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Dante's Inferno 7th Circle.
It's the Circle of Violence.
The Circle of Violence has three sub-sircles or rings which punish three different types
of violence.
Violence against others.
Violence against self.
Violence against nature.
Which ring has its own dismal landscape?
Those who in life were violent against others or immersed to varying degrees in a river
of seething blood.
Those who committed violence against self by suicide have become twigs, shrubs, and trees
in the second ring somber thicket.
Those who offended nature and therefore got himself, find themselves in an open pit of combustible
sand exposed to flakes of fire that rain down on them from above.
Ain't too cool.
This third ring, in turn, divides into three different types of violence against God and nature.
Blast for me, sodomy and usury.
Hmm, I wonder who's down there in that scorching pit.
Stay tuned friends, part four of our series on Dante's characters coming up.
Is that how I'm comfortable down?
The character at the center of today's show was a historical person and well known citizen
of Florence.
He's located in the second zone of the third ring of the seventh circle among the sodomites.
Before we turn to him, some historical and biographical background will help us make sense
of Dante's willingness to place in hell some of the most respected Florentines of his time.
It has a lot to do with Dante's involvement in the turbulent factionalism of late 13th
century Florence.
The politics of medieval Italy was dominated by two main parties, the Guelphs and the
Gibba Leans.
The Guelphs supported the papacy in its power struggle with the Holy Roman Empire.
The Gibba Leans supported the empire.
After soundly defeating the Gibba Leans in 1266, the Guelph party in Florence split
into two factions, the whites and the blacks.
The blacks continued to support the Pope while the whites opposed papal interference in
the self-governing Florentine Republic, and they were especially wary of Pope Boniface
VIII, who had aggressive interventionist political ambitions.
Dante's family belonged to the white party and when the black Guelphs seized power in
Florence in November, 1301, through a coup d'etat backed by Boniface.
Their first order of business was to liquidate their political enemies among the white
Guelphs.
Dante Aligieri, who was away on a diplomatic mission at the time, was one of those enemies.
On January 27, 1302, Dante was found guilty of corruption, extortion and misuse of public
funds during his two-month term in the year 1300 as one of the city's seven priors, the highest
office in Florentine government.
After failing to comply with, or challenge, the court order against him, Dante was condemned
in absentia to permanent exile.
The transcripts of the court proceeding state that Dante was prosecuted, paid equisetes
on him, or what we would call a juridical inquest.
It was initiated after so-called public reports about his crimes, had, I'm quoting, reached
the ears and notice of the court.
The indictment was politically motivated, without any doubt, and the charges against him
were probably trumped up, yet the court that sentence Dante had followed legal protocol, and
in Dante's time, criminal convictions were far more difficult to nullify than political
banishments.
As a result, Dante never set foot in Florence again.
We should always remember when reading the divine comedy that the poem was written by a man
who had lost just about everything a person in that era could lose.
His citizenship, his homeland, his property, and his social identity.
In the letters and works that he wrote after 1302, Dante complained bitterly about the
hardships of poverty, vagrancy, and the loss of civic status.
In Patadizo, for example, written a decade and a half after his banishment, he writes
of coming to know how "salti" tastes the bread of others, "comisadisale la lopane la
lthrui," "salti because of the bitterness of having to ask for bread from others, and
because of the tears that drench it."
Salty also, because in Dante's time, as in ours, Tuscanae was one of the only places
in Italy that did not salt its bread.
And in the same passage of Patadizo, Dante also refers to the indignity of having to,
I quote him, "decent and mount by another's stairs."
We're dissent implies that one's request for hospitality has been denied.
The injury of exile, however, went deeper than hardships and the loss of citizenship,
which Dante chairs more than any other earthly blessing.
But her tanta the most was the infamy of his conviction, based as it was on hearsay evidence
that resulted in a defamation of his character.
Alluding to the way many Florentines simply assumed he was guilty as charged, and unleashed
a public outcry against him, Dante would later write about wandering all around Italy,
quote, "displaying against my will the wound of fortune for which the wounded one is often
unjustly accustomed to be held accountable."
The shame and indignation Dante felt at being chased from his nest by his fellow citizens
never diminished with time.
At the end of his life, the wound remained as raw in his psyche as when disaster first struck
in 1301.
The divine comedy was incubated and completed within the dark, lacerated depths of a pain
that Dante transmuted into a poetic rage against the machine.
The malfunctioning machine of secular justice that had unjustly condemned him.
The scholar Justin Steinberg in a book called Dante and the Limits of the Law makes
an important point when he claims that the divine comedy was meant to rectify Dante's damaged
reputation by highlighting the unreliability of public opinion regarding a person's character.
Dante shocked and knew that he would shock his fellow Florentines by placing some of the
most respected citizens of the city in hell.
