Dante's Divine Comedy

• 1. Read Romans 12:4-11 – “⁴ For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, ⁵ so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. ⁶ Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith; ⁷ or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching; ⁸ he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.

⁹ Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. ¹⁰ Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another; ¹¹ not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord”

Read also 1 Corinthians 12:8-10 – “⁸ for to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, ⁹ to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healings by the same Spirit, ¹⁰ to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.”

How do these two passages connect Canto XX to Canto XIX?

Both include prophecy as a gift of the Spirit. On the one hand, simony pretends that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, of which one is prophecy, can be sold. Sooth-saying, fortune-telling, divination all purport to function as a kind of prophecy not gifted by the Holy Spirit but born of the practitioner’s fraud in exchange for money or other material advantage.

Note that Dante here uses the words canto and canzon which Esolen translates as “canto” and “song” (though other translators translate the latter as “canticle.”

Look at lines 7-9. What does Dante first tell us about the punishment of the sinners here?

They are silent, and they are weeping. They slowly walk at the pace of a solemn religious procession, a litany. Such processions were generally wherein believers pleaded to God for help. Ironically, the soothsayers characteristically regard the future as already determined.

Continue with lines 10-15. What further details of their punishment do these lines reveal?

Their heads (or their torsos) have been twisted so that they can only look backwards, forcing them to always walk backwards. They have “lost the sight of things ahead.”

How do the punishments reveal the contrapasso in this bolgia? See also lines 37-39.

Because they tried to look into the future – or, better, pretended to do so, now they can only look backwards. Their silence, perhaps arising from their twisted throat, reflects the emptiness of their “prophecies.”

Consider the influence of Isaiah 44:25 on Dante’s invention: ““I am the Lord, . . . ²⁵ Who frustrates the signs of the babblers, And drives diviners mad; Who turns wise men backward, And makes their knowledge foolishness.”

Lines 19-26 exhibit again what rhetorical device?

Apostrophe. This is the fourth apostrophe (of seven in the Inferno) directed to the reader specifically.

What do you make of Dante’s use of it?

It seems that Dante is appealing to the reader to excuse his tears at beholding such a grotesque mangling of the human form. Though some may see in these words Dante’s sympathy for the sinners yet again, given his progress and the full impact of this apostrophe, it seems more likely his tears express his grief at witnessing the distortion of the image of God.

Hollander suggests the tears reveal Dante’s guilt about his own involvement in astrological prediction. As a result he presents himself as weeping out of compassion for others, and for himself because of his own errors.

Of course, the apostrophe concludes with the base description of each sinner’s tears trickling down his buttocks’ crack.

In short, the sooth-sayers have looked with wrongful intent into the future.

How do lines 26-30 contribute to our understanding of Dante’s own weeping?

Virgil rebukes Dante for his tears. Virgil’s first sentence (line 27) echoes Christ’s words in Matthew 15:10-16.

¹⁰ When He had called the multitude to Himself, He said to them, “Hear and understand: ¹¹ Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”

¹² Then His disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?”

¹³ But He answered and said, “Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. ¹⁴ Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.”

¹⁵ Then Peter answered and said to Him, “Explain this parable to us.”

¹⁶ So Jesus said, “Are you also still without understanding?”

It would appear that Virgil is rebuking Dante for his failure to react to the diviners’ punishment as exemplifying God’s righteous judgment.

• 2. Lines 31-57 include a sort of catalogue of classical seers. With what injunction does this passage begin?

Virgil instructs Dante to stop weeping and try to understand the nature of the sin by considering the group of “prophets” Virgil will name and detail.

You may find lines 43-45 puzzling. If so, let me know.

“Manly quills” is Esolen’s translation of the Italian maschili penne. In Purgatorio I.42, Dante uses penne to describe Cato’s beard. Therefore, we may interpret the line to refer to Tiresias’ regaining of his beard when he was transformed back into a male. However, penne probably also a pun in this case on the Italian pene, “penis.”

• 3. Lines 58-99 constitute a long digression on the story of Manto, the daughter of Tiresias. Most critics note that this passage contradicts the brief reference mention of Manto in the Aeneid. Casting her here as a seer condemned in the fourth bolgia also contradicts Virgil’s brief account in his own work. Why might Dante have created such fiction?

I hold the position that the entire digression is intended to clear Virgil of any accusation of being a diviner himself. Because of an apparent prediction of the birth of Christ in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, many regarded his Aeneid as capable of supernatural guidance. A person would take a copy of the Aeneid, open it to a random page, and randomly select a passage, the content of which was assumed to answer a question posed by that person.

Lines 97-102 have Virgil instruct Dante to accept the tale he has just told as true (and, consequently, the story related in his Aeneid as untrue). Dante agrees.

• 4. Why does Virgil call the Aeneid his “high tragedy”?

Apparently, he does so because it ends with Turnus’ death; traditionally, tragedies end in death. Because Dante calls his work a comedy in the next canto, this reference places the two epics in contrast. However, it is possible to regard the Aeneid as a comedy since – it Virgil had finished it – it would have ended with Aeneas’ marriage to Lavinia and the founding of Rome.

What can you observe regarding the ordering of the final four fortune-tellers that complete Virgil’s catalogue of the sinners in this bolgia?

They are listed in descending nobility and literacy.

Eurypylus is a classical figure associated with the great myths of the Trojan War.

Michael Scot, generally regarded as a wizard because of his treatises on the occult sciences, was of noble Scottish descent.

Bonati was a tiler by trade who seems to have acted as a domestic astrologer to Guido da Montefeltro, who appears in the Eighth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle, that of the evil counsellors.

“Toothless the cobbler” (Asdente in the Italian) was a shoemaker famed as a soothsayer in the latter half of the 13^th century

The final set of fortune-tellers are “the sad women” who abandoned domestic lives to become witches.

At what time does the canto end?

It is the morning of Holy Saturday.