in “The Great Courses — Why Evil Exists” by Professor Charles Mathewes.
#1 Contrapasso and the Psychological Hell
In Dante’s Inferno, there are nine circles of Hell. Each circle is progressively deeper and more sinister than the last. Dante and Virgil go through each of these circles, encountering the various punishments of the damned and reflecting on the nature of the sin committed.
One of the most perplexing aspects of Dante’s Inferno is the idea of contrapasso, or “counter-punishment”. This is the way in which each person’s punishment perfectly fits the individual’s defining crime.
For instance, the Second Circle punishes the sin of Lust. The souls of the lustful are caught in a whirlwind of fierce winds, symbolizing their lack of control over their desires.
The Third Circle, Gluttony, has people lie in a foul slush produced by a ceaseless, icy rain. Cerberus, the three-headed dog, guards them and tears at their flesh, reflecting the excessiveness and indulgences in their mortal lives.
In each Circle, Dante has to unpack the meaning behind the punishment. The punishment acts as a cryptogram representing the moral transgression behind the crime.
What is the purpose of this? Why has Virgil brought Dante here to witness this suffering?
We need to carefully examine both the crime itself and the counter-punishment received.
It isn’t so much that the damned are here to suffer because of the crimes they committed in their mortal lives, but rather, Hell is seen as an extension of the very crime itself.
Left unchecked, this is the complete manifestation of a being’s commitment to evil and sin — the contrapasso is what evil ultimately wishes to be.
“Hell is an extension of the crimes of the damned, their full flowering. Hell is what evil wants to be.” — Charles Mathewes
The fierce winds tormenting those whose sin was Lust isn’t just an extrinsic punishment in the afterlife— it is the full flourishing of the sin, the dwelling place of someone entirely drunk with Lust.
In the 5th circle of Hell, the wrathful are submerged in the muddy River Styx, where they attack and harm one another. This would be the final manifestation of violent rage, what it will become in totality.
In this way, the Inferno isn’t (necessarily) a metaphysical reality where the damned are punished, but rather it is a psychological Hell, a metaphorical Inferno. This is the place we will end up, as living beings, if we leave our sins unchecked.
The man full of Wrath lives psychologically in the River Styx, he is at war with himself. He is violent to his own psyche, fighting a battle he can never win.
The gluttonous lives psychologically in the foul slush, face-first in the mud constantly seeking the nourishment they will never find — they are left blind and unfulfilled.
To engage in this form of psychological self-annihilation, the type Dante witnesses throughout the Inferno, is to be entirely unconscious of our own behaviours, actions, and values — to have truly lost our way.
The contrapasso isn’t waiting for us in the afterlife, it is a living, reified punishment awaiting those who are simply not careful enough.
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” — Thomas Jefferson
#2 Piety and pity are complexly intertwined
“Here pietá lives when it is quite dead.” — Dante
As part of Dante’s transformation throughout the poem, his understanding of the word pietá changes, which means both “piety” and “pity”. What is the significance of this?
Pity and piety derive from the Latin “pietas”, meaning the “fulfilment of duties to family, country, and Gods”. Dante uses the two interchangeably in The Inferno to illustrate their paradoxical significance.
“What does it mean that piety, a religious sensitivity, and pity, a sensibility to other people’s suffering, are lexically identical for Dante? Well that suggests a tight connection between religious rectitude… and proper emotional responses to situations.” — Charles Mathewes
When Dante first meets the sinners in Hell, he feels great pity for them. Early on in his journey, he meets Francesca da Rimini, a noblewoman from Italy whom he finds in the second circle of Hell, where the lustful are punished.
Francesca regales Dante with her tragic tale, where she and her lover, Paulo, fall in love after reading a romantic story together. So spellbound by this novel, the two form an illicit relationship, before later being killed by Francesca’s husband, Gianciotto — Paulo’s brother.
Both Francesca and Paulo blame the medieval story they read as the reason for their infatuation.
Their punishment is uniquely tied to their wrongdoing, where they are forced to chase each other in a circle, in an attempt to catch one another endlessly — but they are never able to. The punishment serves as a cryptic reflection of the inability to temper their chaotic desires.
