Inferno — Canto VII

"Pape Satan, pape Satan, aleppe!"
That's how Plutus began, in his clucking voice;
and that gracious sage, who knew all things, The most famous nonsense line in the Comedy. "Pape Satan, pape Satan, aleppe!" No one knows for certain what these words mean. Theories include: a corrupted Hebrew curse (aleph = chief, so Chief Satan!), a corrupted French invocation ("Paix, paix, Satan!" — Peace, peace, Satan! — a sarcastic plea), or simply deliberate gibberish — Plutus, the demon of wealth, gibbering meaninglessly because greed produces nothing meaningful. Dante leaves the line untranslated and uninterpreted.

Plutus himself is the classical Greek god of wealth (Πλοῦτος), often confused in medieval sources with Pluto, the king of the underworld — Dante leaves the conflation in. Like Charon, Minos, and Cerberus before him, he is a classical figure pressed into Christian Hell. Unlike them, he is not allowed to keep his dignity: he speaks gibberish, is silenced two tercets later, and collapses like a broken sail.

said, to give me courage: "Don't let your fear
do you harm. Whatever power he may have,
he can't stop you from going down this cliff."

Then he turned to that bloated face
and said: "Be quiet, you cursed wolf —
burn yourself up with your own rage.

This journey into the abyss is not without a cause.
It is willed on high, where Michael
took vengeance on the proud rebellion." Michael's vengeance on the proud. Virgil is referring to the rebellion of the angels — Lucifer and his followers, defeated by the archangel Michael in a war in Heaven before the world began (Revelation 12:7). To say "willed on high, where Michael took vengeance on the proud rebellion" is to say: this man's journey is sanctioned by the same authority that crushed the original rebellion of Hell. It is a stronger version of the password Virgil used at Charon's and Minos's gates, scaled up here for the demon of greed. The Italian phrase Longfellow translates "proud adultery" — il superbo strupo — literally means a proud violent rape; "rebellion" carries the meaning more cleanly into modern English.

Just as sails, full-bellied with wind,
collapse together in a heap when the mast snaps,
that's how the cruel monster fell to the ground.

And so we went down into the fourth chasm,
pressing farther onto the sorrowful slope
that gathers up all the misery of the universe.

Justice of God! Who is it that piles up
so much new toil and suffering as I saw here?
And why does our own wrongdoing wear us down so?

The way a wave breaks itself, above Charybdis,
against the wave coming the other way —
that's how the people here have to dance their counter-dance. Charybdis. The legendary whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland, paired in Homer's Odyssey with the rock-monster Scylla — together they were every Mediterranean sailor's worst nightmare. Currents at the strait genuinely behave strangely: opposing tidal flows meet and break against each other. Dante uses the image to describe what he sees in this circle — two streams of souls rolling weights at each other from opposite directions, smashing into each other at two collision-points and bouncing back, forever. The contrapasso is delivered as physics.

Here I saw more people than I had elsewhere —
on one side and the other, howling loudly,
rolling weights with the full force of their chests. The contrapasso of avarice and prodigality. Two opposite sins of the same disorder, paired in a single circle. The avaricious (the hoarders) and the prodigal (the wasters) roll great weights from one side of the circle to the other in opposite directions, smashing into each other at two collision-points and bouncing back. They shout, at impact: "Why hoard?" and "Why throw away?" — each accusing the other of the opposite mistake. Both got it wrong about the same thing: the right relation of the soul to wealth. Aristotle's idea that virtue is the mean between two extremes is enacted here as physics. The pointlessness of their motion is the punishment.

They crashed into each other, and then, at the point of impact,
each one turned around and rolled backwards,
shouting "Why hoard?" and "Why throw away?"

And so they went back across the dark circle,
on either side, to the opposite collision-point,
shouting their shameful refrain forever.

