The Limits of Our Reason are the Limits of Our World.
(Canto IV, Inferno): Limbo, Virtuous Pagans and the Unbaptised.
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Welcome to Dante Read-Along!
Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide is the great Roman poet Virgil and in this fourth Canto we wake up in the first circle of Hell. You can find the main page of the read-long right here, reading schedule here, and the list of characters here (coming soon).
In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character and symbolism explanations.
All wonderful illustrations are done specially for Dante read-along by one and only Luana Montebello.
This Week’s Circle ⭕️ : The First Circle
Dante was revived from his swoon by a thunderclap - He and Virgil are at the edge of the misty abyss - They enter the First Circle, the realm of Limbo - Christ entering Hell to rescue the Old Testament figures - The great poets of antiquity welcome Virgil and then Dante into their midst - The castle with seven walls - The virtuous pagans and great figures of the past - The statesmen and writers and philosophers - Dante and Virgil depart to venture to the Second Circle
Canto IV: Summary 🌒
Canto IV opens as Dante, revived by a thunderclap, adjusted to all of the sensations of the strange environment in which he found himself.
In truth I found myself upon the brink
of an abyss, the melancholy valley
containing thundering, unending wailings.
Inferno IV.7-9
Dante and Virgil, having crossed the River Acheron, have traversed boundary after boundary into liminal space until they are within the First Circle, the obscuring mist a shroud over what is yet unknown.
“Let us descend into the blind world now” Virgil instructs Dante, as the air trembled with sighs. The First Circle contains Limbo, the place of “sorrows without torments” (IV.28), where, Virgil says, “we have no hope and yet we live in longing” (IV.42). He explains the role of that place:
They did not sin; and yet, though they have merits,
That’s not enough, because they lacked baptism,
The portal of the faith that you embrace.
And if they lived before Christianity,
They did not worship God in fitting ways;
And of such spirits I myself am one.
Inferno IV.34-39
As one commentator explained it, “after those who refused choice come those without opportunity of choice.”1 Virgil is referring to those who lived without sin, yet were not baptised in the Christian tradition. The virtuous pagans placed here, while living nobly, still held original sin that was not cleansed through baptism, and so could not enter into Paradise.
Dante asks if anyone has ever risen from the estate of Hell into the higher regions of the afterlife. Can one move from the region of Hell up into Purgatory or even Paradise? Virgil tells him of the only time such a thing had happened, upon the arrival of a Great Lord who rescued the shades of early Biblical figures such as Adam and Abel, Noah, Moses, and Abraham, David and Rachel.
This is the Harrowing of Hell, the details of which are drawn from a variety of biblical interpretations and apocryphal books; that after his crucifixion and before his resurrection, Christ entered into Limbo and released the Old Testament patriarchs, prophets, and other holy figures.
Dante saw a light ahead in the wood, and by that light he saw honorable men. There was a light here in the darkness of hell, wisdom shining brightly, a beacon of light.
Who are these souls whose dignity has kept
Their way of being, separate from the rest?
Inferno IV.74-75
The shades call homage to Virgil, as this is the place from whence he came to Dante to guide him. Giants of the classical world greet them, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. Dante saw Virgil as rising above even these, showcasing to what heights he honored him. As the shades of these poets talked, they opened their circle to Dante, who joined as one of them. This is a simple yet profound moment; Dante was continuing their classical tradition of wisdom through poetry. Boccaccio says in his Life of Dante that “by him all the beauties of the common speech were set to fitting numbers; by him dead poetry may properly be said to have been revived.”2
So did we move along and toward the light,
Talking of things about which silence here
Is just as seemly as our speech was there
Inferno IV.103-105
Here, the poets conversed together, and I imagine the secrets of those poets touched by the Muses were spoken of, and that they spoke of them as familiarly as we would speak of earthly things.
The poets came to a beautiful castle fortified with seven wall and a stream round the outside. The symbolism for this castle has been thought of as representing the seven liberal arts, or the gates of wisdom so revered in the classical and medieval world, that must be passed to attain to the heights of understanding. Dante passed through these gates with his fellow poets into a meadow at the castle’s center, similar to the Elysian fields where Aeneas visits with his father in his visit to the Underworld.
Here begins a listing of the figures that Dante saw as upholding that classical tradition, both in exempla and by their works.
First we see Electra with Hector, Aeneas, and Caesar.
Then Camilla, Penthesilea, Latinus and Lavina.
Brutus and Tarquin, Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia. Saladin.