Dante, early in his journey of individuation, feels great remorse for Francesca, even fainting out of sorrow and empathy. What Dante does not yet understand, is that he is as easily subdued by his passions and emotions as those in Hell are — he is not conscious of the fact that he is ultimately responsible for his emotional responses to situations.
“ ‘Francesca, the torment that you suffer brings painful tears of pity to my eyes’.” — Dante
He feels pity in situations that are not properly appropriate and doesn’t recognize that his sympathy can be dangerous. What Dante fails to realize is that whilst the details of their crimes differ, the damned in Hell all share one thing in common: they never owned up or took accountability for what they did.
“They never came to terms with what they had done; and in refusing to acknowledge that, in indulging in that kind of self-deception, each person’s soul has been warped in some particular way, and that warping now, after their deaths, cannot be undone.” — Charles Mathewes
The perennial thread connecting those in Hell is their inability to take responsibility. There are many cries of pity and grief, but none of repentance. As Dante progresses through Hell and becomes cognizant of this, he realises that the people in Hell aren’t deserving of his pity.
True piety for the damned, is the absence of pity. True kindness for the damned is to not indulge their self-deception.
It is the development of this refined, ethical judgment that we would see emulated in a figure such as Christ, contrasted harshly by Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”, who instead offers blind compassion.
Through his spiritual guide Virgil, Dante begins to understand the importance of this distinction. He treats those he sees with an appropriateness and proportionality congruent with the nature of their transgression.
#3 The gates of Hell are always open
What is most striking about Dante’s depiction of Hell is that anyone is free to leave at any time.
In Dante’s Hell, there is no gate that keeps people trapped there — in fact, it was permanently broken by Christ crashing into it following his crucifixion. This ultimately begs the question — why do people stay there?
We see this most discerningly in Dante’s depiction of Satan. At the very centre of Hell, Satan is depicted as a monstrous figure trapped waist-deep in a frozen lake. He has three faces, and chews eternally on the three greatest traitors in history: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, and Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar.
Rather than being the ruler of the damned, Satan is more akin to Hell’s first inmate — the Inferno was created by Satan’s fall from Heaven. Satan’s eternal longing is to be free from God, to flee from him as far as possible.
Satan ultimately desires the end of his existence, he wishes to not be at all.
In a fitting twist of irony, Satan is kept locked in the ice by the beating of his own wings. His desire to escape is what keeps him stuck in the centre of Hell — if he stopped trying to escape, he would be rid of the ice. So why doesn't he?
Herein lies the true wisdom in the Inferno — Hell is ultimately self-made and self-inflicted; it is chosen by the damned themselves.
Satan is free to leave if he would only stop beating his wings — if he no longer desires to escape, he could be free. But he doesn't, he chooses to remain there.
This in part reveals the irony behind the sign above the gate at the entrance, “Abandon all hope, you who enter”. It doesn’t mean that you should give up now, but rather if you remove your false hopes and take accountability for your actions, you may be able to leave.
In an even greater irony, Satan’s longing to be rid of God and his own Being is the cruel recipe of his own fate — to rule over the damned forever, as God’s greatest servant. This is Satan’s contrapasso.
Dante’s psychoanalytic insight here is profound: sin is always knocking at our door. Should we invite it in, we may wander unknowingly and blindly through the gates of our own personal Inferno and fester in self-inflicted damnation.
But we are also free to leave. The gates of Hell are always open, and so if we find the humility to take responsibility for our actions, and abandon our false hopes, we can find our way out of the darkness.
Dante’s encounter with the ultimate figure of evil marks the turning point for his ascent towards Purgatory and his quest for salvation. It is here at the end of the Inferno where Virgil abandons Dante for one greater than he, Beatrice, Dante’s soul companion and Anima.
Dante, far less from offering direct advice on the reality of evil and suffering, offers us an ethical re-education of our soul, a soul that has lost its way. Rather than remain wandering in the dark woods forever, Dante develops the strength of character necessary to grow larger in the face of evil, to find the light hidden in the abyss.
What is the final message of the Inferno? What is it that we must know?
Be eternally vigilant. Always be on guard for what is lurking in the dark. Choose voluntary suffering; for the path to paradise will always begin in Hell.
