Inferno Xi: The Geography Of Criminal Offense Together With Punishment

Hell is a house on Earth. And although it is inhabited past times spirits that are non-corporeal, they also volition endure reunited amongst their bodies later on the Day of Judgment – whereupon they shall receive got to suffer a minute eternity, longer than the first, except straight off they’ll endure endowed amongst an fifty-fifty greater capacity to experience pain, too fifty-fifty less promise of futurity relief. Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 sentence, heed you, that tin never endure served inwards full: for the debt is non to society, but to God.

The Divine Comedy is a poesy form most criminal offence too punishment, equally good equally virtue too reward. God’s judge consists inwards punishing the dead inwards monastic tell to prepare the living, too its geography recalls a concentrationary universe equally opposed to a prison theatre system, exactly because it does non allow for rehabilitation or redemption.

The eleventh canto of the Inferno, like the third, is devoid of activity or movement, too takes the shape of a give-and-take betwixt its leading actors – or to a greater extent than exactly a lecture past times Virgil to Dante – concerning the geography of Hell: that is to tell its spatial organisation, which is highly symbolic too allegorical but nonetheless also concrete too physical. For Hell is a house on Earth. And to remind us of this earthly nature is the setting of the conversation: for the 2 poets, having walked away from the opened upwards graves inwards which the Epicureans are crammed past times their thousands, are straight off standing behind the upturned rock of the tomb of some other heretic – an early on medieval Pope past times the cite of Anastasius – to seek protection from a prodigious stench. ‘We had ameliorate delay our descent,’ proposes Virgil, ‘to give fourth dimension to our senses to larn used to the tristo fiato’, the ‘doleful breath’ emanating from the depths of Hell.

This stench is some other mix of trunk too spirit: equally much physical (there are rivers of boiling blood only below) equally it is moral. The 3 lowest circles of Hell are where the trigger-happy spirits are housed. This violence includes non only physical assaults but also theft, robber, deception too fraud: anything that causes injury, whether to people or their possessions, or to the self (suicide, gambling), or to God – which includes blasphemy, of course, but also subverting the monastic tell of nature. So, non exclusively sodomy (as nosotros mightiness expect) but also usury. For – equally Virgil explains to Dante, who questioned him on this special placement – the worldly labour of humans (be they farmers of tradespeople) mirrors the celestial run of God, too is thence descended from it, whereas trying to larn monetary wealth to reproduce itself, without labour, perverts the exercise of creation.

I’m non going to essay to hash out hither the minutiae of Dante’s penal code, amongst its synthesis of Aristotelean ethics too Christian theology. This is the Comedy at its most obscure, opaque too ultimately distant to the modern reader – so much so that non fifty-fifty the Italian schoolhouse system, amongst its passion for testing students on arcane knowledge, expected us to seriously delve into Virgil’s dissertation. Besides, at that topographic point volition endure farther opportunities to locomote over the catalogue of the damned inwards some detail, for the terminal 3 circles bridge the remaining 23 cantos of the Inferno. As the upside-down cone of Hell narrows down, the poesy form volition progressively expand.

For now, I only desire to hint at this geography, too at its double nature – both actual too symbolic, both physical too metaphysical – because reading the Comedy is also a journeying into agreement how these categories operated inwards the psyche of medieval Europeans. To repeat a indicate I’ve already made too volition proceed to brand inwards this serial of posts: Dante knew the things he imagined to endure true.

And too then those things had to endure represented, that is to tell reimagined. From the crude, naïve schematism of Priamo della Quercia, the miniaturist who illustrated the poesy form a lilliputian over a century later on Dante’s decease (and who listen compresses the entire contents of this canto, including a spurious Pope Anastasius, whose spirits does non inwards fact appear).

Through the expressionistic too already modern map that Sandro Botticelli drew for an edition commissioned to him past times Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici too completed only about the twelvemonth 1500.

Via William Blake.

Down to the acquaint solar daytime textbook diagrams

too the infographics

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Click hither for the full-size image

or the printable report posters.

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The history of these representations is also a history of the readings of Dante too of the uses of the comedy – from quasi-sacred poesy form to text yous receive got to report inwards monastic tell to demonstrate competence at school, too that some read for pleasure.

This real limited gallery shows how Botticelli’s extraordinary cross-section map is all the same the dominant model for thinking of the Inferno. This seminal instance has locomote the dependent land of I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X.