This chapter sets out – in overview – what I consider to be Dante’s ethical agenda: his approach to the gradations of good and evil, to questions of happiness, and to the relationship between different pagan and Christian moral criteria. In the context of thirteenth-century debates about the relationship between reason and revelation, nature and grace, and moral and divine law, I maintain that Dante’s approach is characterised by distinction and separation rather than by integration and subordination (the approach of Aquinas). I situate Dante’s moral system in relation to those systems familiar to his medieval contemporaries, and underline those aspects which are particularly novel and, in some cases, surprising. I also argue that Dante employs different moral criteria for the three canticles, in contrast to the approach of scholars such as Cogan and Moevs, who seek one overarching moral rationale for the poem as a whole.Footnote ¹ The moral structure of Inferno is highly complex and has been the subject of extensive scholarly debate and controversy. I argue that Virgil’s rationale is coherent, effectively demarcating Hell’s four principal categories of incontinence, violence, simple fraud, and treacherous fraud, even though it is also incomplete, leaving out the ‘neutrals’, the Limbo dwellers, and the heretics. These omissions are, I maintain, exceptions that prove the rule, reinforcing (rather than undermining) Dante’s Aristotelian taxonomy. While the structure of Purgatory according to the seven capital vices might appear more straightforward, Virgil’s lecture in Purgatory (as in Hell) leaves out the most theologically original parts of the canticle: the five groups of souls in Ante-Purgatory, and the Earthly Paradise. I analyse the rationale behind the moral regions of Purgatorio, as well as emphasising key differences between Infernal and Purgatorial suffering. In his vision of Paradise, instead of presenting a detailed rationale (as in the other two canticles), Dante places a more overarching emphasis, I suggest, on moral asceticism and mystic union with God, in opposition to the avarice and worldly corruption that the poet considered had infected Church and State. After a short consideration of the moral topography of Dante’s afterlife as a whole, this chapter thus analyses the moral structure of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in turn.

The Moral Topography of Dante’s Afterlife

Dante projects the three realms of the medieval afterlife – Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise – onto the contemporary geocentric worldview (the Earth as the centre of the cosmos), thereby joining his moral vision to the macro history of salvation. He imagines that when Satan fell from Heaven, the Earth in the northern hemisphere recoiled in horror, creating the spiralling funnel of Hell.Footnote ² This displaced mass of Earth then formed the conical mountain of Purgatory in the southern hemisphere. In this way, Dante shows how God even out of evil – Satan’s rebellion and subsequent temptation of man – brings about good: the mountain provides sinful man with a way back to God. As the pilgrim descends into Hell, he encounters increasingly grave human evils until he reaches Satan at the Earth’s exact centre. As he ascends the mountain of Purgatory, the sins he encounters decrease in gravity as he gets ever further from Satan and ever closer to God. Likewise, as he ascends through the nine heavenly spheres on his way to the Empyrean, he encounters blessed souls characterised by ever greater virtues and ever greater holiness. In short, Dante’s poem follows a simple, moral-geographical law: to rise up is good; to sink down is bad.

Dante’s moral vision is especially innovative in terms of its detailed and systematic ordering of saints and sinners. At a fundamental level, the number symbolism of three (the Trinity) and nine (Creation) seems to underpin the poem’s moral structure. There are nine circles of Hell and, with the notable exceptions of circles 1 and 6, there are three main categories of evil: incontinence (circles 2–5), violence (circle 7), and fraud (circles 8 and 9). There are nine principle areas of Purgatory: the seven terraces that purge the seven capital vices (pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) are framed by the two regions of Ante-Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise. And there are nine heavens of Paradise, which are governed by the nine orders of angels. Although the moral structure is less explicit in Paradise, Dante does seem to allude to the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) and the four cardinal virtues (prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance) in the first seven planetary spheres. Furthermore, Dante-character is examined on the three theological virtues in the eighth heaven of the fixed stars.

Topographical markers are further delineators of moral structure. These are particularly clear in Purgatory (the seven terraces of the mountain) and in Paradise (the planetary heavens). Due to the moral complexity of Hell, Dante divides up its multiple regions and sub-regions through a variety of topographical elements, drawing upon a great variety of sources – ranging from classical texts, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid, to Christian voyage and vision literature and preaching manuals of his time. Upper Hell (circles 1–5) is entered through a gateway; Lower Hell (circles 6–9) resides within the city of Dis. A steep cliff divides the sins of violence (circle 7) from the ten ‘evil ditches’ (malebolge) of simple fraud (circle 8), while a central well sets apart the treacherous (circle 9). Differing landscapes are used to subdivide regions. For example, a bloody river, a thorny wood, and a fiery desert segment the seventh circle of violence into violence against another, against self, and against God. Dante draws especially on Virgil’s depiction of the pagan underworld (Hades) in Aeneid vi, transforming this material in ingenious ways. Thus he borrows four rivers to delineate groups of sinners: Acheron divides the anomalous ‘neutrals’ from the rest of the damned sinners (Inf. iii); Styx contains the wrathful and the sullen (Inf. vii), Phlegethon the violent against others (Inf. xii), the icy lake of Cocytus the treacherous. Similarly, Dante transforms a host of mythological monsters to describe or nuance moral structure. For example, Dante gives Virgil’s infernal judge Minos a monstrous tail that he grotesquely wraps around himself one to nine times depending on the circle of Hell allotted to a sinner’s damnation (Inf. v, 4–12), and he transforms Geryon, with the face of a just man and the body of a serpent, into ‘that foul image of fraud’ (‘quella sozza imagine di froda’; Inf. xvii, 7).

Dante’s use of moral topography at the macro level of Hell’s funnel or at the micro level of a ditch or river strongly suggests that he channelled his ethical agenda through his eschatological vision. Notably, however, Dante does not provide his reader with a map of the detailed moral schema that underpins his poem. Dante could have started his poem, after all, with a ‘table of contents’ outlining the moral structure of each of the three canticles, but he chose not to, deliberately withholding the kind of bird’s-eye view provided by later commentators, especially in the Renaissance, and by introductory visual diagrams in modern editions of the poem. It is only one third of the way through Hell (Inf. xi), halfway through Purgatory (Purg. xvii), and two thirds of the way through Paradise (Par. xxii) that we find any gloss at all on the regions’ moral structures. In life, we do not have the luxury of learning all the moral answers before we begin our own ethical journeys and we learn, more often than not, through our painful mistakes. Likewise, Dante’s poem starts not with a neatly organised solution, but in media res with a moral crisis: ‘Miserere di me’ [Have pity on me] (Inf. i, 65). The reader, like Dante-character (Dante’s depiction of himself as a character in the poem), must plunge into the darkness of evil, with only the shadowy presence of Virgil to act as a guide. In this way, Dante emphasises the messy process of moral life rather than a set of prescribed rules and he challenges us, as readers, to find our own ethical bearings. As Ezra Pound memorably remarked: ‘Dante wrote his poems to MAKE PEOPLE THINK.’Footnote ³

Given that this chapter will take perforce a bird’s-eye view of the poem’s moral structure, and draw out the ethical theory interspersed in the text, it is especially necessary to foreground that this is not, in fact, the reader’s experience. We should be sensitive, in other words, to the way in which Dante progressively builds a moral structure into his poem, and to its narrative effects. So with this one important caveat in mind, let us turn to the moral structure of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Pagan Moral Authorities in Hell: Aristotle and Virgil

One of many interpretations of the three beasts that Dante-character encounters at the beginning of his journey – the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf (Inf. i, 31–60) – is that they represent the basic tripartite moral structure of Dante’s Hell: incontinence, violence, and fraud.Footnote ⁴ However, such symbolism is allusive at best, and the actual moral classification of the sins in Hell occurs only after Dante-character has left Upper Hell and entered the city of Dis. Without the benefit of scholarly diagrams and maps, the first readers of Dante’s poem would have been initially bewildered and disoriented as surprise builds upon surprise: Dante’s first moral guide is not an authoritative Christian saint, but rather the pagan poet Virgil (Inf. ii, 61–136); the first group of sinners encountered (the ‘neutrals’) are unknown to medieval theology and entirely Dante’s own invention (Inf. iii, 21–69); and the first circle of Hell (Limbo) is radically revised by Dante to include the presence of virtuous pagans (Inf. iv, 67–151). Given that the second circle is devoted to lust (Inf. v), the third to gluttony (Inf. vi), the fourth to avarice and prodigality (Inf. vii), and the fifth to wrath (Inf. vii–viii), the reader might naturally suppose that the seven deadly sins (or capital vices) is an ordering principle. Dante sets up this expectation only to frustrate it, however, for the system of the seven deadly sins then decisively breaks down. Sloth may be implicitly condemned as a counterpart to wrath (Inf. vii, 115–26).Footnote ⁵ But there is no circle dedicated to either envy or pride, despite these two remaining deadly sins being referenced alongside avarice in Inferno vi, 74.Footnote ⁶ Boccaccio first claimed that the opening of Inferno viii – ‘io dico seguitando’ [Continuing, I have to tell] – represents Dante’s return to writing after a decisive break, and some critics still suggest that Dante changed his mind about the moral structure of Hell in the process of writing.Footnote ⁷ It has been argued, for example, that Dante originally intended to embody envy in Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti and pride in Farinata, and only later salvaged the material in his masterly creation of the canto of the Epicureans (Inf. x).Footnote ⁸ Dante, of course, ultimately deploys the scheme of the seven vices to structure Purgatory. Whether or not he originally intended to apply this scheme to Upper Hell, its suggestion there remains strong, providing interesting points of parallel and contrast with its later development in the second canticle.

The delayed classification of moral evil is presented after Dante and Virgil have left Upper Hell and entered the city of Dis.Footnote ⁹ Unable to descend further because of the horrible stench cast up by the abyss of Lower Hell, Dante and Virgil are forced to wait while they become accustomed to it. Virgil takes advantage of the time by finally explaining Hell’s moral structure (Inf. xi, 16–66). Virgil makes a threefold distinction: first, between incontinence (Upper Hell) and malice (Lower Hell); second, between malice through violence (circle 7) and malice through fraud (circles 8 and 9); and third, between simple fraud like counterfeiting, which deceives a stranger who has no particular reason to trust us (circle 8), and treacherous fraud like betraying one’s own mother or father, which deceives someone who has a special reason to trust us, thereby breaking a special bond of love (circle 9).

