In Our Time - Dante's Inferno

Episode Date: July 3, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Dante’s ‘Inferno’ - a medieval journey through the nine circles of Hell. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. This famous phrase is written above the gate of Hell in a 14th century poem by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The poem is called the ‘Divine Comedy’ and Hell is known as ‘Dante’s Inferno’. It is a lurid vision of the afterlife complete with severed heads, cruel and unusual punishments and devils in frozen lakes. But the inferno is much more than a trip into the macabre - it is a map of medieval spirituality, a treasure house of early renaissance learning, a portrait of 14th century Florence, and an acute study of human psychology. It is also one of the greatest poems ever written. With, Margaret Kean, University Lecturer in English and College Fellow at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford; John Took, Professor of Dante Studies at University College London and Claire Honess, Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds and Co-Director of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Abandon Hope or You Enter Here. That line is written above the gate of hell in a 14th century poem by Dante. The poem called The Divine Comedy,

and hell is part one, the inferno, she followed with Bogatorio and Paradiso. The warnings well made, for beyond it is a panoply of horror. Severed heads, talking trees, demons, monsters and punishments, both cruel and imaginatively horrific. But the Inferno is more than just a journey into the macabre. It's a map of medieval spirituality, a treasure house of classical learning,

and an acute study of human psychology. And it's also considered to be one of the greatest poems ever written. With me to discuss Dante's Inferno, I Claire Hernes, Senior Lecture in Italian at the University of Leeds and co-director of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies. John Took, Professor of Dante Studies at University College London, and Margaret Keane, University of Lecture in English

and College Fellow at St. Hilda's at the University of Oxford. Margaret Keane, can we ignore the warning on the gate? And if you can take us inside, who goes in, in this poem, and what happens in the sort of anti-chamber of Hel, Limbaugh? Well, going into hell we have a first-person narrator, we might call him Dante the Pilgrim, and he has been guided in by a classical figure, a figure who he calls both his master and his author, and that's Virgil. So going into hell, we have these two figures, and one of the very first places that they arrive in is, as you said, an antechamber limbo.

And this brings us to one of the clashes or one of the ambivalences within the poem, which is that our pilgrim and indeed our author Dante, are, Christian in their positioning and in their idea structures. Whereas of course Virgil is pagan, classical. Dante, the man, has a great respect for all classical virtues and classical values, classical philosophy and of course classical literature. And this positioning of limbo allows him both to consider and also perhaps to worry about the problem of being a Christian poet. And basing yourself or having yourself guided at least in part by the classics. Virgil was considered one of the most elegant, if not the most elegant, of Roman poets,

and he died about 30 years before the birth of Christ. And in that sense, as you say, and he's most famous for the Aeneid. His great, his long poem about the coming back or the coming from Troy to Rome of Ineus to establish Rome. So to continue with the classical theme in the limbo, he meets a lot of people in limbo, which seems to be a rather, it's not a very stressed place, is it? Socrates is there, Plato's there,

the great Islamic scholars, Arroyas and Avicenna are there. What are they doing there? It's kind of a very dignified space, isn't it? It's a place without torment. It is, as you said, an antechamber. In addition to the kind of Christian ideas or the Catholic ideas of an anti-chamber,

where the Old Testament patriarchs would have waited for the coming of Christ and the possibility of salvation. Dante has added in the idea that those who are virtuous and yet without faith, without baptism and without true religion, might also be there for all time. So when Dante and his guide arrive in limbo, it's coming after the harrowing of hell, it's coming after a Christian salvatory moment.

So the Old Testament patriarchs have gone. I mean, when Christ went to hell and brought out the patriarchs and Adam and Eve, but he didn't bring out Sophocles or, have you saying it? No, no, exactly. I mean, sorry, Socrates and so. So exactly. So when Dante arrives there, he finds the great mythic figures. He finds figures like Hector, figures from the story of Troy. He also finds great philosophers, great thinkers.

