Ferocious Beauty

...Virgil is quick to remind his companion of the calling that brought him to this hard place...

...Virgil tells him the reason for Dante's journey, and entreats him, by the love of his wife, Marcia, who in Hell prays that Cato still loves her, to let the two poets proceed on their way...

...Soothsayers have their heads turned backwards...

...The human mind, one discovers, is made to grasp the world's perfection, as Dante declares in the opening lines of the Paradiso's tenth canto: Looking on His Son with the Love which the One and the Other eternally breathe forth, the primal and ineffable Power made with such order all that revolves in mind or space that he who contemplates it cannot but taste of Him...

...The Hollanders' version—like the 1939 prose rendering by John D. Sinclair, but far too few others—has the Italian text on the facing page...

...Mar-cia's undying love is part of her infernal suffering...

...Dante gets up and keeps walking...

...they are pathologically sensible of their reputations, as though their damned condition were not the last word on their character...

...Poetry does not get any more frightening than Dante's Inferno...

...Unrelenting rain, snow, and hail fall upon gluttons, who don't have a bite to eat...

...he is especially taken with a triumphal car drawn by a multi-colored griffin: Not only did Rome not gladden Africanus or Augustus himself with a car so splendid, but that of the sun would be poor beside it...

...The cantos run to over a hundred lines, each of eleven syllables, arranged in terza rima (with the rhyme scheme aba, bcb, cdc, and so forth...

...The Roman poet Virgil serves as his guide through Hell and most of Purgatory, after which the sainted Beatrice, whom he loved in his youth, takes over and initiates him into the delights of Paradise...

...So, for instance, Farinata, a heretic who did not believe in Christ's resurrection and a Florentine political eminence, raises himself from his searing tomb as though he held all Hell in utter scorn, and the first thing he does is ask Dante who his ancestors were...

...the Inferno contains the worst of earthly life in ceaseless and concentrated doses...

...with this light goes abstruse but exhilarating talk, which also tends to dazzle...

...He has three faces, and each mouth chews on the foulest of traitors: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius...

...The treacherous are sunk to the neck in eternal ice, and one gnaws at another in undying hate: As a famished man will bite into his bread, / the one above had set his teeth into the other / just where the brains stem leaves the spinal cord...

...Algis Valiunas is a writer in Greenacres, Florida...

...Already in Canto XXIX of the Purgatorio, Dante has been treated to the pageant of revelation, which features a procession of marvels...

...For what is it that constitutes the bliss of this Paradise...

...Virgil writes that it is the character of Roman martial virtue to "show pity to the humbled soul and crush the sons of pride...

...The same flaw mars Robert Hollander's recent intellectual biography Dante: A Life in Works, which aims to introduce readers to Dante's lesser-known works of poetry, philosophy, and philology...

...With a visionary intensity, he turned his mind to the world beyond this one...

...Thieves run naked through swarms of snakes, whose bite makes the sinners burn down to a pile of ash, after which their bodies reconstitute themselves so the routine may start over again...

...That is part of both their sin and their punishment: What the world thinks of them is the fretful preoccupation of their spare moments...

...It used to be a rare human being who did not wonder acutely about what became of us after death...

...And to help one steer clear of Hell and direct one's steps toward Paradise, there is no handbook to the afterlife—and therefore to life itself—more ferocious, beautiful, and compelling than Dante's Divine Comedy...

...Robert Hollander has also written the notes to this edition: some of them valuable to general readers, but rather too many pitched to those who are professionally obliged to be up on the latest academic scuttlebutt...

...This lesson does not always go down easily...

...A capacious sub-basement would have to be dug in Hell to accommodate the souls incited to monstrosity by Nietzschean inspiration...

...To live as though this world were all there is effectively assures the soul's ruin, for the earth abounds in pleasures that seem to be all we could want, when in fact they are fatal snares or delusions or distractions that keep us from our true good...

...And yet, his attitude toward the ambition to leave a lasting name in the world cannot simply be reduced to disdainful mockery...

...God has fashioned Heaven for the appreciation of human souls, so that the best part of the virtuous soul's existence is only beginning with death...

...The Divine Comedy (actually Commedia...

...Whenever their pain lets up sufficiently, they think about the life they have left behind...

...In the second canto of the Purgatorio, a spirit approaches Dante with such eager affection that the poet attempts to return his embrace...