Aristotle, Socrates and Plato. Democritus, Diogenes, Thales, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Zeno and Heraclitus.
Dioscorides, Orpheus, Tully, Linus, and Seneca the Younger. Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Averroes.
Dante is nodding to all of these characters from a wide range of thought in antiquity to show the tradition that he is working in: the Classical tradition that honors elegance, style, and form while communicating ideas through traditional stories and myths, universal truths of the human condition.
The group was so rich in ideas, wisdom, and action, that Dante could not express everything about them that he would have wished to express within the Canto; he had to move on, following Virgil, the darkness and grief around him thickening.
💭 Philosophical Exercises:
Virtuous Pagans and the Limits of Human Reason 🪶
Dear reader,
Allow me to begin this philosophical exercise by quoting the last lines of this canto:
I cannot here describe them all in full;
my ample theme impels me onward so:
what’s told is often less than the event.
Please keep these lines in your mind throughout our read-along. This post could have been twice or thrice longer, in fact sometimes I feel that each canto can become a fully fledged book, but the genius of Dante sets my limits. I try to stay focused, not to follow ‘a whirling banner’ as neutrals do in our previous exploration.
My plan is to write and expand on each canto in the future, to cover what I missed. If there are parts of canto I did not shine a light that it deserves feel free to add your thoughts and insights in the comments, or to the chat thread that was specially open for it.
I. There is wisdom that cannot be understood by our intellect alone.
We descend into Limbo. ‘Limbus’ in Latin means ‘edge’, and the first inhabitants that Dante meets in Inferno are unbaptised and virtuous pagans.
It was an extraordinarily radical move for Dante, in his time, to place pagans in Limbo. Even more daring, however, was his decision to include figures like Averroes, Avicenna, and Saladin among them. One might speculate that the pagans, at least, had not been exposed to the truths of Christianity, whereas these individuals were aware of it yet practiced Islam—a faith Dante regarded as heretical.
Once again, Dante’s descent into each successive circle mirrors the nature of those he is destined to encounter there.
“Let us descend into the blind world now3,”
the poet, who was deathly pale, began;
“I shall go first and you will follow me.”~ words spoken by Virgil to Dante, Inferno IV
‘The blind world’ and in the previous terza rima we heard Dante saying that he gazed into its pit and ‘couldn’t discern a thing’.
They say Hell is a dreadful place, but at least the company there is bound to be fascinating. I do not think that this humorous expression could be applied to the rest of the inhabitants of Inferno, but it certainly does apply to those who are in Limbo.
How I wish to meet Cicero, to talk to Seneca, to Zeno, or if I could, to talk to all of the poets and philosophers whom Dante meets there. I own nearly every book available in English by Cicero and Seneca, and they have profoundly shaped both the way I write but also why I write.
The historical figures we meet lead extraordinary honourable lives, they reached inscrutable heights and at their pagan time they were regarded to be close to gods. For Dante, who meets his other guides such as Homer and Ovid, Horace and Lucan, it seemed unfair that these noble souls should suffer in Inferno in the same way as other sinners.
They had a clear sight of wisdom, but were blind to the Divine truth. They sigh, their noble souls yearning for Heavenly Grace, much like a healthy body thirsts for water in a desolate desert.
Homer and his noble company occupy a space that lies between the neutral souls encountered earlier and the inhabitants of Purgatory. They are too noble to dwell deeper in Hell, unlike the former, yet they lack the divine grace needed to ascend to Purgatory. (Though here, Dante, in his sense of justice, does make certain exceptions.)
In fact the word magnanimità is the key in this canto. Magnanimità is described in the Italian dictionary as ‘grandezza, nobiltà d'animo, generosità disinteressata.’ (grandness, nobility of the soul, uninterested generosity.) Saladin, the great Muslim commander, is also here, because even an enemy can be noble. (more on this in a theme section called ‘Your Enemies Can Be Better Than Your Friends’)
In this edge of Hell, Dante tells us about the limits of the human reason. Whether the great Homer, who holds a sword in his hand that symbolises the genre of epic poetry, or the Islamic polymath Averroes whose intelligence echoes to our day - all of them led noble and honourable lives unaware of the limits of their reason and intellect.
So did we move along and toward the light,
talking of things about which silence here
is just as seemly as our speech was there.
What did Dante and his great companions discuss during their walk that must be left in silence?
Secrets of poetry? A hidden knowledge available just to them?
