"Divine Comedy": when hell freezes over

Abandon all hope: this is how the descent into hell begins in Dante. Depiction from Late Middle Ages.

Only in the reflection of darkly burning flames can you see the tormented figures, tortured by bizarre-looking creatures in all kinds of demonic ways. Dante Alighieri, Italy’s national poet, employs imagery of fire, heat, and death to evoke his Inferno. The Hell he portrays in the Divine Comedy – a fantastical, sadistic nightmare from the Middle Ages – has inspired many painters.

And yet the pictures, like those painted in oil on wood by Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch, show just one aspect of Dante’s Hell: “The Hell depicted by Dante as an abyss reaching down to the center of the Earth is not equally hot everywhere, but actually ice-cold in large parts,” points out Professor Florian Mehltretter, Director of the Institute of Italian Philology at LMU. This applies most of all to the lowest, the ninth circle of Hell, where the betrayers of God and fatherland suffer their torments. Here the sinners are trapped in ice, their bodies caught in absurd contortions: “Già era, e con paura il metto in metro, là dove l'ombre tutte eran coperte e trasparien come festuca in vetro.” Or as the English translation by Robert and Jean Hollander has it: “Now, and I shudder as I write it out in verse, I was where the shades were wholly covered, showing through like bits of straw in glass.”

Satan at frozen bottom of Hell

Hell is populated by all kinds of figures, famous personalities from antiquity as well as contemporaries of Dante. The latter, the majority of whom are entirely obscure to most people today, often owe their banishment to Dante’s political views. At the very center of Hell is Satan, who is trapped, immobile and suffering, in a lake frozen solid by his own icy breath. Only his three jaws grind and chew ceaselessly on Judas Iscariot and the murderers of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. Maximum distance from God does not mean infernal flames, but icy cold. “The greatest punishment is the absence of God’s love,” says Mehltretter.

»The Hell depicted by Dante as an abyss reaching down to the center of the Earth is not equally hot everywhere, but actually ice-cold in large parts.«

Florian Mehltretter

The punishments in Dante's hell "are modeled after the sins themselves," says Florian Mehltretter. | © LMU / ole

That being said, fire and blazing heat are certainly present in the Divine Comedy – in the Inferno, but also in Purgatorio, albeit just in one place there. What is crucial is the different function of fire in Purgatorio and the Inferno. Mehltretter explains that Purgatory “is designed to cleanse sinners through exercises and recitations such that at the end of their allotted time they partake of redemption in Paradise after all.”

For the Inferno, by contrast, the phrase inscribed over the gates of Hell says it all: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” (“Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate”). In the Inferno, the fire generally intensifies the imposed torments. Take Canto IX, for example, where the heretics are encased in flaming, but open tombs. “They get what they predicted,” notes Mehltretter: “Despite appearances, this is not simply a form of Old Testament punishment in the spirit of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The punishments are modeled after the sins themselves and perpetuate them. The souls of the heretics who thought the soul was mortal end up lying in a tomb.”

The intensifying role of heat is particularly memorable in the punishment of murderers and bloodthirsty tyrants. In the Inferno, they are immersed in boiling blood – “What’s decisive here is naturally the blood,” says Mehltretter and quotes Dante: “the river of blood that scalds those who by violence do injury to others.” Grafters, meanwhile, are immersed in boiling pitch. And simoniacs, who sold ecclesiastic offices and sinecures for money, are rammed head-first into the ground and have burning feet, whereas the “violent against God” – the likes of blasphemers, usurers, and sodomites – are subject to a rain of fire – “a curse indeed,” notes Mehltretter.

Cross-section of the infernal abyss: Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine like Dante, illustrated the Inferno and the other two parts of the Divine Comedy. He created about 100 drawings and engravings on this subject in around 1480.

Dante’s alter ego and his guide Virgil – Botticelli drew them in colorful garments – are deep down here in the eighth Circle of Hell, where punishment and torture are inflicted on the sinners in ever harsher forms.

Odysseus in the flames

Another interesting fate is that of fraudulent advisers, who misuse their logos, their spirit, to deceive others. They too are encased in flames. Among them is a prominent hero of the ancient world: the “cunning” Odysseus, as Homer describes him in the Iliad. With his invention of the wooden horse filled with Greek warriors, he decided the Trojan War in favor of the Greeks. “But this crafty betrayal has a salvation-historical meaning,” remarks Mehltretter. After all, the Romans saw themselves as descendants of the Trojan Aeneas, whose flight from burning Troy first laid the foundation for the Roman Empire and consequently, in time, for the Roman Church.

Dante’s alter ego wanders through Inferno and Purgatorio, led by the ancient poet Virgil, toward Paradiso, where he hopes to meet his true love Beatrice again.

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Hope for ‘wrong’ lovers

When the two wanderers through the hereafter leave the innermost circle of Hell and – back on the Earth’s surface – arrive in Purgatory, the conditions are quite different. When it comes to ‘wrong’ lovers, the flames of purgatory are of a different nature than those of the Inferno. The lustful go around the Mountain of Purgatory in opposite directions – homosexuals one way and heterosexuals the other, explains Mehltretter. Every time they meet, “they give each other a chaste little kiss.” As the Hollander translation puts it: “There I can see that every shade of either group makes haste to kiss another, without stopping, and is content with such brief salutation.” The inclusion of “sodomites” – meaning homosexuals – among the future saved has prompted much discussion in Dante research. Potentially, Dante sees the sin of homoerotic love as residing in excess desire, not in the desire itself being intrinsically sinful. “So he does not condemn homosexuality outright here,” concludes Mehltretter. The ‘wrong’ lovers, whether homo- or heterosexual, are not punished by the flames, but purified – the precondition for redemption.

The painter Domenico di Michelino created a memorial to Dante for Florence Cathedral in 1465. In the painting, Dante presents his Divina Commedia, with the descent into Hell on the left and the Mountain of Purgatory in the background, crowned by the earthly paradise. Meanwhile, the city of Florence is depicted on the right.

In Paradise, by contrast, “heat, fire, and flames do not play a large role,” says Mehltretter. Only in one of the cantos of Paradiso do flames (“fiamme”) appear in a prominent place, as an emanation of the Holy Spirit. “In the very last canto, Dante’s narrator tries to look at God, but he doesn’t understand what he sees. Suddenly he’s struck by a mystical insight. This doesn’t consist in an explanation, or in understanding, but in the experience of a circular movement of love, being one with the will of God.”

Dante’s dramatic and highly detailed description of Hell has had a major influence on iconography down to this day. There is a plethora of pictures that refer to Dante’s great poem. At the beginning, we have his Florentine contemporary Andrea di Cione Orcagna, and later Renaissance artists like Sandro Botticelli, the French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix, and the surrealist Salvador Dalí. Others to have engaged with Dante’s work include Anselm Feuerbach, Edouard Manet, and Auguste Rodin, among many others. But however the painters depicted the fiery inferno, our conception of Hell as a place of fire is not owing to Dante Alighieri, but is much older, presumably going back to the New Testament. In the Book of Revelation, it says: “And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.”

Florian Mehltretter is Professor of Italian Literature and Director of the Institute of Italian Philology at LMU.