Many scholars have posited an inconsistency in Virgil’s rationale that apparently derives from Dante’s fusion of two sources. Where Cicero’s De officiis i, 13 subdivides malice into violence and fraud (Inf. xi, 22–24), Aristotle’s Ethics, vi, 1–6 distinguishes between incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality (Inf. xi, 79–84).Footnote ¹⁰ However, Virgil’s rationale is arguably consistent.Footnote ¹¹ On such an interpretation, the Ciceronian and Aristotelian usages of the term ‘malice’ (22 and 82) both map onto the region of Lower Hell as a whole; the Ciceronian subdivision between ‘violence and fraud’ differentiates circles 7 and 8; the Aristotelian ‘mad bestiality’ serves as a subcategory of the genus ‘malice’ to indicate extreme cruelty, thereby differentiating circles 8 and 9.Footnote ¹² In this way, Virgil’s rationale effectively demarcates the four main regions of Hell: the four circles of incontinence (circles 2–5) and the three ‘rings’ (gironi) of violence (circle 7) which make up the first half of Hell; the ten concentric Evil-pockets (Malebolge) of simple fraud (circle 8) and the pit of Cocytus consisting of four sub-circles of treacherous fraud (circle 9) which constitute the second half of Hell.Footnote ¹³

The circles of incontinence follow the principle of ‘counter-punishment’ (contrapasso; Inf. xxviii, 142) explicitly referenced by the Occitan poet Bertran de Born, according to which infernal suffering reflects the nature of the sin being punished. For Dante, human beings are rational animals: as incontinent sinners subject their reason to their desire (they know what the right moral action is but, despite this, do evil because of an overwhelming passion), they become – in act – like a beast or even like vegetative or inanimate matter: ‘è morto [uomo], e rimaso bestia’ (Conv. iv, vii, 14).Footnote ¹⁴ For the lustful sinners stripped of reason, the sensual pleasure of touch, shared by all animals, becomes their overpowering desire; in Hell, in keeping with medieval bestiary lore, they are consequently compared to birds buffeted by the wind (Inf. v).Footnote ¹⁵ For the gluttons, bodily nourishment necessary also to plant life becomes their overriding desire. In Hell, they appear human but in reality they have become indistinguishable from beasts and wallow in their own filth like dogs and pigs (Inf. vi).Footnote ¹⁶ The avaricious make material goods – the level of inanimate matter – their goal and become in Hell little better than the boulders they must endlessly push around (Inf. vii). Finally, according to the extent of their wrath, the sinners in the fifth circle are submerged by degrees in a river of blood (Inf. viii).

As Virgil clarifies (Inf. xi, 28–33), the seventh circle of violence is divided into three rings: violence against one’s neighbour (Inf. xii), against oneself (Inf. xiii), and against God (Inf. xiv–xvii). Although modern commentators typically trace this triple division to Aquinas, Dante construes these categories in a markedly different way. For example, the classification ‘sins against the self’ includes, for Aquinas, the intemperate sins of gluttony and lust; in contrast, for Dante, it is restricted to wilful self-destruction (suicide or a squandering of one’s own possessions). More convincing, in my view, is that these three victims of man’s violence (neighbour, self, and God) are connected to the parallel victims of man’s hatred in Virgil’s corresponding lecture on the moral structure of Purgatory (Purg. xvii, 104–14). Virgil explains there that one cannot hate God directly because God is the necessary cause of our existence. One can rebel against God indirectly, however, insofar as our disordered will hates God’s effects such as His supremacy or His prohibition of sins. In this way, violence against God is possible. Similarly, we cannot hate ourselves directly but we can do violence to ourselves. Thus, for example, we may misjudge as good something that is, in fact, evil, as when the suicide kills himself as a means to end misery and suffering.Footnote ¹⁷ From Virgil’s lecture in Purgatory, therefore, we may understand why violence against self (our very existence) and violence against God (the origin of that existence) are – for Dante – not only possible but progressively more grave than violence against one’s neighbour (who is outside our existence).

Virgil’s threefold division of violence against God into blasphemy (Inf. xiv), sodomy (Inf. xv–xvi), and usury (Inf. xvii) in the third ring of violence (a sterile desert battered by a rain of fire) provokes Dante-character’s puzzlement, however, and requires further comment (Inf. xi, 94–96). Citing Aristotle’s Physics and, for further confirmation, the theological authority of Genesis, Virgil argues that Nature takes its course from the Divine Intellect, whereas human work takes its course from Nature. Where blasphemy scorns God directly, the sexual act of sodomy disdains the principle of fertility in Nature and, consequently, indirectly scorns God. Usury – the lending of money on interest – scorns Nature because, as Aristotle argued, it is unnatural that money should beget money (Politics 1.10).Footnote ¹⁸ It also derides man’s work because the creditor does not add value, but instead receives something (the interest) for nothing (the original sum of money is returned risk free).Footnote ¹⁹

Of the three forms of violence against God, Dante devotes the most space – two cantos (Inf. xv–xvi) – to sodomy, a sin which scholars of this episode have typically equated with homosexuality.Footnote ²⁰ There are, however, problems with this characterisation.Footnote ²¹ Male–male sodomy in Dante’s Florentine context appears to have been predominantly pederastic, and defined in terms of active (elder male) and passive (young male) partners, rather than in terms of sexual orientation or mutual reciprocity.Footnote ²² According to contemporary penitentials, moreover, men could sin in different ways, and with women as well as with other men, ‘against nature’.Footnote ²³ Pietro d’Alighieri’s commentary on the third rung of sodomy, for example, draws extensively on Peraldus’s treatment of the peccatum contra naturam.Footnote ²⁴ Peraldus emphasises that the sin against nature can be according to the substance (ad substantiam) or according to the position (ad modum).Footnote ²⁵ Anal or oral sex is against nature ad substantiam because semen is not ejaculated into the appropriate place.Footnote ²⁶ Peraldus considers anal or oral sex between a man and a woman worse even than incest, and most hateful in a wife (‘in uxore’).Footnote ²⁷ Vaginal sex is against nature ad modum if a woman is on top of the man (‘ut cum mulier supergreditur’) or if a man enters, like a beast, from behind (‘vel cum sit bestiali modo illud opus’).Footnote ²⁸ There are arguably, then, two groups of sodomites in this ring of Hell: male–male (Inf. xv) and male–female (Inf. xvi). The first group comprise ‘cherchi / e litterati grandi’ [clerks and great men of letters] (xv, 106–7), most notably Brunetto Latini, and commentators have speculated that Dante may be reflecting – in this episode – on having been the object, in his youth, of the elder Brunetto’s sexual advances.Footnote ²⁹ There is only a single and allusive one-line reference to the sin of sodomy in Inferno xvi: ‘la fiera moglie più ch’altro mi nuoce’ [my fierce wife harms me more than anything else] (45). It seems plausible that Dante may be playing here, in the tradition of nomen significans rei, with the Latin etymology of the man and woman in question: Iacopo Rusticucci (‘Iacopo Rusticucci fui’) really was ‘rusticus’ [rustic, rural] with his ‘fera uxor’ [bestial, savage wife].Footnote ³⁰ We should not be surprised, moreover, that Dante’s references to such sins against nature are allusive, both because this sin was seen as unspeakable and because, in nonetheless speaking of it, one might give others the occasion to sin.Footnote ³¹

Virgil allots only a single terzina to the ten species of simple fraud (circle 8): ‘hypocrisy, flattery, divining, impersonators, theft and simony, panders, barrators, and like filth’ (ipocresia, lusinghe e chi affatura, / falsità, ladroneccio e simonia, / ruffian, baratti e simile lordura; Inf. xi, 58–60).Footnote ³² Virgil’s list is in no apparent order, and it omits two sins altogether.Footnote ³³ Is this accidental? Is it just for convenience of versification and rhyme? Does Dante, at this point of writing, not have a clear plan of how he will structure Malebolge? Whatever the reason, there is a clear narrative effect: the reader must discover those sins unnamed by Virgil – the counsellors of fraud (eighth bolgia) and the sowers of scandal and schism (ninth bolgia) – as well as the respective gravity of the sins enumerated.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, perhaps Dante seeks to stress the generic effect of simple fraud, which offends against the natural bond of love between human beings, rather than its degrees (notably, no more detailed rationale is given).Footnote ³⁵ In this light, it is striking that half of Dante’s Inferno (cantos xviii–xxxiv) is concerned with the sin of fraud, whether simple (circle 8) or treacherous (circle 9). The moral weighting of Inferno arguably reflects Dante’s profound concern with the way in which fraud perverts human reason, and its expression through language.Footnote ³⁶ Furthermore, all the sins of fraud undermine the very foundations of civil society, as Pietro d’Alighieri’s gloss to Inferno xi, 52–60 highlights with its references to Aristotle’s Politics and to Justinian’s code (the Corpus Juris Civilis).Footnote ³⁷ In the last pocket of Malebolge, this is emphasised by the punishment of the falsifiers. For their corruption of the ‘body politic’ through alchemy, impersonation, counterfeiting (especially of coinage), and lying, they must suffer eternally four horrific diseases – leprosy, insanity, dropsy, and a raging fever – in their own individual bodies. The social–political dimension of Dante’s moral structure is reinforced in the pit of Cocytus (circle 9), where treachery is punished in four sub-circles: Caina (treachery to kin), Antenora (treachery to country), Ptolomea (treachery to guests), and Judecca (treachery to lords and benefactors). Dante considered it worse, in other words, to betray one’s lord than to betray members of one’s own family.

Although Virgil’s rationale for the moral structure of Hell delineates the four principal regions of Hell that take up thirty of Inferno’s thirty-four cantos, it strikingly leaves out Hell’s first section, where the ‘neutrals’ reside, and which lies inside the infernal gate but outside the circles of Upper Hell (Inf. iii); Virgil’s own eternal resting place, the Limbo of the virtuous pagans within the first circle (Inf. iv); and the very area in which Virgil gives his lecture, the sixth circle of heresy (Inf. x–xi).Footnote ³⁸ In a literal sense, these three categories are theological rather than philosophical, they do not concern moral evil as such, and they are not intelligible in pagan or purely rational terms. In an allegorical sense, however, these daringly original regions of Dante’s Hell are the exceptions that prove the rule, and arguably reinforce the Aristotelian taxonomy underpinning the moral structure of Hell as a whole.

