Canto iv of Inferno contains probably the most famous passage in all medieval writing about the virtuous pagans and their fate in the afterlife.
Perhaps because of its very celebrity, many readers do not realize just how unusual is Dante’s approach – unusual not because of his extreme respect and admiration for these heroes and heroines, poets and philosophers, but because of the severity with which they are treated. In the first part of this chapter, I shall explain and justify this judgement – with which few Dante scholars will agree – by comparing Dante’s theological stance on the issue with the positions more common in his time. Outside the context of vertical readings, it is unlikely that anyone would associate either canto iv of Purgatorio, concerned principally with the sluggish Belacqua, nor canto iv of Paradiso, responding to the questions raised by Piccarda and her speech, with this theme. It turns out, however, that the vertical method yields unexpected results. Both cantos contain passages drawing them into the discourse on hopeless desire and unjust justice, which runs through the Commedia in counterpoint to the optimistic theology it offers its Christian readers. The second and third parts of this chapter will concentrate on these points, which link together the three cantos, leaving aside many other important themes and passages in Purgatorio iv and Paradiso iv.2
1 The video of this lecture is available at the Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy website, https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1459230
2 More rounded accounts of these cantos are given, for Purgatorio iv, by Sergio Romagnoli,
‘Il canto IV del Purgatorio’, in Letture dantesche (Florence: Sansoni, 1964), pp. 749-46;
Umberto Bosco, Dante vicino. Contributi e letture (Caltanisetta and Rome: Sciascia, 1966),
© John Marenbon, CC BY 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0066.05
78 Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’
Inferno iv
In a passage close to the beginning of Inferno iv, Virgil explains about the Limbo of Hell, which he and Dante have now reached, and the souls who are consigned to it:
Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, non avea pianto mai che di sospiri che l’aura etterna facevan tremare;
ciò avvenia di duol sanza martìri, ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi, d’infanti e di femmine e di viri.
Lo buon maestro a me: ‘Tu non dimandi che spiriti son questi che tu vedi?
Or vo’ che sappi, innanzi che più andi, ch’ei non peccaro; e s’elli hanno mercedi, non basta, perché non ebber battesmo, ch’è porta de la fede che tu credi;
e s’ e’ furon dinanzi al cristianesmo, non adorâr debitamente a Dio:
e di questi cotai son io medesmo.
Per tai difetti, non per altro rio, semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi
che sanza speme vivemo in disio’. (Inf., iv. 25-42)
[Here, as I could hear, the only lamentation was of sighs, with which the air forever trembled. It came from the grief without tortures of the large, numerous crowd, of babies, women and men. The good master said to me: ‘Do you not ask what spirits are these which you see. I want you to know, before you go further, that they did not sin, and if they did good works,3 it is not enough, because they did not have baptism, which is
pp. 122-34; Giorgio Petrocchi, ‘Il canto IV del “Purgatorio”’, Nuove letture dantesche 3 (1969), 291-309; Aldo Vallone, ‘Il canto IV del “Purgatorio”’ in Casa di Dante in Roma, Purgatorio. Letture degli anni 1976-’79 (Rome: Bonacci, 1981), pp. 79-99; for Paradiso iv by Giuseppe Albini ‘Il canto IV del Paradiso’, in Letture dantesche (Florence: Sansoni, 1964), pp. 1399-1417; Guido di Pino, ‘Canto IV’ in Lectura Dantis Scaligera. Paradiso (Florence:
Le Monnier, 1971), pp. 95-120; Sofia Vanni Rovighi, ‘Il canto IV del Paradiso visto da uno studioso della filosofia medievale’, Studi danteschi 48 (1971), 67-82; Giorgio Varanini, ‘Il canto IV del “Paradiso”’, Nuove letture dantesche 5 (1972), 317-39. I also discuss Dante’s views on the wisdom, virtue and salvation of pagans in Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Oxford and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 189-210. There (pp. 194-99) I include a full treatment of the cases, not discussed here, of Trajan, Ripheus, Cato and Statius – exceptional pagans who are not in Hell (or the Limbo of Hell).
