Summary: Canto III
[A]bandon all hope, you who
enter here.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Virgil leads Dante up to the Gate of Hell, upon which
they read a foreboding inscription that includes the admonition
“abandon all hope, you who enter here.” As
soon as they enter, Dante hears innumerable cries of torment and
suffering. Virgil explains that these cries emanate from the souls
of those who did not commit to either good or evil but who lived
their lives without making conscious moral choices; therefore, both
Heaven and Hell have denied them entry. These souls now reside in
the Ante-Inferno, within Hell yet not truly part of it, where they
must chase constantly after a blank banner. Flies and wasps
continually bite them, and writhing worms consume the blood and
tears that flow from them. The souls of the uncommitted are joined
in this torment by the neutral angels—those who sided with neither
God nor Satan in the war in Heaven.
Virgil leads Dante to a great river called Acheron, which
marks the border of Hell. A crowd of newly dead souls waits to be
taken across. A boat approaches with an old man, Charon, at its
helm. Charon recognizes Dante as a living soul and tells him to
keep away from the dead, but after Virgil informs him that their
journey has been ordained from on high, Charon troubles them no
longer. He returns to his work of ferrying the miserable souls,
wailing and cursing, across the river into Hell. As he transports
Virgil and Dante across, Virgil tells the frightened Dante that
Charon’s initial reluctance to ferry him bodes well: only damned
souls cross the river. Suddenly, an earthquake shakes the plain;
wind and fire rise up from the ground, and Dante, terrified, faints.
Summary: Canto IV
A clap of thunder restores Dante to consciousness. When
he wakes, feeling as though he has been asleep for a long time,
he finds himself on the other side of the river, apparently having
been carried off the boat by Virgil. He looks down into a deep valley
that stretches in front of him: the First Circle of Hell, or Limbo.
Virgil informs him that this circle, which contains the souls of
those who led virtuous lives but either were born before the advent
of Christianity (and thus could not properly honor God) or were
never baptized. Dante asks if any souls have ever received permission
to leave Limbo for Heaven, and Virgil names a number of Old Testament
figures—Noah, Moses, and others. Christ granted these souls amnesty
when he descended into Hell during the time between his death and
resurrection (an episode commonly known as the Harrowing of Hell).
Many other notable figures, however, remain in Limbo.
Virgil himself resides here, and has been given only a brief leave
to guide Dante. Dante watches a group of men approach and greet
Virgil as a fellow poet. Virgil introduces them as Homer, Horace,
Ovid, and Lucan—the greatest poets of antiquity. They lead Dante
to a great castle with seven walls, wherein he sees the souls of
other great figures from the past: the philosophers Aristotle, Socrates,
and Plato; Aeneas, Lavinia, and other characters from the Aeneid;
the mathematician Euclid and the astronomer Ptolemy; and many others.
Virgil guides Dante out of the castle and again off into the darkness.
Analysis: Cantos III–IV
In the first line of the inscription above the Gate of
Hell in Canto III, “through me you enter into the city
of woes,” Hell is described as a city. This description
gains support in the portrayal of Hell’s architecture: it is walled
and gated like a medieval city. The idea of cities figures significantly
in Inferno, and Dante’s treatment of them situates
his poem both historically and theologically. Historically, large
cities had begun to play an increasingly important role in European
social and economic life in the high Middle Ages, particularly in
Italy, where city-states such as Dante’s native Florence had become
important bases of social organization. Dante portrays Hell as a
city in large part because, to a thinker in the early fourteenth
century, any substantial human population would almost necessarily
have suggested a city.
In the theological sense, however, Inferno’s
treatment of cities belongs to the great tradition of St. Augustine’s City
of God, written in the early fifth century a.d.
Augustine posited that all human cities center around love either
of man (“the City of Man”) or of God (“the City of God”). In the
City of God, the forces of charity, kindness, and love bind people
together; in the City of Man, each citizen acts only in his own
self-interest and thus preys on his neighbor. In his various portrayals
of Rome, Dante describes it as both the ultimate temporal power,
a City of Man, and the spiritual center of Europe, a City of God.
This dichotomy corresponds to spiritual states within the individual:
after the Judgment, those who have lived metaphorically in the City
of God go to Heaven, while those who have lived in the City of Man
go to Hell. The city of Hell in Inferno—whose inhabitants
have died and been beset by divine justice—functions as
a sort of phantasmagoric, supernatural representation of the City
of Man. John Freccero has written that Dante’s Hell, like Augustine’s
City of Man, represents the negative consequences of sinful desires,
not just on a theological level but also on a social one.