The neutrals, who pursued neither good nor evil, may correspond to Aristotle’s category of the pusillanimous ‘who omit to do what they could’: the river Acheron, on this reading, divides sins of omission (Inf. iii) from sins of commission (Inf. iv–xxxiv).Footnote ³⁹ Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics makes the general distinction between, on the one hand, those who turn away from the good (retrahunt a bene agendo) and do not try to achieve good deeds (absque conatu ad bonas operationes) and, on the other hand, those inclined to evil doing (inclinatur ad male agendum). The first are the pusillanimous ‘who omit to do what they could’. The second are evildoers in two ways: the incontinent (incontinentes) are enslaved to the senses and do harm to themselves (in propriam deordinationem), while the unjust (injusti) do evil to others (mala faciunt aliis).Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus Dante’s ‘neutrals’ correspond to Aristotle’s pusillanimous: they are not evil doers (‘male-factores’), as they sin through omission. For this reason, even in this figurative sense, the pusillanimous do not fit into Virgil’s lecture, which divides sins of commission into incontinent sin and injustice or malice (with its subspecies ‘mad bestiality’). In essence, this more generic schema accounts for the sins of omission punished on the near side of the river of Acheron and reaffirms the binary division of sins of commission into incontinent sin (punished in upper Hell beyond the river) and injustice (punished in the City of Dis).Footnote ⁴¹

Although the pusillanimous make sense in terms of Aristotelian ethics, they certainly do not in terms of orthodox theology. Indeed, Dante’s invention of the neutral souls who pursued neither evil nor good and are grouped with a third order of angels that followed neither God nor Satan sorely disturbed the early commentators.Footnote ⁴² But through this peculiar category, Dante emphasises figuratively the precious gift of free will: he affirms the imperative to actively seek and do good, rather than sitting on the fence like the apathetic neutrals who ‘never really lived’ (Inf. iii, 64) and die despised alike by God and the Devil. Thus, for Dante, Celestine – whose sin of omission was to give up the Papal mantle (‘il gran rifiuto’) – does not even deserve to be named (58–60). In contrast, his successor Boniface, still alive at the fictional date of the poem, will be memorably named (Inf. xix, 53) – though, ironically, mistaken for Dante – for his many sins of commission in that office. Celestine’s ‘viltade’, moreover, recalls Dante’s ‘viltade’ (Inf. ii, 45), which, Virgil says, holds him back from the honourable endeavour (‘onrata impresa’) of his journey and, at a figurative level, of writing the Commedia itself.Footnote ⁴³

The neutral souls who had a choice but did not use it also throw into relief the tragic predicament of the limbo dwellers. The unbaptised infants and virtuous pagans are not morally evil (they contract original sin but commit no personal sin) but, from a theological perspective, they are damned (denied the beatific vision) because, through no apparent fault of their own, they did not have access to the fruits of the Incarnation. As with the neutrals, Dante’s purpose is, I would suggest, primarily figurative: the virtuous pagans represent in the afterlife a secular human happiness attainable through natural (rather than distinctively Christian) ethics. In the first circle of Hell, the exceptional virtue of the pagans (Inf. iv) may inversely parallel the exceptional degree of vice of the treacherous souls in the ninth circle (the pit of Cocytus). Indeed, Aristotle counterpoises incontinence with continence, malice with virtue, and extreme malice (or bestiality) with a rare superhuman level of virtue; Aristotle’s example of the latter is Hector, who is also named by Dante alongside Aeneas in Limbo (Inf. iv, 122).Footnote ⁴⁴

Furthermore, where heresy (Inf. x–xi) is, conventionally at least, a specifically Christian sin, Dante singles out for special treatment the ‘Epicureans’ (Inf. x): remarkable for their political and intellectual prowess, they are punished for denying the immortality of the soul rather than for any strictly moral fault.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, the ‘spiriti magni’ of limbo (iv. 117) arguably find a counterpart in Farinata, who is given the Aristotelian epithet ‘magnanimo’ (a great-souled one).Footnote ⁴⁶ The distinctive aspects of the three theological regions omitted from Virgil’s account are further evidence, therefore, of the Aristotelian ethical framework of Hell overall: the neutrals may embody pusillanimity; the virtuous pagans, heroic virtue; and the Epicureans, a human secular virtue without faith.

Ordering Disordered Love in Purgatory: Augustine and Peraldus

Where visual depictions of the sufferings of Hell and the rewards of Paradise saturated the medieval imagination, Dante’s poetic depiction of the afterlife places Purgatory as its literary and topographical centre. Dante gives equal weight to Purgatory, dedicating a canticle to Purgatorio (33 cantos) as well as to Inferno (34 cantos) and Paradiso (33 cantos). Moreover, he transports the region of Purgatory from its traditional location as an ante-chamber of Hell to its own, independent location in the southern hemisphere. Dante’s Purgatory is given equal structural weight as well: the nine regions of Purgatory balance the nine circles of Hell and the nine heavens of Paradise. In addition, the three main partitions of Purgatory – Ante-Purgatory, the seven terraces of Purgatory (purging the seven capital sins), and the Earthly Paradise – are structural counter-weights to the three main categories of moral evil in Dante’s Hell: incontinence (circles 2–5), violence (circle 7), and fraud (circles 8 and 9).

There are, however, four key differences between Infernal and Purgatorial suffering. First, whereas Hell punishes sins or evil actions, Purgatory purges vices or evil habits. The seven capital vices are ‘seven springs’ from which ‘all the deadly corruptions of souls emanate’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, whereas corporeal suffering is unredemptive in Hell, it has a twofold purpose in Purgatory: according to its intensity, it punishes a sinner’s guilt and, according to its duration, it corrects a sinner’s vicious dispositions. Third, although all souls not in Paradise experience a lack of the divine vision (poena damni), this deprivation is perpetual in Hell but only temporary in Purgatory. Fourth, whereas evil is punished principally in accordance with natural ethics in Hell, the completely different moral order of Christian holiness emerges in Purgatory: ‘qui si rifà santa’ [here they make themselves holy again] (Purg. xxiii, 66). Dante’s treatment of wrath, avarice, gluttony, and lust is essentially different, therefore, in Hell and in Purgatory. For example, gluttony is punished in Hell as the failure of reason to moderate the appetite. By contrast, on the mountain of Purgatory (at the exact antipodes of Jerusalem, the place of Christ’s crucifixion), the gluttonous souls’ extreme fasting – their faces become dark, hollow, and wasted, and their eye sockets like rings without gems (22–33) – leads to spiritual union with Christ (70–75).

The moral structure of Purgatory is only articulated in its central (fourth) terrace (Purg. xvii), and at the centre of the poem as a whole. Dante-character and Virgil arrive at the terrace of sloth at nightfall. As the mountain cannot be climbed without the light of the sun (symbolically without the grace of God), they are forced to wait. As in the corresponding episode in Inferno xi, Virgil makes the time profitable by explaining the region’s moral structure. Its foundation is the universal relationship of love between the Creator and His creation: ‘Né creator né creatura mai … figliuol, fu sanza amore’ [neither Creator nor creature …, my son, was ever without love] (Purg. xvii, 91–92). Virgil distinguishes between two principal kinds of love: natural love and love of the mind (‘naturale o d’animo’; 93). Natural love is shared throughout the order of creation: it is the love that makes any material body fall to the earth, fire to ascend, a plant to grow, or an animal to move towards food. As it is predetermined, this natural love is always without error. By contrast, rational love (‘d’animo’), which specifies humans as ‘rational animals’, is subject to free will. As an elective force, this rational love may err, and such disorder is vice. For this reason, love is the seed not only of every human virtue, but also of every human action that deserves punishment (Purg. xviii, 103–5). The function of Christian ethics, then, is the reordering of human love. As Augustine emphasises, ‘a brief and true definition of virtue is “rightly ordered love”. That is why, in the holy Song of Songs, Christ’s bride, the City of God, sings, “Set charity in order in me”’ (De civ. Dei, xv, 22).Footnote ⁴⁸ Everything must be loved, including the self, insofar as it is ordered to God.

To describe this disordered love in terms of the seven capital vices, Dante adopts the moral framework provided by the Dominican friar William Peraldus (c. 1200–71) in his treatise on the vices (De vitiis).Footnote ⁴⁹ Dante divides disordered love into two main categories: love of an evil and perverted love of a good through excess or deficiency (Purg. xvii, 94–96). The evil loved must be directed against one’s neighbour (106–14), as humans necessarily love their own existence and God as the cause of that existence. Dante defines pride, envy, and anger, therefore, as different ways by which we may hate our neighbour. The proud hope for excellence through the humiliation of others (115–17). The envious fear to lose their power, honour, or fame through the success of others, so they desire that others be brought low (118–20). The angry, because of some injury, are desirous of revenge and are ready to harm their neighbour (121–23). What, then, about the disordered love of the good? The unmeasured love by deficiency (‘per poco di vigore’; 96) is the quiddity of sloth: the distinctive failure sufficiently to love God, the greatest good. Unmeasured love by excess (‘per troppo … di vigore’; 96) is the genus of the three final vices of avarice, gluttony, and lust (136–39). Peraldus’s schema thereby enables Dante to adopt both an Augustinian theory of sin as disordered love and the popular moral framework of the seven capital sins.Footnote ⁵⁰

Dante uses the noun ‘Purgatory’ (Purgatorio; Purg. vii, 39; ix, 49) only to refer to the seven terraces of the mountain (Purg. x–xxvii), and Virgil’s lecture just explains the moral structure of this region. As with his corresponding lecture on Hell, Virgil leaves out perhaps the most theologically original parts of the canticle in terms of moral structure: an antechamber conventionally named Ante-Purgatory, which stretches from the shore up a rock face to Purgatory’s gateway (Purg. i–viii), and the Earthly Paradise at the summit of the mountain (Purg. xxviii–xxxiii). Dante condemns five groups of souls to Ante-Purgatory: the spiritually tardy, who must wait at the mouth of the river Tiber for their ferry crossing to the shores of Ante-Purgatory; the excommunicates (Purg. iii); the lazy who delayed repentance (Purg. iv); those who repented at the last minute, even at point of death (Purg. v–vi); and the negligent rulers (Purg. vii–viii). According to a novel kind of contrapasso, the souls in Ante-Purgatory – deprived temporarily of the purifying pain of sense (poena sensus) – are forced to experience exclusively the lack of the divine vision (poena damni).

The emphasis in Ante-Purgatory on those who have delayed their penitence on Earth and, as a punishment for that delay, must wait for the purifying pain of sense (poena corrigens) highlights that Purgatory continues a moral process that should have started in this life. Ante-Purgatory is framed by the appearance of four stars symbolising the cardinal virtues and three stars symbolising the theological virtues which rise in their place (Purg. i, 22–27; Purg. viii, 85–93). The region is characterised by a powerful nostalgia for the world left behind. Indeed, on his arrival to Purgatory, Dante-character is warned by the gatekeeper that ‘whoever looks back must return outside’ (‘di fuor torna chi ’n dietro si guata’; Purg. ix, 131–32). In Augustinian terms, Christians must be in but not of this world: they are pilgrims (peregrin; Purg. ii, 63) moving through a temporary dwelling place on their way to their true home, the celestial city (De doctrina Christiana, i, 4). In a thinly veiled allegory at the door of Purgatory (Purg. ix, 70–145), Dante-character undergoes the sacrament of penance and, on absolution, enters Purgatory to begin his satisfaction for his sins that are ritually marked as seven Ps (peccata) on his forehead. Through the seven terraces of Purgatory, Dante-character is purged of the seven vices alongside the souls he encounters, and the seven Ps are miraculously erased.

The first terrace is of pride, the worst of the seven vices in the order established by St Gregory the Great. Pride and envy are both vices associated with the intellect and are graver, and therefore lower on the mountain, than wrath and sloth (associated with the irascible appetite) and avarice, gluttony, and lust (associated with the concupiscible appetite). The seven vices are, moreover, causally connected: pride begets envy as, in seeking an empty renown, the soul feels envy towards someone able to obtain it; the last vice, lust, may be caused by gluttony as the inordinate consumption of food may dispose the soul to sexual wantonness. In keeping with popular tradition, Dante pairs each of the seven capital vices with one remedial virtue; that is, he links pride with humility (Purg. x–xii), envy with charity (xiii–xv), wrath with gentleness (xv–xvii), sloth with zeal (xvii–xix), avarice with poverty (xix–xxii), gluttony with abstinence (xxii–xxv), and lust with chastity (xxv–xvii). These abstract vices and virtues are embodied in the vicious and virtuous actions of particular individuals in episodes taken from the Bible, from pagan myth, and from history. The narrative exempla are presented in contrasting ways from sculptured reliefs (humility and pride) and ecstatic visions (gentleness and wrath) to disembodied voices (envy and charity). The Virgin Mary occupies the most important role as the model par excellence of the path to Christian virtue, and prayerful meditation upon her life is presented as a remedy for the wounds of sin. The souls in Purgatory are also orientated to God through passages of Scripture, the beatitudes, liturgy, and major Christian prayers (including an innovative vernacularisation of the Lord’s Prayer).