3 ‘Mercede’ means ‘reward’, ‘payment’ (from the Latin merces), but is used twice in the Commedia (substituting effect for cause) to mean that for which reward is given: here (in the plural) and at Par., xxi. 52 and xxviii. 112. In this sense, the word is usually
Virtuous Pagans, Hopeless Desire and Unjust Justice 79 the gate of the faith which you believe. And if they were before the time of Christianity, they did not worship God duly. And of these I am one myself. For such deficiencies and for no other fault we are lost, and we are punished in just this way: that we live in desire without hope’.]4
Although they are not the only inhabitants of Limbo, Virgil concentrates in this canto on the souls of those who, like himself, had lived as virtuous pagans, such as his fellow great poets of antiquity, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan (ll. 88–90); heroes and heroines from ancient history (ll. 121-28);
the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and others (ll. 130-43), and also two philosophers and one military leader from the world of Islam (Avicenna, Averroes and Saladin) (ll. 143-44, 129). In the passage quoted, Virgil explains why these souls are damned and what punishment they receive (ll. 34-38). They have not committed sins (‘ei non peccaro’ (l. 34);
‘per tai difetti, non per altro rio’ (l. 40)) – that is to say, mortal sins – and indeed they have done good works (l. 34). But that is not enough to save them, because either they lived after the coming of Christianity and were not baptized (ll. 35-36), or they lived before the coming of Christianity, but they failed to ‘adorar debitamente a Dio’ (ll. 37-38). The reason given for why the post-Christians, though virtuous, are not saved is straightforward.
With the coming of Christianity, baptism was imposed as a universal sacrament necessary to cleanse humans of original sin, and the virtuous pagans who lived in Christian times lack it. But most of the virtuous pagans listed by Dante, including Virgil himself, lived before Christ, when there was no requirement for baptism. The pre-Christians, we are told, failed to worship God duly. What Virgil means becomes clearer from the extra detail he adds in Purgatorio vii about why he and those like him were damned.
There he explains that he is in Limbo and
quivi sto io con quei che le tre sante virtù non si vestiro, e sanza vizio
conobber l’altre e seguîr tutte quante. (Purg., vii. 34-36)
[Here I stand with those whom the three holy virtues [faith, hope and charity] did not clothe, and without vice knew the other virtues and followed all of them.]
translated – following the glosses in the early commentators – as ‘merit’, and this rendering is good, so long as ‘merit’ is not taken here in its strictly theological sense, as what makes for salvation, since these virtuous pagans were not on the path to salvation at all. For that reason, I translate as here, following Boccaccio’s gloss to the phrase: ‘e s’egli hanno mercedi, cioè se essi adoperarono alcun bene il quale meritasse guiderdone’.
4 All translations are my own.
80 Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’
Not worshipping God duly, it seems, means lacking faith, and so also the other two theological virtues of hope and charity, which require faith. Faith would be understood to be faith in Christ – something which was indeed possible before Christ, since the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs were considered to have had faith in Christ, as expressed in various passages in the Old Testament that were taken as prophecies of the New.5
Virgil and his fellows are therefore damned, but Limbo (literally
‘the margin’) seems not to be like Hell proper. At the beginning of the passage quoted, Virgil makes the point which he will repeat almost word for word in Purgatorio vii: he and the others do not suffer quasi-physical punishments (martìri (l. 28)); the air is not filled with the groans (‘guai’
(l. 30)), but merely the sighs of those who must desire without hope (Inf., iv. 42). And the setting in which the great poets, philosophers and heroes themselves are presented – a fresh green meadow modelled on Virgil’s Elysian fields – appears anything but infernal.6
Most readers today are surprised that Dante has to exclude from Heaven the guide he so reveres and portrays as so virtuous. But they will probably put down his decision, and perhaps the other features of his account, to the demands of medieval Christian doctrine. Yet, from the wider perspective of how other medieval thinkers, theologians especially, deal with virtuous pagans and their fate after death, everything in Dante’s description appears very strange. There are three ways, in particular, in which Dante departs from the usual ways of thinking: (1) by placing the virtuous pagans in Limbo; (2) by ignoring a common line of thought which would have allowed him, had he wished, to put Virgil and his fellows into Heaven; (3) by insisting both that Virgil and the other pagans he discusses are completely virtuous and yet that they are damned. I shall explain each of these points in turn.
(1) It was an innovation of thirteenth-century theology, generally accepted by Dante’s time, to identify a limbus or margin of Hell.7 But its two usual sorts of inhabitants were certainly not virtuous pagans. One of these groups is that alluded to, very briefly, by Virgil where he mentions ‘infanti’
5 See also Par., xxxii. 24, where those in Heaven ‘che credettero in Cristo venturo’ [who believed in Christ who was yet to come] are pointed out.
6 Inf., iv. 111: ‘giugnemmo in prato di fresca verdura’ [we came to a fresh, green meadow];
see also Virgil, Aeneid vi: ‘deuenere locos laetos et amoena uirecta’ [they came to joyful places, green and pleasant].
