Dante the genius poet and Dante the at-times bewildered pilgrim traveled across the spectrum of the body in Inferno. After knowing the sins of the body and witnessing the infernally and eternally tormented souls, and after climbing up the hairy, bloody body of Satan, Dante engaged purgation on Mt. Purgatory. Here he aimed for the lofty, spiritual heights of Paradise. A discussion of body and soul, of matter and spirit, of somatic control and desire, can go in many directions within Dante’s great poem. This essay maintains its distance from such travels, however, and aims instead to encourage a meditation on the idea of the entire Divine Comedy as its own corporeal essence, as having moved from the idea of a human body in Hell toward the sublimation of the soul, toward salvation. There are many opportunities to deliver work on the idea of the body as a vessel for the soul, of the need through the power of personal will to control one’s desires and passions. This is indeed the central thrust of the entire Commedia: to discuss the ideas of damnation and salvation and to help the poem’s author and its readers map out a successful journey away from sin and toward the divine.
The successful traverse of hell, purgatory and paradise by the pilgrim is the literary device of genius. The Divine Comedy as a physical presence is about the writing of it, much as Proust’s Marcel tells the story of learning how to write In Search of Lost Time. As Marcel the youthful narrator moves toward the elder Author, they merge and the book is written. So, too, does Dante the lost pilgrim, the writer of earthly love lyrics, move toward a wiser, purged poet who knows he will be saved. Freccero corroborates this when he claims that “For Dante, the distance between protagonist and author is at its maximum at the beginning of the story and is gradually closed by the dialectic of poetic process until pilgrim and poet coincide at the ending of the poem” (Freccero, “Prologue,” 99). Further, in a different essay covering Manfred’s wounds, Freccero allows for the notion that self-discipline “...will bring the ‘body’ of the text closer and closer to the spirit which informs it” (Freccero, “Manfred,” 147). The pilgrim as the body and the poet as divinely inspired grow closer as the poem unfolds. As the poet sings the divine poem, so the pilgrim gains access to Paradise. The pilgrim and poet merge and the story is told. There is a metamorphosis from pilgrim to poet, from Hell to Paradise, from potentially damned to absolutely saved, as well as the metamorphosis from idea to reality in the corporeal structure of the poem, from an idea that did not exist to the immortal final creation of The Divine Comedy.
If we deal effectively with the idea of power over the body as an ability to control the physical and intellectual desires of oneself in order to free the soul from its love of material objects and material life, then we must discuss the idea of desire and passion unloosed and creating personal and social havoc for the individual. The story of the Divine Comedy is the story of the damned and the saved. We visit plenty of both examples in heaven and on Mt. Purgatory. Much has been made of the innocent soul’s defilement in the body. It awakens, and through love pursues the objects of its love. These objects can be, of course, earthly distractions, or they can be those curbed, focused desires on the divine. Here rests the central essence of the Commedia. However, it carries a note of curiosity to treat the poem itself as a corporeal individual and its creator as the object of divine grace, of immortality.
Dante makes the incredible journey across the boundaries between eternal damnation and divine love. He traipses the defiled, dark body of the poem in Hell to the lofty, spiritual realm of Heaven, beyond Purgatory’s Garden of Eden. This travel from hell to heaven equates to a discussion of the body and the soul. Inferno is the body, Paradiso is the soul, and Purgatorio necessarily bridges the two by preparing the spirit for God. This combination is what Ronald Martinez has called “...one of the richest and most problematic issues of medieval anthropology and theology – what Shakespeare was to call ‘this knot intrinsicate of life’ – as well as one of the most promising nexuses of Dante’s poetics” (Martinez, Modern Philology, p.68-9).
Herbert Austin calls Dante’s job of writing a narrative across the complex Cosmos from heaven to hell “superhuman.” He says about Dante that he faced “...the necessity of describing and explaining in narrative sequence his progression across, or through, the boundary which divides the world of sense from the world of spirit” (Austin, 141). This quote provides a trigger that yields an understanding of our topic, in that it delineates this world of sense – our worldly elements of body and desire, of necessary suffering and sin – and that of spirit – the divine release from the sins of the world. It is our job to learn how to live properly, according to the Christian tradition, and Dante has provided us with the map of how to do it. This writer is not the only one inspired to re-read the Bible and open a new relationship with God after reading the poem: Clements writes in “Dante After Seven Centuries” the following whimsical insight: “Dante even led some (like Schlegel and Novalis) back to the Church of Rome” (Clements, 248).
