Inferno · Canto XXVII ·
Inferno XXVII — The Second Flame
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 27 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XXVII
Before reading
The canto of Ulysses had no Italian in it. This one has nothing but. As soon as the great two-horned flame of the Greeks moves away, another flame approaches the rim — and the soul inside it begs, in the dialect of the Romagna, for news of home. The contrast is the canto's first move. Counsellors of fraud come in pairs, and this pair is built to be measured against each other.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim and Virgil are still on the high ridge above the eighth bolgia of Malebolge, the bolgia of fraudulent counsellors. They have just heard Ulysses tell the story of his last voyage. A second flame now reaches the rim and a second soul speaks from inside it. The structure is the same; the moral content is precisely the opposite. Ulysses was a pagan hero whose intellect carried him past the limits of human navigation. This second soul was a Christian friar who used his intellect to advise a pope on the destruction of a Christian town.
What it helps to know
The soul inside the flame is Guido da Montefeltro (c. 1223–1298), the most celebrated Ghibelline military commander of his generation in central Italy. He fought the papal armies through the 1270s and 1280s with such cunning that the chroniclers called him il sagace — the cunning one. Late in life, repenting his violence, he resigned his commands, donned the Franciscan habit, and became a friar in the order of St Francis. He died, the world believed, as a holy man.
In this canto Dante makes the holy man tell another story. Pope Boniface VIII (c. 1230–1303) — the same pope whose election was cleared by the abdication of Celestine V (the Great Refusal of canto III), the pope Dante held responsible above all others for his political exile — was in 1297 engaged in a private war against the Colonna family in Italy. The Colonnas held the fortified hilltown of Palestrina outside Rome. Boniface, the canto alleges, summoned the old friar Guido out of his monastery and asked him for the trick by which Palestrina could be reduced. Guido, according to this canto, gave the advice — promise much, fulfil little — was absolved in advance by Boniface for the sin of giving it, and went back to his cell. When he died, St Francis came for his soul; a black cherub intercepted Francis with a piece of impeccable scholastic logic; the soul was carried instead to Minos, who wound his tail eight times round his back and assigned the friar to the eighth bolgia, where he now stands wrapped in flame.
The scene is a corrosive piece of political authorship. Dante is using one of the Inferno's most celebrated voices to deliver his bill of indictment against a living pope. Boniface had died in 1303; Dante is writing somewhere in the years after 1308; the wound is still open. The Franciscans had been bitterly divided over Boniface, and Guido's posthumous reputation as a saintly friar was an inheritance of the more accommodating faction. Dante is suggesting, in the canto's most arresting line, that the cherub who came for Guido's soul was black — and that Francis himself was outargued at the deathbed by a devil with better Latin.
The opening of the canto is a small simile most readers love. The Sicilian tyrant Phalaris was said to have commissioned a hollow brass bull as a torture device; the bronze-worker Perillus demonstrated it by having the screams of its first victim transformed by the bull's interior into the appearance of a bull's bellow. Guido's voice, struggling to escape the tip of his flame, makes the same conversion in reverse — the human cry becomes the voice of the fire.
What to read for
Listen to the opening tercet. If I believed that my reply were made / To one who to the world would e'er return, / This flame without more flickering would stand still. Guido speaks because he believes the pilgrim is dead. He is wrong — and the entire confession that follows is offered, the canto wants the reader to feel, under a misapprehension the speaker never corrects. T.S. Eliot, six centuries later, will take these three lines as the epigraph of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. You do not need the reference; you need only the doubleness of the situation.
Notice the verb in the cherub's argument. Who repents not cannot be absolved, / Nor can one both repent and will at once, / Because of the contradiction which consents not. The cherub is a logician and the logic is airtight. The whole canto turns on a piece of pure scholastic reasoning delivered by a devil. Pay attention to what the Commedia is suggesting about the relationship between airtight logic and damnation.