He finds Galen. He finds Euclid, and he finds great poets. He actually positions himself, along with Virgil, now talking to four of the other great poets. Those are going to be Homer. the money's always wanted to meet perhaps. Ovid, Horace and Luchin. And they stand apart and they are the wise

amongst all of these great and virtuous figures and they stand apart and discuss great things that we can't know of us. Just to encapsulate it, why are they there in limbo? He's going to hell as limbo and why are these people there? Well, they've been placed here as a place where although they are guilt-free and therefore without torment, they have no faith.

and therefore they cannot be saved. And this is one of perhaps one of the things that Dante really struggles with throughout the poem is this idea that although he can respect the classics, he cannot save the classics, not even Beatrice, even if she speaks well, or Virgil could bring him out from his position because he is a man without faith.

Virgil, as I said, wrote Deer and Inniere, Inius, goes down to Hades. Is the idea of going down to Hades somewhere in the background goes down to hell? Is somewhere in the background of Dante's poem? So he's been led by somebody who himself has led somebody into a sort of hell? The whole idea of having authority, also that you might know the way and that you might also know the way back.

But I think equally the idea that Virgil can actually be a limited guide. He won't be the guide for the entire poem. He's only the guide for the Inferno and some of the progatorio. He has limits, and he has a number of limits which Dante as a Christian poet can actually identify, I point to. He has moments when he almost loses faith when, for example, he doesn't know how to get into the city of Diss. He also has great courage. He's as far as you can go with human reason without revelation. And Dante, the pilgrim, is very careful before he actually accepts this guide to say, why are you here? And he doesn't go with Virgil to see hell. He goes with Virgil because Virgil says he can take him through hell and then on and back up. And he goes because he wants not to see the gate of hell, because he wants to see the gate of hell, because he wants to to see St. Peter's Gate. I mean, I must just emphasize that this is also a journey. It's deserts, its mountains, across rivers.

It is a journey as well as a journey into an idea of hell. John took, from my vantage point in Limbaugh, can you describe the structure of hell going down into the bowels of the earth? Yes, probably the place to start is with a kind of general cosmology. Danty's view of the world is a geocentric world, so the earth is at the centre, and it's surrounded by the planetary spheres, and then beyond that is the firmament, the fixed stars which seems so far away that they do not seem to move,

and then the primum mobile, which gives the movement of the whole thing and the mechanism of the world generally, and then encompassing the whole the mind of God, which is all circumscribing and uncircised. So it is a geocentric, rather neatly conceived universe. So hell is imagined by Dante to be at the very centre. He imagines it to be in a sort of funnel of descending concentric circles which are located there beneath Jerusalem, which is with Rome, the providential city, the working art of world history in Jerusalem.

Hell goes down right to the very centre, right at the very centre of the earth, and he's located Lucifer, who is there transfixed in the ice at the bottom and where everything is still, everything is quiet, there is no life, there is no light, everything is frozen. The way to describe the structure of hell is probably in this way, to begin with a sort of an anthropology. Dante has a very distinctive sense of what human nature is. Human nature is we are psychosomatic creatures, we are intellectual creatures in the flesh,

which Dante imagines a predominantly long Aristotelian line, so that we have a sensitive or an animal part of our nature, and we have also a rational part of our nature. Now then it's in keeping with that that hell is organised, we are able to love in keeping with the animal part of our nature and with the rational part of our nature, and it's probably very important to stress that Dante is really the world's great love poet in this sense.

He celebrates every kind of sensitive and rational love that we have, but it is possible to sin, therefore, to alienate ourselves from God in a sensitive way and in a rational way. And when I use the word sensitive, I mean by that, the animal, the biological part of our nature, as distinct from the rational part of our nature. And so the structure of hell is determined by this. First of all, we have, well, there are a couple of refinements

which I'll add in a moment, but there are the sins of the concupiscent, the sensitive soul, that is, the sins of gluttony and lust, not the kinds of things which we would determine, which we would opt for. A few people would wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to be gluttonous today or whatever. There are sins which involve a lack of self-control.

