Pier delle Vigne’s second speech. After some hesitation—and the first words from our pilgrim, Dante, since Canto X—Pier sets into an explanation of how he became a bush and what will happen to his body in the resurrection. Seems like a simple metamorphosis of an Ovid text. And one of Jesus’s parables. And other New Testament passages. All while Virgil spouts heresy. In other words, brace yourself for sheer brilliance.

Dante, our pilgrim, has done what his guide advised: he’s torn a branch from a bramble to find blood and air—and words! Pouring out. A rhetorical flourish from one of the most engaging, troubling sinners in hell. A tour de force of language. All in a passage about how you can’t trust what you read. Which brings up uncomfortable questions about Dante’s poem. In other words, our poet’s playing with literary suicide.

Our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, have entered the wood of the suicides in the second circle of the seventh ring of hell. But there’s more than one sort of suicide. There’s also squandering everything you have. And then even more: There’s literary suicide. That is, writing a text that stretches credulity too far. Which seems to be the game our poet is playing. How can you trust his text, if seeing is believing?

Canto XIII of Dante’s INFERNO is one of the most brilliant in the entire hellscape. It rivals those with Francesca and Farinata. But before you can experience this tour de force, you need to know a couple of classical texts that rattle around in the canto. Here’s my take on a passage from Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES (book IX, the story of Dyope) and two passage from Book III of Virgil’s AENEID, the initial moments of Aeneas’ flight from burning Troy.

It’s taken us a long time to finally see those who have been violent against others—and it’s almost anticlimactic after a Minotaur and the centaurs. What’s going on in this very strange canto from Inferno? It might be the problem of corporeality in the poem. Or perhaps the poet’s own guilt. Or even the changing notion of who Dante the pilgrim is inside the magnificent poem.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil walk right up to the centaurs—who notice 1) that the pilgrim is in his body and 2) that Virgil is courtly to them. Virgil even flatters them with periphrasis. Would they get the reference to Beatrice? No, but we do. Which means that COMEDY is starting to refer back to itself in this passage which may shift in tone from deadly serious to tongue firmly in cheek.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil arrive on the shores of the boiling river of blood to meet, not the sinners, but their tormentors: the centaurs. But isn’t the focus supposed to be on the violent, on the evil being punished? This is a strange and complicated moment for the poet who seems to realize that surface and depth are not always an easy unity.

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil have made it down the rock slide—and our pilgrim has gone noticeably quiet. Virgil thinks he knows why. He thinks Dante has questions about the landscape. Does he? Whatever the answer, Virgil then launches into more of his backstory, his life in the afterlife outside of COMEDY. It’s a curious passage that turns stranger by the line.

Dante and Virgil walk back out to the edge of the abyss and confront two roadblocks to the seventh circle of INFERNO, the first part of lower hell: the ruins of an avalanche and the Minotaur, the “infamy of Crete.” Both blocks are actually fraught for the COMEDY’s poetics and thematics. Our pilgrim needs to get down the slope. But first we need to know what it all means.

Over a century ago, an Italian scholar leveled a charge at the likes of me (and maybe you, too). People like us have killed Dante’s COMEDY by papering it over with too many footnotes. We’ve lost the artistry of this magnificent poem. So let’s stop and take a breath before we descend to the circle of the violent. Sure, we’re going to untie a lot of interpretive knots ahead. But for now, look how far we’ve come!

Our pilgrim, Dante, has a second question for Virgil concerning the old poet’s map of hell he’s laid out in INFERNO, Canto XI. What about those usurers? Why are they punished so far down at the bottom of the sins of violence? The answer is utterly unexpected: Virgil offers a theory of art. Truly, this is a map of the road ahead for our pilgrim as he walks across the known universe.

Virgil has completed his map of hell in INFERNO, Canto XI. But maybe he’s not the cartographer he thinks he is. Our pilgrim has questions. In this episode, the first of two. And Virgil? He seems to be furious. What’s more, he doesn’t seem to be the Virgil we first met many cantos ago. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore the changing theology and the changing narrative itself in this complicated passage from COMEDY.

Dante-the-poet’s consummately theological poem has taken a dramatic turn with Virgil’s final bit of his map of the abyss ahead in INFERNO, Canto XI. Our poem is changing from one that diagnoses the human condition to one that diagnoses what ails human society. It is the body politic that is sick. And fraud (not pride) is our greatest sin.

Virgil’s mapping of hell continues with an explanation of the seventh circle of hell. But gone is Aristotle and his golden mean of ethics. Instead, Virgil’s a scholastic! He offers us divisions of the ring into smaller and smaller parts. What’s more, Dante-the-poet is weaving a wild tapestry of Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, the Gospels, and old Roman law into one explanation for the violent.

As our pilgrim rests under the lid of a heretic pope’s tomb, Virgil lays out the first rationale for the lowest parts of the abyss: injustice and malice, force and fraud, powerful combinations of human evil. In other words, Virgil is mapping the world he knows on the cusp of the age of discovery. And he’s giving us the rationale for the regions of the underworld that neither he nor his hero Aeneas could visit in his own poem THE AENEID.

Dante has to force himself away from Farinata and back to Virgil—who then makes a promise that is never fulfilled in COMEDY. The passage out of the sixth circle of hell is a strange one: heretic popes, Beatrice’s eyes, the edge of blasphemy, and the stench of the deepest parts of hell, the place where the poet Vergil and his hero Aeneas never dared to step. But we’re headed right there!

Let’s step back from the lines of Inferno, Canto X, and instead look at its as structure. If we think it through, we’ll realize that we may be misplacing our focus. We tend to see this as Farinata’s canto. But the structure will lead us to realize its Cavalcante’s canto. And mostly, a canto the turns on his horrifying question, “Where is my son?”

Dante and Farinata arrive at a place we could never have predicted. A machismo match has become camaraderie. They see each other as fellow-sufferers and perhaps honor each other, even in hell. Farinata explains the metaphysics of sight in hell. He even gets to name the farthest point in the future ever named in COMEDY. Then Dante, our pilgrim, repents something. But what? And does it do the trick?

Cavalcante sinks back into the tomb in fatherly grief—and Farinata, our austere Greco-Roman statue of Stoicism, is ready to pick up his jabbing fight with our pilgrim right where he left off. Except something strange happens. Farinata softens. He does something no heroic figure would ever do: He sighs. What’s going on in this strange passage about factionalism? How do you come to see your great enemy as human, too?

Dante the pilgrim finds himself face to face with the suffering he himself has caused as the shade of his own poetic friend’s father rises up beside Farinata. Or more than friend. His own poetic rival, Guido Cavalcanti’s father. This is a tough passage, with garbled lines and intentional misunderstandings. And it may tell us that that poet is proving to us that the pilgrim, still sunk in Florentine factionalism, is not ready to be a poet.