Where the pains of Purgatory as a whole were conventionally depicted as a refining fire, Dante specifically reserves fire for the seventh terrace of Mount Purgatory, thereby effectively evoking the intense burning of sexual desire.Footnote ⁵¹ Some critics have been particularly struck that Dante should have included sodomites among those purging their lust in Purgatory. Barolini, for example, sees this as ‘truly progressive and unconventional’, and underlines the ‘huge implications of allowing homosexuality to be classified as a form of lust’.Footnote ⁵² However, it was entirely conventional to treat sodomy as a lustful vice, and it is notable that Peraldus, in his treatise on lust, treats first and extensively the peccatum contra naturam.Footnote ⁵³ It is also unremarkable, in my view, that Dante chooses – on the terrace of lust – paradigmatic forms of a vice for his two exempla. The only penitents to circle Mount Purgatory from right to left (an allusion to their sin being ‘against nature’), the sodomites are further identified by the reference to Caesar – who was called ‘Regina’ (queen) for having been the passive sexual partner of the King of Bithynia (Purg. xxvi, 76–78); by their cry of Sodom (79); and by their extreme shame (81). Circling from left to right (Purg. xxvi, 82–86), it seems, are the rest of the lustful penitents. Again, however, their identification with Pasiphaë, ‘che s’imbestiò ne le ’mbestiate schegge’ [who made herself a beast within the beast-shaped planks] (87), and their description as ‘seguendo come bestie l’appetito’ [following our appetites like beasts] (83), allude to the worst kinds of lustful sins outside sodomy: bestiality itself, as well as the two male–female sexual sins against nature ad modum delineated by Peraldus: – vaginal sex from behind (‘vel cum sit bestiali modo illud opus’) or with woman on top (‘ut cum mulier supergreditur’), an ‘unnatural’ switching of gender roles also suggested by the term ‘hermaphrodite’ (82).Footnote ⁵⁴ Just as the positive examples of Mary and Diana are incitements to chastity (Purg. xxv, 127–35) and remedies for the fire of lust (136–39), so the negative exempla of sodomy (King of Bithynia) and bestiality (Pasiphaë) serve as warnings of the grave dangers of sexual desire that does not follow human law (Purg. xxvi, 83).Footnote ⁵⁵ The perceptions of a rupture in Dante’s moral scheme here, and of his radically ‘unconventional’ treatment of lust in Purgatory, are not then, in my view, justified.Footnote ⁵⁶

By reserving the punishment of fire for the vice of lust, Dante also succeeds in bringing together the final suffering of Purgatory with ‘the fiery revolving sword’ which guarded Eden after the Fall (Gen. 3, 24). Dante’s syncretism is even more daring, as he explicitly identifies Eden with ‘the golden age and its happy state’ dreamed of by the ancient (pagan) poets (‘l’età de l’oro e suo stato felice’; Purg. xxviii, 139–41). Strikingly, it is at this stage in the poem that Virgil nonetheless departs the scene. As is clear from the staged encounter with Statius (Purg. xxi–xxii), Dante conventionally believed that Virgil’s fourth eclogue had prophesised Christ without the poet’s awareness so that Virgil himself had not benefited from its miraculous intuition. Although Virgil crowns Dante-character at Purgatory’s summit with a will which is free, upright, and healthy (Purg. xxvii, 124–42), his role of guide is overtaken in the Earthly Paradise first by Matelda and then, after a procession which allegorises God’s revelation through the books of the Bible, by Beatrice. The moral climax of Purgatorio is, then, Dante-character’s encounter with Beatrice, who is circled by handmaidens representing the three theological and four cardinal virtues. The pilgrim is forced to confess his sin in turning from her before having the memory of his sins washed away in the river Lethe and his good memories restored in the river Eünoè. In this way, Dante equates the restoration of grace in the Earthly Paradise after ritual purgation through the seven terraces of Purgatory with the recovery of Eden and the upright conscience of prelapsarian man. In the overall moral structure of the canticle, the Earthly Paradise is – in the terminology of Alan of Lille – ‘the purity of conscience, the image of eternal life, and the preface to the heavenly kingdom’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is only after this moral purgation that, in the last line of Purgatorio, the pilgrim finally is ‘pure and made ready to rise to the stars’ (puro e disposto a salire a le stelle; Purg. xxxiii, 145).

Nature and Nurture in Paradise: Astral Influence and the Virtues

For the Inferno and the Purgatorio, Dante combines moral schemes with invented topographies: the subterranean funnel of Hell in the northern hemisphere and the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory in the southern hemisphere. For the Paradiso, by contrast, Dante starts with the actual universe as perceived in early fourteenth-century Ptolemaic astronomy: the seven planetary spheres, the eighth sphere of the fixed starts, the primum mobile, and the Empyrean. Dante informs us, however, that the souls in Paradise actually reside only in the Empyrean, the highest of the ten regions described. The blessed souls appear in the other celestial spheres just for Dante-character’s benefit – that is, to signify to him their different grades of beatitude (Par. iv, 28–39). The blessed souls’ glorious lives illustrate, furthermore, particular aspects of virtue.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Scripture condescends to human faculties in attributing feet and hands to God, but means otherwise, so the blessed souls thereby condescend to Dante-character’s human mode of knowing: from sense perception to intellectual cognition (Par. iv, 40–48). Dante thereby makes a clear distinction between what Paradise is (the ontological status of the blessed souls in the Empyrean) and how Paradise is conveyed (the illustrative appearance of the blessed souls and the angels in the nine celestial spheres). This distinction seems particularly appropriate to Paradiso, with Dante’s insistent emphases on the limits of the human mind to comprehend divine realities and the even more limited capacity of human language to express them.

The simultaneous unity and diversity of the blessed souls – sharing the beatific vision but in different degrees – does raise a pressing theological question: how are degrees of beatitude compatible with the perfection of Paradise? Notably, the blessed soul to whom Dante-character addresses this question is Piccarda Donati. In Purgatory, Dante-character had asked her brother, Forese, ‘where is Piccarda?’ (‘dov’è Piccarda’), only to be informed that she ‘triumphs joyous with her crown on high Olympus’ (‘trïumfa lieta / ne l’alto Olimpo già di sua corona’; Purg. xxiv, 10–15). In the same encounter, Forese had prophesied the death and damnation of their brother Corso, whom he foresees dragged ‘towards the valley where guilt is never forgiven’ (‘inver’ la valle ove mai non si scolpa’; Purg. xxiv, 84). The hierarchy of Paradise is thus related to the central issue of divine justice in Dante’s moral vision as a whole. Infernal pain, Purgatorial suffering, and Paradisiacal bliss are of different degrees in the afterlife because human beings are not equal in merit or fault on Earth. But, as Piccarda explains, a lower degree of bliss in heaven does not imply a lack of perfection because God’s favour is proportionate to a particular individual’s capacity to receive it. Repeating the word ‘more’ (‘più’) thrice in two lines (Par. iii, 65–66), Dante-character asks Piccarda, the ‘least’ of the blessed, if she desires a higher place in heaven. Smiling ‘a little’ (‘un poco’; 67), Piccarda explains that, were she to desire ‘more’ (‘più’; 73), her will would be discordant with God’s will: to be in God’s will is the peace of Paradise (64–87). From this reply, the pilgrim understands both that everywhere in Heaven is Paradise and that the grace of the highest good does not rain there in equal measure (88–90).

How, then, does Dante structure the celestial spheres to represent these different degrees of beatitude? In the Convivio, Dante had already used the Ptolemaic heavens to project his idea of the system of knowledge (Conv. ii, xiii, 2–20), playfully connecting each discipline with a heaven by a shared characteristic. For example, the ninth sphere of the primum mobile, which sets the eight lower celestial spheres spinning in their diurnal rotation, is like ethics, which orders our learning of all the other branches of knowledge (14–18). For Paradiso, however, Dante rejects any straightforward analogy of this kind. Instead, alongside any symbolic significance, he insists upon the material effect of each of the heavenly spheres on the sublunar world. The discourses on free will at the centre of Purgatorio clarify that, for Dante, only the human intellect and will, as non material, are free from astral influence (Purg. xvi, 67–130; xviii, 49–75). All the human bodily organs and faculties including imagination, judgement, personality, and artistic gifts are influenced by the seven planetary heavens – an influence Dante considered to be more powerful than heredity.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Charles Martel (1271–95) highlights (Par. viii, 94–148), it is through these astral influences that Providence brings about the diversity in natural gifts necessary for society. Thus, when ascending through the seven planetary heavens, Dante encounters groups of souls whose lives and missions were directly informed by the particular influences of the planetary sphere in which they appear. When we find lovers in the sphere of Venus, their presence reflects Dante’s belief that the planet literally moved or disposed people under its influence to love.

It is equally true that the seven planetary heavens would have suggested to Dante the ethical schemes of the seven remedial virtues or the three theological and four cardinal virtues. As we have seen, the former scheme is adopted in the seven terraces of Purgatory, while the latter is anticipated by the stars in Ante-Purgatory and Beatrice’s handmaidens in the Earthly Paradise. For his vision of Paradise, the poet overlaps the scheme of the cardinal and theological virtues with the idea of astral influence on personality. As the Sun is the fourth planet orbiting the Earth in geocentric astronomy, it was believed that the Earth’s shadow partly obscured the first three planets. Dante uses this ‘shadowed’ aspect of the heavens of the Moon (Par. ii–v), Mercury (Par. v–vii), and Venus (Par. viii–ix) to represent the three theological virtues – faith, hope, and love – tainted by earthly concerns. The equation between faith and the inconstant in vows (Moon), between hope and the glorious in earthly fame (Mercury), and between charity and the earthly lovers (Venus) is, however, no more than implicit. In fact, some scholars have interpreted these spheres in terms of imperfect fortitude (Moon), justice (Mercury), and temperance (Venus).Footnote ⁶⁰ Both interpretations are plausible. Piccarda was inconstant in her vow when seized from her cloister unlike, she says, St Clare of Assisi (1194–1253) who persisted in her pledge of consecration despite threats (Par. iii, 98–99). Not holding to her vow even unto martyrdom, Piccarda thereby lacked both faith and fortitude. Justinian pursued justice on Earth and consequently is presented as the ideal of the emperor-ruler. Yet he was overly motivated by the hope of earthly fame rather than by a vision of eternal glory. Cunizza d’Este was compassionate in later life, yet infamous for her serial lovers and marriages. Her love was intemperate, thereby falling short of the perfect love of charity.

