Inferno — Canto III

"Through me the way to the sorrowing city.
Through me the way to eternal grief.
Through me the way among the people who are lost.

Justice moved my high Maker to build me.
I was made by divine Power,
by the highest Wisdom, and by the first Love.

Before me, nothing was ever created
except things eternal — and I last eternally.
Abandon all hope, you who enter." The inscription on the gate of Hell. Probably the single most quoted passage in the entire poem, after the opening line of Canto I. The Italian is "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

Three things to notice:

(1) The gate is speaking. The "I" of these tercets is the gate itself, addressing every soul that passes under it. This is unusual and strange — Dante turns an architectural feature into a voice.

(2) Hell is built by the whole Trinity. "Divine Power, the highest Wisdom, and the first Love" are Dante's medieval names for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The astonishing claim, which has bothered readers for seven centuries, is that Love participated in the construction of Hell. For Dante there is no contradiction: a just universe required somewhere for unrepented evil to go, and a loving God could not let injustice be the last word.

(3) What is being abandoned is hope, not faith or love. The damned in Inferno have not stopped believing in God; they have stopped believing they could ever again be reconciled to him. The whole poem is, in a sense, a long argument about hope.

I saw these words written in dark letters
above the lintel of a gate;
and I said: "Master, the meaning of this is hard for me to take."

And he answered me, like a man who'd been here before:
"Here you have to leave all your hesitation behind.
All cowardice has to die at this gate.

We have come to the place I told you about —
where you'll see the souls in suffering
who have given up the good of the intellect." "The good of the intellect." A specifically Dantean phrase, drawn from Aquinas. The "good of the intellect" is, ultimately, the vision of God — the only thing that fully satisfies a rational mind. The damned are the souls who have given up on that good. They didn't fail to know it; they failed to choose it. Inferno is in this sense not a chamber of horrors but an immense argument about misused freedom.

Then he laid his hand on mine —
with a calm, encouraging look that gave me courage —
and led me in among the hidden things. The hand on the hand. A small but quietly devastating gesture. Virgil — a damned soul himself — leads the living man into Hell with the warmth of a teacher leading a frightened student into a dark room. Dante will reach for that hand, or notice its absence, several times over the course of the descent. It is one of the poem's quiet measures of how alone, or not alone, he is.

There — sighs and groans and high, drawn-out wailing
were echoing through the starless air,
and from the very first I started weeping at the sound.

Different languages, horrible dialects,
shrieks of fury, words of anguish,
voices high and hoarse, the sound of hands striking flesh —

all of it together making a din that goes whirling on
forever, in that forever-black air,
the way sand whirls when a desert wind blows. The first sound of Hell. Notice that Dante meets Hell with his ears before his eyes. The air is starless — no light to see by — and the place is announced by a chaos of voices that he can't sort out. The whole canto is being structured around the difference between hearing something and understanding it; that, by extension, is what Inferno is for.

And I, my head ringing with horror,
asked: "Master — what is this I'm hearing?
Who are these people so utterly broken by pain?"

And he answered: "This is the wretched state
of the sad souls of those
who lived without infamy and without praise. The lukewarm — Dante's most original group of souls. These are not classical sinners. They are people who, in life, refused to commit to anything: never took a moral stand, never picked a side, never even sinned in any memorable way. They lived as if life had no stakes.

Dante invents a place for them just inside the gate, before Hell proper begins — they aren't even worth a real circle. The idea has a clear scriptural source: Revelation 3:16, where God says of a similar group, "because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." Dante takes that line very literally. The lukewarm have been spit out of every place — Heaven won't have them, and (as the next tercets explain) even Hell will not give them a real spot. They are nowhere.

Mixed in with them is that worthless chorus
of angels who never rebelled
and never stayed loyal to God either — they were for themselves. The neutral angels. When Lucifer rebelled, tradition has it, a third of the angels followed him into Hell and the other two-thirds stayed loyal in Heaven. Dante adds a third group, almost unattested in earlier theology: angels who simply stood off to one side and did nothing, waiting to see who would win. They are punished here, with the human lukewarm, because their sin is the same: refusal to choose. For Dante, neutrality in the face of moral reality is itself a failure of the soul.

Heaven cast them out so as not to be tarnished by them;
and the deeper abyss won't take them either,
because the damned would draw no glory from being beside them." One of the most pitiless lines in the poem. Even Hell does not want the lukewarm. The damned at least had the dignity of having committed to something — of having sinned in earnest. To be punished alongside someone who never even committed to a sin would diminish them. So the lukewarm are denied even the company of the damned. They get nowhere.