Then each one, on arriving, wheeled around
through his half-circle for another collision;
and I, my heart pierced as if by a wound,

exclaimed: "Master — tell me now:
who are these people? Were they all clerics —
these tonsured heads on the left of us?" The shaven heads. Medieval Christian clergy, especially monks, kept their heads partially shaved — the tonsure, a ring of hair around a bald crown — as a sign of their vocation. Dante notices that one entire side of the circle, the side of the misers, is full of tonsured heads. The implication is bitterly clear: the church, in his lifetime, had become an avarice machine.

And he answered: "They were all so cross-eyed
in mind during their first life
that they could spend nothing in measured proportion.

Their voices bark it out clearly enough
whenever they reach the two points of the circle,
where the opposite vice splits them apart from each other.

Those without hair on their heads were clerics —
and popes, and cardinals —
among whom avarice runs to its worst extreme." Dante's anti-clerical fury, on full display. Virgil names them: popes, cardinals — the highest officers of the medieval Church, indicted by name for the worst form of avarice. Dante was not anti-Christian; he was anti-corruption-of-Christianity, and especially anti-papal-temporal-power. He thought the Church's accumulation of land, gold, and political influence was a betrayal of its founding charter. He says so here, on the lips of his pagan guide. He will return to the indictment, more elaborately, in Canto XIX (the simoniac popes) and again at the threshold of the Earthly Paradise. The line was inflammatory in 1320, and remained inflammatory.

And I said: "Master — among people like these,
I really should recognize a few
who were infected with these diseases."

And he answered: "You're entertaining a vain thought.
The mindless life that made them squalid
now makes them too dim for anyone to recognize.

Forever they will keep coming to these two collisions.
At the resurrection these will rise from their tombs
with their fists shut, and these others with their hair shorn off. Two iconic images for the resurrection of the body. When the dead rise at the Last Judgment, Dante imagines, the avaricious will come back from their tombs with their fists clenched shut — still holding tight to nothing — and the prodigal with their hair shorn off, signs of the wealth they wasted. The bodily detail of damnation: even the gesture of greed is preserved into eternity. Compare Canto VI's teaching that the resurrected body will feel its punishment more keenly than the soul alone — the same theology, here visualized.

Bad giving and bad keeping have stripped them
of the lovely world and put them in this scuffle.
Whatever it really is, I won't dress it up in words.

Now you can see, my son, the brief charade
of the goods entrusted to Fortune —
the goods over which the human race tears itself apart.

All the gold under the moon,
or that there ever has been,
could not buy a moment's rest for one of these worn-out souls."

"Master," I said, "tell me now also:
what is this Fortune you speak of,
that has the world's goods so completely in her grip?"

And he answered: "O foolish creatures —
what is this ignorance that has hold of you?
Now I'll have you learn what I think about her. One of the most theologically remarkable passages in Inferno. What follows for the next eight tercets is Virgil's defense of Fortune — and it amounts to canonizing her.

In medieval Christian thought, Fortuna had been a problem. Inherited from pagan Rome, where she was a goddess (capricious, blind), she sat awkwardly in a Christian universe ruled by a single, just, all-knowing God. Most theologians either denied her existence or recast her as a kind of metaphor for human ignorance. Dante does something audacious: he makes her a real angelic intelligence.

Virgil's argument: just as God created the heavenly spheres and assigned each one an angel to govern it, so God created the realm of worldly goods and assigned Fortune as its angel. Her job is to redistribute money, status, and power across nations and bloodlines according to a divine plan that humans cannot see. When a kingdom rises, Fortune. When it falls, Fortune.

What looks to humans like blind chance, in this picture, is just an angel doing her assigned work. People curse her because they don't understand her. She doesn't hear them. She is in bliss, like all the other intelligences, turning her sphere.

For Dante, this is a serious theological move and a personal one. He had lost everything to Fortune — his property, his city, his political career, his ability to die in his hometown. Putting her here, in the mouth of his guide, in a circle full of people who clutched at her gifts and got crushed by them, is the closest the Comedy gets to consolation about his own exile.

The One whose all-knowing transcends everything
created the heavens and assigned guides for them,
so that every part may shine on every part,

distributing the light in equal measure.
In the same way, for the splendors of this world,
he ordained a general minister and guide,

to shift the empty treasures, from time to time,
from one nation to another, from one bloodline to another,
beyond the reach of any human wisdom that might resist her.

