Inferno XI — The Stench and the Tomb

Before reading

This is the Inferno's engineering canto. Almost nothing happens in it. The pilgrim and Virgil pause on the edge of a great cliff, take shelter from the stench rising from below, and Virgil explains — for forty-eight tercets — the entire moral architecture of the rest of Hell. The canto is short, didactic, and indispensable. It is the only place in the Commedia in which the categorical scheme is laid out in plain prose. Read it slowly; it will save you fifty cantos of confusion.

Where the canto sits

The pilgrim is between two of Hell's structural divisions. He has just passed through the cemetery of the heretics (canto X) and stands at the lip of a vast precipice — the cliff that descends from the sixth circle (heresy) to the seventh (violence). The poets need to pause to let their eyes and lungs adjust to the smell from below; Virgil uses the pause to teach. From this canto onward, every circle the pilgrim enters will have been introduced first as a category. The scheme he is about to deliver maps out cantos XII through XXXIV — twenty-three cantos, the entire bottom half of the Inferno.

What it helps to know

The architecture Virgil describes is Aristotelian, not biblical. Dante took Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De Officiis as his main classification systems for sin, and adapted them to a Christian framework. The three great divisions of human malice in the canto are:

Violence (circle 7): force against neighbours, against self, against God.
Fraud (circle 8): deceit against those who have no reason to trust the deceiver.
Treachery (circle 9): deceit against those who do have reason to trust — kin, country, guests, benefactors.

The deep ranking is the canto's most important argument. Fraud is man's peculiar vice, and so it more displeases God. Animals can do violence; only rational creatures can do fraud. The reasoning faculty turned to deception is, for Dante and his sources, the deepest possible distortion of what makes a human a human.

A small theological note will help when it comes. Virgil includes in violence against God two categories that look odd to a modern eye: sodomy (read by medieval natural-law tradition as violence against nature, and therefore indirectly against God-as-Creator) and usury (read as violence against industry, since industry — art, in the canto's vocabulary — is nature's child and therefore God's grandchild). The argument about usury is one of the Commedia's most economic passages. The condemnation of sodomy will land, two cantos later, on one of Dante's own old teachers.

The single named soul in the canto is Pope Anastasius II — a fifth-century pope (496–498) whom medieval tradition mistakenly identified with the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I, who was condemned as a heretic for entertaining the Monophysite Photinus's denial of Christ's divinity. The historical confusion is not Dante's; he inherited it. The point of placing the pope here is structural. The cemetery of the heretics — the boundary the canto stands on — contains a pope. The lower circles will contain many more, named or implied. Dante's Comedy is a long, slow indictment of the medieval Church, and the canto that lays out the architecture of lower Hell opens with the only named heretic in the Inferno — a pope.

What to read for

Listen for the small philosophical line at the canto's centre — fraud is man's peculiar vice. Hold it against everything that comes after. The whole of cantos XVIII–XXXIV is the working out of that single line.

Notice how Virgil teaches. He uses scholastic structure (three categories, three subcategories under each, with a justification for the ordering), and he assumes the pilgrim has read Aristotle. He cites thy Ethics and thy Physics directly. The canto is, among other things, a small portrait of how Dante's Virgil functioned in the medieval imagination — as a teacher of pagan moral philosophy who happened also to be authoritative inside Christian theology.

Notice the small puzzle at the close. The pilgrim asks why the incontinent — the souls of the upper circles — are punished less severely. Virgil reminds him of the Aristotelian distinction between sins of appetite (forgivable in degree because they fight reason from below) and sins of malice (unforgivable because they corrupt reason from inside). The whole structural argument of the Inferno sits in that distinction.

The canto ends with two coordinates of the dawn sky — the Fishes at the horizon and the Wain over Caurus — which date the pause to roughly two hours before sunrise on Easter Saturday, 9 April 1300. Dante times the journey with astronomical exactness throughout the Commedia. Keep an eye on the sky.

