Episode 58. The Greatest Sin Isn't Pride--It's Fraud: Inferno, Canto XI, Lines 52 - 66

We’ve left behind the seven deadly sins and we’re moving into the lower parts of hell. What happened to sloth, pride, and envy? Who can say?

What we can say is this: the nature of the offenses are changing (they are more civic than theological). And the character of Virgil is changing (he’s becoming a scholastic theologian). And the nature of the poem itself seems to be altering to diagnose not what’s wrong with humanity per se, but more specifically what’s wrong with human civil society.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we walk through the last bit of Virgil’s lesson outlining hell, his mappa-inferno. The bottom of hell—and the bottom of the universe—is not about what humans do against God. Rather, it’s about what humans do to each other.

In this episode, I go all the way back to line 16 and read all of Virgil’s map of the road ahead. However, the specific passage for this episode is INFERNO, Canto XI, lines 52 - 66. Here’s my English translation:

People can use fraud, by which every conscience is chewed up,

Against someone who trusts them

And against the ones who have invested no trust.

The method of the latter cuts

Only the bond of love that Nature makes;

Thus, in the second circle is nested

Hypocrites, flatterers, and magicians,

Counterfeiters, thieves, and simoniacs,

Panderers, barrators, and similar garbage.

The former method of fraud wipes out

The bonds made by Nature as well as that which is added to it—

Namely, that which is created by a special sort of trust.

Therefore, in the smallest circle, at the point

Of the universe at which Dis is enthroned,

Whoever is a traitor is eternally consumed.