Inferno — Canto VI

When my consciousness returned — it had shut down
out of pity for those two who were kin,
a pity that had completely overwhelmed me with grief — The structural blackout pattern again. Canto V ended with Dante fainting from compassion at Francesca's story. We never saw how he was carried into the third circle. The opening of Canto VI picks up exactly there: he is now in a different place, under different weather. The poem keeps using these losses of consciousness to skip the impossible-to-narrate in-between moments — the reader, like Dante, awakens already on the next side of things.

I see new torments and new tormented souls
around me — wherever I move,
wherever I turn and look.

I am in the third circle — of the eternal,
cursed, cold, heavy rain.
Its law and quality never change. The third circle: gluttony. Like the second circle of lust, gluttony is a sin of incontinence — the failure of reason to govern an appetite. The punishment fits: those who lived to satisfy the body now lie buried in cold rain, hail, and snow, flat in stinking mud. The bodily appetite indulged in life is punished here by bodily filth. The atmosphere is pointedly miserable rather than dramatic — no fire, no whirlwind, just a perpetual nasty weather designed to humiliate. Lust at least had its storm. Gluttony gets a downpour.

Heavy hail, dark-tinted water, and snow
pour down through the gloomy air;
the ground that takes all this in stinks.

Cerberus — cruel, monstrous beast —
barks like a dog through three throats
over the people sunk in the rain there. Cerberus. The three-headed dog of classical mythology, guardian of the gates of Hades, redeployed by Dante as the warden of the third circle. He appears in Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI, where the Cumaean Sibyl gets Aeneas past him by tossing him a drugged honey-cake. Dante is going to remember the trick — Virgil will use a debased version of it (a fistful of mud) on the next page.

Cerberus is the third classical Hell-creature pressed into Christian service after Charon and Minos, and he won't be the last. Through Inferno, Dante will keep doing this: the gods and monsters of Greco-Roman myth become demons in his Hell — neither denied their existence nor allowed to mean what they used to mean.

He has red eyes, a black, greasy beard,
a huge belly, hands armed with claws —
he rips the spirits apart, flays them, quarters them.

The rain makes them howl like dogs.
They use one side of their bodies as a shield for the other,
turning themselves over and over, the wretched reprobates.

When Cerberus saw us — the great worm! —
he opened his mouths and showed his tusks;
not one limb of him stayed still.

And my guide, with his hands spread wide,
scooped up some of the earth, and with both fists full
hurled it into those greedy gullets. The honey-cake debased to mud. In Virgil's Aeneid Book VI, the Cumaean Sibyl pacifies Cerberus by feeding him a drugged honey-cake; the dog gulps it down and falls asleep. Dante's Virgil — who, of course, wrote that scene — uses the same trick here, but with a fistful of the foul mud of the third circle in place of the honey-cake. The dog, who is greedy by nature, falls for it anyway. The substitution is grim and precise: the gluttonous dog of the gluttonous circle is shut up by being given exactly the kind of filth that defines the place. Dante is quoting Virgil and revising him in the same gesture.

Just as a dog who is barking because he wants food
quiets the moment he is gnawing on it,
thinking only of how to devour —

that's what those filth-caked muzzles became —
the muzzles of the demon Cerberus, who thunders
over the souls so loudly that they wish they were deaf.

We crossed over the shades — whom the heavy storm
is pushing down to the ground — and we set our feet
on their emptiness, which only looks like a body.

They were all lying flat on the ground,
except for one — who sat up the moment
he saw us going past in front of him. One soul out of thousands. Notice the cinematic move: a vast plane of bodies lying flat in the mud, and one figure who, alone, sits up to address Dante. This is the standard Dante move for introducing a named soul — the human face emerging out of the anonymity of the punishment. The figure recognizes Dante. Dante does not recognize him. The line that follows in the next tercet — "you were made before I was unmade" — is one of the most poignant ways anyone has ever phrased I knew you when we were both alive.

"O you who are being led through this Hell,"
he said to me, "recognize me if you can —
you were made before I was unmade."

And I said to him: "The anguish you are in
has maybe pulled you out of my memory,
so that it doesn't feel as though I'd ever seen you.

But tell me who you are, who have been put
in this miserable place, with this kind of punishment —
one which, even if it isn't the worst, is the most disgusting."

And he answered: "Your city — so full of envy
that the sack is overflowing now —
held me inside its walls in the calm life. "Your city, so full of envy that the sack runs over." The first explicit appearance in the Comedy of Dante's central political obsession: Florence. Dante had been a Prior — one of the highest magistrates in the city — in 1300, when his political faction lost a power struggle and he was sentenced, in absentia, on trumped-up corruption charges, to death by burning if he ever returned. He spent the rest of his life in exile, never seeing his city again. The image of envy spilling out of an overstuffed sack is the kind of thing only an exile could write. The next several tercets are a coded prophecy of the political catastrophe Dante is, in 1300, about to live through.

You citizens used to call me Ciacco.
For the ruinous sin of gluttony
I am being battered by this rain, as you can see. Ciacco. The name Ciacco means Pig or Hog in medieval Tuscan — almost certainly a nickname rather than a given name. Whether it was attached to him for his physical appearance or for his appetite (the appetite that put him here), no one knows. Boccaccio, writing fifty years later in the Decameron, gives Ciacco a recurring role as a witty, freeloading Florentine glutton — suggesting the name was a memorable type by then. He was apparently a real Florentine of Dante's parents' generation, but almost nothing else about him survives. He is the first contemporary Florentine soul Dante meets in the poem — and the first of many. The Comedy is, in part, a tour of every Florentine Dante ever knew or heard about, scattered through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

And I, sad soul, am not the only one —
all these suffer the same penalty
for the same sin." And he said no more.