Sir characters like Vadinata de Lubetti, Tagayo Aldo Brandini, Yakoboru Stikuchi and others.
These were all names that Dante himself considered among the most worthy.
By the same token, Dante saves various souls who had been publicly condemned or excommunicated by
the church. The souls of people who most Florentines would have assumed were damned.
By dramatizing the discrepancy between public reputation and posthumous fate,
Dante of course is casting doubt on the accepted court practice of using public opinion as
a basis for legal judgments. In Padizo 20, when Dante's wayfarer expresses amazement
that the pagan rifius, the minor character and Virgil's Aniad, is in heaven,
The souls in the six heaven of Jupiter declared to him, "You mortals hold back from judging for even
we who see God do not yet know all the elect."
"Hold back from judging. Fair enough. But where does that leave the divine comedy,
which is a prolonged act of judging and deciding who is damned and who is saved?"
So either we believe that heaven set its hand on the poem as Dante claims in Padizo 25,
and that its vision represents God's true moral order,
or else we believe that Dante Aligaid, either historical individual,
authored its representations of hell, purgatory and heaven. In which case, we must assume that Dante,
not God, was the arbiter who saved or dammed the souls that his wayfarer meets on his journey through
the afterlife. If we believe the latter, then a question arises as to whether Dante was in fact guilty
of the partial, prejudicial, and precipitous judgments that he censors in his divine comedy.
After all, not all of his damnation flew in the face of public opinion. Many were based on the
prevalent perceptions, reputations, or rumors surrounding the historical characters in question.
How much hard evidence did Dante have for his damnation? Precious little. How much did he have
for that matter in the case of late repentance, like Prince Manfred or Bonconte de Monte
Velthro who, by Dante's account, repented of their sins just instance before they died?
These are not idle questions because Dante's divine comedy has in fact had a considerable impact,
at least in Italy, but not only on the posthumous reputations of various historical individuals
whom he placed in Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise. Consider a famous scene in Inferno 15, where we find the
main character of today's episode. Dante and Virgil have arrived at the third section of the third
ring of the Circle of Violence. They're walking along the elevated ledge of the sand pit,
protected from the fire that rains down on the sinner's beneath them.
Dante describes the scene as follows. We had already come so far from the wood that I would not have
seen where it was even if I had turned back when we encountered a band of souls coming along the
barrier and each was gazing at us as in the evening people gaze at one another under the new moon,
and they sharpen their brows toward us as the old tailor does at the eye of the needle.
Looked over in this way by such a company, I was recognized by one who seized me by the hem and cried,
"What a marvel."
Let's pause here for a moment. The sin punished in this region of Hell is never explicitly named,
neither of the words "sadami," nor the word "sadamites" appears in the divine comedy,
maybe because even back then homosexuality was the love that dares not speak its name.
Yet Dante leaves little doubt that we are among the sadamites. In the first torset I just read,
he mentions that he did not turn back, recalling the destruction of sadam and lots wife,
who although warned by the angel not to look back, did in fact look back, and was turned into a
statue of salt. The imagery of the sinners quote gazing at us as in the evening people gaze at one
another under the new moon, conjures a scene of cruising to use a modern term for what frequently
took place outside the walls of Florence on darker nights with men checking each other out in the
dimness of the new moon. The last torset I cited is particularly telling, suggesting that
Dante knew exactly what it felt like to be leered at by cruisers. Looked over in this way by such a
company I was recognized by one who seized me by the hem and cried, "What a marvel."
In his confessions, St. Augustine uses that image of lovers tucking at his hem, holding him back
from converting to Christianity. "My lovers of old held me back, they plucked at my fleshy garment
and they whispered, 'Do you cast us off?' And from that moment we shall no longer be with you forever and ever.'
So, a sinner down in the pit tugs at Dante's hem and explains what a marvel. Now back to the text,
I continue, and I, by Dante, when he stretched out his arm toward me, penetrated with my eye,
his baked appearance, so that his scorched face did not prevent my intellect from recognizing him,
and reaching my hand down toward his face I replied,
"Siete voi qui se brunette, though. Are you here se brunette, though?"
That's a line that T. S. Eliot reprises in little gidding by the way.
"Sé brunette, though, who is se brunette de latini?"
We can be sure that Dante's contemporary readers were as flabbergasted as Dante's wafer
seems to be in this scene. If we go by Dante's account in Inferno 15,
brunette de latini, who was born in 1220 and died in 1294, had been Dante's beloved teacher and
mentor. He was far more than that, however, brunette was a Florentine statesman, a civic hero,
and one of the most revered citizens of Florence. He was also one of the great
humans of the 13th century, having authored a very important book called the Tezoretto or
my treasure, which had a profound impact on Dante himself and from which Dante borrows liberally
in constructing his divine comedy. The whole opening conto of Inferno has a significant debt
to brunette de tésoretto. So what is brunette doing among the sodomites? Scholars have searched
long and hard for evidence outside of Dante's poem that brunette, though, the father of several
children who condemned homosexuality in two of his books, was gay. They've come up empty-handed.
