Commentary

Inferno 3: Abandon All Hope

Last updated 11/01/2023.

Inferno 2 | Inferno 4

Commentary and translation by J. Simon Harris (Copyright © J. Simon Harris).
Italian text adapted from Project Gutenberg.

• 1-9: The dead text.

1 Through me go in unto the city sullen,
2 Through me go in t’ th’ eternal pain thereof,
3 Through me go in amongst the people fallen.

4 ’Twas justice moved my maker high above;
5 Divine omnipotence made me appear,
6 And highest wisdom and primordial love.

7 Before me nothing was created here
8 If not eterne; eternal I endure.
9 Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

1 ‘Per me si va ne la città dolente,
2 per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
3 per me si va tra la perduta gente.

4 Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
5 fecemi la divina podestate,
6 la somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore.

7 Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
8 se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
9 Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’.

The canto opens cold for the first-time reader—we don’t know what these verses are until after we read them. It has the effect of putting the reader directly into Dante’s shoes; we read the words as he does, and they are just as mysterious to us as to the pilgrim. I’ve rendered them in an archaic dialect for dramatic effect, which isn’t reflected in the Italian.

Through me go in: Ital. Per me si va, repeated three times at the beginnings of the first three lines of the canto. In Robert Hollander’s words, “the anaphora… has a ring of inevitable doom about it.” Notice the preposition per (“through”) is repeated from the final line of Canto 2.

city: Only later will we understand the nature of this “city.”

Justice moved my Maker: On the face of it, this defies St. Thomas’s definition of God as the unmoved Mover (a concept from Aristotle), especially since Dante later personifies Justice as an angel (29.56).

Omnipotence…Wisdom…Love: These three qualities are established terms for the three persons of the Holy Trinity. In Dante’s own words: “For as it is so that the divine Majesty is in three persons, which have one substance, threefold contemplation of them is possible. For one can contemplate the highest power of the Father… the highest wisdom of the Son… [and] the highest and most fervent love of the Holy Spirit” (Convivio 2.5). See also St. Augustine’s On the Trinity 6.

God created Hell to receive Lucifer and his rebel angels as they fell (see Matthew 25:41), just after the beginning of creation. Dante depicts Hell as an integral part of God’s plan, not Satan’s base of resistance.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Easily one of the most recognizable lines in Western Literature. To name a few recent examples (from a search on Bowdoin College’s Dante Today website), it appears in the novels Gone Girl and American Psycho; in episodes of the TV shows Supernatural, Criminal Minds, Jessica Jones, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Avatar: The Last Airbender; the movie Boondock Saints; the videogame Resident Evil: Revelations; an X-Men comic; the titles of an album, a hip hop song, and an Australian metal band; a NY Times article about the Mets; and the title of a review for the movie Cats. If you live on earth, you’ve probably heard or read this line at least once.

The inscription on the gates of Hell may have been inspired by the inscriptions, engraved in capital letters, above Roman triumphal arches. Try Googling the Arch of Titus in Rome, for a supreme example.

Their meaning…I’m unsure: Ital. il senso lor m’è duro, “their meaning is hard for me.” The diction recalls John 6:60, “This is an hard saying.”

like a shrewd person: An interesting turn of phrase, since it suggests that Virgil is not a shrewd person—perhaps because he’s only a shade.

the good of the intellect: Citing Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics VI, Dante says, “Truth is the good of the intellect” (Convivio 2.13). The damned have lost all hope of knowing God, the highest truth.

devoid of stars: The absence of stars, those farthest things the eye can see in the heavens, punctuates the despair of the damned.

timeless: Not only eternal, but also timeless because the stars and planets by which time is measured cannot be seen in Hell.

The sounds swirl through Hell like sand in a gyre; one thinks of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” The essentially biblical image is gradually perfected as we learn that Hell is shaped like a gyre, and the pilgrim follows the winding path of a grain of sand swirling to the center.

horrors: Ital. orror (“horror”), but some editions have error (“error”).

These are the souls of the lukewarm (see Revelation 3:15-16), those who sat on the sidelines waiting to see which way the wind blows. You might recall the popular meme: “The darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” Dan Brown quotes this at the beginning of his novel Inferno, and it was also a favorite quotation of John F. Kennedy. It’s a wonderful phrase, but Dante didn’t write it. In fact, the neutral souls are right here; as we shall see, they are not in the darkest places in Hell, but just outside its border.

These are the neutral angels, those who did not take sides in Lucifer’s rebellion against God. This is the only place in Dante’s universe where angels and humans have equal footing.

by themselves: In his essay “The Neutral Angels,” John Freccero makes much of the preposition here—the angels are not faithful to themselves, for that would be choosing a side. They are by themselves.