But then just below that come the sins which involve a rational component, the sins of violence, which belong partly to the sensitive soul, but also have a rational component in the sense that the soul commits itself to a certain course of action. So we have the sins of the violence following a sense. at a deeper stage, at a deeper point in hell. It is violence to be, it's possible to be violent against self, against God against one's neighbour.

It's tripartite, that area. And then right at the very bottom of the pit, we had the sins of fraudulence. That is, those kinds of sins which involve a scheming, a kind of a commitment to defraud, to deceive in a variety of different ways. So the basic structure is that concupiscent, and then rational involvement in sinning as we good honour to help.

And heavily illustrated by artists, heavily mapped and illustrated by artists, since a few years after it was published. Claire Hannes, can I ask you, why were the nine circles? Why were there nine circles? I don't know. Well, let's pass on then. We can come back to that. The second circle of hell contains those punished for the sins of lust, and here Dante meets Francesca da Riemanni, one of the most famous encounter. She was a real person, several people in Household,

his readers would have maybe known about, certainly, if they'd been in the city of Florence, known about Francesca de Rémini. Why was she there, and why is he so sympathetic to her? Yes, Francesca is a wonderful character, and as you said, one of the characters of the Comedia who has been most taken up by later writers and artists from Boccaccio onwards. And Francesca's in hell, she tells Dante her story,

and she explains that she was, she had been married to an older man, reputed to be both ugly and cruel, in a marriage of political expediency, but had fallen in love with his younger brother, Paolo, known, not coincidentally as Paolo Ibello, the handsome one. So she falls in love with the handsome younger brother.

And she describes how they were reading the Arthurian romances. They were reading the story of Lancelot and Gwynivir together. And inspired by the love of Lancelot for Gwynivir, Paola was moved to kiss her, after which Francesca says enigmatically, after which we read no further. But Francesca's husband came to hear of the affair and killed the pair of them.

and we're told that his soul will be welcomed further down in hell, in the part of hell, where those who betray members of their family are punished. But Paolo and Francesca appear in the circle of lust. They're being blown about on a whirlwind which echoes the passion. They're out-of-control passion. And Dante feels sympathy for her, because I think of the way in which she tells her story, She uses language in a very persuasive way to get Dante onto her side.

She portrays herself as a hapless victim, a victim of a whole series of things, of love which is irresistible, which is a force which cannot be resisted by anyone who has felt its power. She presents herself as a victim of Paolo, who moves to kiss her when he reads the story. And very significantly, she presents herself as a victim of the book. So she says, Galeoto full libro,

the book was their go-between their Gala had. And this is very significant because, of course, Dante's drawing a comparison here between literature which leads its readers astray, literature which can land you in hell, and the kind of literature which he wants to write, which will, of course, lead its readers to heaven,

which will teach them how they should behave. There might have been a slight shade, his mind because he earlier had written the sort of literature that led Francesca to hell, didn't he? He had written love poetry. He had written love poetry but of course already even before the comedia even in his earlier

work of Vita Nueva he had shown how love poetry poetry written for a real woman could be developed could be turned into a Christian love poetry which could lead its readers to God so

even in the Vita Nava, Beatrice becomes for Dante a way to God. His love for her becomes a channel for his love for God. Dante himself briefly, The Inferno actually begins with the lines, translated by Doraesaius, Midway in the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood for the straightway was lost. He wrote it in exile. He was exiled, born in 1265, in France exiled in 1301.

He never went back to France. for the next 20 years he had to leave his wife and his sons. And so those are the exiled years. Does that the exile, he probably didn't know he's going to be away for 20 years, but still, did that play a part, you think, in his writing, in his decision to write, and in the writing itself of this poem? Absolutely. I think when he describes the situation of his protagonist in the dark word,

he is describing a state of spiritual exile. he's exiled from God. There's some kind of spiritual crisis which has led him to reject everything that Beatrice stands for and the wood is in some ways a parallel to the wilderness into which Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden of Eden.