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

Almost nothing visible. The pilgrim and Virgil paused at the lip of a precipice, sheltered behind a sarcophagus from the stench rising out of the void below, and Virgil spent the canto explaining — in scholastic order — the moral architecture of the rest of Hell. The canto is the Inferno's structural diagram. It is the only place in the Commedia in which the categorical scheme is laid out in plain prose, and it is, by design, the canto with the least story of any in the cantica. The two pieces of action — the tomb of Pope Anastasius at the start, the astronomical fix at the end — are book-ends to a lecture. The lecture is doing two kinds of work at once: it is preparing the reader for the architecture of the next twenty-three cantos, and it is showing the poem's classical-Christian synthesis at its most explicit. Virgil teaches Aristotle and Cicero inside a Christian Hell as if there were no problem in doing so. The seamlessness is the Commedia's philosophical claim.

The architecture, in plain terms

Virgil's scheme can be summarised as a nested taxonomy with three top-level categories:

Circle 7 — Violence. Force against three classes of object: against neighbour (homicide, rapine — cantos XII–XIII), against self (suicide, profligacy — canto XIII), against God (blasphemy, sodomy, usury — cantos XIV–XVII). The justification for the third grouping is the natural-law argument that God's creation (nature, and the human industry that follows nature as a student follows a master) cannot be attacked without attacking its source.

Circle 8 — Simple fraud. Deceit against those who have no reason to trust the deceiver. Ten ditches (malebolge) punishing ten categories: seducers and panders, flatterers, simonists, soothsayers, barrators, hypocrites, thieves, false counsellors, sowers of discord, and falsifiers (cantos XVIII–XXX).

Circle 9 — Treacherous fraud. Deceit against those who do have reason to trust — the betrayal of special bonds. Four rings: betrayers of kin (Caïna), of country (Antenora), of guests (Ptolomaea), of benefactors (Judecca). These will be the last cantos of the Inferno, XXXI–XXXIV.

The ranking — violence above fraud, simple fraud above treacherous fraud — encodes the canto's central claim: fraud is man's peculiar vice, more it displeases God; and so stand lowest the fraudulent, and greater dole assails them. Violence is shared with animals; only rational creatures defraud. Reason turned to deception is therefore the most distinctively human distortion of what makes a human a human. And among forms of fraud, the betrayal of trust where trust was specifically owed is the worst — because the betrayer has destroyed the human bond on which the possibility of any other action depends.

What the canto includes that is not Aristotle

Two categories in Virgil's account belong distinctively to medieval Christendom rather than to pagan ethics. Sodomy is placed under violence-against-God because medieval natural-law theology read it as a violation of the natural order God created. Usury is placed there as well, on a more carefully argued ground: human industry (art) imitates and continues nature, and is therefore as it were, God's grandchild; charging interest is to make money breed unnaturally, which is to substitute artifice for industry and so to violate both nature and its Creator. The line so that your art is, as it were, God's grandchild is one of the Commedia's most economically charged single tercets. Florence in 1300 was the banking capital of Europe; the largest Italian banking houses were Florentine; the wealth that built the city Dante was exiled from was, in significant part, interest. The poem is being precise about the source of its city's prosperity.

The placement of sodomy under violence-against-God will cost Dante one of his most affectionate cantos. The pilgrim's old teacher Brunetto Latini appears among the sodomites in canto XV, and the encounter is one of the warmest and most respectful in the entire Inferno. The systematic structure laid out in canto XI requires the categorical condemnation; the poetic structure of canto XV honours the man. The collision between the two is one of the Commedia's most exposed places.

The puzzle about incontinence

At the close of the canto the pilgrim asks why the souls of the upper circles — the carnal, the gluttonous, the avaricious, the wrathful — are punished less severely than those of the lower. The implicit objection is moral: a sin like Francesca's lust seems as bad as a hypocrite's deceit. Virgil answers by appeal to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the dispositions three that Heaven abides not are incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality, and how incontinence less God offendeth, and less blame attracts. Incontinence is the failure of reason to govern appetite; malice is the corruption of reason itself. The first is a weakness of the rational soul; the second is its perversion. Hell is hierarchical because what kind of evil a sin is, not only how much harm it does, determines its weight.

The argument is the Commedia's clearest single answer to the question modern readers most often press on Dante: how can it be that some souls are worse off than others. The answer is that the architecture follows ontology. The deepest punishments are not necessarily for the most damaging sins but for the sins that most thoroughly destroy what makes the sinner a soul at all.