And so one people prospers and another
languishes, by her judgment —
which is hidden, like a snake in the grass.

Your knowledge cannot stand against her.
She foresees, judges, and carries out
her own rule — the way the other gods do theirs.

Her changes never pause for a truce.
Necessity makes her hurry —
which is why so many get their turn so often.

And this is the one who is so cursed
even by those who ought to praise her —
blaming her wrongly, slandering her name.

But she is in bliss, and she does not hear it.
Among the other glad primal creatures
she turns her sphere, and in bliss rejoices."

Let's go down now into greater suffering.
Already every star that was rising when I set out
is sinking, and we are not allowed to linger." Already the stars that were rising are sinking. Dante uses these astronomical references throughout the poem to keep approximate time. The journey began at dusk on Holy Thursday, and we are now somewhere in the early morning of Holy Saturday — past midnight, the stars that were ascending at sunset have crossed their meridian and are setting in the west. Hell has its own clock, faintly visible through the smoke. "Loitering is forbidden" — Virgil knows the journey has a deadline. He will reference time again at major thresholds.

We crossed the circle to the other bank,
near a spring that boils up and pours itself
down a gully running out from it.

The water was darker than dark blue.
And we, alongside its murky waves,
went down by a rough path.

This sorrowful little stream — once it has come down
to the foot of the malignant gray banks —
forms a marsh that goes by the name of Styx. Styx. The second of the four classical underworld rivers — Acheron (Canto III), Styx (here), Phlegethon (XII), and Cocytus (XXXI). In Greek myth Styx was the river of hatred, sometimes the river the dead crossed to enter the underworld; medieval and Christian sources reshape it into a marsh of foulness. Dante's Styx is the boundary of lower Hell — once the travelers cross it (in Canto VIII), the topography shifts radically: cities, towers, walls of iron. Up to now, Hell has been a series of relatively open circles. From here on it becomes architecture.

And I, standing intent on watching,
saw people coated in mud in that lagoon,
all of them naked, and with furious looks.

They struck each other not only with hands
but with their heads and their chests and their feet,
tearing each other to pieces with their teeth. The fifth circle: the wrathful and the sullen. Two more paired opposites of the same vice, like avarice and prodigality. The wrathful are visible above the surface of the marsh — naked, mud-coated, attacking each other with hands, heads, chests, feet, teeth. The anger that was open in life is open here in death too. Compare them with the souls underneath the surface in the next tercets — the same vice, the opposite expression.

The good master said: "Son, you are now seeing
the souls of those whom anger overcame.
And I want you to know, beyond doubt,

that under the water there are people sighing —
and they are what makes the surface bubble,
as your eye will tell you wherever it turns.

Fixed in the mud they say: 'We were sullen
up in the sweet air the sun makes glad,
and we carried inside us a sluggish smoke. The hidden anger: the sullen. Beneath the surface of the Styx — invisible except for the bubbles their breath makes — a second class of damned souls. These are the sullen: people whose anger turned inward, never openly expressed, manifesting in life as a heavy refusal to be present in the world. Their punishment is precise: those who refused to take part in the joy of "the sweet air, which the sun makes glad" are now drowning forever in mud, gargling a hymn they cannot finish. The detail that they cannot even speak in whole words — that their hymn comes out as gurgles — is one of Dante's most disturbing physical images. The vice that locked their mouths in life keeps their mouths locked here.

Now we are sullen, in this black mire.'
They keep gurgling out this hymn from their throats,
because they cannot get the whole words out."

And so we went, circling around the filthy marsh,
a great arc between the dry bank and the swamp,
our eyes turned to those who were gulping mud —

and at last we came to the foot of a tower. Link to Canto VIII. The tower in the distance is the first piece of architecture proper Dante has seen in Hell — a watchtower at the gate of the City of Dis, the great walled fortress of lower Hell. We are about to leave the open landscapes of the upper circles behind and enter the civitas diaboli, the City of the Devil. Hell from here on becomes a built environment.