If we are to offer an explicit exegesis of Dante’s – and thus medieval Christian – notions of the body and its relation to soul and sin, then we should rapidly descend into the very bottom of the pit of hell and pay a visit to Satan in Canto 34 of Inferno. Satan is the abject manifestation of the soiled and condemned body. That he was an angel in heaven and therefore not of the body reinforces our point. Lucifer was the angel of light, the most beautiful of all the angels, and he fell from grace when he rebelled against his Maker. The poet writes, “When we had moved so far ahead that it pleased my master to show me the creature who had once been beautiful” (Inferno 34.16-8). Lucifer had plummeted from the heavens as an intemporal being and crashed through the earth as a temporal one. His nosedive into the earth created the conical structure of Dante’s hell as we know it, and consequently displaced the amount of rock and dirt in an inversion that is Mt. Purgatory. Satan is stuck in the center of the earth as the heaviest object in the universe. Satan is the reverse process of what Dante desires for himself. The object, of course, is that we are to employ the power of our will over our bodies and in the end shed temporality for the divine light of heaven. Satan’s fall and metamorphosis is a precise and extremely illustrated analogue that clearly reinforces our interpretation.
The sinners in Hell, as we shall see from a discussion of free will in Purgatorio 16, chose their own fates. They have rejected God, have turned their backs on salvation. They chose, according to Francis Newman, “true substantiality,” and they chose to “condemn themselves to live forever in the kind of material world they were meant to transcend” (Newman, 70). The sinners chose to remain with their defiled, corruptible bodies rather than accepting the ethereal essence of the Divine. Newman anchors our essay best when she informs us that Satan “...never had a body to lose to the grave or regain at the judgment...(he) is in cosmological position the heaviest thing in the universe. Once utterly incorporeal, he is now the most corporeal of beings, having sunk to the center of the earth, where he remains, hairy, rime-encrusted, and forever fixed in place” (Newman, 70).
It is not a stretch to claim the entire Commedia as a body unto itself, a body as crafted by the poet (through the supreme guidance of God) that exists as one with the infernal body of hell and with the supreme light of salvation. The poem as a whole, as mentioned above, is immortal. But it also contains within itself the freed soul of paradise, the cleansing soul of purgatory, and the struggling, condemned body of hell. One of the foremost Dante scholars, Robert Durling, has on more than a few occasions shown how the Inferno is an analogy of the human body. We paraphrase Durling’s own genius here in order to quickly portray the symbology: Virgil and the pilgrim enter hell at the body’s head; the brain and memory are in Limbo; Canto 5 with the lovers Francesca and Paolo represents the eyes; gluttony is of course the gullet; the sullen are the spleen; the walls of Dis the human breast; the heretics are placed where they are in the structure of hell because their placement mimics biblical language and Aristotelian physiology, according to Durling, that of reason wisdom and faith, situated in the heart (Durling, Additional Notes, 552-3; Durling, “Microcosm,” 129-130). The analogy does not stop there, however. One need only peer at the illustrations traditionally representing the Malebolge to see the segmentation of the intestines. Further, contained within the textual subcircles of the Malebolge are continual references to digestion and digestive fluids, to bodily functions, which unfortunately cannot be elaborated here. The condemned souls work their way by varying degrees down toward the anus, where Satan is dramatically situated, at the base of a large hopper. Satan is the spider at the bottom of his sandy, conical trap.
Relating the above elements of the material, body-like structure of hell to the discussion of body and soul must pass again through Durling. He writes “Dante continually associates sins with the misuse and/or malfunctioning of parts of the body, often in the sense of inversion (as when lust, associated with the lower body, dominates reason, located in the head; Satan may be the head of Hell, but he is located at its anus)”(Durling, Notes, 554). Dante makes certain we get the reference, as he and Virgil are escaping Hell along Satan’s furry, encrusted integument: “...let the gross people ponder it who do not see what point it was that I had passed” (Inferno 34.91-3).