The great author of Paradise Lost, John Milton, once remarked that even the greatest poets cannot fully comprehend how their Muse inspires them—how lines take shape in their minds and flow onto the page. Perhaps, Dante suggests here that even these figures, so devoted to wisdom and intellect, are ultimately limited in their understanding of their own extraordinary talents.
II. How to Defend Your Mind Against Information?
We reached the base of an exalted castle,
encircled seven times by towering walls,
defended all around by a fair stream.Inferno, IV, 106-108
The ‘fair stream’ symbolises eloquence and seven towering walls are seven liberal arts (or areas of knowledge and investigation) that was professed in medieval and Renaissance period.
I found an incredibly practical lesson in the symbolism that Dante uses here. Why are seven liberal arts surrounded by a stream of eloquence?
The whole purpose of intellect is to transform what at first seems chaotic working of nature into a coherent vision. To make any knowledge practical to oneself and to the humanity one should first be able to articulate it properly. Your mind may hold countless fragments of information, but it is your ability to eloquently articulate how these pieces connect that transforms mere information into true knowledge.
Why are these seven towering walls defended by the river of elocution? Because information without articulation cannot be called knowledge. We need to defend the knowledge we have from the noise of information and we can do this by filtering it out through the ‘fair stream’.
This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭
(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)
Themes 🖼️ :
Your enemies can be better to you than your friends. ⚔️
Cicero’s ethics had a profound influence on Dante’s worldview and his masterpiece. In his essay called On Friendship, Cicero writes that a true friendship is possible only among two good people. He says that friendship is two people supporting each others’ better selves. A friendship is not a partnership in wickedness, but a mutual pursuit of virtue.
Saladin led Muslim armies against Christians in the Third Crusade. Dante places him here, next to Caesar and Homer, because Saladin’s conduct in that war was noble to his enemies. He was praised by Christians for magnanimity. This is what Cicero tells in essay as well, that a noble enemy is better than a wicked friend.
Why Virgil?
I wonder what the other great poets think (if they do of course) when they meet Virgil and Dante. The divine grace sent Virgil to guide our pilgrim, but why not Homer or Ovid?
Quotes 🖋️
(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):
“O you who honor art and science both,
who are these souls whose dignity has kept
their way of being, separate from the rest?”
Characters:
- In Order of Appearance -
- Adam - The first man created in Genesis who lived in the Garden of Eden with Eve.
- Abel - The son of Adam and Eve, who was slain by his brother Cain.
- Noah - The Old Testament patriarch who built the Ark and survived the flood with his family and menagerie of animals.
- Moses - Old Testament prophet who led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt.
- Abraham - Patriarch of the Old Testament, he was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac as a testament to God.
- David - A king of Israel, and the father of Solomon.
- Israel and Rachel - Jacob of the Old Testament, who fathered the Twelve Tribes of Israel, was renamed Israel by God. His wife was Rachel, for whom he worked 14 years to earn the right to marry her. Israel’s father was Isaac.
- Homer - The revered epic poet from ancient Greece, and the name given to the author/s of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dante would have only known of Homer through fragments and quotes, not through the complete Greek texts.
- Horace - Poet of the Roman Empire and contemporary of Virgil, Horace composed odes, satires and lyric poetry.
- Ovid - Poet of the Roman Empire, Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses and the Amores, among other works. His Metamorphoses was a key source of myth for Dante.
- Lucan - The nephew of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, Lucan wrote epic historical poetry - The Pharsalia - about the Civil Wars between Caesar and Pompey. He was ordered to suicide by the Emperor Nero, as was Seneca, for his supposed role in the Pisonian conspiracy.
- Seven Liberal Arts - Education method in the medieval era, it was composed of the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium included Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium included Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Harmony.
- Electra - One of the sisters of the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas. Through her son Dardanus, son of Zeus, came the ancestors of the Trojan race.
- Hector - The Trojan hero of Homer’s Iliad, who is slain by Achilles.
- Aeneas - The legendary founder of Rome and hero of Virgil’s Aeneid.
- Caesar - Julius Caesar, general, consul, and eventual dictator of the Roman Republic.
- Camilla - In the Aeneid, Camilla is the daughter of King Metabus of the Volsci, who ultimately fights with the Trojans on the side of Turnus (See Canto I.107).
- Penthesilea - Queen of the Amazons, she fought with the Trojans in the Aeneid and was killed by the Greek hero Achilles.
