Seventh Circle, Third Ring: The Violent Against God (and Nature and Art)
Canto XIV of Inferno
Friends,
In the various places that I have lived, I have experienced several extreme weather events (increasingly so in recent years). But there are two winter storms that stand out as particularly prominent in my memory. The first was the Blizzard of ’93. I was eight years old, living in Knoxville, Tennessee. In the middle of March, just days before the official end of winter, a Category 5 nor’easter formed in the Gulf of Mexico and dumped billions of tons of snow throughout the eastern United States. It was more snow than I had ever seen, and my sister and I had a blast playing outside while our school was closed. Our neighborhood lost power for several days, but my family had a wood-burning stove downstairs. We kept our fire stoked and hosted our neighbors from up and down the block—roasting potatoes in aluminum foil and playing games by flashlight. It was exciting, fun, and rich in community, and I had very little sense of how hazardous the conditions actually were.
The second storm, Snowpocalypse 2011, was quite a different ordeal to endure. I was twenty-six years old, living in Waukegan, Illinois. On the last day of January, I had just given my first-ever guest lecture at a local college when classes were canceled for the rest of the day. After a dangerous drive home, I discovered that my roommate had donned his cross-country skis and trekked out to stay with some friends. Between the high winds and the lake effect, the snowdrifts in our driveway soon reached to the level of my chest, forcing me to stay inside. I wrote some long-overdue emails and watched a Redbox rental; that night, with stunned amazement, I also saw lightning and heard thundersnow amidst the blizzard. Otherwise, though, I mostly spent the next couple days bored, depressed, and alone.
In today’s canto, we encounter a very different combination of community and precipitation. Unique among the settings we’ve yet seen, the seventh circle contains three distinct infernal ecosystems. Having already traveled across the boiling river and through the thorny thicket, Dante and Virgil now emerge “at the very edge” of an arid plain of coarse sand (line 12; in Italian, a randa a randa, literally “at the edge at the edge”; this is a form of emphatic repetition called an Italian doublet). Recalling what he witnessed there, Dante the poet-narrator breaks off in an anguished apostrophe: “O Vengeance of God, how much must you be feared by everyone who reads what was made manifest to my eyes!” (16-18). All throughout this desert scene are naked, weeping souls—some lying on their backs, others sitting in a crouch, and still others in constant movement. Worse yet, all are besieged by flakes of fire falling slowly but constantly, singeing the shades such that they constantly have to brush themselves off. These fireflakes (vastly more perilous than thundersnow) also set the sand alight and render the inhabitants of this subcircle vulnerable to heat from both above and below, thus “doubling the grief” (39). Their placements and postures are punishments keyed to specific sins, and the contrapasso will become clearer in next week’s letters. For now, however, it is enough to note that the common theme is violence against God, whether committed directly (through willful intent to insult the Deity) or indirectly (though violations against Nature or Art—God’s child and grandchild, respectively).
But what does it actually mean to commit violence against God? Interestingly, rather than choosing a biblical example or theological explanation, Dante the person-writer opts for an instance of blasphemy from Greco-Roman myth. He sets it up by having Dante the pilgrim-protagonist take in the scorching scene and then ask Virgil to identify an especially noticeable figure. For the first time, the pilgrim throws some shade at his guide, referring back to their debacle at Dis: “Master, you who overcome all things, except for those stubborn demons who came out against us at the entrance of the gate” (43-45). Why bring up Virgil’s lone failure now? Perhaps Dante is still feeling somewhat indignant for having been induced to cause harm to the plant that housed the consciousness of Pier delle Vigne. In any case, he asks, who is the giant who seems so unaffected by the burning? While everyone else howls, he just scowls! Before Virgil has the chance to respond (or even acknowledge Dante’s dig), the object of their focus notices them and boastfully tells the story of his death (49-60).
As it turns out, he is one of the seven kings who laid siege to the ancient city of Thebes in the generation before the Trojan War; this conflict was a popular theme for both Greek (e.g., Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes) and Roman (e.g., Statius, Thebaid) dramatists and poets to address. His name is Capaneus, a warrior of such stunning arrogance that he was reputed to pray only to his own right hand. Having bested the city’s defenses, he defied not only its patron gods, but also Jupiter (Rome’s equivalent of Zeus) himself. That blasphemy earned him a one-way trip to Hell via a thunderbolt blast. Ever since then, he hasn’t changed at all: “That which I was alive, so I am while dead” (51). Millennia in Hell have only further confirmed his earthly character.
Virgil, having finally found his voice, responds vehemently: “O Capaneus, for your arrogance that is not quenched, you’re punished all the more: no torture other than your own madness could offer pain enough to match your wrath” (63-66). This fierce rebuke gestures at something really important: although subjection to the fireflakes and burning sands is certainly a painful forensic punishment, Capaneus’ own pompous pride and resentful rage comprise an intrinsic punishment that is actually worse in the long run. An eternity of remaining locked into the same attitudes and words that got him killed, neither willing nor able to change, isolated within himself even amidst a crowd of other sufferers? Capaneus is in a Hell of his own making, and it has nothing to do with the heat. (Note: if this sounds to you at all like The Great Divorce, keep in mind that C.S. Lewis drew much inspiration from Dante!)
One final comment on the idea of violence against God is in order. In each era of its history, the Christian tradition has tried to engage with contemporary cultural and philosophical trends to explain how God interacts with people. In medieval culture, when absolute monarchs ruled over a rigidly stratified class system, the metaphor of God as a great king worthy of ultimate honor deeply resonated. In this context, any insult to the king’s dignity (let alone blasphemy against God) would be unthinkable, truly tantamount to violence. Several centuries earlier, trying to prove the compelling rationality of faith to skeptical Greek philosophers, Christian apologists adopted the categories associated with their interlocutors’ conception of God as the “Unmoved Mover,” such as omnipotence, immutability, and impassibility. On this account, violence against God is not even possible, because the all-powerful God can neither change nor suffer. And several centuries earlier, Christianity’s ancestors (Jewish prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel) incorporated an element of vulnerability when they employed the analogy of a broken marriage, with the covenant-keeping God as a jilted husband, heartbroken and angry over his partner’s infidelity (expressed in the people’s idolatry and injustice). Strikingly, the Gospels address all of these aspects in their portrayal of the Passion of Christ: in Jesus, God the great king embraces human weakness, makes himself vulnerable, suffers lethal violence, heals broken relationships—and forgives even those who blaspheme against him.
We’ll remain by the burning sands for the next week. So be sure to watch out for fireflakes, drink plenty of water, and get some rest. We continue with Inferno Canto 15 on Wednesday.
Yours on the journey,
Joshua
“The Meteorite” by C.S. Lewis (1946)
Among the hills a meteorite
Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,
And wind and rain with touches light
Made soft, the contours of the stone.
Thus easily can Earth digest
A cinder of sidereal fire,
And make her translunary guest
The native of an English shire.
Nor is it strange these wanderers
Find in her lap their fitting place,
For every particle that’s hers
Came at the first from outer space.
All that is Earth has once been sky;
Down from the sun of old she came,
Or from some star that travelled by
Too close to his entangling flame.
Hence, if belated drops yet fall
From heaven, on these her plastic power
Still works as once it worked on all
The glad rush of the golden shower.
The Legend of the Seven Against Thebes