Where imperfect (‘shadowed’) faith and fortitude, hope and justice, love and temperance may implicitly underpin the spheres of the Moon, Mercury, and Venus, there is little doubt about the relationship between the next four planetary spheres and the four cardinal virtues. Prudence is clearly associated with the Christian intellectuals in the heaven of the Sun (Par. x–xiv), fortitude with the Christian crusader-martyrs in the heaven of Mars (Par. xiv–xvii), justice with the just in the heaven of Jupiter (Par. xviii–xx), and temperance with the contemplatives in the heaven of Saturn (Par. xxi–xxii). And yet, the scheme of the cardinal virtues is still subordinated to the primary consideration of astral influence. Thus, it might have been more natural for Dante to follow Aquinas in pairing prudence with temperance and justice with fortitude, as we need temperance to follow what prudence counsels, and fortitude to fulfil the social demands of justice. But Dante pairs prudence with fortitude and justice with temperance, because – in terms of planetary influence – the human disposition to temperance is associated with the cold planet Saturn while the virtue of fortitude is associated with the fiery planet Mars. Beyond the seven planetary spheres (Par. ii–xxii), the theological virtues reappear in the eighth heaven of the fixed stars, where saints Peter, James, and John become the shining exempla of faith, hope, and charity (Par. xxiii–xxvii), and Dante-character is examined by them on each of these virtues in turn.

Although it is possible to draw out the moral structure of Dante’s Paradise in this way, there is no parallel in the canticle to Virgil’s lessons on the moral order of Hell or of Purgatory. There is, however, a backward glance at the seven planetary spheres in Paradiso xxii, 133–53. This detached, contemplative perspective on the world (in the tradition of the contemptus mundi) is ethically significant, precisely because it is exactly what Dante believed was lacking in his own time, and particularly so in the Roman Church. Indeed, two overarching moral themes of Dante’s Paradiso are Christian asceticism and the Church’s true mission to lead people to God. Another notable feature of Paradiso is that Dante-character encounters female characters only in the first and third of the seven planetary spheres, both of which are feminine (the Moon and Venus) and both of which are ‘shadowed by the Sun’. Women are presented ‘in caelum still touched by saeculum’, as Victoria Kirkham notes, and she infers that, for Dante, ‘this is where, in the Great Chain of Being, woman belongs. As matter, flesh, sense, and sin, she is defined by opposition to man, whose better nature makes him an entity intellectual, rational and virtuous’.Footnote ⁶¹

It is worth addressing this issue about gender in relation to the moral structure of Paradiso and, indeed, of the poem as a whole. Kirkham highlights Dante’s association between women and the number five, a number which may denote symbolically the flesh, sensuality (the five senses), and our animal nature (animals were created on the fifth day of creation).Footnote ⁶² The fifth of five female souls to speak in the fifth canto of Inferno (the circle of lust), Francesca da Rimini, is, for Kirkham, ‘the voice for all damned womanhood, cursed with a vice of carnal sexuality’.Footnote ⁶³ The five women sinners (one in Hell, two in Purgatory, and two in Paradise) who converse with Dante-character in the Commedia are also all presented as weak-willed, or – in the tradition of nomen rei significans – as failing to live up to their names. Francesca should have tried to be more like the saint and holy lover ‘Francesco’ and his order of Poor Clares, than the Quinivere of French Romance.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Purgatory, Pia and Sapia appear more pious and sapient than they were, it seems, in their life on Earth.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Paradise, Piccarda (who allegedly took the name of her companion in Paradise, ‘Costanza’, on becoming a nun) should have been, of course, more constant.Footnote ⁶⁶ Cunizza’s ‘Provençal name Conissa possibly alludes to sexual excess’, as Ronald Martinez notes. In the words of one early commentator, Cunizza ‘was so shamelessly inflamed by carnal love that she would not deny anyone her bed’ (‘amore procaci succensa nulli concubitum denegasset’).Footnote ⁶⁷

If, for Dante, women’s particular capacity to love may dispose them to carnal sensuality (and it is undeniable that Dante registers strongly this social anxiety in his poem), it also disposes them to a generosity and liberality in holy love. Indeed, this seems to be the implication of Cunizza’s (and Dante’s) celebration of the influence of Venus (Par. ix, 31–36).Footnote ⁶⁸ It is important to register, moreover, that Dante’s circle of the lustful does not, as Holly Hurlburt asserts, ‘contain the largest group of women to be found in his Hell’, for there are almost twice this number named in limbo.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although Dante’s poem includes relatively few female characters (on Kirkham’s estimate, the ratio of named women to men is ‘roughly 1:10’), the proportion of women doubles for the limbo of the virtuous pagans (8 of 40, or 20 per cent), and almost half of the further virtuous pagan souls listed by Statius in Purgatory (8 of 18, or 44 per cent) are female.Footnote ⁷⁰ Moreover, these numbers reverse, with named women actually outnumbering men, in the heaven of the rose (10 of 18, or 56 per cent).Footnote ⁷¹ Dante’s positive portrayals of women – such as of Nella in Purgatorio (Purg. xxiii, 85–111) or of the ‘fortunate’ [fortunate women] of Cacciaguida’s Florence in Paradiso (Par. xv, 118–26) – do invariably highlight their modesty, in contrast to prevailing sexual mores. But we should not infer from this, as does Hurlburt, that, for Dante, ‘Modesty and chastity … defined a woman’s moral existence’.Footnote ⁷² By including such a comparatively large proportion of named women in limbo (in total, the square of the cardinal virtues), Dante is emphasising – in his poem’s moral structure – that women are capable of exceptional levels of all four cardinal virtues. Moreover, if we are to infer anything from the fact that women make up approximately 10 per cent of named characters in his afterlife as a whole, but 28 per cent of those in the limbo of the virtuous pagans and 56 per cent of those in the heaven of the rose, it is perhaps that Dante considered women more – rather than less – disposed to moral virtue and, especially, to Christian holiness than men.

Given the sophisticated organisation of evil in Hell, the school of ordered and disordered love in Purgatory, and the joyful celebration of human talents and virtues in Paradise, it is easy to lose sight of the binary division in Dante’s moral universe. From a Christian point of view, this bifurcation is the one that ultimately matters – namely, the division between those who are able and freely will to submit themselves to God’s infinite love and mercy and those who, wilfully or not, are closed to God’s love. The first category includes all those in Paradise and in Purgatory. The second category comprises all those in Hell. The primary condition of souls in Hell, after all, is not only a lack of the beatific vision (which they share with souls in Purgatory) but, crucially, a lack of any hope that they may ever attain it: in entering Hell’s gate, they leave all hope behind (Inf. iii, 9). In Purgatory, the souls are joyful – even in suffering – because of their living hope for the beatific vision. In Paradise, they enjoy this vision: ‘intellectual light, full of love, love of the true good, full of joy, joy that surpasses every sweetness’ (‘luce intelletüal, piena d’amore; / amore di vero ben, pien di letizia; / letizia che trascende ogne dolzore’; Par. xxx, 40–42). This ultimate division between the damned and the saved strongly reaffirms the urgency of Dante’s poem as a work of ethics, written ‘for the good of the world that lives badly’, for those who live and, while alive, still have hope. As Manfred beautifully articulates in Ante-Purgatory, ‘none is so lost that the eternal love cannot return while hope keeps any of it green’ (‘non si perde / che non possa tornar l’etterno Amore, / mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde’; Purg. iii, 133–35). The poem’s most powerful moral message, then, is God’s love for those who turn to Him. As Manfred, smiling, confesses: ‘Horrible were my sins, but the infinite goodness has arms so wide that it receives whoever turns to it’ (‘Orribil furon li peccati miei; / ma la Bontà infinita ha sì gran braccia, / che prende ciò che si rivolge a lei’; 121–33). Union with God is the fulfilment of all human desires as Piccarda, the first soul encountered in Paradise, explains: ‘And in His will is our peace. It is the sea to which all things move, both what it creates and what nature makes’ (‘E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace: / ell’è quel mare al qual tutto si move / ciò ch’ella crïa o che natura face’; Par. iii, 85–87).

This chapter analyses the political dimension of Dante’s ethical thought. In the first part, I present a preliminary outline of Dante’s ethical–political theory, as it is articulated in the Monarchia. A dominant critical tradition has emphasised ‘the fundamental difference’ between the Commedia and the Monarchia. I demonstrate, by contrast, the fundamental unity between these two works, and show how Dante’s distinctive theory, with its strict division between temporal and spiritual power, underlies some of the key surprises that we find in his depiction of the other-world, in relation to previous traditions both popular and learned about the afterlife.Footnote ¹ The second part of this chapter analyses Dante’s striking presentation of pagans in the afterlife. I argue that, for Dante, the virtuous pagan instantiates secular human flourishing (man’s earthly ethical goal) in a poem which literally depicts the afterlife. I also show how Dante’s presentation of pagans, and especially Roman pagans, forms a major structural argument for the divinely mandated vocation of the Holy Roman Empire, a key thesis of the Monarchia as well. The third part of the chapter examines Dante’s treatment of popes and prelates in the afterlife. I argue that, in line with the dualistic theory of the Monarchia, this contributes to a highly controversial manifesto for the radical reform of the Roman Church.

Dante’s Dualistic Ethical–Political Theory

Towards the end of his life, Dante developed a friendship with the Bolognese professor Giovanni del Virgilio, exchanging poetical epistles which have come down to us as his Latin eclogues.Footnote ² After Dante’s death, Giovanni composed an epitaph in memory of the theologian-poet, who, he writes, assigned ‘to the dead, their places, and to the twin swords, their kingdoms’ (‘qui loca defunctis, gladiisque regnumque gemellis’).Footnote ³ In this single line, Giovanni celebrates, and gives equal weight to, Dante’s vision of the Christian afterlife in the three canticles of the Commedia, and to his argument for the strict division between temporal and spiritual power (the ‘twin swords’) in the three books of De Monarchia.

The relationship between temporal and spiritual power was one of the most contested issues of Dante’s period. In the late thirteenth century, a progressive via media had been adopted by Christian-Aristotelian scholars (typically accommodating the relative autonomy of these two powers with degrees of indirect subordination). At the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, positions became more polarised.Footnote ⁴ In 1302, the extreme papal claim for the direct subordination of temporal to spiritual power was represented by Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate and Pope Boniface VIII’s derivative Unam Santam.Footnote ⁵ In the same year, John of Paris’s Tractatus de regia potestate et papali rebuffed these claims, arguing instead that the strict division between temporal and spiritual power is divinely mandated, and that if the pope abuses the spiritual sword (‘gladius spiritualis’), a temporal monarch may legitimately wage war against him, as an enemy of the public good.Footnote ⁶

Dante’s De Monarchia takes this division of jurisdictions to its extreme: Dante argues for the complete independence of two hemispheres of human conduct institutionally governed by the Empire and the Church.Footnote ⁷ Dante’s rationale for this theory combines a particular interpretation of Aristotelian anthropology with a novel extension of Aristotle’s political theory to apply to universal empire. He starts from the premise that man, uniquely amongst animals, has a hybrid nature: as mortal, man pertains to the world of time and contingency; as immortal, he connects to the sphere of eternity. In virtue of this, man has two ethical goals: human flourishing in this life and the beatific vision in the next. Dante then argues that the means to attain these goals have been revealed by the teachings of philosophy and of Divine revelation, respectively, and that the institutions divinely ordained to facilitate these journeys are the Empire (with temporal power and the responsibility for man’s earthly felicity) and the Church (with spiritual power and the responsibility for man’s eternal beatitude).Footnote ⁸ For Dante, then, the Church should possess no temporal power or wealth.