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 canto is the second half of a diptych. Ulysses in canto XXVI was a pagan hero whose intellect carried him past the limits of human navigation. Guido da Montefeltro in canto XXVII is a Christian friar whose intellect was bought by a pope to advise the destruction of a Christian town. Both are damned for fraudulent counsel; both speak from inside flames; both tell their own stories. The structural mirror is exact, and the contrast it makes is the canto's argument. Ulysses' folly was a tragedy of curiosity that strained against a divine limit. Guido's folly was a small mean piece of professional advice given for money, sanctioned in advance by a pope, and proved by the cleverest possible piece of theological logic to be unrepentable. The deeper sin, the Commedia is willing to say, is the second.
Phalaris's bull and the voice in the flame
The opening simile is a small marvel of compression. The Sicilian tyrant Phalaris was said to have commissioned a hollow brass bull as an execution device, and the bronze-worker Perillus to have demonstrated it on himself by having the screams of its first victim transformed by the bull's interior into the bellow of a real animal. Guido's voice does the conversion in reverse: a human cry inside the flame must escape through the tip, and the only way out is to make the tip itself flicker as the speech of fire. The pilgrim watches a flame learn to speak as a tongue. The image insists, before any word is uttered, that what comes next is being heard through a medium that distorts.
The opening misapprehension
The first six words of Guido's speech — S'i' credesse che mia risposta fosse / a persona che mai tornasse al mondo — are the canto's whole ethical premise:
If I believed that my reply were made To one who to the world would e'er return, This flame without more flickering would stand still; But inasmuch as never from this depth Did any one return, if I hear true, Without the fear of infamy I answer. (Inf. XXVII.61–66)
Guido speaks because he believes the pilgrim is dead. The whole confession that follows is offered under that misapprehension. The pilgrim never corrects it. The canto is allowing one of its most consequential pieces of testimony — an inside report on the political conduct of a recent pope — to come from a speaker who has consented to speak only because he thinks no one will carry the news. T.S. Eliot took the tercet as the epigraph for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the borrowing is exact: the modern lyric, like the medieval damned confession, depends on the assumption that the listener is in no position to repeat what is said. Both texts are wrong about their listeners.
Boniface VIII at his most useful
Boniface VIII is the Inferno's most repeatedly attacked figure, and the attack works in part by indirection. He never appears in person in the Commedia — when Dante meets him, in Paradiso XXVII, it is to hear him cursed in his absence by St Peter — but his presence runs through Hell as the silent cause of much of what is shown. In canto XIX, the simoniac pope Nicholas III mistakes the pilgrim for Boniface coming early to take his place in the rock. In canto XV, Brunetto Latini predicts Florentine politics that turn on Boniface's machinations. In this canto, Boniface is finally given a scene of his own — and it is the worst scene in the Inferno in which a pope is named:
And then he said: Be not thy heart afraid; Henceforth I thee absolve; and thou instruct me How to raze Palestrina to the ground. Heaven have I power to lock and to unlock, As thou dost know; therefore the keys are two, The which my predecessor held not dear. (Inf. XXVII.99–104)
The accusation is detailed. Boniface absolves Guido in advance for the sin he is about to commit; he cites his papal authority over the keys of heaven as the basis for the absolution; he sideswipes his predecessor Celestine V (the predecessor who held not dear the keys is the saintly hermit whose abdication cleared Boniface's election — the figure of the Great Refusal of canto III). In four tercets Dante draws a pope who treats the sacrament of absolution as a transaction, the keys of heaven as political currency, and his own predecessor as a fool. The political consequences are immediate. Guido gives the requested counsel: long promise with short keeping — lunga promessa con l'attender corto. Palestrina falls. The Colonna family is broken. Boniface dies five years later. Guido dies first and lands here.
The cherub's logic
The canto's most theologically charged passage is the report of what happened at Guido's deathbed:
For me; but one of the black Cherubim Said to him: Take him not; do me no wrong; He must come down among my servitors, Because he gave the fraudulent advice From which time forth I have been at his hair; For who repents not cannot be absolved, Nor can one both repent and will at once, Because of the contradiction which consents not. (Inf. XXVII.112–120)
The cherub speaks the cleanest scholastic syllogism in the Inferno. Absolution requires repentance; repentance requires the will not to repeat the sin; willing the sin and repenting of it at the same time is a logical contradiction; therefore Boniface's pre-emptive absolution was theologically void from the moment it was uttered. The logic is airtight. Two implications follow that the Commedia lets the reader assemble. The first is that the holy reputation Guido had in the world — the saintly old friar who died in his Franciscan habit — was a fraud that survived him by virtue of papal protection. The second, more disturbing, is that the cleanest piece of theological reasoning in the canto is delivered by a devil. The poem is suggesting, quietly, that scholastic logic is a tool indifferent to who uses it, and that the church which lives by logic alone can be outargued in its own register at any deathbed.
