While reading these ten songs of Inferno, I was munching my way through a massive slice of carrot cake at Magnolia Bakery. Frosting and fraud? Pineapple and purgatory? A bit of a strange combination.
Anyway, here are some of my (less sugary) thoughts on the midsection (pun intended) of Inferno.
As an obviously Christian text, Inferno necessarily contains an omniscient, omnipotent God. However, I thought Dante included some interesting deviations and layers of complexity to this conception of God.
Dante says to Virgil "you are my lord; you know I do not swerve from what you will; you know what is unspoken" (19.37). In referring to Virgil as his lord, and saying that he knows what is unspoken (i.e. has a level of omniscience), Dante casts Virgil as a god-like figure. In a similar vein, at the end of Canto 16, Virgil can hear Dante's thoughts, again occupying the omniscient role of God. I interpreted this in two ways: either Virgil is a manifestation of God (which is problematic in Virgil occupying the role of Christ), or Dante is praising Virgil to the extent holding him at the level of the divine. Either way, this parallel is theologically complicated and I suspect contentious in Dante's time. By granting Virgil these godly powers, God's own power seems diminished. This also comes up when Dante is describing the 7th circle of hell, and says "just so were these embankments, even though they were not built to high and not so broad, whoever was the artisan who made them" (15.10). It is apparent from this passage that God did not create hell. On one hand, this makes sense, because it would be difficult to imagine a benevolent God creating something this wicked (as Augustine points out). On the other, the idea that a) God has not created everything and b) there is this entire world of hell in conflict with the world God did create, draws God's omnipotence into question.
Because hell is a punishment for sins, Dante's conception of hell reflects upon specific Christian values In general, Dante's description of the different sinners' punishments reflect a policy that you get what you've given (ex. the astrologers and diviners who tried to see the future have their heads turned backwards). In my opinion, this essentially condones revenge, at least in the sense of divine retribution. On one hand, if I believed in God, I would be horrified by a God who was vengeful. On the other hand, this type of punishment also echoes the non-Christian ideal of karma (what goes around comes around).
Speaking of the damned astrologers in the Eighth Circle of hell, I found that Greek and Christian views of theology to differ in an interesting way. In Greek tradition, divination extremely important: we see oracles in Homer, Virgil, and Herodotus, and the word of these oracles is taken seriously. However, in Dante's hell the diviners are condemned. He describes "those sad women who had left their needle, shuttle, and spindle to become diviners" (20.121), alleging that divination is bad because it takes place of other productive tasks. I think, however, that this is not the main reason for its criticism: in Christian theology, divination can't exist because God knows future, so the only acceptable way to try to know the future is through trying to know God.
On a final note, the motif of natural settings permeates all circles of Dis. Almost every Canto in which Dante enters a new circle includes a physical, natural description (for example, the beginning of Canto 13). This, along with the intensely physical descriptions of suffering, seems to conflate the body and soul, and sin of the body/sin of the soul much more explicitly than Augustine suggests in Confessions.
It seems that Dante also sometimes mixes natural metaphors, such as when he is talking about the people who were violent against god, upon whom "above that plain of sand, distended flakes of fire showered down" (14.28). The paradoxical sand, flame, and flakes (snow?) represent a perversion of nature, perhaps intended to reflect the extent to which the sinners have perverted custom or even the natural order of the universe by being violent towards God.
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