Satan is the heaviest object in the universe because of his enforced materiality. The farther down in hell one goes the heavier the bodies are. As Dante descends, his weight is noticed; as he ascends in Purgatory, his increasing lightness of being is noted. In hell we are in the vilest representation of the body, the unsaved body, the unclean body. It is weighted down and it is mortal. The condemned never make it out of their tortured bodies and in fact must pay the equivalent price in hell corresponding to their sins, their contrapasso. Opposing this in Purgatorio and Paradiso, though: as the souls ascend there is less and less an emphasis on the body, on manifest temporality. Thus, Satan is the heaviest of all bodies and Beatrice seems to float amid blinding light. Satan is the dramatic allegory of the lost body, the body caught in damnation. He is the representation of one’s inability to control the passions of the body. The greatest sinner of all is eating the worst sinners of humanity, Brutus, Cassius and Judas. Virgil interprets for Dante: “’That soul up there who has the greatest punishment,’ said my master, ‘is Judas Iscariot, with his head inside, waving his legs outside” (Inf. 34.61-3). Here are condemned the souls of Judecca, the last subcircle of the 9th circle of hell, those sinners against lords and benefactors. Brutus and Cassius, of course, betrayed their emperor, Caesar, and Judas betrayed Christ. Their inabilities to control greed, pride and lust for power – i.e. the physical and emotional passions of the body – led to their distinct betrayals and consequently Dante thrusts them to the bottom of the infernal pit.
A direct representation of our current thesis is displayed in the following phrase: “If he was beautiful then as now he is ugly, when he lifted his brow against his Maker” (Inf. 34.34-5). Satan had been an angel, a spirit of the divine, and now he is a condemned body held in the ice by the pressures of the Cosmos. Additionally, when the author of the tale presents to us that he as a pilgrim “did not die and did not remain alive,” he is cajoling us – “if you have wit at all” – to see that he has accepted humility and is proceeding to shed his sin as he prepares for Purgatory (Inf. 34.25-26). The frightened man lost in a dark wood – the human being lost to sin – has completed his penitential descent into Hell (a symbolic mimic of Christ’s descent) and is preparing for an ascent. He has taken his individual body through the structural, material body of Hell and is prepared to curb his desires and purify his soul. Purgatory is the necessary station for such a soul’s cleansing.
Dante takes pains to remind us throughout the poem that he is also the poet writing the great work and we are the reader. This stepping out of the poem reinforces the allegorical nature of the work, and it exhibits once again the notion of the poem as a body. Dante removes us temporarily from the dramatic vision, and displays again the poem as a corpus. He writes, as he is describing the condemned souls appearing as straws in glass, “and fearfully I set it in meter” (Inf. 34.10). Added to that reference, he addresses the reader specifically in line 23, when he asks us not to inquire how he became so frozen and feeble with fear (Inf. 34.22-4). At the bottommost cavity in the universe Dante reminds us that he is not only the pilgrim (as bodily manifested), but also the poet, carrying through toward the heavens his sublime song.
Any writer or artist will allude to the notion that creativity is similar to procreation. The similarities between the saved body and the poem cover the breadth of Purgatorio, just as the fall of lesser writers is noted in Inferno. As Marco Lombardo and Statius cover the soul, as we shall later see, so Dante covered the genesis of his work. Freccero writes “As the soul is inspired in the fetus, so the inspiration of the poet comes from God. The body, however, is the work of parenthood. In the same way, the poetic corpus is sired by the poet, who provides the vehicle for God’s message” (Freccero, “Manfred,” 145). As the birth yields our body, so divine inspiration gives birth to the poem; As salvation may come to one who properly directs desire toward Heaven, so goes the material, phenomenal entity of the Commedia.
