INFERNO, Episode 56. Mapping The Uncharted At The Beginning Of The Age Of Discovery: Inferno, Canto XI, Lines 16 - 27

As our pilgrim, Dante, rests under the shade of a heretic pope’s tomb, Virgil begins to map lower hell for us. And he does so in a very specific way: he explains the nature of the lowest forms of human evil.

In other words, a map is a sacred document, not just a physical artifact—which is keeping with the nature of maps on the cusp of the age of Western exploration.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we think through Virgil’s first explanation for the sins ahead, the lowest bits of the abyss: injury and malice, force and fraud, powerful combinations that show us the worst humans are capable of.

Here is my English translation of INFERNO, Canto XI, lines 16 - 27:

“My son, down inside these rocks,

He began to say, “Are three smaller circles,

A concentric gradient, like the ones you’ve just left.

“All are stuffed with wretched spirits;

But so that the mere sight of them will be enough for you,

Listen to how and why these are constrained.

“Injustice is the finish line of every evil

That picks up the hatred of heaven;

And the end of it all, whether by force or by fraud, is to hurt someone else.

“But because fraud is an evil that is especially human,

It displeases God even more; that’s why the fraudulent

Are situated lower down and more pain assails them.”