Inferno Dante Quotes

When mistaken by Pope Nicholas III for his successor Pope Boniface VIII come to replace him in Hell, Dante is tempted to play along and to trick Nicholas into believing he will bring him some relief. This is evidenced by his hesitation to refute Nicholas’ words and it is not until Virgil scolds Dante into telling the truth that he reveals his true identity. Thus, Virgil’s claim that fraud is the worst and most human sin gains legitimacy here because even the moral Dante is swayed for a moment to succumb to deceit. The scene receives an even greater flavor of dishonesty when Dante describes himself (in a simile) as a friar with the authority to confess a sinner – something which he definitely is not. That Dante even dares to suggest such a dishonest image implies that he is feeling the effects of the fraud all around him.

The hypocrites or Jovial Friars have all the hallmarks of a deceitful people. They are "painted" and their "cloaks were gilded" so that "they dazzled." On the surface, these sinners are brilliantly attractive, drawing the eye with their golden robes, but on the inside the mantles are lined with "lead," "so heavy" that their wearers must walk "tired and defeated." What initially promises to be beautiful suddenly turns out to be ugly and restrictive. This comments on the Friars’ actions in life: they promised to keep the peace in their provinces but instead founded their own orders, bringing strife and violence to the land.

Malacoda, who was supposedly trying to help Virgil, deliberately gave him false information to torture him. Ironically, the truth comes from the hypocrites, who also rebuke Virgil for so naively trusting a demon, a known "liar." So even the seemingly infallible Virgil, master and guide for Dante, can be deceived.

In this passage, Dante shows how the fraud practiced by individual men can come to torture a whole community of people. The "horse’s fraud" here is the trickery used to bring the Trojan horse within the walls of Troy so that the Greek soldiers, hidden inside the wooden statue, could emerge to ransack the city from within. This, of course, got many good Trojans killed. In addition, Ulysses persuaded Achilles to leave his lover Deidamia and their unborn son to fight in the Trojan War, leaving the pregnant woman distraught and vulnerable. To compound their guile, Ulysses and Diomedes lied their way into the Palladium (Athena’s sacred temple) and desecrated it, forcing countless Trojans to question their faith in the goddess.

Dante sees lying as a disease. To illustrate the point, he shows Guido da Montefeltro considering Pope Boniface’s words "delirious" or, as the Italian reads, "feverish." Pope Boniface VIII exchanges a promise he cannot fulfill – absolution – for advice to raze a rival family’s estate to the ground. In a telling statement, Guido reflects the pope’s moral corruption because he advises "long promises and very brief fulfillments." Here, Dante seems to comment that language – for all its eloquence – can just be a sham. Silence here would have been a better response for Guido than saying anything at all.

On the verge of entering the last and most treacherous circle of Hell, Dante becomes a victim of fraud. He mistakes the unmoving torsos of giants for a city of towers. It is not, as Virgil claims, only the distance that "deceive[s Dante’s] sense," but the sheer amount of deceit surrounding them that darkens their path and warps Dante’s vision so he can see only "faulty images."

In Dante’s ostentatious attempt to show humility, he misrepresents his talent and deceives readers. First he claims that he "cannot write it," that he cannot possibly render Hell’s description with justice, but he then proceeds to do exactly what he professes he cannot: he describes Lucifer in great detail.

This is a strange case of Christian logic. The more perfect (or godly) a being is, "so much the greater is its pain of pleasure." According to medieval beliefs, when the Judgment Day comes, sinners’ souls will be reunited with their bodies, rendering them more whole or perfect. Thus, as more perfect beings subjected to Hell’s torment, their pain will only intensify. In Dante’s eyes, this is because the sinners ignored their souls (or minds) and fulfilled their physical desires, just as animals instinctively do, at the price of corrupting their spirits.

Heresy, which Dante defines as the simple denial of man’s immortal soul, is ironically punished with the obvious presupposition that, yes, the soul is immortal because it writhes in pain for all of eternity. Those who deny that Hell even exists are appropriately punished with burning, the most familiar image in Hell. As a metaphor for life and warmth, fire ironically torments those who reject the idea of life after death. Locked into their tombs, the burning heretics are an ironic reminder that the dead do indeed lead an afterlife.

Those violent against God and nature (the blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers) receive not the nourishing and life-giving rain from Heaven, but the opposite – a killing cascade of fire-flakes. The falling flames are not extinguished on contact with the ground, but their heat is absorbed and radiated by the hot sand, "doubling the pain" of those who would offend God.

In life, the flatterers wheedled others with false praise to achieve their own filthy ends. Their words, spoken insincerely, amount spiritually to rubbish. Thus, they wallow in their own excrement, which is so squalid that their very "exhalations, rising from below….encrust them with mold."