But it's also very clear, I think a reflection of his political situation where he finds himself cast out of the city which he always thinks of his home, even though I think he probably does realise, maybe not when he starts writing the poem, but eventually

I think he does realise that he probably won't ever return to Florence. But he never stops thinking of himself as a Florentine. He has this phrase which he uses about himself in his letters he describes himself as a Florentine

and an undeserving exile. But he never stops calling himself a Florentine. Yes, we're talking about the the high time of the city-states, and although there were Gulls and Gimilene's across Italy, it was cities, and it was cities that he went to, and was well received in these cities, as one understands, there's very little evidence

because of his talent. So in that sense, he's looked after. Margaret Keane, except that he couldn't go and see his wife and son. Mike, can we skip through the third, fourth and fifth circles, and go, that's the glutton, the misers and the Rothfall, unless you want to call attention to any one of those, and come to the six, because we come to the walls of the, city of Dis, which garges the lower reaches of hell.

Now, what's the significance of those walls, and why is the lower reach of hell walled in that way? Well, I think one of the reasons is because in Virgil's poem, when Virgil is suggesting that the Sibyl is the guide for Aeneas, they aren't allowed in to the city of dis. So one of the things that's happening is actually a little bit of ambition on the part of the point that I can go further than you can, I can see more than you could. So in this sense it's a test of Christian versus classical. However the classics were, they can't take as far as the Christians can, both in terms of the journey of the individuals and the journey of the mind and the journey towards a sort of revelation of ultimate truth.

That's what's all going on. Absolutely. There's a lot of testing going on in the poem, and there's an awful lot about what courage you will have and what you will do with your own will, what intentionality you have to sin or what intentionality you have to be on the right path. There's also using this kind of structure of the city of this. It's a bit of a breather in some ways, but it's also a very important marker

that this again is a Christian poem. First of all, that there is some disruption that's taken place to the city as it should stand and that's happened because of Christ coming to Harrow Hell. And so there's been an earthquake and the landscape has actually changed and those in hell can do nothing about that because Christ is a stronger force than they are.

And also that, as we've said before, that Virgil actually has his way barred by the rebel angels. They refuse to let him enter with this pilgrim, with its living soul. And they don't know quite what to do. And suddenly the pilgrim is vulnerable. We have this figure of the furies who are crying and mocking him

and suggesting that they're going to have him turn to stone. Medusa will come and turn him to stone. And the Dante first person figure is terrified. And Virgil, as his guide and also as in some way a defence says, close your eyes, don't look. And more than that, there's this figure of Virgil's reason of this figure of Virgil as the individual conscience

also puts his own hands over the pilgrim's eyes to shade him. But they cannot get in. They're stuck. And the pilgrim is terrified that he won't be able to get back. He won't be able to go further down, which is the only way out. And he'll be stuck there. And they have to wait. And Virgil has to wait. The entire poem has to wait until something revelatory happens.

And you get this slightly disgruntled angel who appears in a whirlwind, who is just, a minor figure, a minor angel, but stronger than anything that we've seen in hell or that we will see in hell. And he simply touches the gates with a little wand

and the open and he said, what was all the fuss about? Why did you make such a fuss? God wants this to happen. And right up to this point anyway, Virgil is the masterful figure always referred to as the master, the calm, the braver.

Dun to the Pilgrim, represents Dante the Pilgrim as naive, frightened, timid, questioning, wants to go back. and so far on the journey we're now in the sixth circle of Held that seems to be the relationship. John took in the seventh circle, reserved for the violent.

He meets and laments his friend and mentor Brunetto Latini. And it's almost as if he's very, well he says, I'm very surprised to see him there, which is a very good touch because it's as if the thing really exists and what a surprise to find you there, as if he hadn't written it, as it were. So can you? What's the significance of that for you?