...Although Guido repented of his career—he was not a lion but a fox—while he was still alive, he cannot bite back the thrill of pride at the glory his vulpine prowess won him: My fame rang out to the far confines of the earth...

...Meanwhile, suicides are transformed into thorn bushes, which bleed when their branches are broken off...

...For the damned he meets on the first third of his journey, earthly life still compels allegiance...

...Where the souls in Hell knew God only as the impediment to their own desires, in Heaven souls joyfully apprehend the divine order that oversees all earthly fate...

...That part of the universe made specifically for human souls is vaster by far than the surface of the earth, and men must live accordingly...

...That is not to say that Dante's is the last word on Christian love...

...English translations of The Divine Comedy have been attempted many times...

...Writing The Divine Comedy is Dante's effort to secure immortal glory in both senses of that phrase: He intends that his fame will last on earth for as long as such things do last, which will not be forever but should be a good long while, and that he will earn a place in Heaven for his efforts to lead other souls toward the everlasting truth...

...Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) knew this fundamental need—and presented himself as the authority who would settle the point...

...but spirits have no bodies to embrace with, and three times Dante's arms pass right through the shade he is trying to hold close...

...The mind of a formidable scholar can be like a Christmas goose stuffed not only with fruits, nuts, and breadcrumbs, but also with used-shoeshine cloths, old watchsprings, and congealed motor oil—which is to say that the accumulated erudition of a scholarly lifetime can be unpalatable to the average reader...

...Exhorting men to forget their fears of Hell and their fantasies of Heaven, instructing them to love life on earth as though it were to be repeated throughout eternity, he contrives an exuberantly godless mythology to rival Dante's divine order, and he professes to do so out of true love for mankind...

...This is not exactly orthodox...

...The earthly city of Rome was "itself ruled by its lust for rule...

...Yet Dante does not draw a simple dichotomy between the moral ignominy of earthly glory and the incomparable splendor of eternal blessedness...

...and the highlight of the passage comes with Dante's acceptance into this most exclusive confraternity: And they showed me greater honor still, / for they made me one of their company, / so that I became the sixth amid such wisdom...

...Alchemists are covered from head to toe in vile sores, and their nails tore off scabs / as a knife strips scales from bream / or other fish with even larger scales...

...they walk across the body of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, who advised the Pharisees to sacrifice Christ for the people's sake...

...the adjective divina was the addition of a fifteenth-century commentator, and it stuck) is Dante's poetic rendition of the privileged excursion he took through the afterlife while still alive...

...Roman martial virtue, which Augustine despised, has acquired a godly luster, and Justinian presides over the planet Mars, eternal home to the great warriors...

...In On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, with characteristic wild bravado, overturns Dante's eternal order, for the sake of a higher human good: Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when, with a terror-inspiring ingenuity, he placed above the gateway of his Hell the inscription "I too was created by eternal love"—at any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise and its "eternal bliss" the inscription "I too was created by eternal hate"—provided a truth may be placed above the gateway to a lie...

...It is hard to learn the inconsequence of the earthly things one cherished most, and the Purgatorio beautifully renders that middling state of the soul between attachment to transient worldly goods and attainment of spiritual perfection...

...Dante shows how empty the concern with honor, a passion that outlives death, can be under the aspect of eternity...

...Haste to the mountain to strip you of the slough that allows not God to be manifest to you...

...it is a rare warrior who casts aside the life of manly glory and puts on the mendicant's robe, and Guido wants the world to honor him...

...Schismatics are cleft in two, while sowers of secular discord are forced to walk with severed head in hand...

...Dante uses Virgil with far greater reverence...

...These are not small ambitions, and we know that at least one of them has been satisfied...

...What negligence, what delay is this...

...Still, Dante's Heaven is not to everyone's taste...

...There is a stretch of especially hard climbing in the infernal neighborhood called the Malebolge, and the exhausted Dante sinks to the ground...

...Heretics lie in sepulchers so hot they glow...

...The love of what one is leaving behind yields, not without a sharp sadness, to the divine love that will fill one's entire being forevermore...

...In Heaven glory comes piled on glory, there is always some new marvel to be disclosed, and Dante wants more and more...

...The spirit turns out to be that of the musician Casella, who tells him,Even as I loved thee in my mortal flesh, so do I love thee freed...

