Fecemi la divina Potestate, La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore. Si non eterne, ed io eterno duro; Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate! Let us now compare the Italian with the English, and mark how the liquid and intense quality of the original well-nigh disappears in the translation: Through me ye enter the abode of woe; Through me to endless sorrow are ye brought; The gate is "closed to none, being reft of all its fastenings since the day when the Conqueror of Death, fresh from the cross, forced through it his resistless passage." So Dante, following Virgil as his guide, pursues the deep and savage pathway and enters the Inferno. Let us enter with him. Hell, as we have seen, is a pit within the earth, a hollow inverted cone, growing narrower as it descends; in which, as space contracts, torment is intensified. The outermost borders of the pit constitute an ante-hell, rather than hell itself. It is the abode of the Neutrals, those who are not good enough for heaven, and who have not character enough for hell. Here are confined the angels who at the first great rebellion in the spirit-world stood neither for God nor THE ENTRANCE TO THE HELL 127 Here is for his enemies, but only for themselves. confined a large part of the human race, even as the circuit of this uppermost region of the Inferno is the widest. These feeble and cowardly souls, stung by flies and wasps, the image of a reproving conscience, chase a hurrying standard, while worms in the dust beneath their feet absorb their blood and tears. So Dante punishes those who only ignored God, but did not have force enough to rebel against him. He crosses the River Acheron, the joyless river, with Charon for his ferryman, who grimly drives the reluctant souls out of his boat with the blows of his oar. So they reach hell proper, a pit of nine circles, each furnishing a landingplace, on one side of which is the wall of solid earth, on the other the abyss. The first circle of the Inferno proper is called Limbo -the home of infants who died unbaptized, and of nonbelievers who had no knowledge of a Saviour. Here once dwelt the saints of Old Testament times; but when Christ descended into the underworld after his resurrection, he rescued them and led them forth in triumph. Here still, and forever, dwell the heathen. sages whose ignorance was invincible. There is no outward infliction. Their pain is the pain of loss, of unsatisfied yearning. Within a castle of sevenfold walls and gates they lead their shadowy life, neither sad nor glad, grave and subdued in aspect, conversing still with regard to the problems of existence, knowing nothing of the present, but only of the past and future. It is the highest point of attainment for unbelievers. Here Virgil points out "the luminous habitation of the poets." Homer and Horace receive Dante into their company, and show him Socrates, Plato, and other master-spirits of antiquity. When they leave him, he re-enters the domain of darkness; passes before Minos, the infernal judge; and now at length descends into the hell of positive sin and of real punishment. It will be worth our while here to pause a moment and consider the three great divisions under which Dante classifies the sins punished in the eight circles which we have still to visit. There are, to his mind, three great types and gradations of sin. They are incontinence, bestiality, and malice. But neither incontinence nor bestiality is precisely what these words would seem to indicate. Incontinence includes all sin of mere emotion and desire, of affection and feeling. Lasciviousness, gluttony, avarice, and anger all belong to this category. They are sins of impulsive passion, exaggerations of principles of our nature which are themselves innocent, but which are indulged in manner or measure opposed to the will of God. It is significant that all these sins are punished in darkness, as befits the nature of them, committed as they have been with mind beclouded by passion. And the respective punishments are punishments in kind. Carnal sinners are swept along by a violent hurricane, as if to intimate that they who have sown the wind must reap the whirlwind. Gluttons lie prostrate on the ground beneath a pelting storm of rain, snow, and hail; while Cerberus, a sort of personified belly, devours them. The avaricious and the prodigal crawl in two bands in opposite directions, pushing before them great weights which clash together as they meet, the one band howling to the other: "Why did ye THE HELL OF BESTIALITY 129 "Why did keep?" and the other howling in return: ye give away?" The wrathful and gloomy are im mersed naked in a lake of mud, and in this lake they strike and tear each other. There is an impressive lesson here. Anger and melancholy are punished together. Too much indignation and too little indignation are equally sins. The wrathful and the wrathless both transgress God's law. "Be ye angry, and sin not," says the Scripture. "Ye that love the Lord, hate evil." Not to be angry at unrighteousness, smoothly and indolently to condone wrong-doing, this to Dante is sin against God, and they who commit it are imbedded in the dregs of the Stygian pool. We have been dealing with sins of feeling. How solemn a truth does the poet teach us when he makes sins of the thoughts to follow these! For this is what he means by bestiality, the next great class of transgressions. The bestial man is the man who is besotted in mind, and who gives himself over to infidelity or to heresy; who either says with the fool: "There is no God," or says with the errorist: "God is different from what he has revealed himself to be." Here, in the flaming city of Dis, where the walls are of iron and the darkness is mingled with fire, the arch-heretics are confined in red-hot tombs; as if to show the living death of the soul that cuts itself loose from faith in God and his revelation. Notice that this sin of bestiality or unbelief follows, and grows out of, the sin of wrong desire. The heart first departs from God, and then the intellect follows in its train. It is only an anticipation of Goethe's dictum: "As are the inclinations, so are the opinions." When man gives loose rein to evil affections, the eyes of his understanding are darkened. But there is something worse even than sin of the feelings and of the intellect: it is sin of consciously evil will; and so the third great class of iniquities in Dante's hell is that of malice, in its ever-deepening forms, now of violence, then of fraud, and finally of treachery. The sin of unbelief cannot maintain itself against the accusations of conscience except by becoming the sin of positive hatred and opposition to God. First the heart, then the intellect, and lastly the will, sets itself against him who made it. Malice is punished after its kind also. The violent, such as tyrants, murderers, and marauders, are sunk in a boiling river of blood, and as often as they emerge are shot at by the Centaurs. Such the fate of those who commit violence against others they have their fill of blood. Suicides, or those who are guilty of violence against themselves, are turned into trees, whose living branches are plucked away by harpies only to grow again. Blasphemers, or those who have done violence to God, are exposed to a slow shower of fire upon a plain of burning sand. Below the circle where violence is punished, at a vast depth indeed beneath, fraud in its ten sub-divisions has its place of doom. Here are seducers and flatterers, the first scourged by demons, the second immersed in filth. Simoniacs, who have purchased high places in the church with money, are fixed in circular holes, like purses, with their heads down, their legs only appearing, and the soles of their feet burnt with flames. Sorcerers or diviners, as they endeavored to pry into the future, have their heads twisted around so that they have to walk backward now. |