Inferno · Canto IV ·
Inferno IV — The Pale Poet
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 4 of 100 · Inferno, Canto IV
Before reading
This is the first canto of Hell proper. The pilgrim has crossed Acheron — though he was unconscious for the crossing — and now stands on the far bank. What he finds there will be one of the most quietly disturbing places in the whole Commedia, because it is the place in which the Comedy's machinery and the Comedy's sympathies pull hardest against each other.
Where the canto sits
Inferno is a great inverted cone with nine descending circles. This canto opens at the first circle. The reader has spent two cantos being prepared for screaming, fire, and the gnashing of teeth. Instead, what comes first is something gentler and harder to hold — a green meadow inside the dark, a castle with seven walls, and a population of the noble dead who never knew Christ. The poem's first sustained moral problem is not how to bear the punishments of Hell. It is how to bear the absence of punishment for souls whose only fault is when they were born.
What it helps to know
The medieval Church inherited from Augustine a stern doctrine: no one who lacked baptism could enter Heaven, even an unbaptized infant, even a virtuous pagan who had lived before the Incarnation. By Dante's time this had softened slightly. Aquinas had argued for a limbus patrum (the limbo of the patriarchs, emptied at Christ's harrowing) and a limbus infantium (the limbo of unbaptized children, who suffered no positive pain). What Dante does in this canto is bigger than either. He widens the limbo to take in the entire pre-Christian noble world — the philosophers, the poets, the historians, the heroes of Greece and Rome and Troy — and gives them a place that is, on its surface, beautiful.
A few figures are useful to recognise as they appear. Homer the pagan Greek epic poet, Horace the Roman satirist, Ovid the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, Lucan the Roman poet of the civil-war Pharsalia: these four come forward to welcome Virgil. Aristotle, called by Dante simply il maestro di color che sanno — the master of those who know — sits at the centre of a philosophic family that includes Socrates and Plato. The names that close the canto (Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, Hippocrates, Avicenna, Averroes) are reminders that Dante's pre-Christian world is not only the Greek and Latin one. Two are Islamic philosophers from the twelfth century; their presence in the noble castle is one of the poem's broad gestures.
Christ's Harrowing of Hell — the tradition that between Crucifixion and Resurrection he descended to Limbo and led out the worthy souls of the Old Testament — will be alluded to. Watch the careful, indirect way Virgil refers to it.
What to read for
Notice that this is the only circle in Hell whose population includes Virgil himself. The guide is describing his own permanent address. Listen for what that does to his voice. He goes pale.
Notice the physical aesthetic of Limbo. The light, the meadow, the castle, the seven walls, the silence of the great teachers. Then notice what is missing — and what the absence costs.
Notice who Dante chooses to name in the noble castle, and which absences are conspicuous. The selection is itself an argument.
The canto plants a question the rest of Inferno will not settle: whether the Commedia's God is the kind of God whose justice the Commedia's reader can finally bear.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The first canto of Hell proper refuses to look like Hell. There is no scream, no fire that burns, no monster on a throne. There are sighs and a green meadow and a castle with seven walls and a luminous open hall in which the noble dead of the pre-Christian world sit in silent attention around the master of those who know. The canto's mechanism is the Comedy's sharpest provocation: a place whose only punishment, Virgil says, is to live without hope in desire. No physical pain at all. And the souls held there are, for the most part, exactly the souls Dante most admired — Homer, Aristotle, Aeneas, his own guide. The pilgrim's reaction is recorded plainly: great grief seized on my heart when this I heard, because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in that Limbo were suspended. The poem opens its catalogue of damnation by damning its own teachers. The reader is asked, on the first circle, whether the system the gate inscription announced — justice incited my sublime Creator — is one she can accept when it is applied to the people she would most want to spare.
What Limbo costs Virgil
Virgil goes pale before they descend. Let us descend now into the blind world, he says, began the Poet, pallid utterly. Dante, watching, reads the colour as fear; Virgil corrects him — the anguish of the people who are below here in my face depicts that pity which for terror thou hast taken. It is the only time in the canto Virgil names his own condition. He is descending into the circle that is his own permanent address. When the four great poets come out to greet him — all honor be to the pre-eminent Poet; his shade returns again, that was departed — the welcome is also a reminder that he has only left briefly. The cantos to come will give us a Virgil composed, authoritative, sometimes severe. This is the canto in which we see what that composure costs him.
What the noble castle is, and what it is not
The castle stands on a green meadow inside Hell. It has seven walls and a small stream the pilgrim crosses as upon firm land. Once inside, the air is luminous — a meadow of fresh verdure. The great souls walk and speak quietly. The architecture is the architecture of a philosophy school, or of a humanist's ideal academy. Read straight, the place is a generous gesture: Dante is making room inside his Christian Hell for the world's wisdom. Read more carefully, the generosity is also the cruelty. The seven walls are the seven liberal arts, or the seven cardinal and theological virtues — interpretations differ — but in either reading the walls enclose rather than open. The light has no source. The meadow has no sky. The great souls do nothing but be present to one another, forever, with their desire directed at a horizon they cannot cross. Limbo's beauty is precisely the measure of what its inhabitants have been refused. The canto is asking the reader to feel both at once.