7 On the development of the idea of Limbo, see Attilio Carpin, Il limbo nella teologia medievale, Sacra Doctrina 51 (Bologna: edizioni studio domenicano, 2006).
Virtuous Pagans, Hopeless Desire and Unjust Justice 81 (Inf., iv. 30). It was to the limbo infantium that unbaptized babies, who died before they could commit any sins, were usually consigned. Dante comments on them a little more fully in Purgatorio, when Virgil says that he is there (in Limbo) ‘coi pargoli innocenti / dai denti morsi de la morte avante / che fosser da l’umana colpa essenti’ [with the innocent young children bitten by death’s teeth before they were absolved from human sin]
(Purg., vii. 31-33). Augustine had argued that such children, stained as they are by Original Sin, cannot escape eternal torment, although he conceded that their punishment would be ‘very mild’ (Enchiridion xxiii. 93). From Abelard onwards, theologians abandoned the idea that the infants received any sort of physical punishment: they were merely deprived of the beatific vision.8 From the time of Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), these souls were usually placed in Limbo. Limbo’s other customary set of inhabitants in scholastic theology is mentioned a little later in this canto (Inf., iv. 49-63) when Dante asks Virgil whether anyone has ever left Limbo and gone to blessedness in Heaven. Virgil tells the story of the Harrowing of Hell which, although never completely established as Church doctrine, was accepted by most medieval thinkers. After his crucifixion, when Christ went down to Hell, he freed and raised to Heaven the souls of the Old Testament patriarchs, prophets and those of many of their people, which had been waiting in Limbo without punishment for the salvation they deserved but which could not take place until after Christ’s sacrifice.
Dante’s decision to add a third class of souls, those of the virtuous pagans, to the inhabitants of Limbo was not just entirely unprecedented but so much against theological orthodoxy that it drew protests, even from some of the early commentators on the Commedia, such as Guido da Pisa (1327-28) and Francesco da Buti (1385-95).9 Indeed, no less an authority than Augustine had explicitly ruled out the idea of ‘some place between damnation and the Kingdom of Heaven’ for ‘the Reguluses and Fabiuses, the Scipios and Camilluses and their like’ – the (supposedly) most virtuous of Romans.10 Moreover – perhaps not surprisingly – Dante’s position seems to have had
8 See also below, p. XX, on punishment (or its lack) in Limbo.
9 Da Buti, in Commento, ed. by Crescentino Giannini (Pisa: Fratelli Nistri, 1858), I, p. 120, writes that ‘the author is in disagreement with the Holy Church, which places no one in this place save the infants. The author can be excused because he is speaking poetically’;
see also Giorgio Padoan, ‘Il Limbo dantesco’, in his Il pio Enea, l’empia Ulisse. Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 1977), pp. 103-24 (pp. 105-15).
10 Contra Iulianum IV.3.26. This passage has been cited by Padoan, Il pio Enea, pp. 106-07 and George Corbett, Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfilment (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), p. 124.
82 Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’
no independent followers, although in his commentary Boccaccio did try to defend it (not without modifications).11 And, while Dante certainly took the idea of damnation without tortures from the accepted doctrine about the state of the souls of the unbaptized babies in Limbo, he added an extra element, the idea of desire without hope. Exactly what this involves will be discussed below, but it certainly differentiates the state of Virgil and the others from that traditionally accorded to souls in Limbo.
(2) It would be easy to understand why, against all authority, Dante invented a place in Hell where his admired ancient poets, philosophers and heroes could live in dignity without pain, with, as described later in the canto, their slow, serious mien, full of authority and their sweet voices (Inf., iv. 112-14), if the theology of his time had given him no alternative otherwise but to put them into Hell proper. But there were three strategies, followed by theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which Dante could have used, any of which would have allowed him to put at least the pre-Christian virtuous pagans – most of those he mentions, including Virgil himself – into Heaven.12
The doctrinal barrier to the salvation of just pagans was that they lacked faith: as St Paul says (Hebrews xi, 6), ‘Without faith it is impossible to please God’. Faith was taken to be faith in Christ. But how could those before the coming of Christ have had such faith? Each of the three strategies answered this question in a different way.
The first available strategy was provided by the idea of implicit faith.