Most of them assume that if Dante put him among the sodomites, brunette those inclinations must
have been well-known in Florence, and some scholars have speculated that brunette
though might have made passes at Dante when Dante was a young student. Both hypotheses are
belied by Dante's shock at finding his teacher in this zone of hell.
Something here doesn't add up, and that's why some scholars are intent on interpreting
brunette de sodomy in non-sexual terms as linguistic perversion, for example,
since brunette had written his leifre du Tezore in French rather than in Latin or Italian.
Or brunette those so-called unnatural political affiliations, a natural from Dante's point of view,
since brunette was opposed to empire, while Dante was definitely in favor of empire.
I have a different take on it, which I'll get to shortly, but first, let me emphasize a degree to
which when it comes to brunette de Latinis place and Dante's inferno of everything,
becomes murky and even contradictory. We can't even be sure that brunette was ever
Dante's teacher, at least not in the affectionate way, Dante represents that encounter in Inferno 15,
where brunette of flatter's Dante about the glorious future that awaits him, and where
Dante treats brunette the with great respect and affection, declaring to him that in life,
quote, "You used to teach me how man makes himself eternal and how grateful I am for that,
as long as I live must be discerned in my language."
Dante refers to, I quote again, "The dear kind paternal image of you,"
and brunette the twice refers to Dante as "sun." Ironic to say the least in the context of
sodomy or non-procreative sex. There's a universal consensus among scholars that Dante had a
genuine love and reverence for brunette, though, and that he is genuinely distressed to discover him
among the damned. Yet I've always found that to be an absurd assumption.
Dante doesn't discover brunette to inhale, Dante put him in hell. Not only that, he
incidiously undermines brunette to an Inferno 15, if you consider the choreography of the scene.
Dante may bow his head downward in a gesture of reverence as he walks along the ledge, with his beloved
teacher. Yet the teacher walks beneath him, his head at the level of Dante's feet.
Even more pathetic, from my point of view, is the fact that Dante uses his encounter with
brunette to secure a blessing for himself from one of the great humanists of the age.
Oh, son, brunette to tell him, if you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.
Your fortune holds so much honor and store for you that both sides will hunger for you.
Meanwhile, brunette to his in hell, and Dante is destined for heaven.
This fact essentially undercuts the sincerity of Dante's declaration that brunette taught him
how man makes himself eternal. As I mentioned earlier, brunette was the author of a magnus opus
called "treasure." And his last words to Dante are, "Let my treasure be commended to you in which
I still live and I ask no more." The problem here is that Dante had a very different idea about
how one becomes eternal than the idea that one lives on in one's work.
Dante believed in Christian salvation, making oneself eternal for Dante meant finding one's way
into the eternal presence of the divine. If we take this difference into account,
then maybe his decision to place brunette to among the sodomites was his way of impugning
what Dante, from his Christian viewpoint, saw as the sterility of brunette those humanism,
where sterility means a secular ideology that does not lead to genuine transcendence.
If this is indeed by Dante puts brunette to in such company, that's an invidious way to take issue
with his beloved teacher's humanism. Stay tuned, more on Inferno 15 coming up.
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Along with brunette, Dante places three other highly respected citizens of Florence among the sodomites,
citizens whom Dante admired and whom he treats with the same respect as he treats his former
teacher in Inferno 16. I understand Dante's desire to stress the unreliability of public opinion
as a basis for adjudicating a person's guilt or innocence, yet at what cost. In the end,
Dante be smurched his teacher's reputation for centuries to come on no justifiable basis whatsoever.
to this day, but Rentalatini is remembered more as a sodomite than as a great humanist,
thanks to Dante's portrait of him in Inferno 15. This hijacking of a person's posthumous reputation
is egregious to say the least when you think about it, especially in the case of someone like
brunette though who in life assiduously curated his future fame.
I love Dante as much as anyone, yet he was no paragon of moral virtue. Yes, he had been defamed,
or so he believed, but that makes it all the more troublesome that he was willing to defame
brunette while feigning to be so fond and respectful of him. In Inferno 15 remains a baffling
Kanto from other points of view as well. Sottami, for example, how are we to understand it?
No one really knows. In Inferno, Sottami is punished in lower hell as a form of violence against
nature, but in Pudgatorio the second Kantoical, fully half of the penitence on the terrace of lust,
which is the least grave of the deadly sins, are homosexual. As Dante puts it,
they "committed the offense for which Caesar, in his triumph once heard himself reproach as queen,
therefore they depart crying Sodom."
Why, in his Inferno, does Dante put sodomites in the circle of violence rather than the circle of
lust? If Sottami is merely a term for homosexuality, why is it a form of violence in the Inferno?
