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.

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.