Inferno: Canto 20 -- Circle 8, Bolgia 4

"Now must I sing new griefs, and my verses strain/ to form the matter of the Twentieth Canto/ of Canticle One, the Canticle of Pain" (1-3).

The fortune tellers and diviners merely walk around their round (no demons are needed to lash them), but their necks are twisted backwards so that their eyes drop tears on their backsides. Having used unnatural powers to foresee events, they may only see what's behind them. Dante's compassion for the sinners in this round is overwhelming, and he remarks, ". . . ask yourself [reader]/ how I could check my tears, when near at hand/ I saw the image of our humanity/ distorted so . . . / Certainly/ I wept. I leaned against the jagged face of a rock and wept so that my Guide said: "Still?/ Still like the other fools? There is no place/ for pity here./ Who is more arrogant / within his soul, who is more impious/ than one who dares to sorrow at God's judgment?" (20-30). Caught between a chasm of remorse and a sharp rebuke for being unable to perceive G-d's wisdom, Dante is paralyzed to the point that Virgil decides to distract him by first pointing out a litany of sinners who make up this round and, settling on one he knows, the founder of his birth city, Mantua, takes most of the remaining space in the canto to tell her tale. Once Dante has calmed down, Virgil identifies a handful of other soothsayers, and they move on. The question to be asked of this round, though, is "why the disproportionate grief?"

Ciardi's only mention of Dante's grief is an indirect one in the notes to the canto, where he discusses Virgil's scolding. He writes, "It is worth noting that Virgil has not scolded Dante for showing pity in earlier cases, though he might easily have done so and for exactly the same reason. One interpretation may be that Dante was not yet ready to recognize the true nature of evil. Another may be that Human Reason (despite Dante's earlier reference to his 'all-knowing Master') is essentially fallible" (163). After all, the only two persons we've seen who've been unmoved by hell, Ciardi points out, are Beatrice and the Divine Messenger who responds to Virgil's plight. We know Dante gets moved, and we've seen Virgil get flustered (not only at Dis's gate, but also in the next round of the grafters). Perhaps a study of Virgil's reactions gives credence to Ciardi's idea that even human reason is essentially fallible (an idea expressed earlier by Atskro and Fr. Earl when Virgil agreed with Dante's abuse of Filippo Argenti in the fifth circle). More significant to the question, though, is not Virgil at this point, but Dante.

Areas of extreme remorse we've seen so far in hell include the circle of the carnal and the round of the diviners. (You might include areas of sympathy being the round of the suicides and the round of the sodomites and areas of antipathy being the circle of wrath and the bolgia of simoniacs (and the later round of Antenora).) In this way of classification, we can develop a pretty strong profile of Dante's own personality and how it plays out in his work. We already know from his encounter with the carnal that he is highly sympathetic to love when it takes as its object the creation rather than the creator -- he considers it merely love displaced, but it's a shadow of the true love, and its connection to the divine is enough to give it the softest place in hell (outside of limbo) and the lightest place in purgatory. Love displaced is also found among the sodomites, so that there's a connection between Circle Two and Circle 7, Round 3, but the latter will never be fertile, which is why it's punished with the violent against nature. Dante's remorse and sympathy for misplaced love comes directly out of his own life experience in his relationship with Beatrice -- she became a divine ideal after she died, but she was a flesh and blood woman who inspired in him all sorts of desires, not all of which could have been platonically idealized.

Just as we can extrapolate from this that Dante struggled with his own sexuality (the greater struggle being his lust for a woman), we might also be able to extrapolate from this that Dante struggled with his own games at fortune-telling. In the question of the diviners, then, we have a primary remorse -- Dante sees those who tried to perceive the future through unnatural means as having personal meaning for him. After all, Dante's fortune-telling throughout the Inferno, as his characters every now and then tell him his future. That he's writing after the fact about a time that happens before the fact is what enables him to predict the future, though, and he's using no unnatural means by which to do this. The criticism I've read on the subject, then, excuses him on this account -- naturally, the critics write, this cannot be a sin for which Dante is accountable since he's telling a future that is already past.

I wonder, though, about what Fr. Brennan said that no one can really know the extent of G-d's mercy to the dead. Certainly, Dante cannot know, yet he's just come from the third bolgia where he's firmly placed Boniface VIII in hell, damned him there outside of knowing G-d's mind. He has, in fact, left behind him a whole scattering of names of those he condemns to these torments (and we're but halfway done with his assignations), and even though he's using these characters as types of sinners (as tropes on the moral level of the allegory), he's still be very specific about whom he condemns. It's as though he were trying to predict their fates, and this may be Dante the Poet's way of admitting that fact through the reaction of Dante the Pilgrim. In any case, I've left behind me in this commentary at least half a dozen semester project ideas for those of you still in discernment, and I predict that at least one of you will seize upon them.

S.