Dante’s distinction between the lex naturalis and the lex divina, although not ubiquitous in thirteenth-century thought, is a feature of those scholastic authors committed to the recuperation of neo-Aristotelian philosophy.Footnote ⁹ But whereas St Thomas Aquinas, for example, integrates and subordinates the order of nature to the order of grace, Dante’s strategy of two autonomous ethical goals emphasises distinction and separation rather than integration.Footnote ¹⁰ This leads to three problematic ethical implications: (1) it potentially relegates the function of Christianity solely to man’s eternal destiny in the next life; (2) the intrinsic perfectibility of human nature appears to render ‘healing grace’ (gratia sanans) redundant, with the implication that only ‘elevating grace’ (gratia elevans) is theoretically necessary for man; and (3) it establishes a dichotomy and tension between man’s pursuit of an earthly goal and his (apparently competing) pursuit of an eternal goal.Footnote ¹¹ The political ramifications are correspondingly problematic. Where other Christian-Aristotelian authors advocated a via media mediating between temporal and spiritual power, Dante takes the distinction between homo naturalis and homo Christianus to an extreme. By doing so, he justifies the autonomy of Empire and Church which, in his view, independently derive their authority directly from God.

Dante’s radical dualistic theory, particularly given the extreme theocratic pretensions of the contemporary papacy, could not but suffer rebuke. Only six years after Dante’s death, it was lambasted by the Dominican Guido Vernani in De reprobatione ‘Monarchiae’ compositae a Dante Alighiero Florentino. Dante’s theory was, moreover, politically explosive.Footnote ¹² In 1326, when Louis of Bavaria marched into Italy to oppose Pope John XXII and to install the anti-pope Nicholas V, Dante’s Monarchia was cited by the Imperial side to rally troops to its cause.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, Bertrand du Pouget, the papal legate in Italy, accused Dante of heresy, ordered all copies of his Monarchia to be publicly burnt, and threatened to disinter and incinerate Dante’s bodily remains.Footnote ¹⁴ Dante’s Monarchia was subsequently placed on the Vatican index of prohibited books in 1554, only to be removed in 1881.Footnote ¹⁵

It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that the early commentators and readers, right up to the twentieth century, showed little regard for the Monarchia (with only limited reading of the Convivio) – and paid little attention to Dante’s dualistic theory – in their interpretation of the poem. Leaving aside the restricted early readership of the Monarchia and the Convivio, it is understandable that the early Dante enthusiasts who commented on his poem, the first of whom included his sons Pietro and Jacopo d’Alighieri, shied away from reading the Commedia in light of this extreme dualism.Footnote ¹⁶ But even much of twentieth-century Dante scholarship, which scarcely needed to protect Dante’s poem in this way, sought to limit this dualism to Dante’s Latin and vernacular prose works (marginalised as chronologically earlier ‘minor works’). Thus Bruno Nardi, a dominant scholar in this tradition, claimed that ‘In the Commedia there is no more trace of the “two final ends” of the Monarchia.’Footnote ¹⁷ Kenelm Foster and Etienne Gilson, both acute readers of philosophical heterodoxy in Dante’s prose works, were still keen to emphasise that ‘the Comedy is quite another matter’ and that its subject ‘is theological – the final aims of man (ultima regna)’.Footnote ¹⁸

More recently, the compositional chronology underlining this view – that Dante’s Monarchia represents a dualistic stage in his intellectual trajectory that the poet left behind when he began writing the Commedia – has been systematically refuted. Modern philological evidence dates the Monarchia to the last few years of Dante’s life, when the greater part of the Commedia was already written.Footnote ¹⁹ Prue Shaw has argued convincingly that ‘there seems no good reason to doubt’ the authenticity of ‘the cross-reference in Book I to the Paradiso’ and, therefore, that the Monarchia was written ‘certainly no earlier than 1314 and possibly [during] the very last years of its author’s life’.Footnote ²⁰ Further recent historical and contextual arguments have corroborated Shaw’s thesis. Specifically, they have narrowed the dating of the Monarchia to after 1316 and, most probably, to the years 1317–18.Footnote ²¹

This might make us reconsider Dante’s Commedia and Monarchia not only as (in Giovanni del Virgilio’s estimation) his two most significant works, but also as fundamentally related. Dante’s eschatological poem in the vernacular certainly served, like his political thesis in Latin, as imperial propaganda, calling insistently for the restoration of the ‘two suns’ (Empire and Church) in Rome: ‘Soleva Roma, che ’l buon mondo feo, / due soli aver, che l’una e l’altra strada / facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo’ [Rome, which made the world good, used to have two suns that made visible the two paths, of the world and of God] (Purg. xvi, 106–8). But, as we shall see, Dante’s radical theory also profoundly influenced the very structure of his vision of the afterlife, contributing to an innovative, and distinctly politicised, eschatology. We can observe the imperial and papal dimensions of Dante’s dualistic ethical–political argument particularly clearly, I believe, in his representation of pagans and popes in the Commedia.

Pagans in Dante’s Christian Afterlife, and the Ideal of Empire

Alison Morgan’s analysis of the demography of Dante’s afterlife overturned the generally held critical assumption that his introduction of contemporary and obscure figures, and his portrayal of them as ‘lifelike individuals’, were major, original contributions to Christian eschatology.Footnote ²² Although Dante may be the first to combine a classificatory moral scheme with detailed characterisation (‘a convincing character who incarnates the sin of which he is suffering the consequence’), Morgan shows how, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, many examples of ‘obscure individuals’ emerged in popular visions of the afterlife, many of whom were portrayed as ‘rounded characters’.Footnote ²³ Dante’s originality lies, instead, ‘in the inclusion of classical figures, who are totally unrepresented in the earlier medieval texts’.Footnote ²⁴ Of the approximately three hundred characters resident in Dante’s other-world, eighty-four are classical figures. Why, then, does Dante not only include classical figures, itself a novelty in prior vision literature, but include them in such great numbers? Morgan’s explanation is brief and reductive: the visions are ‘popular in nature’, whereas Dante, in the Commedia, is – by including classical figures – attempting to unite the learned and popular traditions, to aspire to the grandeur of a classical epic.Footnote ²⁵

There is, I think, much more to Dante’s innovative inclusion of classical figures in his vision of the afterlife than literary ambition. Indeed, arguably more startling than Dante’s inclusion of classical figures is the location in which more than half of them (fifty-one), and more than one sixth of the total characters in the poem, are to be found: Limbo, the first circle of Dante’s Hell. The representation of Limbo, of itself, was unproblematic. It was conventionally identified with ‘Abraham’s bosom’, the place inhabited by faithful Jews (the limbus patronum) until the harrowing of Hell. That Limbo was still occupied in 1300, the date of the poem, was also unproblematic. Many thirteenth-century theologians supported the hypothesis that unbaptised infants, dying with original but not personal sin, would eternally occupy Limbo (the limbus infantium); there they would suffer the lack of the vision of God, but no exterior or interior pain. In contrast, the notion that Limbo would be occupied by grown men and women, and pagans to boot, was – as the reception of Dante’s first readers testifies – deeply problematic and troubling.Footnote ²⁶ Augustine explicitly ruled out the possibility of a Limbo, equivalent to the limbus infantium, for pagans as ‘shameless presumption’ because all pagan virtue is contaminated.Footnote ²⁷ Aquinas was perfectly comfortable with pagan salvation, and had developed a sophisticated theory of implicit faith whereby a pagan, even just by believing in Divine providence, could be seen implicitly to believe in Christ to come.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, Aquinas argued that it would be simply impossible for an adult, having reached the age of discretion, to avoid personal sin and die only with original sin.Footnote ²⁹ Dante, however, adopts precisely this state as the moral situation of the virtuous pagans in the Commedia and, just as importantly, rejects the theory of implicit faith, thereby damning the ‘virtuous pagans’ to Limbo eternally.Footnote ³⁰

Why does Dante include so many classical figures (itself unprecedented) in the afterlife and, against major theological authorities, locate the majority of these (fifty-one) in, of all places, Limbo? The answer, I believe, lies in his dualistic theory. Dante uses the virtuous pagan – to whom the spiritual goal, Divine revelation, and the institutional Church were of course unavailable – to figuratively represent secular human flourishing (man’s earthly goal) in a poem which literally depicts the afterlife.Footnote ³¹

For the overall topology and structure of Dante’s Hell, two occupants of Limbo are particularly significant: Dante’s guide, Virgil, and Aristotle. For visionaries of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the choice of guide was typically fulfilled by a guardian angel, a local saint, a church patron, or the founder of an order.Footnote ³² Although Dante absorbs many of the characteristic features of the relationship between visionary and guide, his choice of guide, then, is striking: Virgil is neither an angel nor a saint, but instead a pagan who, as we soon discover, is eternally damned. Why Virgil? Clearly, at a meta-poetic level, Dante borrows extensively from Virgil’s depiction of the pagan underworld (Hades) in book six of the Aeneid to construct his own vision of Hell; at a narrative level, this relationship is embodied by Dante-character literally following Virgil. But once again, there is more to it. In the Commedia, Virgil identifies himself not as the poet of the pagan underworld (important though that is), but rather as the poet of Roman Empire (‘cantai di quel giusto / figliuol d’Anchise’ [I sang of that just son of Anchises]; Inf. i, 73–74). This reflects the fact that Dante treats Virgil’s Aeneid, in his prose works as in the Commedia, as a divinely revealed text in which God authorises and legitimates the Roman Empire as imperium sine fine.Footnote ³³

Dante’s eulogy to the pagan poet Virgil in the opening of the poem as ‘lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore’ [my master and my author] (Inf. i, 67–87) is matched only by his eulogy to the pagan philosopher Aristotle in Limbo itself: ‘’l maestro di color che sanno’ [the master of those that know] (Inf. iv, 130–32). This choice reflects another remarkable feature of Dante’s vision of Hell in relation to its wider context. As Morgan has demonstrated, most of the sins punished in Dante’s Hell are found in popular Christian visions of the other-world, or are listed in twelfth- and thirteenth-century confession manuals.Footnote ³⁴ What is innovative in Dante’s vision, as we have seen, is the subordination of this Christian material and competing classificatory schemes to a distinctively pagan moral categorisation taken principally from Aristotle. When Dante asks about the moral ordering of evil in Hell in Inferno xi, Virgil responds with reference not to Christian Scripture, but rather to natural philosophy, citing Aristotle’s Ethics (80), his Physics (101) and, arguably, his Metaphysics (97) within just twenty-two lines.Footnote ³⁵

Why Dante’s particular eulogy of these two pagans, Virgil and Aristotle? This double emphasis reflects Dante’s conviction, born from experience, that ethics without power is weak, while power without ethics is dangerous (Conv. iv, vi, 17). Dante believed that the pagan Aristotle had given a comprehensive account of secular ethics: ‘qui ab Aristotele felicitatem ostensam reostendere conaretur’ (Mon. i, i, 4). And, contrary to apologists for papal temporal power, he believed that Imperial power was divinely instituted by God to administer justice and to enforce the moral law. As Davis puts it: ‘the emperor therefore presides over the moral world. It is his duty to put the ethical teachings of philosophers, especially Aristotle, into effect.’Footnote ³⁶ In Purgatorio vi, Dante bemoans the empty seat (the ‘saddle’) of empire: what use are laws (the ‘bridle’) if there is no one to enforce them (Purg. vi, 88–90)? Arguably, then, one purpose of Dante’s Inferno is to represent in the afterlife the moral justice which, in the absence of an Emperor, Dante saw unfulfilled on Earth.

