The Pre-Christian Inferno

Dante is the Christian poet; his world so thoroughly detailed, so powerfully evoked, so relentlessly consistent that it helped create Church canon. And yet his schema for The Inferno, which is so much a part of later doctrine, is rooted more in the Greco-Roman tradition than Judeo-Christian mythology.

Dante wrote in Italian, the linguistic daughter of Latin, which was the language in which he would have read the New Testament. And those documents were originally written in Greek, the legacy of previous conquerors who spoke that language, about a province of the Roman Empire mere decades after Virgil. By Dante's time, this had become the Holy Roman Empire. Clearly Christianity itself in the medieval world had an intimate relationship with both the Greek and Roman cultures. In The Inferno, it is this aspect, enriched with the magic of the old religions, that Dante almost exclusively explores.

The main characters of the New Testament are Jews, its plot a fulfillment of ancient Hebrew prophesies–they do not appear in The Inferno. Instead, Dante's characters are ancient Greek philosophers and poets and heros, Italian politicos and Roman emperors. Granted, this is Hell, and the apostles and patriarchs are hardly going to be imprisoned beneath the godless heathens. It is to be expected that the Christian and Hebrew philosophers and heroes will make their appearance later, in Purgatory and Paradise. But Hell belongs to the pagans, and the effect of beginning the adventure in this part of Dante's universe is to establish a firmly classical context. This is not Hebrew mythology.

Hell itself is not Hebrew mythology. And Hell is, in the broadest and narrowest senses, the subject of the poem. So consider: it is very difficult to find any Biblical ideas even approaching Dante's vision of the afterlife. Jesus mentions a judgement day and a kingdom to come, but vaguely enough that his compatriots though he meant a temporal kingdom within their lifetime. To be sure, there will be some souls not admitted to this kingdom–it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter, and the road is hard and narrow. Satan himself has rejected it, and revelations hints that he will cause a sort of Hell on Earth in the days before the apocalypse, but this is quite a different scene from that which Dante paints. Except for exile from God's presence, there is little hint of punishment for those judged unworthy. Old Testament figures hardly seem to get an afterlife at all. The occasional ghost appears, the prophet taken to live in the Kingdom Jacob dreamed, but nothing terribly specific. For the most part, the dead stay dead and their children reap their punishment and reward.

In the classics, however, is ample precedent. Dante calls the central city of his Hell "Dis," a part of Greek myth borrowed by way of Virgil, who seems to have collected, in his underworld, a variety of contemporary views of the afterlife. There is the forking path, one branch of which leads to Elysium (Heaven) and the other to Tartarus (Hell). This seems to have been part of the Pythagorean religion, and later mystics believed that they could train initiates by ritual to recognize the right road. "I had lost the path" says Dante (I, 3). While the metaphor of a religion which allows one to recognize the way to a happy eternity may exist elsewhere, there can be little doubt that Dante inherited this central theme of his Comedia from the Roman mystics.

He pays them explicit homage in his descriptions. Hell is a place underground, peopled by monsters from Greek mythology. Here are centaurs, Cerebus, the Minotaur and other creatures. Here are even gods. The sinners call God "Jove", as in "That which I was in life, I am in death. / Though Jove wear out the smith from whom he took, / in wrath, the keen edged thunderbolt with which / on my last day I was to be transfixed" (VII, 51-52). And Virgil and Dante themselves make such references, mapping the whole of Greek myth onto the Christian with Virgil's speech upon their encounter with the giants and Dante's reaction:

(Virgil) ... So towered here,

above the bank that runs around the pit

with half their bulk, the terrifying giants,

whom Jove still menaces from Heaven when

he sends his bolts of thunder down upon them.

....

(Dante) Surely when she gave up the art of making

such creatures, Nature acted well indeed,

depriving Mars of instruments like these.

(XXXI, 41-45, 49-51)

Again, Jove is God, whose real name may not be spoken in Hell. This stroke both emphasizes the alienation of the damned and serves to sever the experience of The Inferno from Biblical Christianity. The religion of the region is pagan, and this is, perforce, much of the religion of the book.

In later Christendom, "heathen" equals "foreign". Not so for Dante. He clearly feels at home in this centuries-past world. More–he loves it. His affection for Virgil, of course, is plain. But it is clearly more extensive than that. One must know the stories intimately to use them as Dante does, and one must care about them to read them so carefully. It's not so surprising. Dante, as an Italian and a subject of the Empire, was in some non-trivial sense Roman himself.

He wrote an epic poem, and identified himself unhumbly with the great classical authors. It makes sense that he should involve himself in that tradition as much as possible. In feeding his imagination on Roman scholarship and second hand Greek literature, in imparting a fearsome symmetry to the Christian life-after-death, in borrowing the grotesques of the cultures ancestral to his own, in creating such a vivid and detailed classification of crime and punishment, he succeeds. It is a near impossible feat, to live up to his romantic models. In achieving it, he brings all the legitimacy of that history to his language, all the power of the method to his subject. What he took from his ancestors he bequeathed to his descendants. Christianity after Dante had a darkness, a fantastical drama that it must owe at least in part to its greatest poet. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso may derive their poetry from the Bible, but the Inferno is pre-Christian in several ways.