Dante's Inferno

I am continually fascinated by the ways in which epic poets from the Middle Ages were able to appropriate references and features of the epic poems of antiquity and incorporate them into serving their own moral imperative. As an epic, Dante’s Inferno contains a Hell populated by countless figures of Greek and Roman myth, including Odysseus and various Titans. Dante’s Inferno seems to be an epic exploration of his belief system and the strict moral doctrines of the Catholic church of his time. It is often called an allegory, and I was quite amused to find Dante himself calling it his poem an allegory within:

Men of sound intellect and probity,
weigh with good understanding what lies hidden
behind the veil of my strange allegory. (Canto IX.58-60)

Clearly, he is writing this poem to push both his moral and political imperatives.

Although it has been much analyzed, Dante’s morality based upon obedience to God as a paradigm makes the degree of certain offenses reverse from what we consider to be more or less of an offense in our reality. For example, the usurers are in a lower circle than the murderers, surely a violent crime is more of a transgression against God than fraud?

Virgil’s explanation of this hierarchy illuminates Dante’s justification of the different punishments:

All malicious crimes perpetuate
injustice: whether violence, or fraud,
they equally deserve celestial hate.
But since fraud is a very human vice, so God
hates it more, and puts the fraudulent
below, where they are more afflicted by his rod. (Canto XI.22-27)

In other words, violence is a sin of passion, while since fraud is premeditated, Dante believes it is more sinful and more of a transgression against God’s will. Therefore crimes of passion are less sinful than crimes of human reason. Clearly this moral system was very carefully thought out.