Dante : Tale of a Descent into Hell (Sheldon Kopp)

Gustave Doré, Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell, 1861

Extracts from :

Sheldon Kopp

If You Meet the Buddha

Tale of a Descent into Hell

At Easter time, in the Year of Our Lord 1300, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri descended into the Inferno of Hell. Some say that his tale is mainly a medium for exposing the social and political evils of his time. Others insist that Dante represents Mankind, that human life itself is the journey, and that "Hell is the death which must precede rebirth." It is also possible to view his trip as taking place in inner space, as a descent into the pit of his own soul, showing that the sinful soul itself is Hell. I agree with Eliot, that "the aim of the poet is to state a vision ... and that Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory ... or as his comment or reflection, but in terms of something perceived." Open yourself to listening to his tale, if you dare, and surely you will see what he saw.

Midway through his life, Dante, on the eve of Good Friday, 1300, discovers that he has strayed from the True Way of the religious life, and has wandered into the Dark Wood of Error, where he must spend a miserable night. At sunrise, hopeful once more, he turns to

climb the Mount of Joy, only to find that he is distracted and blocked by the Three Beasts of Worldliness: the leopard of malice and fraud, the lion of violence and ambition, and the she-wolf of incontinence. Terrified, he is driven back down into the Wood, and begins to despair. It is then that the Shade of Virgil comes to his aid, explaining that he represents Human Reason, and has been sent to lead Dante out of Error by another path. He will take Dante as far as reason can, and then will turn him over to another guide, Beatrice, the revelation of Divine Love. Virgil leads and Dante follows.

They begin their descent into the pit, for it is only through the recognition of sin that purification may take place. Arriving at the Gates of Hell, Dante reads an inscription

cut deeply into stone:

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

Passing through the Gates, they enter an anteroom filled with noise and confusion. Here are the first of the souls in torment whom Dante will meet. Here are the Opportunists,

those who, in life, pursued neither good nor evil, "who were neither for God nor Satan, but only for themselves."

Here in Hell, they must pursue for Eternity a banner they cannot catch, neither quite in Hen, nor quite out of it.

These wretches never born and never dead ran naked

in a swarm of wasps and hornets that goaded them

the more and the more they fled,

And made their faces stream with bloody gouts of pus

and tears that dribbled to their feet,

To be swallowed there by loathsome worms and

maggots.

Because of the darkness of their sin, they run through darkness. As they pursued every passing opportunity in life, so they must now chase an elusive banner forever. Stung by swarms of conscience, feeding the maggots in death, as they produced moral filth in life, they are punished in accordance with their sins.

This is the Law of Symbolic Retribution, the Immutable Law of Hell. The punishment is already implied in each sin. Turned back upon the sinner, it causes him to suffer in a way he really has brought upon himself. This descent into the pit of his own soul is the journey of every pilgrim. No patient in psychotherapy can recover his own beauty and innocence without first facing the ugliness and evil in himself. Jung tells us we have "dealt the devil ... [no] serious blow by calling him neurosis." The ways in which we live, the experience

of our own sinful souls, still is itself our only Hell.

(...)

Dante describes Hell as a funnel-shaped cave descending to the center of the Earth. Circular ledges line the inside, Circles of Damnation. Descending into this "kingdom of eternal night," on each ledge he and Virgil find the damned souls of the perpetrators of increasingly grievous sins, each group tormented for Eternity by ironically fitting punishments. Carnal sinners, who in life betrayed reason by giving in to their every appetite and abandoning themselves to the wild sweep of their passions, are punished in kind, made to live on a dark ledge, swept 'round forever in the whirlwind of Hell's tempest. Gluttons who wallowed in food and drink, producing nothing but garbage, in Hell must wallow in "putrid slush," while being tom at by Cerebros, the gluttonous, three-headed hound of the pit.

Now it is they themselves who are slavered over. Hoarders and Wasters are divided into two opposing groups, each of which must roll great Dead Weights of Mundanity at each other until they clash in the middle, each excess punishing the other. In the foul slime of the

Marsh of Styx, the Wrathful attack one another. Up through the mud, bubbles rise from the places beneath in which the Sullen are entombed.

Heretics who denied immortality in life, believing instead that with the body dies the soul, must lie forever in open graves surrounded by the flames of God's wrath. In the River of Boiilng Blood lie Murderers and Tyrants, who in life wallowed in the blood of others,

doing violence to their neighbors. Panderers and Seducers, who used others· for their own purposes, now are driven by whip-carrying, homed demons who force them to hurry along endlessly to serve the foul purposes of their own tormentors. Flatterers pay for having heaped false flattery on others, by living forever in "a river of excrement that seemed the overflow of the world's latrines ... [forever] smeared with shit."

Hypocrites march in a slow endless procession. Poetically, they are burdened with cloaks of lead, dazzlingly gilded on the outside, and deadweighted on the inside. Falsifiers, who in life deceived the senses of their fellowmen, now in kind have their own senses offended by darkness and filth, by terrible sounds and smells. And those who betrayed people to whom they were bound by special ties are in the final pit of guilt, the pit of souls who denied love, and so denied God. In the dead center of the earth, they must endure the infernal ice frozen by the loss of all human warmth.

And at the very center is Satan, the King of Hell. The beating of his mighty wings sends out the icy Wind of Depravity, the chilling breath of evil. Once having come to the very center of Evil, having faced every sin and seen its consequences, only now can Dante hope to purify his soul. Only by facing life as it is can he find salvation.

(....)

Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted. Jung points out that "the sick man has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis but how to bear it. For the illness is not a superfluous and senseless burden, it is himself; he himself is that 'other' which we were always trying to shut out."

If we flee from the evil in ourselves, we do it at our hazard. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel. Much of the time I believe that we are all about as good and as bad as one another. A greater capacity for good, such as that to be found in the enlightened therapist, is matched by his increased capacity for even greater evil. As for the patient, "at best ... he should come out of the analysis as he actually is, in harmony with himself, neither good nor bad, but as a man truly is, a natural being."

Dante has descended into the Abyss of Evil; he has had to spend a season in Hell, before he could rise once more to be illumined by the Divine Light. There is no sin he could not find within himself. He is as good and as bad as the rest of us. But even if you should believe

that some men are better than others then I ask you in the name of myself and all of the others who find that we have never had a completely pure motive in our entire lives: "Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned'"

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