Dante’s Inferno: The Saga Continues

One of the sweetest fruits of friendship is the inside joke. When a buddy cuts a one-liner in company, and you are the only one to belly laugh, those on the outside are made to feel…well, outside. He is drawing from a shared history that not everyone has access to. The same thing is true with reading. Great authors like Dante often assume, or demand, that their readers have read certain works and can therefore pick up on literary illusions. Think of it as the insidejoke for bookworms.

In Canto V, which is the circle of Hell where the lustful are kept, Dante cracks one such inside joke. Although it isn’t particularly funny, it is powerful in its suggestion and a warning to us all. As he and Virgil enter this circle of Hell they see multitudes of shades which are driven about by a never-resting wind. “Hurricane, whirling, bellows ...” are among the synonyms stacked up so that we will feel the secret. Here suffer the shades of people who sewed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. They lived without selfcontrol, enslaved to their driving lusts, and here they suffer the fate they chose. Dante recognizes many of the shades but is able at length to interview one couple named Francesca and Paulo.

It is a heartbreaking tale of two young people who fell into sin when they read quietly together of Lancelot and Guinevere. Read Francesca recount their fall:

“One day we reading were for our delight

Of Lancelot how love did him enthrall.

Alone we were and without any fear.

Full many a time our eyes together drew…

But one point only was it that o’ercome us.

When we read of the much-longed-for smile

Being by such a noble lover kissed

This one, who ne’er from

Me shall be divided,

Kissed me on the mouth…

That day no farther did we read therein.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how these two fell into sin. But it does take a familiarity with another lustful man in history to catch Dantes’s allusion. Re-read the last line which is pregnant with suggestion. “That day no farther did we read therein.” I believe that Dante wrote these lines to remind us of the conversion of St. Augustine. St. Augustine was a notoriously lustful man before he converted to Christianity. In his Confessions he tells us of a dark night of his soul in when he sat weeping under a certain fig tree. He was “choked with tears” being torn between the life of lust he was living and the live with Christ which he wanted. He had become convinced of the error of all other philosophies, the emptiness of sensuality, and of the truthfulness of Christ’s death and resurrection. But the pleasures of the flesh had deep hooks in Augustine’s heart. He was hopeless and felt helpless. As he wept, into the lonely garden came the sing-song words of a child, who he never did meet, singing Tolle Lege…take up and read. Augustine took it as a sign to open the Bible he had just laid aside and read the first thing he saw…which happened to be written by a man named Paul… just like Franchesca’s partner.

“I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.” He then describes how “a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart…all the shadows of doubt were dispelled…and I neither wished nor needed to read further.” Does that sound familiar? “That day no farther did we read therein.”

Can you see Dante’s point? Both Franchesca and Augustine were forever altered by what they were reading and neither needed to read any further. But Franchesca was reading with the wrong Paul. Her Paulo led her where she didn’t want to go, and like all sin, kept her longer than she wanted to stay. St. Paul led Augustine where he wanted to go but couldn’t find the way to get there.

We all know that lust is no joke. We have seen the boneyard-remains of too many families to doubt it. But neither is reading. One can never be too careful what one reads and with whom one does it. Dante would be proud of you if you were warned by his work and turned from lust…by all means do that! But that isn’t any of business mine. My exhortation to you is the same as the little girl who chanted to St. Augustine. Tolle Lege! Tolle Lege…and now you have the inside information needed to understand me.