The neutral souls and angels are outcasts of both Heaven and Hell. I’m reminded of what the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said about a young physicist’s paper: “This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.”

They have no hope of death: Not only because their souls are eternal; they also have no hope of “death” in the sense of damnation to Hell. The lukewarm souls don’t die because they “were never quite alive” (3.64).

mercy and justice: As Charles Singleton puts it, “By God’s mercy, man is saved; by His justice, man is condemned.”

Although we aren’t in Hell proper, this is the first punishment we encounter in the Inferno. The punishments are based on Dante’s law of contrapasso (“counter-suffering” or “retaliation”), which is named much later in the poem (28.142). Like the lex talionis of the Old Testament (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth;” see Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20), contrapasso is a principle of apt punishment for a given sin; we’ll see that it takes many different forms. Here, the lukewarm souls and the neutral angels are driven onwards by wasps and flies at their backs and worms at their feet, unable to stand still as they did in our life. A banner leads them on, as a battle standard leads footsoldiers into a skirmish, because they chose no flag to follow in life; but unlike a real standard, the banner is nameless and aimless.

T. S. Eliot, who adored Dante, uses a version of these lines in The Waste Land to describe a crowd flowing over London Bridge.

he who made the great refusal: There is no general consensus as to the identity of this soul. In fact, his anonymity may be exactly the poet’s point; as he says, “the world does not allow their fame to last” (3.49). To me, the best candidate is Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea who refused to grant clemency to Jesus, instead washing his hands of responsibility by passing the judgment of Him off to the angry mob. In a Christian context, how can there be a greater refusal of duty than that? Others have suggested Esau, the twin brother of Jacob in Genesis, who refused his destiny when he sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of red pottage. However, most early commentators (including Dante’s son Pietro) agree in identifying this sinner with Pope Celestine V, who lived most of his life as a penitent hermit named Pietro Angeleri (also called Pietro da Morrone) before his election to the papacy in July 1294 at the age of eighty. Celestine was unaccustomed to the power and pomp of the papacy, and felt increasingly ill-suited to his new role. One of his cardinals, Benedetto Caetani, played upon these inadequacies and concocted various schemes to compel the new pope to abdicate. In one of the most devious tales, Caetani bribed Celestine’s attendants to gain access to his chambers at night; and for three nights in a row, speaking through a long tube above his bed, he proclaimed, “I am the angel sent to speak to you, and I command you on behalf of glorious God, that you must immediately renounce the papacy, and return to being a hermit.” Perhaps believing that his highest office really gave him access to the counsel of angels, Celestine heeded the voice and refused the papacy in December 1294 after just five months as pope, becoming one of the only popes in history to abdicate of his own accord (in modern times, Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, the first to do so in six centuries). On the day before Christmas, less than a fortnight after Celestine’s abdication, the conniving Cardinal Benedetto Caetani was elected Pope Boniface VIII—the pope whose deceitful actions would lead directly to Dante’s exile (see 19.53).

caitiff: Ital. cattivi, which incidentally is used in the Italian title of Sergio Leone’s film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (il cattivo is “the bad”). Here, the word connotes “cowardly,” and is interchangeable with pusillanimous—the sin Dante nearly fell into in Canto 2 (see note to 2.44).

The insects elicit blood and tears from the neutrals, who in life never put their blood, sweat, and tears into any worthwhile cause.

If you’ve read it, it is impossible to miss the influence of Virgil’s Aeneid VI (Aeneas’ descent to the underworld) on the rest of this canto.

Acheron: “River of Sorrow” in Ancient Greek, one of the five rivers of the underworld in classical mythology. As in Aeneid VI, the souls of the dead have to cross the River Acheron to get into Hell.

It seems Virgil gets a bit irritated at the pilgrim for getting ahead of himself—Dante must learn to let Virgil lead him.

skies: Ital. cielo, which can mean “sky” or “heaven.”

living soul: The boatman immediately singles the pilgrim out of the crowd as a living soul among the dead.

The boatman’s admonition is actually a prophecy of Dante’s eventual salvation, though we won’t understand what the “lighter craft” might be until we come to Purgatory 2.

Charon: A deity from classical mythology who ferries the souls of the dead across the River Acheron (or Styx) and into the underworld. His physical appearance here is taken mostly from Virgil’s Aeneid VI.