Nowhere is this political polemic clearer than in the final climax, or rather anti-climax, of Dante’s Hell: the depiction of Satan. With regard to the visionary tradition, that Dante’s Satan should digest sinners is unremarkable.Footnote ³⁷ His image of Satan’s three mouths endlessly chewing three sinners, moreover, seems to derive directly from the vivid mosaics in the baptistery of Florence. What is extraordinary, rather, is the identity of two of the three sinners. At the centre, unsurprisingly, is Judas, who betrayed Christ. On either side, however, are the pagan Roman republicans Brutus and Cassius. Where Shakespeare would allow Brutus to justify his tyrannicide by his love for republican Rome (‘Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I lov’d Rome more’), Dante considers Brutus and Cassius the very worst sinners precisely because, by betraying Julius Caesar, they sought to frustrate the divinely ordered establishment of a universal Roman ruler.

Julius Caesar himself is amongst the ‘virtuous pagans’ in Limbo: ‘Cesare armato con li occhi grifagni’ [Caesar in armour with hawk-like eyes] (Inf. iv, 123). Indeed, of the pagans lauded for their moral virtue in Limbo (Inf. iv, 121–29), all – with the exception of Saladin who is alone and to one side (‘e solo, in parte, vidi ’l Saladino’; 129) – are connected to the history of Troy and Rome. Conversely, of the twenty-nine classical figures condemned to corporeal punishment in Hell, many – like Brutus and Cassius – frustrated or sought to frustrate the providential emergence of the Roman Empire. Their attempts are portrayed by Dante as entirely futile. Thus, in the first circle of lust, we encounter Helen and Paris, whose elopement led to the destruction of Troy; Dido, whose love Aeneas had to overcome to found Rome; and Cleopatra who, with Mark-Anthony, turned against Julius Caesar’s nephew Augustus. In the eighth circle of fraud, moreover, Ulysses, Diomedes, and Sinon are punished for their role in the deception of the Trojan Horse. In Dante’s providential view of human history, the consequent defeat of Troy would ultimately lead to the emergence of the Roman race which, in turn, would eventually subjugate the Greeks to its imperial rule.Footnote ³⁸

Although the vast majority of Dante’s classical figures are found either in Limbo (fifty-one) or in the rest of Hell (twenty-nine), three notable exceptions exist: Cato of Utica, the custodian of Purgatory’s shores, and Ripheus and Trajan, who are amongst the just in Paradise. Strikingly, Cato is the next character encountered by Dante-character on his other-worldly journey, after Brutus and Cassius. Like them, Cato was a staunch republican and enemy of Julius Caesar. If not in Satan’s jaws (he was, after all, no traitor), he should surely, following Augustine’s specific condemnation of him as a famous suicide, be condemned with the violent-against-themselves in circle 7.Footnote ³⁹ If not there, he should, at the least, be found with Lucretia (another Roman suicide whom Dante, unlike Augustine, deems virtuous) in the first circle of Limbo. Instead, Dante choreographs an elaborate narrative eulogy to Cato on the shores of Purgatory (Purg. i, 13–84), a decision that, for the poem’s first readers, carried with it more than a whiff of heresy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Why, then, Cato’s startling presence here? The reason, I believe, is that Cato signifies the secular perfection of human nobility which Dante, in his dualistic ethical theory, distinguishes from man’s eternal, Christian beatitude. Following Roman authors, and with scant regard to subsequent Christian critique, Dante presents Cato as truly the quintessential model and pattern of pagan virtue.

Critics have failed to observe, however, that Cato in Ante-Purgatory is, with respect to his punishment, arguably no different from the virtuous pagans in Limbo. Souls in Ante-Purgatory, like the Limbo dwellers, experience the lack of the Divine vision (poena damni) but do not experience corporeal pain (poena sensus). What differentiates the state of the souls in Ante-Purgatory from their counterparts in Limbo is that their lack of the Divine vision and of corporeal pain is temporary (they will experience the poena sensus on the terraces of Purgatory so as to attain the vision of God in Paradise), whereas the Limbo dwellers’ lack of both Divine vision and corporeal pain is eternal. Dante arguably leaves it as ambiguous, then, whether this temporal distinction applies to Cato himself. Were he to remain permanently in Ante-Purgatory (unlike all the Christian souls who pass temporarily through), he would not, in fact, be saved: Ante-Purgatory would then be equivalent in its state (poena damni without poena sensus) to Limbo, except that Cato, unlike the Limbo dwellers, would be eternally bereft of human company. This fate would be worse than that experienced by his wife Marcia and a punishment, perhaps, for his suicide (in isolating himself from the human community). Most critics, however, have concluded that Cato is saved and will rise, on the last judgement, to heaven (and this may well be the implication of Purgatorio i, 73–75).Footnote ⁴¹

If Dante leaves open the possibility of Cato’s salvation, he is nevertheless insistent on the eternal damnation of Virgil and the other virtuous pagans. Although two virtuous pagans, Ripheus and Trajan, are amongst the blessed in Dante’s Paradise, their presence is due to two exceptional miracles which serve to accentuate, and prove, the general rule (Par. xx, 106–29). The fate of the souls in Ante-Purgatory, who live with hope and desire for the beatific vision, only intensifies Virgil’s consciousness of his own eternal fate – as one who lives without hope in desire (Inf. iv, 42). Whereas the long wait of the former – for the excommunicates, thirty times the period of their contumacy; for the rest, the period equal to the duration of their earthly lives – is bearable, Virgil’s wait entails little else but despair, as it represents not waiting at all but rather eternal loss (Purg. vii, 7–8). In this way, Dante makes the eternal damnation of Virgil and the other virtuous pagans a key drama in the poem as a whole. Virgil’s fate has also exercised critics, many of whom, even from the early commentators, have tried ‘to save Virgil’.Footnote ⁴²

It is crucial to reiterate that the damnation of pagans (whether virtuous or not) was not an inevitable or irresolvable problem for Dante, as he had theological resources at his disposal, such as Aquinas’s theory of implicit faith, which he chose not to deploy. Dante’s original insistence that pagans could be without personal sin yet damned is, instead, a corollary of his dualistic ethical thought. On the one hand, it upholds pagan standards of virtue and philosophy as flawless and, therefore, legitimate guides to man’s temporal felicity. On the other hand, it places an exclusive primacy on Christian faith for man’s eternal salvation: a man, no matter how perfect in the moral and intellectual virtues, cannot be saved without faith.Footnote ⁴³ In short, Dante sacrifices the destiny of Virgil and of the virtuous pagans in general to the exigencies of his theological–political vision. Dante’s representation of pagans in the afterlife is, then, directly related to the theological–political worldview articulated in the Monarchia. It supports an ethical theory which Dante put at the service of an imperial political programme. And it is no accident that the pagans exemplary for their moral virtue in Limbo (Inf. iv, 121–29) and the four virtuous pagans we encounter outside Limbo – Virgil, Cato, Ripheus, and Trajan – all played a critical role in the development of the Roman and Holy Roman Empires.

Popes in Hell, and a Celestial Manifesto for the Roman Church

Dante’s inclusion of contemporary characters, as we have seen, is not original: according to Morgan’s analysis, they make up 69 per cent of the identified characters in popular visions and only 36 per cent in Dante’s poem.Footnote ⁴⁴ Notably, in her detailed comparison, one striking novelty occurs within this category: no writer before Dante had dared to place contemporary popes in Hell. Dante not only damns Pope Nicholas III (b. 1225; papacy 1277–80) to Hell as a simoniac (one who sells spiritual office for material gain), but also has him prophecy that the current Pope Boniface VIII (b. 1230: papacy 1294–1303) and the future Pope Clement V (b. 1264; papacy 1305–1314) will join him there.Footnote ⁴⁵ Dante also implies that Pope John XXII (b. 1244; papacy 1316–1334), who was Clement V’s successor after a two-year interregnum, will also join him amongst the simoniacs: in Paradiso, St Peter refers to them both by their place of origin (Cahors and Gascony) and describes them as preparing to drink his blood (Par. xxvii, 58–60).Footnote ⁴⁶ Celestine V (b. 1215; papacy 1294), who was canonised by Clement V in 1313, is also condemned by Dante to Hell, residing amongst the pusillanimous ‘neutrals’, as one ‘who in his cowardice made the great refusal’ (Inf. iii, 59–60). In fact, Celestine V’s abdication led to the pontificate of Boniface VIII, Dante’s bête noire.

Only three contemporary popes escape Dante’s Hell. Pope Adrian V (b. 1210/1215; papacy 1276) does so, in Dante’s account, only by a hair’s breadth, and he is presented in humiliating prostration on the terrace of avarice in Purgatory (Purg. xix, 103–14). Pope Martin IV (b. 1210/1220; papacy 1281–85) is presented as the worst of gluttons; in consequence, his face is more pierced than all the others on the terrace (‘e quella faccia / di là da lui, più che l’altre trapunta’; Purg. xxiv, 20–21).Footnote ⁴⁷ The only contemporary pope whom Dante places in Paradise is Pope John XXI (b. 1210/1220; papacy 1276–77). No reference at all is given to his role as pope or to his papacy; instead, he is referred to as Peter of Spain (‘Pietro Spano’) and celebrated for his work of logic, the Summulae logicales (Par. xii, 134–35). Of the fourteen popes in Dante’s lifetime, then, eight are apparently allotted a place in Dante’s vision of the afterlife: of these, two were already in Hell in 1300 and two or three more are – we are informed – soon to follow. One, despite being a pope, gets into Purgatory through a late conversion; one is presented as the worst glutton on his terrace; and one, with no mention of his tenure as a pope, resides in Paradise as a celebrated logician.Footnote ⁴⁸

What underlies Dante’s polemic against the popes of his day in his vision of the afterlife? His original, and striking presentation reflects more than a powerful sense that individuals are betraying their sacred office. Instead, Dante is arguing that the contemporary papacy is institutionally corrupt, and that it has lost its direction and betrayed its true purpose. Dante’s scathing depiction of contemporary popes in the afterlife, like his innovative representation of pagans, forms part of a theological–political argument with direct relevance for his immediate audience. As Nick Havely emphasises, Dante wrote the poem (c. 1307–21) around the same time as controversies surrounding Franciscan poverty reached fever pitch: ‘around 1309–12, when Clement V was formally investigating the Franciscan Spirituals; and from 1317 onwards, when John XXII was actively engaged in suppressing them.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Davis adds, ‘it is Dante’s singling out of particular popes as protagonists of an epiphany of evil that seems to correspond most closely to the Spiritual Franciscan view of ecclesiastical corruption.’Footnote ⁵⁰ There is, then, a pamphlet-like immediacy to Dante’s poem, with its theological–political programme for the radical reform of the Roman Church.Footnote ⁵¹