I answered him: "Ciacco, your wretchedness
weighs on me so much that it makes me want to weep.
But tell me, if you know — what's going to happen

to the citizens of the divided city?
Are any of them just? And tell me why
so much discord has fallen on it."

And he answered: "After long quarreling
they will come to bloodshed, and the rustic party
will drive the other one out with much violence. The Florentine factions. Florence in 1300 was about to tear itself apart. Two factions had emerged within the dominant Guelph party: the White Guelphs (Dante's faction — moderate, anti-papal-interference, drawn largely from rural and newly-urbanized "rustic" families like the Cerchi) and the Black Guelphs (aligned with Pope Boniface VIII, drawn from the older urban elite around the Donati).

Ciacco prophesies — in the language of a poem written after the events but set in 1300 — that the Whites ("the rustic party") will first drive out the Blacks (1301), and then the Blacks will return and drive out the Whites in November 1301, backed by the force of "one who now is on the coast" — Pope Boniface VIII, then maneuvering from outside the city. The Whites, including Dante, will be permanently exiled. "Within three suns" in the next tercet means within three years.

Then this party in turn must fall
within three years, and the other rise again
by the force of one who now is biding his time.

It will hold its head high for a long time,
keeping the other side under heavy burdens,
no matter how that side weeps and bristles at it.

There are two just men there, and they go unheard.
Envy and pride and avarice —
those are the three sparks that have set every heart on fire." "The just are two." One of the most-debated lines in the canto. Ciacco declares that there are only two just men left in Florence — but he doesn't name them. The medieval commentators offered candidates (some said Dante himself was one; others suggested specific contemporaries) but none agree. The line's force may not depend on identification at all: it is more biblical than political — an echo of Genesis 18, where Abraham bargains with God about how few righteous men it would take to save Sodom. The point is simply that there are not enough.

"Envy and pride and avarice are the three sparks" — these are the three sins that, in Dante's structural moral scheme, drive most of human history. He will spell them out in detail across the rest of Inferno.

Here he ended his tearful speech.
And I said to him: "I want you to teach me more —
give me the gift of further conversation.

Farinata and Tegghiaio, once so worthy,
Jacopo Rusticucci, Arrigo, and Mosca,
and the others who set their minds on good deeds — The roll call of Florentines. Five names of major figures, each a soul Dante will eventually find further down. Farinata degli Uberti — the great Ghibelline leader — will appear in Canto X, in the circle of the heretics. Tegghiaio Aldobrandi and Jacopo Rusticucci — both will appear in Canto XVI, among the sodomites. Mosca dei Lamberti — will appear in Canto XXVIII, among the sowers of discord, identified as the originator of the Guelph–Ghibelline feud itself. Arrigo is unidentified — Dante never returns to him.

The list is wistful: these are men Ciacco (and Dante) admire as "those who set their minds on good deeds," and Ciacco has to deliver the bad news that they are, in fact, all in Hell. The pattern is going to recur all through Inferno: virtuous-seeming Florentines turning up in deeper and deeper circles. The poem is a mirror Florence does not want to look into.

tell me where they are, let me know what's become of them.
A great longing presses me to find out
whether Heaven makes them sweet or Hell makes them bitter."

And he answered: "They are among the blacker souls.
Different sins weigh them down farther toward the bottom;
if you go that deep, you can see them.

But when you are back in the sweet world again,
I beg you — bring me back to other people's minds.
I will tell you no more, and I will not answer further."

Then he turned his straight gaze sideways,
looked at me a little longer, and bowed his head —
and with that, he fell flat down like the other blind ones.

And my guide said to me: "He won't wake again
on this side of the sound of the angelic trumpet —
when the hostile Power approaches. "The angelic trumpet." The trumpet of the Last Judgment, prophesied in 1 Corinthians 15:52: "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump… the dead shall be raised." At the end of time, the Christ that Virgil calls "the hostile Power" (hostile to Hell, friend to the world) will return to judge all souls. The damned will rise from their tombs, take back their bodies, and hear the eternal verdict. Until then — Virgil tells Dante — Ciacco will lie in this mud, eyes closed, with no other awakening. The teaching that follows in the next tercets is one of the most concentrated bits of Aristotelian theology in the poem.

Each one will find his miserable tomb again,
will take back his flesh and his own form,
and will hear what echoes through eternity."

And so we walked onward over the filthy mixture
of shadows and rain, taking slow steps,
talking a little about the life to come.

And so I said: "Master — these torments —
will they increase after the great sentence,
or ease, or stay as scorching as they are now?"

And he answered: "Go back to your philosophy.
It teaches that the more perfect a thing is,
the more it feels of pleasure and of pain. "The more perfect a thing is, the more it feels." A direct lift from Aristotle's De Anima, mediated through Aquinas: a being that is more developed, more perfect of its kind, is more sensitive to both pleasure and pain. After the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment, the souls in Hell will be more "perfect" — having recovered their full form — and will therefore feel their punishment more acutely than they do now. It is one of the bleaker logical consequences of Christian-Aristotelian thought: the very completion of the soul intensifies its damnation. The doctrine is delivered without comment, one philosopher to another, on a walk through the rain.

Although these damned souls
can never reach true perfection,
after the resurrection they will be closer to it than they are now."

We followed that road around the circle,
talking of much else that I won't repeat.
We came to the point where the descent begins —

and there we found Plutus, the great enemy. Plutus. The next circle's gatekeeper, classical god of wealth (often confused in medieval sources with Pluto, lord of the underworld — and Dante leaves the conflation in). He will speak nonsense in the very first line of Canto VII before Virgil shouts him down — the fourth classical figure in a row to be repurposed as a Hell-demon, after Charon, Minos, and Cerberus.