...This happiness doesn't take much getting used to...

...So it is that when Virgil departs, unable to lead on into Heaven, Dante cannot hold back his sorrow, however much Paradise might beckon...

...The word onore and its derivatives ring out six times in thirty lines, to make sure we get the point...

...It is a cornucopia of horrors, and, just when you think you have seen the worst, Dante pulls out another torture to top it...

...With such distinction comes grave responsibility...

...Cato's implacable severity instructs the poets and the other new purgatorial arrivals in how they should conduct themselves...

...The statements look similar, but Augustine finds the second to be insufferable arrogance, "the inflated ambition of a proud spirit," which ascribes to itself a prerogative belonging to God alone...

...the most remarkable of mental adventurers, he staked a claim to the undiscovered country...

...He does believe eternal blessedness is incomparably splendid, but that does not mean he conceives of mortal ambitions and pleasures as merely the futile graspings of sin-raddled, worm-fodder humanity...

...In Canto VI of the Paradiso, the Emperor Justinian recounts the illustrious advance of the Roman standard in its mission to bring peace, justice, and unity to the world...

...The thirst for glory, the desire to shine in the admiring eyes of men, can be quite a good thing...

...Fire burns, ice freezes, serpents bite, and diseases make the body loathsome...

...The Divine Comedy consists of three books: the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, the first of thirty-four cantos, the other two of thirty-three each...

...Flatterers stew in a ditch of excrement...

...God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble," Scripture says...

...In a philosophical work called the Convivio, Dante lays down the fundamental distinction between necessary wisdom and irreparable error: "I say that of all follies the most foolish, the basest, and the most pernicious is the belief that beyond this life there is no other...

...One leaves Dante's Hell with the macerating awareness of how fearsome a place the earth is...

...These are sufferings of the sort that nature casually inflicts on men, or that men, just as casually, inflict on each other...

...But then Beatrice appears and tells him not to mourn the loss of Virgil, for Paradise is a place where people are happy...

...One will have to do better than Nietzsche if one wishes to supplant Christian love with some nobler sentiment...

...Those who were lustful in life find themselves driven ceaselessly by tempestuous winds in death...

...Although certain of the punishments are fiendishly novel, in most cases what makes them so terrifying is their familiarity...

...his unrivaled love of liberty has merited him this place, although as a pagan, an enemy of Julius Caesar, and a suicide he ought by all rights to be among the damned...

...Dante equates the pagan hero with the Christian saint, and treats Roman legend as though it were as true as Biblical revelation...

...Understanding is pure joy: The best of theologians, who appear as "burning suns," sing, and a mind attuned to the divine harmonies makes music more splendid than any heard on earth...

...Dante weeps, and tears stain his cheeks, which had been cleaned with dew when he had emerged from Hell...

...And in the uttermost depths of Hell, Lucifer stands frozen, weeping icy tears...

...Blasphemers and homosexuals try helplessly to evade flakes of fire that drop from above and set the sand ablaze underfoot: Not otherwise do dogs in summer gnaw and scratch...

...Great tyrants steep in Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood...

...The torments of the damned are drawn from life, even in their most grotesque or bizarre manifestations...

...The Jews and the Christians represent the weak and ignoble, whose triumph made Roman virtue seem damnable...

...Cato's indifference is the token of his spiritual superiority...

...There is an undeniable grandeur to Farinata— Dante calls him "magnanimo," great-souled—but his steely hauteur also betrays the sinful pride of mind that defied Church teaching and caused his damnation for heresy...

...What he takes most pride in, however, is his reputation for sanctity...

...Hellish mayhem is not without earthly precedent...

...one recalls that it was Virgil who had lovingly wiped Dante's face then, and one sees why Dante would call Virgil his "sweetest father...

...Certain of the most advanced modern minds regard it with outright revulsion...

...Hollander's strengths are seen to better effect in his introduction to the Inferno and his 1999 essay "Dante: A Party of One" in the journal First Things...

...In the first canto of the Purgatorio, the great Roman statesman Cato stands guard at the foot of the purgatorial mountain...

...Nietzsche sees Rome as Virgil saw it: "For the Romans were the strong and noble, and nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of...

...He wants to see, to know, to love—and his every desire shall be satisfied...