And who was Brunetto Latini? Brunetto Latini was probably one of Dante's informal teachers. Brunetto Latini was a rhetorician. He had translated works of Cicero. And Dante would have been, would have encountered him probably informally early on in his young life. The episode of Grunetto Latini is open to all sorts of interpretations. He is there as an unnatural sinner.

He is violent against nature. He is amongst the sodomites. And Dante makes, there's no other evidence anywhere for Brunetto Latini having been a sodomite. But in actual fact, Dante develops different dimensions in that, different kinds of questions. And you asked me how I would see it myself. It seems to me that the text suggests a different kind, and perhaps even a more fundamental kind, of unnatural sinning.

There is a sense in which, as Brunetto speaks, he insists on what amounts to a certain kind of moral determinism. I'd just say, he says, if you follow your stars, good fortune will shine upon you. Your stars will bring you home. There is almost a sense there that he is betraying moral self-determinism in human nature to astral forces beyond self, which is a deeper betrayal in a certain sense of human nature than unnatural sin in the, in the obvious sense. So what I'm saying in reply to your question is there are different dimensions, different preoccupations in that canto.

Why is he in the seventh circle, though? It seems a bit rough to be that far down. The seventh circle there is the circle of violence. And violence, there are various species of violence. And the formal answer to that question is that he has violated, in his understanding of it, a natural pattern of activity. he's an unnatural sinner. But as I say, I think this reaches down

into spiritual moral depths as well. Dante quite frequently explores issues, parallel issues, different dimensions of questions as he goes along. But it is problematic that counter. Claire, Annas, we've talked very briefly about Florence and his being exiled from France on what some say,

the burden of it seems to be trumped up charges of corruption. He was on the wrong side in a battle between the whites and the blacks of the Gulfs and the... in the city. And yet the idea of Florence haunts this poem and sort of getting his own back on Florence seems to be a big part of this in a very, I'll teach you way.

Yes, it does. Although I think his attitude towards Florence is tempered by the fact that he hopes always to return, even as late as the 25th count of Paris. Did he have any evidence that ever went back at all, sneaked back. No. And he was offered later the chance to return

if he would confess to the charges with which he'd been accused and he refused to do so. He said that he would not confess to something of which he was not guilty and he preferred to remain in exile. In the 25th Cantor of Paradiso he says that he hopes that perhaps this poem

will be his passport back to Florence. He hopes that the honour that the home will bring him, will allow him to be welcomed back and indeed crowned as poet laureate in Florence. And of course, that never happened, at least not until after his death. But in hell, he is very concerned with an attempt to identify the causes of Florenton corruption. He looks for, we have a whole series of theories about what has gone wrong in Florence. So in the circle of the suicides, there's a Florentine suicide, an anonymous character, we don't know who it is, who blames the influence of the god Mars. Florence had been, the god Mars had been the patron of Florence, and Florence had changed Mars for St. John the Baptist.

And the Florentine suicide suggests that it is the influence of Mars, disgruntled at having been ousted by John the Baptist, which means that Florence will always be characterized by war. Mart is the god of war. Brunetto blames the corruption in Florence on a conflict between two groups of people, those who were descended by the Romans, the great myth of Florence's foundation, is that it was founded by Julius Caesar,

that it said that Florence was a Roman city, but that it was also in, influenced by the Etruscans coming from the neighbouring city of Fiesole. And that, so Brunetto sees the conflict in Florence as a conflict between the good Romans and the bad Fiesolens. And he sees Dante as one of the last few remaining descendants of the Romans, the good Roman side. And there's a tension throughout of the contrast between the power of the papacy, the heavenly power of papacy and the power of the Roman Empire, which is the earthly empire. and which as they fought for supremacy,

which should have supremacy. But let's move on on this journey, Margaret Keane. They get, they're helped by a winged monster, which is an honest face in a scorpion's tale, to get into the eighth circle of hell, the circle of fraud. Now fraud, we're talking about flatterers, corrupt politicians and thieves and so on.

Why was fraud so abhorred by Dante and put in that circle? Is that an inherited idea? Was it his notion? I think it's probably a little bit of both. It's intentionality. It's going further than just being overtaken by passion, something, being stronger than you are.