If we must undergo, because of Adam and Eve’s Fall, the battle between bodily control and pleasure, agony and ecstasy, then Satan’s final crime and his subsequent punishment is gruesomely painted by Dante. “With six eyes he was weeping, and down three chins dripped the tears and the bloody slobber” (Inf. 34.52-4). The suffering of the souls in hell culminate in the depraved, ice-enclosed souls of the ninth circle. After the pilgrim and Virgil have succeeded in climbing past Satan in the ass of the universe, Virgil seems to wipe the sweat from his brow. He is encouraging his guest to prepare for the climb of Purgatory, and then he says, “That was no walk through a palace where we were” (Inf. 34.97). The two travelers begin to ascend to light. The pilgrim removes himself from the darkness of the defiled body, toward something else, toward the hope of saved souls. They “return to the bright world” without a desire for rest; they climb until the pilgrim “saw the beautiful things the heavens carry” and they step beyond the abyss. “And thence we came forth to look again at the stars” (Inf. 34.134-140). His body is no longer cloaked in darkness, and he has stepped through the body of Hell in order to gaze upon the flickering firmament, a draw for the soul, an inducement. There are the stars of the heavens and there must rest the souls.
The task of how to achieve those stars is set forth in Purgatorio. Where the souls in Hell are tormented in contrapasso for eternity, the souls in Purgatory know they are saved and must only endure the shedding of their sins through penance. The time it takes to engage the sloughing off of sin does not matter here because years do not measure up to eternity. Therefore, though the souls may feel pain and torment, their focus is necessarily on the pleasures of heaven. They climb the mountain toward the Garden of Eden and beyond. Canto 16 contains the following: the souls suffering penance still sing and turn their eyes toward heaven, eager to ascend; the body of the Church is corrupted; an explanation of free will, which unites our interpretation of body and soul, of command over pleasure, and of salvation.
Though the souls have passed through the terrace of pride (as all must, for pride is the foundation of all sin), and are currently engaged in purging themselves of wrath, they endure their torments with song. The smoke that blinds the eyes does not stop them from singing: “’Agnus Dei’ was every their exordium; the same words came from all, and the same melody, so that all harmony appeared among them” (Purgatorio 16.19-21). The Agnus Dei is a prayer of exhortation, asking the Lamb of God to remove the sins of the world. We can look at the world as a temporal function and thus equate it with the body and, finally, see our way to the prayer as a call to remove sin from the individual human body. The souls in Purgatory have corralled their desires and focused them on Heaven. As the soul pursues love with desire, it is paramount for the desire then to aim for the love of God. Auerbach adds a distinct voice to our deliberation on freedom and control over the body when he writes of Cato’s death. “The political and earthly freedom for which he died was only a shadow, a prefiguration of Christian freedom from evil which leads from the bondage of corruption to true sovereignty over oneself.” Dante ascends to the top of Purgatory and is proclaimed “master over himself” (Auerbach, “Symbolism,” 109). This is the primary desire of the pilgrim, the poet, the reader. Dante, too, it must be emphasized, attains mastery over his subject: when he learns to control his earthly passions, he in turn better represents the voice of God and consequently masters the entire Commedia. The poem is a figura of his mastery over his own body, and in the end Dante the poet saves both.
Given that Canto 16 sets forth the fundamentals of free will, which insist that our sins are not the fault of Heaven, but are our own doing (or undoing), then Virgil’s comment about untying the knot of wrathfulness is important (Purg. 16.23-4). If wrath binds us into knots, then it is a supreme example of one’s inability to control the passions of the body. This is a canto explicating the ideas behind untying knots in an entire canticle of untying knots. It is our job, as we shall see, to exercise the free control of will over ourselves. We are responsible for either our damnation or salvation.
