Abandon all hope ye who enter here

The first few cantos in “The Divine Comedy” establish Dante’s theology, spoken through metaphor and psychological symbol.

The middle-aged Dante has strayed into the allegorical Dark Wood of Error. The error is not theological error but worldliness. Dante has, as is easy to do, gradually surrendered his attention to the gain and loss, to politics, to exile, to mundane concerns. Though he has not yet lost God’s grace, he is in danger of doing so, because serving God is no longer Dante’s primary concern. 

In his descent into error, Dante has lost some of the natural acuity. He is sleepwalking through life and now finds himself lost, alone, not knowing where he is or how he got there. He is a man in a stupor: “How I came to it I cannot say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered there from the True Way.” 

The good news is that Dante did not intentionally pursue evil, as some of the damned we are about to meet. He merely wandered of the path. The bad news is that Dante is dangerously lost; even the good souls in heaven worry he will not find his back to the True Way.

Dante looks up from the shadowy wood and sees the light of the sun, the Son, divine illumination. He instantly realizes his situation is so perilous that “death could scarce be more bitter.” He sounds like shipwrecked Odysseus pulling himself exhausted to shore: “Just as a swimmer, who with his last breath flounders ashore from the perilous seas...” 

Alas, redemption requires more than just climbing up the slope toward the light. The beasts of malice and fraud, violence and ambition, and incontinence bar Dante’s way. One presumes Dante suffers from all these besetting sins in some fashion, but fiercest of all is the she-wolf of incontinence. Which is understandable. We are not as prone to violence, say, as we are to a lack of self-restraint. It is not murder and robbery that land us in the Dark Wood but weakness and lack of discipline. An inch at a time we fall, the inches becoming feet, the feet leagues, the leagues miles, until it is impossible to find our way back. 

Dante must go through Hell, literally, to gain redemption, but he must not do it alone. Indeed, he cannot do it without help. Fortunately, Beatrice, symbolizing divine love, descends to Limbo to commission Virgil to guide Dante, supported with the heavenly prayers of the Virgin, Saint Lucia and Rachel. 

Dante wonders if he is worthy enough to pass through Hell on his way to redemption. He does a rhetorical riff starting with Aeneas, who survived a visit to Hell and went on found Rome, which would become the “Seat of Holiness,” after the arrival of St. Paul “bearing the confirmation of that Faith which is the one true door to life eternal.” 

Then follow the first of several passages T.S. Eliot echoes in “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland”: “But I -- how should I dare? By whose permission? I am not Aeneas. I am not Paul. ... How, then, may I presume this hight quest ...?” 

(Eliot: “And indeed there will be time/ To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare” ... Beneath the music from a farther room. / So how should I presume?”)

Dante then makes a brief aside that is an excellent diagnosis of the second guessing that leads to indecision and failure, and prescribes its treatment: “As one who unwills what he wills, will stay strong purposes with feeble second thoughts until he spells all his first zeal away...”

Virgil correctly perceives that Dante is simply losing his nerve. He tells Dante that the heavenly powers so support his excursion through the underworld that failure is impossible. Thus assured, Dante suddenly regains his enthusiasm -- which will soon wane.

Recapping the theology of the first canto -- which encapsulates the poem’s theology -- Dante has become lost in worldly concerns that turn him away from God, and risks damnation; through grace Dante sees the light, but the height where the light is to be found is not to be gained again easily or cheaply; with the assistance of Heaven, Dante is sent a guide to lead him through the bowels of Hell so that he might more closely study the sins that lead to damnation, and their punishment. 

In Canto III, The Vestibule of Hell, we are introduced to Dante’s system of symbolic retribution, which is based on the perhaps over-simplified notion that souls earn damnation for one particular sin. In this canto, we begin to get an appreciation the horror of damnation, and the frightening notion that we might end up in Hell not for gaudy sins and high crimes against God and man, but for things by not standing up for principles and changing with the political winds. Seeing how harsh the punishment is for those “whose lives concluded neither blame or praise” gives us foreboding for the fate of those who were actively evil in life.

The final line in the inscription over Hell’s gate -- “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” -- is indicative of the one sin for which there is no forgiveness: despair, or the lack of hope. For the faithful there is always hope, for which in Christianity is defined as faith in promised things yet to come. For the damned, there is no hope. 

Midway through the canto, we get to another passage echoed by Eliot: “... a never-ending route of souls in pain. I had not thought death had undone so many as passed my before me in that mournful train.” 

(Eliot: “Unreal City,/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”) 

Dante is inclined to pity the doomed, but Virgil isn’t having any of that. The last theological message of the first three cantos is that we are in error when we feel sympathy for sin. As Dante descends into Hell, his attitude will change. 

Comments

[Dan Morgan]

Very good on the incremental nature of the descent into sin! I find the opening cantos particularly moving, and apt, as they capture the emotional and intellectual state of being lost--and of needing salvation--that anyone (especially in middle age?)--can face. The "dark wood" is such an evocative image.

As Dante the Pilgrim goes deeper and deeper into Hell, he moves farther and farther away from God. After we contemplate the various sins, their hierarchy and their punishments, symbolic or otherwise, this is still the bottom line: to be away from God is to be in Hell.

I look forward to your next commentaries, Mike.

[[email protected]]

Thanks, Dan.

It's interesting to note that moving away from God -- and deeper into Hell -- is also the only way to get closer to God, for Dante. He needs to get to the 9th circle and rappel down Lucifer's flank to come out on the other side of the world and the mountain of Purgatory.

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