The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Audacity may be Dante's chief virtue. In his ambitious allegory of a trip to the innermost rings of Hell, he dares to rank himself with the great poets of ancient Rome, and with his supreme self-confidence, he succeeds. Guided by Virgil, Dante is privileged to witness the fury of the Inferno without partaking of it. He meets all manner of sinners, from infamous figures of the past to his own recently deceased contemporaries, each one consigned to an eternity of torture specifically tailored to fit his most significant sin. Those who tried to divine the future in life can only look backward in death; murders and wanton warriors eternally drown in a river of blood; sodomites, reflecting the sterility of their acts, continually rove a barren desert.

"[I]t is no easy undertaking," says Dante, "to describe the bottom of the Universe," but he manages it excellently. His illustrations of the underworld are luridly, fantastically detailed. He tells of the endless whirlwind to which the carnal are condemned: "I came to a place stripped bare of every light / and roaring on the naked dark like seas / wracked by a war of winds." As he plumbs deeper into the bowels of the earth, Dante becomes superbly gruesome and fabulous in his rendering of suffering. Enemies gnaw one another's heads; men morph involuntarily into reptiles; Judas Iscariot, Dante's ultimate sinner, is suspended in Satan's mouth at the center of Hell, immobilized in an immense floe of ice.

As an allegory, the symbolism is as multilayered and fathomless as the Inferno itself. One of the more obvious and intriguing figures is Virgil, as the light of human reason. Though he is a pagan predating Christ, Dante implies he can still bring spiritual illumination. Virgil, with his wisdom and discretion, leads Dante safely through the perilous abyss and shows him the way to salvation by ascending with him to the gates of Heaven. He cannot, however, journey with Dante farther, demonstrating that human reason can only get one so far.

"I did not dare descend to his own level / but kept my head inclined, as one who walks / in reverence meditating good and evil." Dante converses with the condemned, but he is careful to maintain a safe distance between himself and them. He derives instruction from their mistakes, learning how better to stay on the path of the "True Way." Through sedulous circumspection, he manages to be in their wretched world, but not of it.

Dante's audaciously lofty poetic aspirations were crucial to the effective execution of such a comprehensive delineation. He itemizes nearly every major sin and assigns appropriate punishments to suit them. It is such a terribly attractive idea, to think that every significant action can be put into a neat theological category, that it is no wonder the Comedy became so widely revered. However, this concept of a linear condemnation, like Purgatory, has little biblical basis. Dante does provide some excellent spiritual insights, though, and his literary merit is undeniable.