Dante’s epistle to the Italian cardinals, written after Pope Clement V’s death in 1314, reflects his direct engagement with contemporary events. It also provides a revealing commentary on the Commedia. In the epistle, Dante chastises the cardinals for despising the heavenly fire (the holy spirit which descended on the apostles at Pentecost), and for selling the doves in the temple, making a market of priceless spiritual goods (Epist. xi, 4). In his other-worldly vision, he places their contemporary leaders deep in hell: as counter-punishment (contrapasso), the tongues of flame, instead of informing their words, scorch their feet (Inf. xix, 22–30). In the epistle, Dante castigates contemporary prelates for having their backs and not their faces to the chariot of the Church (Epist. xi, 4); on the terrace of avarice, he represents Pope Adrian V with his backside grotesquely turned towards Heaven (Purg. xix, 97–99). In the epistle, Dante laments the despicable state of the Roman Church and the transfer of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309 (Epist. xi, 1–4); in his poem, he presents an allegorical representation of the Church’s moral corruption, and clearly alludes to the Babylonian captivity through the sacred chariot’s detachment from the tree (Purg. xxxii, 100–60). The final vision of the ‘whore’ (puttana; 149 and 160) almost certainly refers to the papacy of Boniface VIII, while the ‘giant’ is conventionally interpreted to represent Philip IV, the successor to the French monarchy.Footnote ⁵²

Dante is equally forthright in highlighting the root causes underlying the Church’s contemporary degeneracy: sloth and avarice. Where the Church fathers searched for God, the modern prelates, in their spiritual sloth, desire only riches and worldly power: each of them, Dante claims, has taken Cupidity as his wife (‘Cupiditatem unusquisque sibi duxit in uxorem’; Epist. xi, 7). On both occasions that Dante treats sloth and avarice in the Commedia (implicitly in Inferno vii and explicitly in Purgatorio xix), then, he splices these capital vices together, structurally dividing a canto in two. In both cases, he polemically associates these vices with clerics: in Inferno vii, all the avaricious are tonsured clerics, including popes and cardinals (‘Questi fuor cherci … e papi e cardinali / in cui usa avarizia il suo soperchio’). In Purgatorio xviii and xix, Dante sandwiches the siren between two clerics: an abbot (the only slothful soul identified) and Pope Adrian V (the first soul whom Dante encounters in the terrace of avarice). The pope, as successor Petri, should be married to his flock (and the Church, as a whole, to Christ as sponsa Christi); instead, he is paired to a whore (the siren is, by some early commentators, simplify referred to as meretrix hominum). The papacy’s avaricious assumption of temporal power was, for Dante, the principal institutional cause of moral evil: ‘la vostra avarizia il mondo attrista, / calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi’ [your avarice afflicts the world, trampling the good and raising up the wicked] (Inf. xix, 104). This underpinned his firm conviction that temporal and spiritual power should be divided between Empire and Church. Dante’s condemnation of the contemporary papacy arguably reaches its climax in St Peter’s denunciation of his current successors: in the eyes of the Son of God, the seat of the papacy is vacant, and his burial place has become a sewer (Par. xxvii, 19–63).Footnote ⁵³

Dante’s afterlife is not just, however, a polemical vision of the contemporary church’s corruption: it also presents a manifesto for reform. Thus, Dante’s Paradise arguably presents an other-worldly vision for the material poverty and spiritual evangelism he envisaged for the Church on Earth. The first, fourth, and seventh of the planetary spheres emphasise religious orders: Piccarda and Costanza (in the first heaven of the Moon) were Franciscan nuns, ‘Poor Clares’, before being violently abducted from their cloister; St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure (in the fourth heaven of the Sun) praise the founders of each other’s orders, St Dominic and St Francis, while denouncing the subsequent degeneracy of their own; and St Benedict, the founder of Western monastic orders, and St Peter Damian, a rigorous reformer, extol the ascetic contemplative life in the seventh heaven of Saturn. The second and sixth spheres foreground the Empire and political justice. In the second sphere of Mercury, Dante locates the corruption of the papacy in the donation of Constantine, he upholds Justinian as an ideal emperor who reformed the civil law, and he models, in Pope Agapetus’s spiritual counsel of Justinian (in the form of a correction of heresy), the appropriate relationship he envisages between pope and emperor. Moreover, Dante represents the conquests of the Empire (embodied in the Imperial Eagle) as Divinely willed, and he reiterates his strange theory of the Atonement, according to which the universal jurisdiction of the Roman Empire under Augustus was necessary for Christ to have died for all people.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the sixth sphere of Jupiter, the dramatic appearance of Ripheus and Trajan, in the eye of the Eagle, highlights – as we have seen – the providential role of the Roman Empire in administering justice. Finally, the third and fifth spheres of Heaven emphasise the cooperation of the papacy and temporal power in the persecution of heresy (Folco combats the heretic Cathars) and the liberation of the Holy Lands through the crusades (Dante presents his crusading ancestor Cacciaguida as a martyr). Throughout Paradiso, Dante counterpoises the worldliness of the contemporary papacy with the asceticism of the early Church and of the monastic and mendicant orders. The origins of the papacy in St Peter, of Western monasticism in St Benedict, and of the mendicant orders in St Francis were all characterised, Dante claims, by material poverty (Par. xxii, 88–93).

In Paradiso, Dante not only presents St Francis and his order as a model for the contemporary church, but also represents the pristine church in St Francis’s image. Certainly, St Francis is given a unique prominence by Dante, named for the third time in the heavenly rose as second only to John the Baptist in the hierarchy of heaven.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Dante’s hagiography, St Francis is depicted as an alter Christus, and as a ‘new sun’ (‘nacque al mondo un sole’; Par. xi, 50), Dante’s symbol par excellence for God.Footnote ⁵⁶ St Francis’s mystic marriage with Lady Poverty juxtaposes Dante’s representation of the contemporary prelates as married to Cupidity. Dante’s panegyric is particularly striking for emphasising one detail: he claims that ‘[Lady Poverty], deprived of her first husband, had waited, scorned and obscure, without a suitor eleven hundred years and more until this man appeared’ (‘Questa, privata del primo marito, / millecent’ anni e più dispetta e scura / fino a costui si stette sanza invito’; Par. xi, 64–66). In other words, Dante insists that St Francis was only the second (after Christ himself) to embrace poverty. How so? While many saints before St Francis had embraced poverty as a mistress, only Christ and St Francis, according to Dante, made poverty the ‘mother’ of their spiritual children, their followers or disciples. St Francis’s first congregation could not own material wealth (or its buildings) and was granted only the ‘use’ of it by the Church. This singular regulation was confirmed by Pope Nicholas III’s bull Exiit qui seminat (1279) but came under threat in the early 1300s and was effectively nullified one year after Dante’s death, by Pope John XXII’s bull Ad conditorem canonum (1322).

But it is precisely this model of Franciscan corporate poverty that Dante seems to envisage for the Church as a whole in De Monarchia. In that treatise, he argues that the Holy Roman Emperor (holding all temporal land and power) would cede the use, but not the possession, of wealth and buildings to the Church. By linking Christ and St Francis as the two husbands of poverty, he emphasises, once again in his Commedia, that Christ’s followers, the Church, should follow him in institutional poverty.Footnote ⁵⁷ This messianic theological–political programme, then, underpins Dante’s depiction of the Christian afterlife from Virgil’s prophecy of the ‘veltro’, who will chase the she-wolf of cupidity back down to Hell, through the apocalyptic prophecies in the Earthly Paradise, to his final representation of the blessed in the Empyrean.

The canonical and, even, ‘timeless’ status of Dante’s Commedia in Western European literature may distract us from the historical immediacy of its theological–political polemic. But, as I have argued, Dante’s other-worldly vision is best understood precisely in the context of the reforming, and sometimes radical, currents of his time. Dante seems to have believed that a final, definitive eschatology through the culmination of human history in the Second Coming was near.Footnote ⁵⁸ Building on Morgan’s seminal study, this chapter has shown that major innovations in Dante’s other-worldly vision are direct consequences of his theological–political programme for this-worldly renewal and reform. Moreover, in line with those scholars who have emphasised a continuity between Dante’s dualistic political thought in the Monarchia and in the Commedia, I have shown how this continuity is evident not only in terms of the doctrinal content but in the very structural organisation of Dante’s afterlife.

In particular, this chapter has focused on two novel, and surprising, aspects of Dante’s afterlife in relation to previous traditions about the other-world, both popular and learned: Dante’s treatment of pagans and of contemporary popes. By simultaneously emphasising the exemplary moral virtue of certain pagans and insisting on their eternal damnation, Dante is arguing that man can attain a secular happiness through philosophical guidance alone. By making Virgil his guide, by carefully constructing Roman history as Divinely ordained, and by organising the sins of Hell according to rational principles ostensibly taken from Aristotle, Dante is insisting that only a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire may bring peace and justice. Dante’s vision of the Christian afterlife is, as his scathing treatment of contemporary popes and prelates highlights, also a manifesto for radical reform of the Church. The structure of Purgatory and of Paradise, as I have shown, reflects the kind of ecclesial reform he envisaged. Most strikingly, Dante not only appears to adopt Franciscan communal poverty as a model for the Church as a whole, but seems to believe that only a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire may bring about this reform by forcibly stripping the Church of its temporal power and material wealth. Even setbacks from the perspective of 1300, such as Pope Boniface VIII’s worldly success and Henry VII’s future imperial failure, are viewed as temporary, with Dante having us focus on the pope’s and his successor’s future damnation (Inf. xix, 31–87; and Par. xxx, 139–48) and the emperor’s eternal crown awaiting him in heaven (Par. xxx, 133–38)

In Morgan’s taxonomy of the different kinds of other-worldly visions associated with different historical eras, she associates the Carolingian era with written representations of the other-world that are ‘political and satirical in nature’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although Dante’s poem shares other characteristics with many kinds of vision, it is worth stressing its political–satirical vein, which, I think, has been insufficiently examined in the critical tradition.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, one decisive difference separates Dante’s political satire from that of the Carolingian visions. Rather than the ‘vision of the other world [becoming] a political weapon at the hands of the Church’, Dante’s other-worldly vision is decisively a political weapon for the Empire and, indeed, for his patron and the dedicatee of Paradiso, Cangrande della Scala, the leader of the Imperial faction in Italy. Whether Dante would have followed his patron in support of Louis of Bavaria’s march into Italy in 1326, and his installation of the Spiritual Franciscan Pietro Rainalducci as Anti-pope Nicholas, is a matter of conjecture, as Dante died five years earlier.Footnote ⁶¹ What is beyond conjecture, in my view, is that his Monarchia and his Commedia were potent ammunition for that cause.