Dante's Inferno

It is only deep in Malebolge, when the schismatic Bertrand de Born appears carrying his own severed head before him like a lantern, that Dante gives the reader a word for the shape of the torments observed in Hell. “Thus you observe in me the counter-suffering,” Bertrand announces (28.142). Under the law of the “counter-suffering” (contrapasso in Italian), the damned suffer punishments mirroring their besetting sins in life. Thus, Bertrand de Born, who incited murderous hatred among fathers and sons, has his head severed (the father being the “head” of his children); Paolo and Francesca, swept away by their lust, are whirled endlessly in a restless (and unpleasantly moist) storm; Pier della Vigna, who rejected his own human body and life, becomes a bleeding tree—unable to speak unless he is wounded. Even more grimly, the traitors are frozen in ice, their faces bestial: Their treachery is inhuman and paralyses them in their own eternal hatreds.

This is all very grim. However, despite its horrors, the contrapasso is not sadistic. Rather, by definition, it is just. The damned receive exactly what they most highly valued. The revelation of the true nature of their desires is its own punishment.

In constructing his Hell, Dante drew upon an Aristotelian conception of the universe. According to Aristotle, all motion emerges from desire: The soul perceives a good and moves toward it. For Dante, this scheme extends to the furthest reaches of the universe, where angels turn the wheels of the stars out of a fervent love of God. No one is exempt from love and desire; what matters is that one discerns what is truly desirable.

It is for this reason that the upper reaches of Hell are both more populous and less grim than the lower. Consider the circle of lust, for instance: to mistake romantic love for the greatest possible good is a pretty common error (and one to which Dante personally seems prone, as his dramatic fainting fit in this circle demonstrates). When Dante makes it to Purgatory, lust will correspondingly be the last and mildest of the sins purged before one enters the Earthly Paradise.

What separates the damned lustful from the saved lustful? Not the degree or kind of their sin, but their capacity to perceive something worth loving beyond the mortal world, and to turn toward it. Dante’s progression through the Divine Comedy is the story of learning to love the entity of Love.