An incontinence in Pudgatorio.
The answer may lie with another defamatory gesture on Dante's part. In Inferno 15,
Brunette remarks in passing that "Prison is also in the pit."
Prischen, who was Prischen, or Priscianus. He was a Latin grammarian of the 6th century AD,
who authored the Istitutcianus Gramatica, or Institutes of Grammar, which was the primary textbook of
medieval pedagogy. We know next to nothing about Prischen's life, let alone his sexual proclivities,
and Dante knew even less than we do. What Dante did know was that those medieval schools that
used Prischen's Institute of Grammar as their manual were hotbeds of what we today would call child
abuse or sexual violence against boys. The only reason I can think of of why Dante would place
Prischen among the sodomites is to indict by association the whole institution of medieval pedagogy,
which gave teachers absolute power over the bodies, minds, and souls of their students,
a power that they systematically abused.
Pédagogus et goso domitequeous, a teacher therefore a sodomite to quote a maxim of the times.
We may applaud Dante's indictment of sexual violence against children, yet on no account
can this indictment justify Dante's defamation of his teacher Brunetto Latini or the Latin
Grammarian Pédagianus, Chisera lienzis.
To make matters even more perplexing in the Inferno 16, Dante seems to suggest that he himself,
in fact, had homosexual leanings or temptations, and that it was only fear of damnation
that prevented him from acting on them. Here is how he describes his encounter with the
normal Florentines in the ring of sodomy. Already I was in a place where one heard the thundering
of water falling into the next circle when three shades came running together out of a herd,
passing by beneath the harsh punishments burning rain, and on reaching us they made a wheel of
themselves all three, and here the language becomes graphically homoerotic.
As is the custom of wrestlers naked and oiled, spying out their holes and their advantage before
they come to blows and wounds, so they wheeled, and each kept his face toward me,
so their necks made a constant motion contrary to their feet.
After the shades reveal who they are, there are in fact three of the most worthy Florentine
citizens of their time. Dante writes, "If I had been protected from the fire, I would have thrown
myself down there among them, but because I would have burned and cooked myself, fear,
vanquished the goodwill that made me greedy to embrace them."
The word for greedy here is guot-duh, which an Italian has overtones of sexual order,
and I don't think it's pushing things too far to say that this passage contains a discrete
confession that had it not been for his fear of burning in hell, not they might well have been
down there in the pit with them. Stay tuned, wrapping up this fourth episode of our series on
Dante's characters right after this.
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Dante's character is a real human being.
when age, where everything is relative, where on the one hand means, on the other hand,
and where uncertainty is our only certainty, there is something compelling as well as liberating
about the moral clarity of Dante's vision of Gooden Evil.
Dante may have overstepped himself when he presumed to save or damn certain individuals.
Yet in the final analysis, we are moved by what I would call the comedy's cry.
It's the cry of a wrong disenfranchised individual who was outraged at the
turpitude and political corruption of his world, a world in which popes were
scoundrels, power was unscrupulous, and the laws of justice were systematically
produced, abused, or ignored. I borrow the term cry from Dante's ancestor,
Kachagweida, whom the wayfarer meets in the central cantos of Patadizo.
Kachagweida foretells the exile that awaits his descendant shortly after his return to earth.
Dante wrote the comedy in exile, yet the journey is set in the year 1300, two years before
his banishment. In his speech, Kachagweida uses the word giddido or cry twice.
Once in reference to the public outcry against Dante after his conviction, the cry
of blame will follow the party harmed, he warns. And then again in reference to the divine
comedy in itself, which Kachagweida instructs Dante to write, even though the high and mighty
will take onbridge at his denunciations.
Voting again, this cry of yours will be like a wind that strikes hardest the highest peaks,
and this is no small claim to honor. Every reader of Dante's comedia, however naive, or
learned, hears the cry of this poem loudly and clearly. Its idiom may be medieval, yet
its clamor as the universal accent of an offended individual shouting back at the world, a world
that has the power to crush him, but not to silence him.
There is in each of us a stifled, potential, or inarticulate cry of this sort. The reason
we read the comedy so many centuries later is because no one, in the history of literature,
has given that cry such a cosmic reach inarticulation. The cry moves to the degree that
it comes from a flawed, and yes, a very human individual. Dante may have judged others
harshly, and in a few cases unjustly, yet the Inferno also tells a story of Dante's recognition
within himself of an inner disposition toward many of the sins punished there. His discrete
confession among the sodomizes just one of many instances in the poem. The comedy would be
unreadable if Dante presumed even the slightest moral superiority over his readers.
The only virtue he claims for himself in abundance is hope, and that's good enough for me.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, and this episode wraps up the first installment
of our series on Dante's characters. To all of you who made it this far, thanks for listening.
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