This is intentionally either going astray on your own or leading others astray, which is much, much stronger the idea that you might convince yourself to do something, but then that you might go on to convince others to do wrong. And this is where he would place those who are corrupt and steal. They could steal from the church. They could steal from civic responsibility. They could just be thieves.

And he has a very long section on what happens to thieves and the menopauseuses of the thieves into serpents. Very strong on that. And then ultimately... Can you just talk a little bit more graphic? I don't mean... Names. You want names.

I would like some instances of things. punishment. So I'm not talking for anything except what's in the poem because we're saying they did it. Just give us some instances. I mean, these, for instance, turned into snakes and back in the thieves again, very of it, but can you give us some more instances? That's partly because they are going with their

brute nature in the way that John was speaking of before, that they're giving up on rationality. Ulysses is a false counsellor. So we find this great Virgilian and behind that Homeric figure, this great adventurer, this great noble

figure very, very deep down in hell, partly because, of course, he's a Greek, and this is an Italian poem, so he was on the wrong side, if you like, in the Trojan War, and he's seen as a false counsellor. He's given a terrific story, a noble story, but a story of human ambition, a story which, which again comes without faith. Or you get the Pope, you get Pope Nicholas I who's accused of Simony, and we find him upside down in a tomb with the tongues of fire licking his toes. He's basically having his toes tickled by fire, which is much more unpleasant than the term tickling would suggest. And that's a terrific moment when Virgil actually carries Dante the pilgrim down to speak with Nicholas. And Nicholas then names another Pope thinking that he's already meeting Boniface. The only time that Boniface's name is actually used. So you have this... Boniface still being alive, so it's curious that is already now. At the time that the poem was set. Yes. Yes. John took, I'm not being sensationously, I just would like some more instances of these punishments

because one of the striking thing about Tante, and we're all being a bit pussyfooted about it, is the horrific nature of these punishments, which is part of what we're going to talk about. So can you please give us a few instances? If not, I'll get me notes, and I'll do it with me some. There are all sorts of graphic situations there. There are panderas and seduces in pools of feces. and the ulysses in a tongue of flame. There are the quite horrific. The sewers of discord are severed in their limbs,

and one of them, Bertrandaubon carries his head like a lantern, Dante says. So you're quite right. But I think what needs to be said about punishment, and this seems to me to be tremendously important, you're quite right to stress that they are very graphic and very dramatic. That is quite right. But there is an important sense in which punishment in the Inferno, the punishment needs to be interpreted in the context of the soul's preference.

There is a sense in which punishment is not simply in Dante's imagination of it, something which is superimposed almost as so you get a 50 pound fine for parking on a yellow line, not something like that. It is something which is implicit in the life preference of the characters themselves. And so in the case of Bertrandaubon, who is swinging his head, he has been and has organised and structured his existence in terms of factionalism, of creating antagonisms between people, and they live out in perpetuity what they have chosen.

I think that's the most important thing to say there. Yes. We are talking about corrupt politicians immersed in a lake, boiling pitch and people immersed in boiling blood and hypocrites walking around in lead cloaks and as we say thieves turning into snakes and back again it's a fair old circus isn't it? Where did he get that from? Did he invent it?

Or was that around in the imagery of the medieval church that he could draw on? I think he drew on some of his punishments from existing ideas but I think one of the geniuses of Dante's text is precisely the way in which he brings this variety of punishments together, the way in which he invents a punishment which in each case is perfectly suited to the sin committed. This is the idea that John's just been talking about,

the idea of what Dante was a contra pass. Which is the way in which the punishment fits the crime, not in a quantitative way, not in terms of you have committed a sin which is worth, you know, £50 or £100 worth of punishment, but in the way in which that punishment is enacted on the individual. And Bertrand de Bonham, John's mentioned, says that explicitly. He says, because I joined people who should have been,

sorry, because I separated people who should have been joined together, he was supposed to have turned the young King Henry, the third against King Henry II. I am myself divided and he carries his head cut off from his body. Margaret, Margaret King, down in the Ninth Circle, can you briefly tell us about Count Ugolini whom we discover immersed in ice up to his neck,

feeding off the brains of an archbishop? This is as deep down as you can go. Not quite. This is taking us to coquetus. This is taking us down to the pool of ice. And so this is the last section of Cinoos before, as you say before Satan himself. And we encounter traitors here.