The closing detail is small and exact. Guido's soul is brought to Minos. Minos winds his tail eight times around his back — the formula of canto V, here numbering the bolgia of the fraudulent counsellors — and assigns the friar to his eternal flame.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening tercet.
If I believed that my reply were made To one who to the world would e'er return, This flame without more flickering would stand still; But inasmuch as never from this depth Did any one return, if I hear true, Without the fear of infamy I answer. (Inf. XXVII.61–66)
The whole confession is offered under a misapprehension. The pilgrim does not correct it. The reader who knows the Prufrock epigraph hears the canto a second time.
Guido's self-portrait.
I was a man of arms, then Cordelier, Believing thus begirt to make amends; And truly my belief had been fulfilled But for the High Priest, whom may ill betide, Who put me back into my former sins… While I was still the form of bone and pulp My mother gave to me, the deeds I did Were not those of a lion, but a fox. (Inf. XXVII.67–75)
Not of a lion, but a fox — the moral self-portrait of a strategic intelligence that always preferred trickery to courage.
Boniface as the Leader of the modern Pharisees.
The Leader of the modern Pharisees Having a war near unto Lateran, And not with Saracens nor with the Jews, For each one of his enemies was Christian, And none of them had been to conquer Acre, Nor merchandising in the Sultan's land, Nor the high office, nor the sacred orders, In him regarded, nor in me that cord Which used to make those girt with it more meagre. (Inf. XXVII.85–93)
The bill of indictment in nine lines. The Crusader's vocabulary — Acre, Sultan's land, unbelievers — is invoked only to say that Boniface waged none of those wars. He waged Christian war on Christians and the sacrament was no constraint on it.
The pre-emptive absolution.
And then he said: Be not thy heart afraid; Henceforth I thee absolve; and thou instruct me How to raze Palestrina to the ground. Heaven have I power to lock and to unlock, As thou dost know; therefore the keys are two, The which my predecessor held not dear. (Inf. XXVII.99–104)
The transaction. Absolution offered as advance payment for counsel. The keys of heaven cited as the warrant.
The cherub's syllogism.
For who repents not cannot be absolved, Nor can one both repent and will at once, Because of the contradiction which consents not. (Inf. XXVII.118–120)
The cleanest theological reasoning in the canto, delivered by a devil. The poem's small dark joke about the moral neutrality of logic.
The closing image.
He bore me unto Minos, who entwined Eight times his tail about his stubborn back, And after he had bitten it in great rage, Said: Of the thievish fire a culprit this; Wherefore, here where thou seest, am I lost, And vested thus in going I bemoan me. (Inf. XXVII.124–129)
The infernal sentencing reduced to a count of tail-windings. Vested thus in going I bemoan me — e qual mi vedi, di tal vado vestito — the closing line is one of the Inferno's most concise self-pictures: the soul wears his flame the way the hypocrite wears his cloak. Every sin in Malebolge becomes a garment.
What to watch for
Watch the popes accumulate. Dante has now named or implied three popes in the lower bolge — Nicholas III (canto XIX, simony), Celestine V (canto III, the Great Refusal), and Boniface VIII (this canto, fraud). The Inferno's indictment of the late thirteenth-century papacy is precise, sustained, and dated to the moment the poet was driven out of Florence.
Watch the cherub. The figure of the devil-as-perfect-logician will not return in person, but the suggestion the canto plants — that scholastic argument can serve damnation as easily as salvation — will surface again in the lower circles, where Geryon's image of fraud and the falsifiers' counterfeit reasoning will keep raising the question of what intelligence is for.
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.