Dante in the Digital Inferno

T.S. Eliot famously said that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” If people know Dante, it’s probably related to his poem The Divine Comedy—specifically that part about hell. So people only read Dante for The Inferno, if they read him at all. Most, however, haven’t read any part of his magisterial poem and probably have no intention to ever read him. But for those who have read him, or those who will read him, the question must inevitably be asked: Why did Dante have the pilgrimage through hell before ascending Mount Purgatory to take his seat in the choir of saints and angels to sing of “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars?”

In our digital age, Dante is once again journeying through hell. This time without Virgil as a guide or a literate audience knowing his references, allusions, and cultural inheritance. The inferno of TikTok has Dante wandering astray, lost, in the digital forest of ignorance and animosity.

For many people on TikTok, Dante is the often alluded to thirteenth century “Italian poet” who “invented” our modern understanding of hell. As one TikToker put it, “the concept of hell as eternal conscious torment comes from a piece of Italian literature written in the 1300s and is no where in the Bible.” This kind of ignorance proliferates digital space. Another, rather famous example of conspiratorial ignorance writ large was a creator who insisted that Rome never existed and was a medieval invention of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition. Her content was viewed by tens of millions and despite scholars trying to push back on her conspiratorial content, but conspiracy and ignorance tend to rule over digital space. Insinuation and accusation run amok over social media platforms, TikTok especially.

Admittedly, a lot of bad information about Dante and the belittling of his work comes as part of the larger theological and biblical wars waged in western culture that has spread online. As a former graduate student in religious studies and the Bible from Yale, it is rather heartbreaking to see the continuous promotion of misinformation online, especially since it is the misinformation that gets the most traction while a few heroic biblical scholars and professors—almost always on their own free time—take to TikTok to offer corrections. (I must admit that I am on TikTok and actually like the app despite a certain pervasive problem of misinformation and misleading insinuations that dominate the algorithm; I also think that the dismissive attitude is unproductive as the app and the broader digital infrastructure being built around the world brings a lot of exciting opportunities for everyone.)

On the issue of Dante inventing hell because it is nowhere found in the Bible, a very common retort by online activists with very little to no education in the formation of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, the idea of hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is, in fact, found in Scripture. The conceptualization of hell as a place for the punishment of the wicked can be identified rather clearly in the Hellenistic period of late Hebrew Bible literature, Daniel and Trito-Isaiah are the most notable examples. Furthermore, late Second Temple period Judaism was a time of great theological and religious innovations; a lot of extrabiblical literature from the apocalyptic traditions in this period deal with hell and the soul after death. These extrabiblical traditions eventually influenced the New Testament, especially the Gospels, where Jesus very frequently speaks of hell, punishment, and the soul’s torment after death. While this is well-known to biblical scholars and grad students, it remains ignored by a new wave of “digital creators” waging wars online for their own reasons—some sympathetic, others, not so much.

Dante, unfortunately, has become a casualty in this fight. As another TikTok creator crudely put it, “Dante invented hell.”

While Dante’s imagination of hell in the Divine Comedy has been culturally influential, this belittling of Dante within wider conspiratorial disputes in digital space marginalizes the greatness of Dante and his epic poem. Since Dante didn’t create hell, and since most people are probably only now receiving some knowledge of Dante second-hand through these online antics, why should we read Dante and, in particular, The Inferno? Far from delighting in the misery of the damned, Dante’s Inferno is all about pity: pity for the damned, for it is in Dante’s learning of pity which leads to a moment of forgiveness between he and Virgil which allows the poet pilgrim to escape the fires of hell and begin that ascent up the slopes of Mount Purgatory and enter into the blessed realm of the white rose where Love eternal abides. Dante’s tears for the damned lead to his salvation.

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“Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood / for I had wandered off from the straight path.” That is the famous opening of Dante’s great epic of the human soul and its pilgrimage through hell to heaven. But we must ask ourselves, what exactly is hell to Dante and why must he first journey through the dark crevices of the city of Dis and the Malebolge before ascending Mount Purgatory to the abode of Eternal Love?