- Latinus and Lavinia - King of Latium and his daughter Lavinia in the Aeneid; when Lavinia was betrothed to Aeneas over her previous suitor Turnus, a war between Aeneas and Turnus ended with Turnus’ defeat and Aeneas’ founding of Rome.
- Lucretia, Brutus, and Tarquin - In an account of the Roman historian Livy, upon the rape of Lucretia by Tarquin, the son of the Roman king, she called her father and husband to announce the crime and then swore them to vengeance. She then committed suicide. Her brother Lucius Brutus swore to uphold her cause and the Tarquins were driven from Rome.
- Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia - Influential women of Rome; Julia was the daughter of Julius Caesar and wife of Pompey, against whom Caesar fought the civil war. Marcia was the wife of Cato the Younger and Cornelia was the daughter of Scipio Africanus.
- Saladin - 12th century A.D. Egyptian sultan and commander revered for his justice and generosity as a ruler.
- Aristotle - As Virgil was known simply as “the poet,” Aristotle in the medieval era was known simply as “the philosopher.” A student of Plato, he was tutor to Alexander the Great. His influence on medieval science and philosophy is unparalleled.
- Socrates - The ancient Greek philosopher of whom Plato wrote his dialogues.
- Plato - Student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, he is the author of dozens of dialogues; the only one know to Dante would have been the Timaeus with its account of creation and cosmology.
- Democritus - Philosopher of antiquity who wrote upon natural science, mathematics, and ethics, including what is considered the earliest theory of the atom.
- Diogenes - The Cynic philosopher of the third century B.C.
- Thales - Thales of Miletus was a Greek philosopher of antiquity, one of the Seven Wise Men of Athens.
- Anaxagoras - Pre-Socratic philosopher with theories on Mathematics and Astronomy.
- Empedocles - Pre-Socratic philosopher from the 5th century BC, whose primary work was a philosophical poem entitled On Nature in which combinations of the four elements are affected by the forces of Love and Strife.
- Zeno - The founder of the Stoic school of philosophy in Athens.
- Heraclitus - Ancient Greek philosopher, circa 500 BC, from Ephesus in modern Turkey.
Dioscorides - A first/second century CE Greek physician who also wrote on herbs and botany.
- Orpheus - Poet of Greek myth who charmed with his music and lyre, the gift of Apollo He traveled to the Underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice, only to lose her at the last moment by ignoring the injunction of Persephone to avoid looking back at her before they reached the surface.
- Tully - Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman orator and philosopher from the first century BC.
- Linus - Ancient Greek poet and musician.
- Seneca the Younger - Stoic philosopher and dramatist who served as tutor and advisor to the Emperor Nero, and author of Epistulae Morales (Moral Letters) and de Ira (On Anger) among many other works. He was forced into suicide in 65 AD by Nero.
- Euclid - Ancient Greek mathematician, from the fourth century BC, who wrote the treatise Elements on the principals of geometry.
- Ptolemy - An astronomer and mathematician from Alexandria in the second century AD, his conception of the earth centric model of the universe held sway in Europe for over a thousand years until the advent of the Copernican system. Dante’s conception of the cosmos was based on the Ptolemaic system.
- Hippocrates - The famed ancient Greek physician, known as the Father of Medicine and the founder of the Hippocratic Oath.
- Galen - Second century AD Greek physician whose influence was felt far into the Middle Ages.
- Avicenna - Philosopher and physician in the Islamic Golden Age of the 11th century AD, who wrote on highly diversified topics, from alchemy to medicine to poetry.
- Averroes - 12th century AD Islamic scholar, commentator on Aristotle.
Dorothy Sayers, Hell 95n
Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante 39
There have been speculations whether Virgil means the entire Inferno as ‘blind world’ or just ‘Limbo’. Hollanders (Jean and Robert) say that the great guide means only Inferno and I must say, when I first read The Divine Comedy I was under the same impression.
These commentaries are a treasure house of many rooms. Thank you so much. Of many treasures here, this observation I thought particularly insightful: “The whole purpose of intellect is to transform what at first seems chaotic working of nature into a coherent vision. To make any knowledge practical to oneself and to the humanity one should first be able to articulate it properly. Your mind may hold countless fragments of information, but it is your ability to eloquently articulate how these pieces connect that transforms mere information into true knowledge.”
Your commentaries are just fantastic, Vashik! Thank you so much for doing this read-along. I've tried to read TDC on several occasions and was afraid that I might go to my grave first. Now, it seems I will be getting some idea of where I'm going.