So these are the ultimate fraudsters. And you can be a traitor to your family. You can be a traitor to your nation. You can be a traitor to guests. And then finally you could be a traitor to God. And Ugolino is there as a traitor to his nation. And his story is one of somebody who changes allegiances. And he's hooked himself up with the archbishop.

And then the archbishop turns against him. And the story is absolutely desperate. and it's very, very atmospheric. It's because we're in the dark, it's because we're in the cold. And he tells the story of imprisonment with his own children, or he says with his own children,

in reality, actually his children and his grandchildren. The prison is closed for months, and then suddenly they hear the noise of the door being nailed up. There will be no more foot. And we've encountered this figure gnawing at the skull, and it's the skull of the archbishop, and he only speaks to get revenge on the man that did this to him. And what did he do?

what he did was nail up the prison and leave these figures there and this growing understanding of what might happen next is absolutely the frisson in this story they run out of food they run out of time the children die and

Ogolino is groping around in the dark for two days and then he says famine overcame him and he just leaves it there In other words, there's a very strong indication of cannibus. In other words, he ate himself, and so far as he ate his own family. So there's knowing that the skull is, which is revenge, which is knowing at your enemy, it's also knowing it yourself and knowing at yourself,

this internalising of sin, which John has also been speaking about, is what happens down in this place of ice and atropy and no movement. Can I ask you, John, this is a theological poem in a theocratic society, and it brings a lot of medievalism together. listeners, because it would be read aloud as well as read, would they believe this literally at the time? Would this be thought, yes, this is what will happen to you? Is the dreadful warning aspect something that was intended?

And do you think people would believe that this would happen? Yes, I think that the straightforward answer to that question, the one which corresponds with expectations and readings at the time, is certainly that there is a prophetic dimension that Dante is sketching out, more than sketching out, is filling out in great detail. What will happen to the soul unless it chooses to repent

and changes its ways here and now? So there is a prophetic dimension that is certainly the case. So I just wanted to come in on that because I think that takes us back to Dante's surprise when he sees Brunetto Latini in hell, doesn't it?

Because in a way, that's the shock when Dante sees Brunetta and he's completely, the line is very emphatic. Are you here, said Brunetto, he says. That shock underlines the myth, the fiction,

that this journey is not a journey invented in the mind of Dante the poet, but a journey which he really went on. And the punishments which he's being shown are not punishments invented by Dante the poet, but punishments invented by God. That by the shock of seeing Brunetto is a lesson about justice,

a lesson about a lesson that it is not Dante who judges these souls, but God, in the same way as his, in a way, his sympathy for Francesca, that Francesca is in hell because she deserves to be in hell. Whether or not she's a sympathetic character, we should not forget that she's in hell. When we get to Satan, Lucifer, the pit of hell, which is the centre of the universe, because it's the centre of the earth, which is there, we discover ice, not burning, and the fallen angel, his wings have turned to scales and the fluffing of them turns everything to ice,

and he's got three heads eating Cassius and Brutus on either side and Kealt Caesar and by the feet and eating Judas by the head in his front mouth, main mouth as it were. This brings together

the classical versus Christian thing idea very strongly John. Can you address that for a moment? Well, what we need to say about the pitch there at the very bottom is that it is stillness, that there is no life and there is no movement, no dynamism. We have to