Dante's contempt for this group is the most ferocious moral judgment in the entire canto — and the canto is full of judgments.

And I asked: "Master — what is so terrible
to them that makes them wail like this?"
He answered: "I will tell you very briefly.

They have no further hope of death.
Their blind life here is so contemptible
that they envy every other fate. "No further hope of death." The phrase echoes Canto I, where Virgil promised Dante he would see souls "crying out for the second death." That is what this is: souls who long for total annihilation and cannot have it. They envy every other fate — even the fates of the famous damned in the circles below. Anything would be more bearable than being nobody, forever.

The world won't allow any record of them.
Mercy and Justice both look down on them.
Let's not talk about them. Look — and move on." "Let's not talk about them. Look — and move on." In the original Italian: "Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." One of the most famous single lines in Italian literature, and a phrase that has passed into ordinary Italian speech as a kind of dismissal. Virgil — usually the patient teacher — refuses even to discuss this group. They are not worth the breath of his explanation. The line is also the structural turning-point of the canto: it is the moment we leave the lukewarm behind and turn toward the river.

And I, looking again, saw a banner
spinning around, racing along so fast
that it seemed to refuse to stop for anything; The banner. A perfect, savage allegorical detail. These are the souls who in life never followed any cause; in death they are forced to chase, forever, a banner of nothing — a flag with no allegiance, sprinting on ahead of them, never pausing, never resolving into anything they could even be loyal to. The contrapasso (the punishment fitted to the sin) is exquisite: they get the chase without the cause.

And behind it came such a long line of people
that I would never have believed
Death had undone so many. "I had not thought death had undone so many." T.S. Eliot quotes this line, in just that translation, in The Waste Land (1922) — describing the crowd of London commuters flowing across London Bridge in the morning fog. It is one of the great Dante echoes in English-language poetry: Eliot is suggesting that the lukewarm are not somewhere else, in Hell. They are walking to work this morning.

Once I had recognized some of them,
I looked, and saw the shade of the man
who out of cowardice made the great refusal. "The great refusal." Dante never gives the man a name — it is one of the most famous unanswered identifications in the poem — but the overwhelming consensus, since the earliest commentators, is that this is Pope Celestine V. Elected pope in 1294 as a saintly hermit, Celestine resigned the papacy after only five months, overwhelmed by the office. His resignation cleared the way for the election of Boniface VIII — the pope Dante hated above all others, who would help engineer Dante's exile from Florence.

If the identification is right, then Dante is making a brutal political point: by walking away from his post, Celestine handed the Church to its most corrupt occupant in living memory. The "great refusal" was, for Dante, not just personal cowardice but a historical catastrophe. It is also worth noting that Celestine had been formally canonized as a saint in 1313, while Dante was writing this canto. He put a saint among the worst-treated souls in the poem.

Right away I understood, and I was sure:
this was the sect of the worthless wretches
hateful to God — and hateful even to his enemies.

These wretches, who had never really been alive,
were naked, and were being savagely stung
by gadflies and hornets all around them. "Who had never really been alive." The line is the moral verdict of the whole canto. Dante is not saying these souls are nonexistent — he is saying they never lived. To live, in his sense, is to choose; to engage; to commit. These people went through their decades on earth without ever doing any of that. The body was alive. The soul was not.

The blood ran down their faces
and mixed with their tears, and at their feet
disgusting worms gathered the whole runoff up.

And when I looked farther on,
I saw people gathered on the bank of a great river;
and I said: "Master, please tell me —

tell me who they are, and what law
has made them so eager to cross over —
at least, as well as I can make it out in this dim light."

And he answered: "You'll learn all of it
as soon as we stop and stand together
on the dismal shore of Acheron." The Acheron. One of the four rivers of the classical underworld (Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus). All four reappear, one by one, as Dante descends. Acheron — its name from a Greek root meaning woe — is the boundary between the vestibule of Hell and Hell proper. To cross it is to enter the place from which there is no return.

So I dropped my eyes, embarrassed,
afraid I had been pestering him with questions,
and stayed silent until we reached the river.

And then — coming toward us in a boat —
was an old man, white with ancient hair,
shouting: "Misery to you, you depraved souls! Charon. The ferryman of the dead in classical mythology — Greek Kharōn, in Latin Charon. He appears in book six of the Aeneid, in the underworld scene that Dante just discussed at length in Canto II: when Aeneas descends, this is the figure he meets at the riverbank. So Dante is reaching directly into Virgil's own poem and pulling out one of its set-pieces as the gatekeeper of his own Hell. Throughout Inferno, Dante will keep doing this: classical demons and monsters get re-employed as the lower management of Christian Hell. They are not denied — they are absorbed.