Dante is an exile, both in real life and in his spiritual life. However, the journey undertaken through The Inferno is more than that. It is a journey into the heart: the heart of misdirect love and, finally, the desecration of the intellect as the passions of violence overwhelm rationality to the point of people willfully rejecting Truth for the false lies of heresy and violence.

Some knowledge of the Christian theological tradition that informed Dante is necessary. Augustine, most famously, explained sin as misdirected love. In some sense, sin is not unnatural but the misapplication of an originally (and still naturally) good passion: the desire for love. Augustine also formulated the basic doctrine of the imago Dei that would guide western theology: to be made in the image of God meant to be made in love for love and in wisdom for wisdom. Unlike today’s language where being made in the image of God is rhetorically used to imply human dignity and human rights (concepts alien to the patristic fathers), Augustine meant it as an interior reality: we can love and come to know love. In De Trinitate, Augustine would go as far as to assert that the prime image of God in man is the rational intellect.

Dante stands on Augustine’s shoulders. The first circles of hell, properly speaking beginning with the circle of lust rather than Limbo, deal with misdirected love and mirror Augustine’s infamous weeping statement in Confessions that he was “in love with the idea of love” but didn’t know what love actually was. Beyond the River Styx when Dante and Virgil enter the city of Dis, the misdirected love that Dante encountered is now replaced by willful rejection of truth and nature. This is what heresy is. This rejection of truth and nature breeds lies and deceit, all the way to deception of nations, families, and friends (the ninth circle) culminating in betrayal and murder. Dante’s roadmap through hell is a literary-theological imagining of the Augustinian understanding of man and sin.

While there is a sort of neat division between the two halves of hell, what is universal across Dante’s journey is how he learns love, principally through pity which culminates in an act of forgiveness between he and Virgil, which permits his escape from hell. The message is clear: proper love guides us out of the inferno we have trapped ourselves in. In the circle of the lustful damned, Dante meets two illicit lovers. Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta carried on an affair for over a decade before it was discovered.

During Dante’s conversation with Francesca, the reader learns that Francesca (and Paolo by extension) refuse to accept their own sin. They blame others. This is another recurring theme in hell. The damned refuse to acknowledge their own sin. Pride really does come before the fall. Their inability to acknowledge any wrongdoing and their willful blaming of others seals their fate. But it doesn’t have to seal ours. Dante, the in-situ incarnation of the reader, tears up and takes pity on Francesca. Damned and damnable as she is, she still deserves our love. “Love your enemy,” Christ declares in the Sermon on the Mount. Dante eventually faints in pity of the sad story that Francesca relates:

“There is no greater pain
than to remember in our present grief,
past happiness (as well your teacher knows)!

But if your great desire is to learn
the very root of such a love as ours,
I shall tell you, but in words of flowing tears.

One day we read, to pass the time away,
of Lancelot, of how he fell in love;
we were alone, innocent of suspicion.

Time and again our eyes were brought together
by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled.
To the moment of one line alone we yielded:

it was when we read about those longed-for lips
now being kissed by such a famous lover,
that this one (who shall never leave my side)

then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did.
Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.” And all the while

the one of the two spirits spoke these words,
the other wept, in such a way that pity
blurred my senses; I swooned as though to die,

and fell to Hell’s floor as a body, dead, falls. (Inferno, V.121-142)

It’s hard not to be Dante. Dante is us. Francesca and Paolo’s story is tragic. But they made themselves their own idols. Still, Dante relates the pity he took. He did not delight in their misery. He did not mock them in their error. He wept with the damned. In doing so, he saved his own soul. Delight in another’s misery, mockery and scorn afflicted onto others, is not the path to heaven. Love is. That is what Dante learns as he journeys through hell.

As Dante learns love through hell, his relationship with Virgil changes. Initially, when they first met, there was a lack of trust between the two. Yet this lack of trust is overcome with a compassion that grows between the two great poets. When Dante and Virgil approach the gates of the city of Dis, Virgil, terrified and taking compassion on the foolish Dante (Virgil has by now come to realize a certain spirit of foolishness governs Dante), he places his arm to shield the pilgrim-poet’s eyes from Medusa:

“Now turn your back and cover up your eyes,
for if the Gorgon comes and you should see her,
there would be no returning to the world!”

