Dante's Inferno: Meeting Lucifer (Lecture on Cantos XXIII-XXXIV) (Patreon)

'He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins the tears ran mixed with bloody froth and pus. In every mouth he worked a broken sinner between his rake-like teeth. Thus we kept three in eternal pain at his eternal dinner.'

Today we descend to the very deepest circle of hell and finally meet Dante's Satan in the epic, sublime, and endlessly powerful Inferno.

We're discussing metaphorical prowess, ego death, rebirth, identifying hypocrisy, realism vs allegory, how to conduct a moral inventory, making the poem personal, evil counsellors, the worst traitors in human history, Dante's Lucifer vs the biblical devil, the end of the Inferno, and much more.

Timestamps:

0:00 reaching the end of Dante’s Inferno

2:00 Virgil protects Dante like a mother

4:00 hypocrisy as most common flaw

6:00 how hypocrites are punished in hell

8:00 when the fleeting becomes eternal

10:00 vernacular sculpted into poetry

12:00 Caiaphas & Christ’s crucifixion

14:00 Dante’s mastery of the metaphor

16:00 exhaustion from moral inventory

18:00 power of reason armed by faith

19:00 realism embedded in the allegory

21:00 the two adventures of the poem

22:00 how modern readers can benefit

24:00 how I made this poem personal

25:00 the bolgia reserved for thieves

28:00 on not getting away with anything

30:00 remember your personal journey

32:00 sublime serpentine metamorphoses

34:00 Dante’s poetic anxiety of influence

36:00 Dante Alighieri vs Lucan & Ovid

38:00 one of the best cantos in Inferno

39:00 ‘as many fireflies as the peasant sees’

41:00 Dante’s obsession with the fall of Troy

44:00 Ulysses & Diomede as evil counsellors

47:00 appreciating Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’

49:00 Pope Boniface VIII gets it again

51:00 on the different sowers of discord

53:00 most grotesque passage in the Inferno

55:00 Dante assaults the olfactory again

57:00 the falsifiers punished in hell

58:00 the counterfeiter vs false witness

59:00 watching sinners fight each other

1:01:00 a mental health assignment for you

1:03:00 giants guarding the ninth circle

1:05:00 Nimrod & the Tower of Babel

1:06:00 ‘I dreaded death as never before’

1:08:00 reaching Cocytus in the ninth circle

1:10:00 Cain as traitor against his kin

1:12:00 biblical irony in Dante’s Inferno

1:13:00 Dante kicking heads in Antenora

1:16:00 Judas Iscariot in darkest pit of hell

1:19:00 Brutus & Cassius in Judecca

1:22:00 reaching Lucifer on Cocytus

1:24:00 Milton’s Satan vs Dante’s Satan

1:25:00 Satan weeping blood for all eternity

1:26:00 biblical Satan vs Dante’s Satan

1:29:00 reaching the end of the Inferno

1:31:00 Dante’s Purgatorio & Paradiso

1:33:00 how to reread Dante’s Inferno

1:34:00 what did you make of this work?

1:35:00 personal congratulations on reading

Resources:

• Music Appreciation: As outlined in the discussion, I recommend structuring your reread of the Inferno by flipping through it again whilst listening to this soundtrack. Some clips even have corresponding timestamps for which part of the music corresponds to which canto. Many talented musicians came together to craft a unique soundscape for the different circles of hell. Check out the Lost Poet/Earth's Surface for the beginning to whet your appetite. And let us know which piece of music you like the most.

• Divina Commedia : Reading the Inferno during the dark autumn months has been such a powerful experience. But remember that this is just the first part of or sublime poetic triptych. There are two more canticles in the Divine Comedy, which offer a very different reading experience, covering the rest of Dante the Pilgrim's journey: Purgatorio and Paradiso. If you haven't already, you may wish to treat yourself to an edition that has all three parts together, like this one by John Ciardi. There is also this beautiful hardback, replete with Gustave Doré illustrations and translated by Longfellow, which is set to be published very soon.

• Portable Dante: I have spent the last few months carrying around my chunky Divine Comedy almost everywhere I go. And I have found this book to be one of the best conversation starters. So many people are intrigued when they see this work specifically and want to discuss it. But carrying around the entire Commedia could be overkill. So Mark Musa has sublimely collated parts of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, and also La Vita Nuova, together in a wonderful Penguin paperback here, so you can more easily carry heaven and hell with you over the course of your day.

• Classical Expansion: Now you have read Dante's Inferno, you may find it rewarding to sample some of the other great epics in the tradition. You can come forward in time and appreciate John Milton's Paradise Lost, or you can go back to Dante's greatest influence and check out Virgil's Aeneid, or Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. There are so many great translations available, but I am currently very partial to the Robert Fitzgerald for all three. Or you may wish to choose Ovid's Metamorphoses. I love the Arthur Golding translation, which influenced Shakespeare, and the Mandelbaum or Melville translation.

• Rereading Exercise: Go back through your copy of the Inferno, alight upon the passages that you marked, and spend time with your most resonant lines. Why did they leap out at you at this specific time in your life? For a great focusing exercise: identify your top three favourite cantos and your three least favourite cantos. Why do you like or dislike them? You'll likely find that the cantos you love the most have your affection for multiple reasons. Perhaps they are aesthetically pleasing, cognitively challenging, and also speak to you on a deep personal level. Give yourself some time and space to let the ideas percolate and consolidate in your mind. And let us know your choice of favourite lines and cantos because it will be fascinating to compare amongst ourselves.

• Our Next Great Book: Now that we have made it through the heart of darkness that is Dante's Inferno, we will be forging on into a tremendous novel. This weekend coming, we will have our introductory 'how to read' video for Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. In the next few days, we will also unveil the chosen story for the Secret Seasonal Dickens and talk about our approach. But first, you may wish to secure your copy of Hardy and start getting excited for that. I recommend the Oxford Classics edition for paperback and Everyman's Library for hardback.

Questions for You:

1) What did you make of the end of the Inferno?

2) What will you remember most from your journey through Dante's hell?

3) Do you see yourself exploring the next two parts of the Divine Comedy?

4) Which cantos were your favourites? And least favourites? And why?

5) How would you persuade another to read Dante? And what advice would you give to facilitate a meaningful reading experience?

And please let us know what lines, passages, or ideas have stood out to you the most from this part of the poem. Dante said he wished his readers to gather fruit from this work, so let us know what you have gathered from your journey through the Inferno.

Congratulations on reading Dante's Inferno, everybody!