I think that Dante had a very dramatic, a very powerful, a very energetic sense of human nature in its power to moral self-determination and in its power to a kind of spiritual ecstasy when we go on into the purgatorio and the paradiso. And the inferno always has to be interpreted in the context of the purgatore and the paradiso because it's the dark side of a magnificent, a dramatic, a dynamic possibility that man has. Now we come to something of infinite sadness there at the bottom of the pit. We come to something of infinite sadness because everything is still, every possibility, every spiritual possibility, every possibility of establishing a love link, Dante speaks about a vinko d'amore, a chain of love which binds men rationally together, that has all now evaporated and been destroyed. So the first thing to say certainly about the pit there is that horrific image of stillness, the only movement of Satan's wings, it ensures that hell is frozen over.

there is man's ultimate response to the creativity of God himself and man's own energy, man's response to that, that tragic response, is caught there by Dante in nothingness, in stillness, in deadness. Margaret Keane, how did Dante and Virgil as it were in this story get out of hell? That's a very good question. Here you are in this place with no release, no release from the tension,

the release from this utter frozen quality. and what do you do? You keep on going. And it's this idea that by going down, you can come back up again. This remarkable monstrous figure of Satan. They actually have to grasp hold of it, almost as if they are rock climbers, with Virgil holding on to Dante to make sure he doesn't fall. And they go down.

And something happens, something very, very unexpected, something providential happens, that they actually manage to be at the center of the earth and by continuing down, the movement turns, is reversed. They end up then going up, and Satan is almost as it were inverted from their perspective. Their perspective completely shifts. They have gone right down to as far down as it is possible to go.

And because this is a poem of grace, because it's a poem which is going on, they don't have to come through any gate of sleep. They don't have to come through any kind of idea of this as being a fiction. they can actually keep going step by step and these steps will start to climb up and it will become the progatorial. Briefly, Claire, why did he write it in the Tuscan dialect

when Latin was so available to him and to every learned reader at the time? He wrote it in the Tuscan dialect I think because Latin was available as he said to learned readers. But Dante was not concerned only with learned readers. He felt that he had been given a mission to communicate with a world which he sees as having gone astray.

And this obviously takes us back to his own exile, but also to broader concerns. In Lucifer's mouths, we have Bridges and Cassius. He has this great concern with empire. He believes that empire is the only thing that can put the world straight again. And so he believes that the world has gone astray, and he has a mission to communicate that the world has gone astray and that individuals have a role to play and putting it right again.

And those individuals are not only learned individuals, but people in general. So he's getting up to a wider audience. He wants to get it to us as broad an audience as possible. John, why do you think how is the most popular of the three books, Inferno, Portatoria, and a parody of that? I should imagine because most people, most of the time, delight in misfortune and the dramatic

the situations that Dante describes there. It is very vibrant. Dante has a very powerful imagination. That imagination comes through in different ways, very beautifully in the Purgatori and the Paradiso, but there is no doubt that for an initial encounter, Dante's imagination is very strong, very graphic, and so it's immediate.

And finally, Margaret Keene, how influential has that poem been? We talked about something written at the beginning of the 14th century. We're talking about it today. It's being written about today, by Uthery, among many, many others. and red and so on. So can you give us one

or two specific? Absolutely. As you said, almost immediately, people are putting it together as a system and making illustrations of it. John Milton,

the great Protestant writer, is intrigued by it, needs to revise it one more time just as Dante was revising Virgil. He needs to work out what you do when you don't believe in purgatory, what you do when you want to change the doctrine, but where you still want to keep this sense

of a vibrancy in human fallibility and perhaps the voice of Satan in Paradise Lost is very, very strongly influenced by Ulysses, amongst others, amongst the voices in Dante's Hill. You could take that on to Blake and the illustrations by Blake. You could take that onto Shelley. You could take that on to James Joyce. You could take that on to Shemus Heaney. You could take that all through the American tradition.

They're fascinated by it because it's an epic in the vernacular and they would like to have one. Thank you very much indeed. Margaret Keene, Claire Hennis and John Took. Next week, it's Simon Bolivar, the night. since you, Liberator of South America, thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.