The harrowing and the politics of the list
Virgil, who entered Limbo newly, remembers the day a Mighty One came down — incoronate with sign of victory — and led some of the shades out: Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, Israel, Rachel, and others many, and he made them blessed. The episode is the medieval Harrowing of Hell, but Virgil names neither Christ nor God — only un possente, a Mighty One. He recounts the event he witnessed without being able to name what it was. The list of those rescued is entirely Old Testament Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs; no Greek, no Roman, no pagan poet was taken. Virgil watched his neighbours go and was left behind. The whole emotional weight of the Limbo doctrine is concentrated in that small unspoken fact.
The catalogue of those who remain is then offered as compensation, and the names are chosen with care. Trojans (Hector, Aeneas, the matriarch Electra), Romans of the Republic (Caesar, Brutus the founder, Lucretia, Cornelia), then the philosophers (Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Thales, Empedocles, Zeno), then the scientists and physicians (Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen) and — startlingly — two Islamic philosophers from the twelfth century, Avicenna and Averroes, the latter named for his great Aristotle commentary. The list is one of the most cosmopolitan rosters in medieval Christian literature, and its presence here is a quiet argument: the wisdom worth honouring did not belong to any one tribe or scripture. But the same gesture that honours them also confirms their exclusion.
Famous and meaningful passages
The verge of the abyss.
True is it, that upon the verge I found me Of the abysmal valley dolorous, That gathers thunder of infinite ululations. (Inf. IV.7–9)
The whole Inferno is gathered, in three lines, as a sound. Thunder of infinite ululations — what the rest of the cantica will be is announced as a noise heard before anything is seen.
Virgil pale at the descent.
Let us descend now into the blind world, Began the Poet, pallid utterly; I will be first, and thou shalt second be. (Inf. IV.13–15)
The guide goes pale before he speaks. The descent into the blind world — cieco mondo — is being made by a man who lives there.
Virgil's correction.
The anguish of the people Who are below here in my face depicts That pity which for terror thou hast taken. (Inf. IV.19–21)
Pity, not fear. The colour Dante read wrong is the most important emotional disclosure in the canto.
The sound of Limbo.
There, in so far as I had power to hear, Were lamentations none, but only sighs, That tremulous made the everlasting air. (Inf. IV.25–27)
No screams, no chains, no fire. Only sighs that tremulous made the everlasting air. Limbo's whole punishment is given as an atmospheric condition.
The doctrine.
That they sinned not; and if they merit had, 'Tis not enough, because they had not baptism, Which is the portal of the Faith thou holdest; (Inf. IV.34–36)
The harshest theological line in the canto. They sinned not — and yet. The conjunction is the Comedy's sharpest one.
The condition of Limbo.
For such defects, and not for other guilt, Lost are we, and are only so far punished, That without hope we live on in desire. (Inf. IV.40–42)
Senza speme vivemo in disio. The most famous formulation of Limbo's pain. Desire without the possibility of its object. Virgil includes himself in the we.
Dante's grief.
Great grief seized on my heart when this I heard, Because some people of much worthiness I knew, who in that Limbo were suspended. (Inf. IV.43–45)
The pilgrim's response to the doctrine is grief, not assent. The poem records the resistance.
The harrowing, indirectly named.
When I saw hither come a Mighty One, With sign of victory incoronate. Hence he drew forth the shade of the First Parent, (Inf. IV.52–54)
Un possente — a Mighty One. Virgil saw it happen and cannot say the name. The whole Limbo doctrine sits in the gap between his eyes and his vocabulary.
The fire across the dark.
Not very far as yet our way had gone This side the summit, when I saw a fire That overcame a hemisphere of darkness. (Inf. IV.67–69)
The light has no source in Hell's sky; it is the radiance of the great souls themselves. A hemisphere of light against a hemisphere of dark.
The welcome.
All honor be to the pre-eminent Poet; His shade returns again, that was departed. (Inf. IV.79–80)
The four poets greet Virgil as one of their own, returning. The reminder is double-edged: he belongs here.
The four.
That one is Homer, Poet sovereign; He who comes next is Horace, the satirist; The third is Ovid, and the last is Lucan. (Inf. IV.88–90)
The classical canon named in three lines. Homer Dante had never read in Greek; the reverence is for a name and a tradition rather than a text.
The sixth.
And more of honor still, much more, they did me, In that they made me one of their own band; So that the sixth was I, 'mid so much wit. (Inf. IV.100–102)
One of the most quietly audacious lines in the Commedia. Dante writes himself into the canon of classical epic poets. He is the sixth.
The master.
The Master I beheld of those who know, Sit with his philosophic family. All gaze upon him, and all do him honor. (Inf. IV.131–133)
Il maestro di color che sanno. Aristotle, named only as the master, attended in silence by a school that includes Socrates and Plato.
The cosmopolitan close.
Euclid, geometrician, and Ptolemy, Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna, Averroes, who the great Comment made. (Inf. IV.142–144)
Two Islamic philosophers in the final tercet of the noble catalogue. The wisdom of Limbo is not only the wisdom of the West.
What to watch for
Watch the word hope. Without hope we live on in desire is Limbo's diagnosis; the inscription on the gate told us to abandon it on entry. Every later circle will be, in part, a study of what hope's absence does to a soul.
Watch what Virgil cannot name. He saw the Harrowing and called it a Mighty One. In canto V he will refuse to name Dido. In Purgatorio he will be unable to speak the word Heaven. The pattern starts here.
Watch the figure of the sixth. Dante's quiet self-inscription among Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan is the Commedia's first claim about the Commedia itself — that it belongs to that company.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.