What happens when you come face to face with history? And not the history of the great heroes. Instead, the history of the pain your own family has suffered. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as Dante-the-pilgrim comes face to face with Farinata degli Uberti in this complicated and rewarding passage from INFERNO.

In the sixth circle of hell, we haven't yet seen any of the damned. Instead, Dante, our pilgrim, and Virgil are picking their way along a "secret path" between the burning sarcophagi and the walls of Dis. Here, Virgil brings up the Last Judgment. But he also starts to pick a fight with our pilgrim. Or maybe Virgil calls out our pilgrim who then responds with a little passive-aggressive anger.

Walking with Dante, our pilgrim, we’ve passed through the gates of Dis and have come to the sixth circle of hell, the ring of the heretics. It’s curious, because we’ve stepped beyond Virgil’s landscape from THE AENEID, we’ve stepped beyond the seven deadly sins as a structuring device for the poem, and we’ve stepped into a world where politics and poetry show what people do for but mostly TO each other.

We’ve been standing at the walls of Dis forever! Here comes help . . . in the form of Mercury? The archangel Michael? Christ? Jesus is said to be the word of God made flesh. Mercury brought down the words of the gods. Is this the coming of eloquence as we depart the last of Virgil’s world to fully enter Dante’s imagination of hell?

Standing in front of the walls of Dis with out pilgrim, Dante, and Virgil, we encounter the thickest, densest bit of classical imagery we’ve yet seen in INFERNO. And we’re asked to interpret it as an allegory. More than that, we’re asked to go back to classical literature and interpret it as allegory, bringing forward that interpretation into this passage. Complicated, no doubt!

We’ve built quite an interpretive framework on Dante’s masterpiece, COMEDY. Which brings up the question: Did the poet intend all of this? The answer has been various over the historical ages. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I give what I think is the definitive answer: No, but also yes. How did our poet construct a work that invites so much movement inside it?

Dante and Virgil are caught outside the walls of Dis, the city of hell. Virgil seems particularly stuck in a place of doubtful faith. Or maybe faithful doubt. To remedy that, he launches into the story of his first descent to the bottom of hell—thereby complicating Dante’s masterwork COMEDY, causing a rupture in the very fabric of its fiction, repositioning Dante’s work against other classical works, and sticking Virgil himself squarely in the landscape of Lucan’s PHARSALIA.

Dante the pilgrim is left alone at the walls of Dis. But more importantly, this passage from INFERNO may be the most human since the opening lines of Canto I. So much is changing! Virgil is getting a backstory. Virgil is developing interiority (or an inner emotional space). Virgil is becoming more fatherly. All at the moment when he abandons the pilgrim—and maybe the poet, too.

Dante-the-pilgrim and Virgil come to an important barrier in hell: the walls of Dis, the geopolitical center of INFERNO. But Dante-the-poet also comes to an important barrier. Aeneas doesn’t enter Dis in THE AENEID. We have reached the limits of Virgil-the-poet’s imagination. But not Dante’s. He will eventually go where his master can’t.

Our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, are on a boat across the Styx in the fifth circle of hell when a damned soul rises out of the muck and threatens them. This passage is packed with interpretive nuggets: Bible verses, personal vendetta, call-outs to previous cantos, set-ups for subsequent cantos. But most importantly, this passage is about story. The poet is settling into his form. And the results are nothing short of revolutionary.

Rather than picking apart a single passage from Dante’s COMEDY, this episode presents the entirety of the fifth circle of INFERNO, the wrathful. We’ve already had three episodes on this circle—and we’ll have more to come. But right here, I’d like to stop and read you the entire story. Because storytelling is becoming the point!

The fifth circle. The wrathful. Except where are the damned? Not here. Instead, this passage is full of all sorts of problems: it opens with a scene of interpreting, it leads out to a rather obscure figure from classical literature, and it finishes up by putting the pilgrim firmly in his body. Dante-the-poet is never satisfied. His art is ever-changing. And it’s finally settled into the very thing that will make it last: storytelling.

Here’s the problem: there are no manuscripts of COMEDY in Dante’s hand. So what do we have? And can we trust it? Here’s my brief history on the problems of manuscript transmission for Dante’s masterwork. Sure, it’s a bit in the weeds. But weeds can be fascinating!

The famous break! It’s at this point that many see a stop-restart in the poem. True, it does back up, just about the only time the poem does. And true, Boccaccio tried to explain the break with a story. But perhaps we don’t need his story. Perhaps we can understand the shifting dynamics of the poem the poet needs to write by looking at the poem itself and how it carries on from this point.

We descend a full level while still in a canto! After the avaricious (and the prodigal spenders), the pilgrim and his guide scramble down to the next circle of hell: the wrathful. Or really, the wrathful in their two states, a perversion of some pretty standard medieval imagery. But also this section of the canto is stocked with gorgeous, naturalistic imagery. The poem is settling into its stride—despite the fact that it’s breaking the walls of the cantos.

After we’ve seen the ones who hoard and the ones who spend too much, Virgil steps back and offers a boiler-plate sermon straight out of Boethius’ THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY. But maybe that sermon’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the poet has left us some hints that there’s more afoot here than may first meet the eye.

The clergy. Avarice. And Aristotle, too. It’s all packed into this dense passage from Canto VII of INFERNO. I’ve got some thoughts on the anti-clerical nature of some passage of COMEDY. And some further thoughts on why Dante-the-pilgrim doesn’t seem to recognize anyone in the fourth circle of hell.

The fourth circle. The great enemy. But more questions than we can imagine. Who is this blocking figure at the entrance to the circle? What’s he saying? Why’s he so easily put down? And why does Virgil have such a grip on Christian theology all of a sudden? So many questions—with no time to answer them as we’re hoisted up to get a bird’s-eye view of an entire circle of hell for the first time in the poem.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil walk on among the gluttons discussing the only thing possible: the last judgment and the resurrection of the body.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil have made it to the 3rd circle of INFERNO, the gluttons, where they encounter a surprising future-teller in the rancid muck.