Pope Anastasius at the door

The canto opens by naming, on the inscription of one of the heretical tombs, Pope Anastasius — Anastasius II (496–498), whom medieval tradition (mistakenly conflating him with the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I) damned for entertaining the Monophysite Photinus's denial of Christ's full divinity. The historical confusion is not Dante's invention; it was standard in medieval chronicles. But the choice to place that name first in the canto that lays out the moral architecture of lower Hell is Dante's own. The cemetery of the heretics — the boundary the canto stands on — contains a pope. The lower cantos will contain three more popes by name (Nicholas III, Boniface VIII, Clement V in canto XIX) and many more by implication. The poem is starting its long indictment of the medieval papacy at the exact moment it begins to formalise the architecture of damnation.

Famous and meaningful passages

The stench and the named pope.

Of a great tomb, whereon I saw a writing, Which said: Pope Anastasius I hold, Whom out of the right way Photinus drew. (Inf. XI.7–9)

The first named soul in the canto is a pope. The shape of the indictment to come.

The lecture's premise.

My son, upon the inside of these rocks, Began he then to say, are three small circles, From grade to grade, like those which thou art leaving. (Inf. XI.16–18)

Three circles for the rest of Hell. From grade to grade — the descent is structured.

The categorical claim.

Of every malice that wins hate in Heaven, Injury is the end; and all such end Either by force or fraud afflicteth others. (Inf. XI.22–24)

The whole architecture in three lines. Injury (ingiuria) is the end of every malice; the means is either force or fraud.

The deep ranking.

But because fraud is man's peculiar vice, More it displeases God; and so stand lowest The fraudulent, and greater dole assails them. (Inf. XI.25–27)

Ma perché frode è de l'uom proprio male. The line that organises the rest of the Inferno.

Violence in three parts.

All the first circle of the Violent is; But since force may be used against three persons, In three rounds 'tis divided and constructed. (Inf. XI.28–30)

Three rounds: against neighbour, against self, against God. The seventh circle laid out before it is entered.

Violence against God.

Violence can be done the Deity, In heart denying and blaspheming Him, And by disdaining Nature and her bounty. (Inf. XI.46–48)

Three forms: blasphemy, sodomy, usury. The canto's most theologically dense small tercet.

The art-grandchild argument.

So that your art is, as it were, God's grandchild. (Inf. XI.105)

Sì che vostr'arte a Dio quasi è nepote. The argument against usury. Money should not breed because money is not nature.

The Aristotelian justification.

Hast thou no recollection of those words With which thine Ethics thoroughly discusses The dispositions three, that Heaven abides not (Inf. XI.79–81)

Virgil cites Aristotle by book title. The synthesis the Commedia keeps making — pagan philosophy as the framework of Christian doctrine — is here on the surface.

The astronomical close.

For quivering are the Fishes on the horizon, And the Wain wholly over Caurus lies, And far beyond there we descend the crag. (Inf. XI.113–115)

Two stellar coordinates fix the hour to roughly two hours before sunrise on Easter Saturday. Dante times the journey by the sky throughout the Comedy.

What to watch for

Watch the descent of categories. Every circle from XII onward will be introduced first as a category before it is shown as a scene. The lecture you have just read is the table of contents.

Watch the popes. Anastasius is the first named pope in the Inferno. Three more — Nicholas III, Boniface VIII (still alive in 1300, prophetically damned), and Clement V — will appear in canto XIX in the third ditch of the eighth circle. Dante's Comedy is, among other things, a sustained indictment of the medieval papacy, and the indictment is being structured here.

Watch the line on fraud. Fraud is man's peculiar vice is the most consequential single line in the canto. Hold it against every later encounter. Why did Dante place fraud lower than violence? The answer is in those four words.

Watch Brunetto. In canto XV, Dante will meet his own teacher Brunetto Latini among the sodomites — that is, in the third round of violence-against-God established in this canto. The collision between the system the lecture sets out and the affection the narrative shows is one of the Commedia's great pieces of moral self-exposure.

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.