The image of the dishonest clergymen buried upside-down in the rock with their protruding feet seared by flames is recognizable to the devout Christian as an inversion of the Pentecost. In this feast of salvation, the Apostles descended with flaming haloes around their heads. That the simonists are physically inverted, with flames at their feet, demonstrates metaphorically that their practices oppose those of the Pentecost. When the Apostles descended, all their followers were filled with the spirit of the Holy Ghost and began speaking and prophesying in other tongues – basically affirming the truth of the Word. (Some scholars have read the Pentecost as a reversal of the Tower of Babel, a reunification of all the different human languages.) Simonists, on the other hand, sell the Word for profit, as absolution from sin, thus putting a price on the Word and denying its sanctity.

Dante’s issue with diviners, astrologers, and magicians is based more on the idea that they are charlatans – unable to do what they claim – than on the actual concept of seeing into the future. Either way, their punishment fits their crime. Instead of being blessed with the ability to see and move forward in time, they have their heads turned backwards on their shoulders so that they can only see behind them and must therefore walk and look backward, both literally and metaphorically, into the past. This is the punishment for claiming to divine the future.

This passage represents contrapasso on a number of levels. As barrators, these corrupt politicians carried on their crimes in secret; thus, the pitch in which they are immersed is so dark that Dante "[can]not see within it." Tar, as a sticky substance, here represents another link that binds individual human beings to one another (like language, love, and money). By dishonestly buying and selling political offices, the barrators compromise the cohesion of the political system. Also, the barrators’ plight – unlike many other sinners’ – is not depicted in sympathetic terms, but in a comedic, almost slapstick, manner. The demons’ verbal taunting of the sinners illustrates this. The irreverent tone here suggests a personal vendetta against barrators on Dante’s part, which is plausible given his alleged history with grafters.

Thieves fail to recognize the boundaries between their own property and that of others. To Dante, this indicates a basic flaw in their humanity; they lack the human reason to distinguish between what is theirs and what belongs to others. This blatant misuse of their intellects renders them more animal than human. Thus, in the Eighth Circle, they mutate into hideous pseudo-serpentine creatures. And because they did not honor the boundaries of property in life, they "exchange their matter" with each other, merging and morphing into the bodies of other thieves. In this way, they can hardly retain their own identities and have thus come to embody their sin.

Dante’s idealistic vision of man living in peace and unity informs his depiction of the ninth pouch. Because these sowers of scandal and schism have caused social discord and divided people into warring factions, their bodies are now sliced in half. Mohammed, featured here, suffers disembowelment from a laceration that runs vertically down his entire chest. Others endure slit throats, dismembered hands or ears, and even decapitation. The dissent they’ve triggered in their lifetimes comes back to haunt them in their afterlives.

Dante’s only explicit mention of contrapasso, or "the law of counter-penalty," occurs late in the poem. Perhaps because this canto best illustrates the concept of contrapasso, Dante mentions it here. Indeed, Bertran de Born’s grotesque punishment – having his head separated from his body for pitting a king and his son, the prince, against each other – neatly depicts the way in which contrapasso functions.

Since all the falsifiers suffer a number of diseases which distort their bodies, Dante implies that blatant lying is as serious a condition as an actual malady. If a healthy soul always speaks the truth, these sinners must indeed lie through their teeth since they are so sick they "[have] not the strength enough to lift themselves." Here more than anywhere else, Dante attacks the infectious, social aspect of fraud. Each of the different types of falsifiers corrupts a particular bond that unites individual human beings. Alchemists compromise the material stability of the world, falsifiers of persons degrade men’s relationships with each other, counterfeiters compromise the integrity of currency, and liars debase language. All these falsifiers corrupt the natural fabric of reality, and thus have their naturalness compromised by the scourge of disease.

Lucifer, once God’s favorite and the most beautiful angel of them all, "now is ugly" because of the benighted sin he committed against God, betraying the one who created him out of pride. Lucifer is the ultimate traitor and, as such, is trapped in the earth as surely as the lesser traitors; there he creates the freezing winds that trap the Ninth Circle sinners in ice. Lucifer’s immobility is more profound than the others’ because he creates it himself: his "agitating" wings beat to help him escape from his prison, but all in vain. His image too – of three grotesque heads – is a parody of the Holy Trinity. The three vilest traitors suffer their punishment by eternally being chewed by Lucifer’s three heads. This act of eating is sinisterly twisted; it’s not used to gain nourishment and sustain oneself, but instead to deliberately cause pain. Finally, the description of Lucifer’s biting teeth as "a grinder" reinforces – along with the rhythmic beating of his wings – the concept of Lucifer as a massive machine: mechanical, soulless, and essentially anticlimactic.

One of Dante’s more famous literary devices is "synaesthesia," in which he describes something by confusing two of our five senses together for a unique effect. Here, Dante confuses sight and sound, when he describes the sun as "speechless." Because the sun cannot speak to begin with, readers may interpret this as "dark," so that the beast makes Dante retreat into a dark area, both physically and metaphorically. Or one could read this as Dante being rendered "speechless" with fear.