The pilgrim questions Marco Lombardo: “The world is surely as barren of every virtue as you say, pregnant with malice and covered with it; but I beg you to point out the cause, so that I may see and show it to others; for some place it in the heavens and some down here” (Purg. 16. 58-63). It is interesting to note that the material body of the world is both barren and pregnant, the former of virtue and the latter of evil and sin. Each terrace of Purgatory contains the sins of the world and their attendant virtues. Unlike Hell, where the souls must wallow in replications of their sins, the souls in Purgatory are given examples of the opposing virtue and consequently are able to shed the evils of the world and embrace divine virtues as they head toward the Garden of Eden. Also contained in the above passage, Dante the poet peeks through the cloak of his visions, in that he notes as the pilgrim that he will be writing about this experience. Again, we must repeat, on one level this story is the tale of its own creation. Lastly, contained in the pilgrim’s desire to know why the world is so full of sin, is the idea of blaming the heavens. Marco Lombardo is the chosen definer of free will, though Statius and Virgil will in later cantos expound on the soul.
“Brother, the world is blind” opens Marco Lombardo (Purg. 16.65-6). The shade launches into one of the most important definitions in the entire poem, which is perhaps why it is located in the center of the entire Commedia. Marco confirms that the heavens start things off but that we are primed to know the difference between good and evil. We have a free mind within us which “the heavens do not govern. Thus, if the present world has gone astray, in you is the cause, in you let it be sought” (Purg. 16.81-3). Located here is the locus, the absolute focal point, of the discussion between body and soul, between one’s power over the body and one’s rampant desire. Freccero acknowledges that the division between body and soul was important to the ancients, and he underlines the Christian notion of the fallen flesh. He writes, “It is not physical reality that the soul must flee, but sin itself” (Freccero, “Prologue,” 82). The individual possesses the power to master the body and direct the soul toward goodness, and we have no one else to blame for waywardness other than ourselves. Our soul tastes the flavor of “some lesser good” and then runs after it, “if a guide or rein does not turn away its love” (Purg. 16.88-93). It is our job to direct the soul toward divine love, the greater love for which all of the smaller, insignificant loves (and dangerous ones) are analogues.
Here Dante switches into a discourse of new ideas of body: the state and the church. His balanced design of empire, a balance between church and state, is threatened by the current corruption of the church. Dante’s exile from the body of Florence is always underlies the poem, and is evidenced here. Dante has Marco say, “You can clearly see that bad government is the cause that has made the world wicked, and not the nature in you” (Purg. 16.104-5). Yet another body has become corrupted, whether it be the Church, the city-state, or Italy as a whole. The power of effective control, the wisdom that is capable of directing the soul toward God, is lacking in the Italian religious and political spectrum. Dante enforces vigorous comment and condemnation. Lombardo finishes as the canto nears its conclusion: “Say then that the Church of Rome, because it has fused together in itself the two authorities, falls in the mud and soils both itself and its burden” (Purg. 16.127-9). The Church has subsumed the powers of empire and therefore has succumbed to greed and corruption. The popes have been driven by a lust for power. The mud of corruption, the mud of earthly matter and physical body, soils the Church. Worse, the Church has abused its responsibility for lending guidance for the soul. This concludes Lombardo’s foray into a discussion of body and soul and free will, and the pilgrim turns his sights on the brightness that shines through the smoke, the representative angel of the third terrace, the angel as analogous to heaven, the angel guiding the way.
The extant conflict between our bodies and our souls is the story of The Divine Comedy. The body is represented allegorically on many levels in the poem, as we have seen. From Dante and the Body of Christ, from Satan to Beatrice, from the damned souls in the pit to the eagerly trudging shades on the ascent of Mt. Purgatory, the exemplars of good and evil, found and lost, exist as the body parts of Dante’s great poetical corpus. Ideas abound of the poem itself as a material entity, a body. As the pilgrim discovers the truths of salvation – and so notes the poet – so reaches the poem for the divine levels of immortality. The poem is the literal and literary device that saves Dante the poet, while the pilgrim engages hell and purgatory on his journey toward Paradise. Dante achieves Heaven in physical form, in idea, and in art. Whether we live by the construct of medieval Christianity, or we consider ourselves modern secular humanists, the notions of free will and responsibility conform intrinsically to any worldview. Whether we desire Heaven in the Afterlife or a peaceful life on earth, our relationship with body and soul, with temporality and spirit, is as vital as it was in Dante’s time. Dante the man created with divine guidance a poem that would inspire and entertain, and he successfully structured an edifice that one may use as a ladder toward salvation.