Don't ever hope to see the sky again.
I'm here to take you to the other shore,
into the eternal shadow — into heat, and into cold.

And you over there — you, the living soul —
get away from these people. They are dead!"
But when he saw that I wasn't moving,

he said: "By another route, by other ports,
you'll come to a different shore — not this one — for crossing.
A lighter boat is meant to carry you." "A lighter boat." A quiet hint forward to the Purgatorio. The souls bound for Mount Purgatory are ferried across the world on a swift, light vessel piloted by an angel — the opposite, in every way, of Charon's heavy ferry. Charon is recognizing that Dante is among the saved. He has no idea, of course, that Dante is going to cross his river anyway, since the rules in his case have been set aside.

And the guide said to him: "Don't be angry, Charon.
This is willed where what is willed gets done.
Ask no more questions." Virgil's standard formula at the gates of Hell. The original Italian is famously beautiful: "Vuolsi così colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare." Roughly: It is willed there where what is willed has the power to be done. Don't ask further. What he means, of course, is: this comes from God; argue at your own risk. Virgil will use this exact formula again at the next gate, to silence Minos in Canto V. It is the password through Hell — proof that the living traveler is here under heavenly authority.

At that, the woolly cheeks fell quiet
on the ferryman of the leaden marsh —
the one with circles of fire around his eyes.

But the moment they heard those merciless words,
all those exhausted, naked souls
went pale and started gnashing their teeth.

They cursed God; they cursed their parents;
they cursed the whole human race, the place, the time, the seed
from which they had been conceived, and the moment of their birth. The widening curse. Notice how the cursing expands outward, ring by ring: God; the parents; humanity; the moment; the act of conception; the act of birth. They are damning every cause that ever led, even at the smallest distance, to their being here. It is the rage of someone who has finally understood his life and has nothing left to do with the understanding except curse it.

Then, all together, they drew back,
weeping bitterly, to the accursed shore
that waits for everyone who lives without the fear of God.

Charon the demon, with eyes like burning coals,
waves them on, gathers them all up,
and beats with his oar anyone who lags behind.

Just as, in autumn, the leaves fall —
first one and then another, until the branch
has surrendered everything it ever held — One of the most famous similes in the poem. The image of the dead as falling leaves is a deep classical inheritance. Homer uses it in Iliad 6 (Glaucus to Diomedes: "as is the generation of leaves, so is that of men"); Virgil uses it in Aeneid 6, in the underworld scene Dante is rewriting here. So at this exact moment in Inferno — souls drifting one by one off the bank — Dante is calling on the two greatest poets of antiquity at once. He is doing literary work and theological work in the same line.

in just that way, the evil seed of Adam
threw themselves from that bank one by one,
at the signal, like birds answering a falconer's lure.

And so they go off across the dark water —
and before they have even landed on the other side,
a new crowd is already gathering on this one.

"My son," the courteous master said to me,
"all those who die under the wrath of God
converge here, from every country.

And they are eager to cross this river,
because Heavenly Justice itself spurs them on —
so that their fear, in the end, has become their desire. One of the strangest theological lines in the poem. The damned want to be damned. By the time they reach Charon's shore, Heavenly Justice has worked something into them: their fear of Hell has flipped into longing for it. They run toward their own punishment.

Dante does not soften this. The damned are not victims of a vengeful God; they are the agents of their own destruction, finally aligned with what they always actually wanted. It is, in his theology, a final dignifying — God lets them have what they chose, and lets them rush toward it. The lukewarm in the vestibule could not even achieve this much.

No good soul has ever crossed this way.
So if Charon was complaining about you,
you can probably guess by now what his words meant." A small gift to Dante. Virgil is reassuring him, half-implicitly: the fact that Charon objected to you is itself proof that you don't belong here. Dante's awkwardness at the riverbank — the wrong-side-of-the-line embarrassment — turns out to be his clearest credential. He is the wrong kind of soul for the wrong shore.

The moment he had finished, the whole darkening landscape
began shaking so violently
that even now, just remembering it, I break out in sweat.

The land of tears gave off a sudden blast of wind,
and a vermilion light flashed across it,
overpowering every one of my senses,

and like a man overcome by sleep, I fell. The famous swoon. The canto ends with Dante unconscious — and so we never see how he is carried across the Acheron. He simply wakes up in Canto IV on the other side. The blackout is a deliberate, repeated device in Inferno: at moments when the strain on the living traveler would be unbearable, Dante's awareness goes out, and the impossible thing (a living body crossing a river of the dead, for example) happens off-page. The poem is honest about what it cannot show us, and honest about what we cannot bear to see.