It was Hugh of St Victor in the mid-twelfth century who first formulated clearly the idea of implicit faith (though he did not use the term). Hugh was thinking especially about the ordinary Jewish people in Old Testament times. It was widely accepted that their prophets and some of their leaders had prophetic knowledge of the coming of Christ. It was enough, Hugh
11 In the sixteenth century, a few theologians, such as Baptistus of Mantua and Trithemius, would suggest some intermediate state between heavenly bliss and punishment in Hell for the invincibly ignorant pagans recently discovered in America and other remote places. Claude Seyssel (in his De divina providentia, 1543, Treatise 2, art. 3) advocated this solution to the post-mortem fate of virtuous pagans more generally and explicitly linked it to the state of unbaptized babies: cf. Louis Capéran, Le problème du salut des infidèles. Essai historique, revised edn (Toulouse: Grand séminaire, 1934), pp. 220-25 and Marenbon, Pagans, pp. 286-87. But none of them actually placed the virtuous pagans in Limbo, nor did they refer to Dante.
12 Padoan (Il pio Enea, pp. 106-11) is aware of the ways in which thirteenth and fourteenth-century theologians could spare virtuous pagans from Hell, but he places (to my mind undue) emphasis on the Augustinian heritage.
Virtuous Pagans, Hopeless Desire and Unjust Justice 83 argued, for the ordinary people to accept the beliefs of their leaders, without knowing about them, for them too to count as having the faith needed for salvation.13 In his Sentences (c. 1155), which became the standard theology textbook in the medieval universities, Peter the Lombard adopted Hugh’s idea (Sentences, III, d. 25) and its broad lines were followed by most of the later theologians in their Sentence commentaries. In itself, this theory did not offer a way of saving the virtuous pagans of the Greco-Roman world, such as the philosophers, since they could not be said to have followed or believed in the Old Testament prophets, and indeed some of those who followed the theory of implicit faith – Bonaventure (Commentary on Sentences III, d. 25, a. 1, q. 2), for instance, and Matthew of Aquasparta (Quaestiones disputatae 3, 14 and ad 14) – made a point of saying that the ancient philosophers had been damned.
Aquinas, however, extended the doctrine of implicit faith so as to provide a way of showing that Gentiles wise in worldly wisdom – that is to say, the philosophers – might have been saved:
The Gentiles were not placed as instructors of the divine faith, and so, however wise they may have been in worldly wisdom, they should be counted among the minores, and so it was enough for them to have faith about the Redeemer implicitly, either in the faith of the prophets, or in divine providence itself. (De veritate, q. 14, a. 11, ad 5).
Although the first of these suggestions, that the philosophers might have accepted on trust the faith of the (Jewish) prophets sounds fantastical, Aquinas’s longer explanation in his commentary on the Sentences (III, d.
25, q. 2, a. 2, qc. 2, 3 and ad 3) makes his meaning clear: the philosophers simply put their faith in whoever knows the ways of God better than they, and these people were in fact the Jewish prophets. In the fourteenth century, implicit faith tended to be regarded less as faith in another and more as simply indistinct faith – a change which would make it easier to think of the ancient philosophers and poets, who were often considered to have been monotheists, as having implicit faith.14
13 On the Sacraments 2. 6–7; Patrologia Latina 176, 335A–41A. For a full discussion of the origins and development of the doctrine of implicit faith, see Marenbon, Pagans, pp.
168-72.
14 The change is especially evident in the popular mid-fourteenth-century Biblical commentator, Nicholas of Lyra: see glosses to Hebrews xi, 6 and Acts x, 35 in Bibliorum sacrorum cum glossa ordinaria … cum postilla Nicolai Lyrani … (Venice: Junta, 1603), cols 922, 1105.
84 Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’
Aquinas continues the quotation above by adding that ‘it is however probable that the mystery of our redemption was revealed many generations before the coming of Christ to the Gentiles, as the Sibylline prophecies show’. The idea, popular in the sixteenth century (when it was called the
‘Ancient Theology’), that before the Incarnation Christian prophecies were well known to peoples other than the Jews, has patristic roots and was taken up particularly by Abelard, Roger Bacon, and, in the generation after Dante, Robert Holcot and Thomas Bradwardine. The Ancient Theology provided a second possible strategy, because it could be used as a way of arguing that some of the virtuous pagans might not have been pagans at all, but really had faith.15
The third possible strategy was the notion of special inspiration, which provided a way for even pagans who lived after Christ to be saved. The idea, which goes back to Abelard and appears in Aquinas and most of
The third possible strategy was the notion of special inspiration, which provided a way for even pagans who lived after Christ to be saved. The idea, which goes back to Abelard and appears in Aquinas and most of