...When Virgil appears before Dante and introduces himself in the first canto of the Inferno, Dante acknowledges him as his beloved master: O glory [honore] and light of all other poets...

...In Paradise, the divine love takes the form of dazzling light, the contemplation of which constitutes the soul's ultimate rapture...

...That is true for poets as for soldiers.In the first circle of Hell, where the virtuous pagans are found, Virgil introduces Dante to the other supreme poets of antiquity: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan...

...All the gathered spirits are rapt with pleasure in this beautiful song of earthly love—all but Cato, who with a chill censoriousness reminds them this is a diversion from the task appointed them: What is this, laggard spirits...

...Nietzsche goes on to cite Aquinas, briefly, and Tertullian, at some length, on the notion that part of the bliss Heaven will be the sight of the torments of Hell...

...Still, it is hard to resist the conviction that some people definitely belong in Hell, and in the foulest depths thereof: Lucifer would need several more mouths to do justice to the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot...

...The angry tear at one another, while the sullen, who failed to appreciate life in the sweet air that in the sun rejoices, now have reason to be miserable, plunged beneath the foul swamp waters of the Styx...

...The latest, in free verse by the medievalist Robert Hollander and his wife, the poet Jean Hollander, promises to rank at the top when complete, although so far we have only the Inferno...

...Nietzsche doesn't mention Dante's effort to rehabilitate select worthy Romans as the ancestors of Christianity, but one suspects that he would find it good only for a bitter laugh at Christians' preposterous condescension to their obvious superiors...

...Cato's reply is ceremoniously frosty: While on earth he loved Marcia so much that he did anything she asked, now that she is in Hell her power to move him is gone, by the law which was made when I came forth from thence...

...Dante asks him to sing the songs of love which used to quiet all my longings, and Casella responds with a setting of one of Dante's own youthful poems...

...Pope John Paul II (echoing the speculations of the twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar) has observed that, although he is quite certain there is a Hell, he retains the hope that there are no human souls in it...

...Nietzsche is the modern figure who preaches the most fervid defiance of Christianity...

...there is no imperial undertaking more estimable than this: See what valor has made [the Roman standard] most worthy of reverence...

...Still, Dante does teach that what men commonly regard as the real world is only a small fragment of creation...

...Aeneas, the founder of Rome, visited the underworld, and Paul had a look around Heaven, while still alive...

...The place is encyclopedic in its cruelty, as only the work of divine wisdom, or the most inventive of poets, can be...

...Grafters are submerged in seething pitch, and when they dare to poke their heads out, devils rip at them with hooks—in just the same way cooks command their scullions / to take their skewers and prod the meat down / in the cauldron, lest it float back up...

...Nietzsche finds this emblematic of the long struggle between the ancient pagans and the Bible, which continues to be waged in the spirits of the highest modern natures: "There has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction...

...Back in the fifth century, St...

...Of course, the real trick is to ensure that one doesn't join them in perdition...

...And the ultimate end of Roman dominion was not wealth or power but glory: "Glory they most ardently loved: for it they wished to live, for it they did not hesitate to die...

...Hypocrites wear gilded capes lined with lead and trudge endlessly with their heavy burden...

...To Guido da Montefeltro, a great soldier who renounced the active life to become a Franciscan friar and who is in Hell for secretly giving Pope Boniface VIII evil advice about politics, Dante uses his best coaxing manner, exhorting him to speak of himself, so may your name continue in the world...

...To risk one's life for honor's sake may not be the purest virtue, Justinian suggests, but it is nevertheless deserving of everlasting bliss—provided, of course, that one is not fighting for the wrong cause...

...The very existence of his poem proves otherwise...

...Dante honors Aeneas as the founder of Rome, an indispensable agent in the providential design that makes Rome the Eternal City, the center of the Christian world...

...Augustine put, in his preface to The City of God, a pair of opposed quotations—one from the New Testament, the other from Virgil's Aeneid...

...The poem tells the story of Dante himself, middle-aged and spiritually desolate, who is vouchsafed a saving journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven...

...When Virgil tells Dante that he shall conduct him through Hell and Purgatory, and that then a soul more fit to lead than I shall show him Paradise, Dante trembles at his own inadequacy: I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul...

...To be esteemed as holy by the living is the desire he cannot renounce, even though he has been cast down among the unholy by the only justice that matters...