These were my master’s words. He turned me round
And did not trust my hands to hide my eyes
But placed his own on mine and kept them covered. (Inferno, IX.55-60)

Although Virgil still doesn’t trust Dante, he does have compassion toward him. He cares for Dante. And Dante begins to recognize, as these words indicate, that Virgil cares for him. This is the beginning of a relationship of love, compassion, mercy, and friendship that is otherwise devoid throughout all the levels of hell. The love that the two poets begin to form toward each other and share for each other is the means by which they will be able to leave the accursed abode of the loveless dead. Love literally does give new life is what Dante is telling us.

The culmination of love in hell is an act of forgiveness. Without forgiveness there is no reconciliatory bridge to a new life. Without forgiveness, there is no love. Forgiveness is the ultimate act of love for forgiveness is what permits love to unite as Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, love is “the unitive force.” Forgiveness is the essential heart of love which allows for reunification.

As Dante and Virgil are continuing through hell, Virgil carries Dante down the slopes of the Malebolge:

Then he took hold of me with both his arms,
And when he had me firm against his breast,
He climbed back up the path he had come down.

He did not tire of the weight clasped tight to him,
But brought me to the top of the bridge’s arch,
The one that joins the fourth bank to the fifth.

And here he gently set his burden down—
Gently, for the ridge, so steep and rugged,
Would have been hard even for goats to cross.

From there another valley opened to me. (Inferno, XIX, 124-133.)

Here we see our two poet pilgrims literally united in helping each other. Yet Dante, aloof as he has been throughout the poem so far, is dilly dallying and this dilly dallying enrages Virgil who loses his temper:

I was listening, all absorbed in this debate,
when the master said to me: “Keep right on looking,
a little more, and I shall lose my patience.”

I heard the note of anger in his voice
and turned to him; I was so full of shame
that it still haunts my memory today.

Like one asleep who dreams himself in trouble
and in his dream he wishes he were dreaming,
longing for that which is, as if it were not,

just so I found myself: unable to speak,
longing to beg for pardon and already
begging for pardon, not knowing that I did.

“Less shame than yours would wash away a fault
greater than yours has been,” my master said,
“and so forget about it, do not be sad.

If ever again you should meet up with men
engaging in this kind of futile wrangling,
remember I am always at your side.” (Inferno, XXX, 130-148.)

In this moment we see the forgiveness that Dante and Virgil exhibit to each other. Dante asks Virgil’s forgiveness even without asking it with his voice—he seeks forgiveness with his face. Virgil recognizes this and bestows it. But he also recognizes his own errors and tells Dante “If ever again you should meet up with men / engaging in this kind of futile wrangling, / remember I am always at your side.” After this remarkable moment, the moment that the entire pilgrimage of pity and love has been leading to, Dante and Virgil enter the final abode of hell where they eventually walk across the ice of treachery, see Satan eating the bodies of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, then slip out of hell and begin their ascent to the stars, to heaven.

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Dante’s hell, contrary to the inaccurate, ignorant, and sometimes even deliberately deceitful representation of it on TikTok and across the broader abyss of digital space, isn’t meant to terrify anyone. It is meant to instruct. Specifically, instruct in love. Dante calls on us to have pity and compassion for sinners. Pity and compassion for everyone. More importantly, the love that grows from pity and compassion must be realized in forgiveness. If we cannot love and cannot forgive then we really will entrap ourselves in hell, for hell is a loveless place created by the pride, passion, and deceit of the self which reign supreme at the expense of all others.

The Inferno is a deeply inspiring work within the Divine Comedy. It is, personally, my favorite of the three parts. Dante gives us a roadmap, a guide, on how to flee from the Sodom and Gomorrah we have created for ourselves. Love is the remedy. Love is our hope. Love will save us. May we, with Dante, love those who misrepresent him and hope that they will come to learn the beauty of his message.

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