The Danger of Presumed Superiority in Dante’s Inferno

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed…We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness” (The Bluest Eye)

On the surface, Dante’s Inferno is the ultimate feel-good story: our beloved protagonist begins lost in a forest, desperate for an answer to change his ways. All of the sudden, he stumbles upon Virgil, his literary hero, and is able to make a journey through the worst parts of hell so that he can come out the other side a better man. His journey is a passage out of political and spiritual disorder and into the beautiful hands of god. But to read Inferno as a way to understand God’s perfect system of justice would be to gravely underestimate the dangers of organized religion. Dante’s increasing lack of pity is no longer a sign of spiritual strengthening, but an increased callousness in the way he treats humanity, one that he will likely take back with him on Earth. Hell swims with the marsh Dante wished to dunk Filippo Argenti deeper in. It burns with the hair Dante pulled out of Bocca’s head. Presumed superiority makes dumping grounds of its victims. It leaves scars.

Dante feels pity for these eternally damned souls from the moment he steps into hell: “There sighs and moans and utter wailing swept resounding through the dark and starless air. I heard them for the first time, and I wept” (25 lines 22-24). Virgil immediately chastises Dante for doing so, reminding him that these souls are in Hell for a reason. They have refused to be held accountable for their actions, and their god-ordained punishment is perfectly fit to their crime. They don’t deserve pity, but more importantly, they don’t deserve to be remembered. But as Dante descends further into hell and gradually stops wincing at the sight of torture, he gets dangerously close to likening himself to god. When he sees his sworn enemy Filippo Argenti in the circle of the wrathful, he wants to inflict more punishment on him than he already has. To Virgil, Dante says, “‘Teacher, I’ve got a hankering… to see them dunk that spirit in this swill / before we leave the lake and disembark” (79 lines 52-53). This is such a drastic change of heart that Virgil responds with an overwhelming swell of pride: “‘Such a desire is good to satisfy’” (79 line 57). It seems that Dante most permanently changes his outlook on those in hell when he sees Bocca, a man who has betrayed the city of Florence; Dante rips out chunks of his hair at Bocca’s refusal to tell Dante his name. At some point, this goes beyond righteousness and becomes cruelty.

Beyond the inhumanity of Dante’s own actions, Inferno highlights the single-mindedness of viewing God as the only arbiter of morality. Ulysses is in Hell for fraudulent counsel, but his descent began the moment he chose a calling above god. Before embarking on a journey to the ends of the Earth, he gives a speech to his fellow men: “‘O brothers… From time so short in which to live and feel, / do not refuse experience of the lands / beyond the sun, the world where no one dwell” (273 lines 115-118). Ulysses chooses the thrill of discovery over the thrill of pleasing God. The moment one begins to live for anything or anyone that isn’t God, they begin to sin. The moment punishment on Earth becomes scarier that what God could inflict on someone in hell, they begin to sin. Love is fear. Life is fear. Dante’s Inferno is worthwhile to read, not because it is a rousing tale of finding God, but because it is a rude awakening of what happens when one views themselves as always above those who haven’t.