Singleton calls these lines “a sort of password” that gives Dante a free pass to continue through Hell, a version of the golden bough that gives Aeneas a free pass from Charon (Aeneid VI.405). Virgil will use the “password” once more in 5.23-24, where the lines are repeated word for word. It is the longest word-for-word repetition in the Comedy; and with the rhyme scheme, it ripples out into adjacent stanzas as well.

wheels of fire: This infernal image of fiery wheels around Charon’s eyes strangely prefigures the image in Paradise 28 of the angels wheeling around God in fiery circles. The image is a reminder that, as a fallen angel (see line 109 and note), Charon is in the same boat as the sinners he ferries across the Acheron—he too may never hope to see the heavens.

gnashed their teeth: This is a common gesture in the Bible—the wicked gnash their teeth at the righteous (e.g. Psalms 37:12), and the damned shall gnash their teeth and weep in Hell (e.g. Matthew 8:12).

The damned latch onto anything they can blame for their eternal condition—anything but themselves.

demon Charon: It’s hard to overstate how radical this little phrase is. Dante takes Charon, a minor deity of Greco-Roman pagan mythology, and incorporates him into the Christian mythos by making him a demon (one of the fallen angels who rebelled against God with Lucifer). Early commentators were so unsettled by this that they scrambled to understand Charon as an allegory—even though he is clearly intended to be a real character within the fiction of the Comedy. In fact, the phrase epitomizes one of the main projects of the Comedy: just as Thomas Aquinas, in the generation before Dante, sought to reconcile pagan philosophy (primarily Aristotle) with Christian theology, so Dante seeks to reconcile pagan poetry (primarily Virgil) with the Bible—a necessary part of which is the reconciliation of pagan and Christian mythology.

This famous simile has a long history in Western literature. Virgil uses almost the same comparison to describe the souls crowding the shore of the Acheron to cross (Aeneid VI.309-312):

as many as the falling leaves that drop
in the first nip of autumn; or as many as the birds that flock
from the high sea to land, when the year’s cold
drives them across the deep and sends them to sunny lands.

Whereas Virgil’s simile focuses on the sheer number of leaves, Dante’s focuses on their action and motion; and in the second half, Virgil presents an image of many birds flocking to land during migration, whereas Dante presents the image of a single falcon called by a lure—the dead are drawn to the opposite shore. The resulting image is one of organized chaos.

Virgil, in turn, got the first half of the simile from Homer, who compares the generations of leaves to the generations of men, some flourishing, others falling (Iliad VI.146-149). And who knows if Homer borrowed the simile from some other poet lost in the misty centuries. What is certain is that Dante was unaware of Homer’s original version of the simile, because Dante did not have direct access to Homer’s work.

In the seventeenth century, John Milton took up the simile to describe the legions of fallen angels, “Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks / in Vallombrosa” (Paradise Lost 1.302-303). The mention of Vallombrosa (an area in the outskirts of Florence) seems like a veiled acknowledgement of Dante. Then in the nineteenth century, Percy Shelley adapted the simile in the opening of “Ode to the West Wind,” perhaps the most famous English poem written in terza rima (the same rhyme scheme as the Comedy)—and Shelley wrote the poem near Florence. Finally, in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound employs a condensed version of the simile in his two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro.” Now perhaps we’re due for another poet to take up the mantle.

Virgil is apparently suggesting a supernatural reason for the zeal with which the damned launch themselves from the shore—divine justice inverts their fear into desire, making the sinners want to take their assigned places in Hell. But underlying the phrase is a deep insight into human psychology and the nature of sin. When fear is turned into desire—when people choose to become what they fear most—evil is the necessary consequence. We’ll see that, despite their lamentation, despite their torments, the souls of the damned all choose to be in Hell, one way or another; their eternity is fixed as much by themselves as God’s justice.

a blast of wind: Aristotle theorized that earthquakes were caused by subterranean vapors escaping violently from the earth (Meteorology II.viii).

Dante’s fainting here has been the subject of endless critical debate. He literally faints due to the flash of red light: he says as much in the text (line 135); and it seems the wind, which causes the earthquake, also causes the light. So why does the poet have him faint? And why is there an earthquake at this moment? We first have to understand that the poem is about the pilgrim’s Christian conversion—the process, mirroring the death and resurrection of Jesus, in which the old sinful self dies, and the new Christian self is reborn (see Romans 6:6-8). In classical mythology, crossing the Acheron is symbolic of death; thus the pilgrim faints to mimic death. But he isn’t dead yet—not literally, nor in the metaphorical sense required for Christian conversion. His old sinful self will not be able to truly die until the pilgrim completes his inward journey and is ready to ascend towards God. But in a sense, his fainting here is Dante’s first attempt at death by conversion—the first of three.

So why the earthquake? From later references, we can also establish that Dante crosses the Acheron at sundown on Good Friday—the anniversary of Jesus’ death on the cross, around the same time as He would have crossed the Acheron for the Harrowing of Hell (see 4.52-63 and note), which caused an infernal earthquake. When the living Dante crosses the Acheron, the earth quakes just as it did for the Christ.