Dante's Journey to the Centre: Some Patterns in His

Allegory
Critic: Sheila Ralphs
Source: Dante's Journey to the Centre: Some Patterns in His Allegory, Manchester
University Press, 1972, 63 p. Reprinted in World Literature Criticism Supplement, Vol. 1
Criticism about: Dante (1265-1321), also known as: Dante (Alighieri), Dante Alighieri

Dante's Comedy opens with an image of disorder--a wild, dark, tangled forest
without flowers, fruit or birds, where the traveller is beset by prowling beasts. It is
compared to a flooded river or a raging sea which threatens to overwhelm the
shipwrecked sailor who has been pitched into it. There is one hope--a hill on which the
sun shines, where, if only he could reach it, the voyager could find safety and delight.
Thus at the beginning the reader is faced with the mystery of evil and the hope of
salvation. For his own good he must go with Dante the traveler to discover and to
overcome the root of disorder, to know and to conquer that which has caused the earth to
become unfruitful and hostile. Dante the poet, who himself says his task is "removere
viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et perducere ad statum felicitatis," is conscious of a
prophet's call. His task is to reveal to his own generation the eternal issues of death and
life. As a Christian poet he believes that these issues are contained in the Christian
Gospel--yet he knows also that each age must see them afresh. Sometimes it is the poet
who must express the vision to his own time.
The forest, which is the first thing seen in the Comedy, represents two things--first
"the world" in the evil sense of all that which is opposed to the truth of God, and second
the individual sinful soul. The two meanings are, of course, intimately connected. It is
part of Dante's theme that the sinful soul is rooted in evil soil, submitting to forces which
are not merely its own, though this does not absolve it of responsibility. Salvation
requires both recognition of the evil depth, and victory over it through Christ. This is the
meaning of the journey into hell--a not infrequent mythological theme. In the course of
the journey the soul descends into its own depths and knows that its "own" depths are
also the depths of the created world. The root of all evil is for Dante demonic. There is,

he believed, a spiritual evil which affects all Creation--all,at any rate, having to do with
this globe--and this root of evil he calls Lucifer, the Light-bearer turned to become the
source of all darkness. The descent into hell has to do above all with the encounter with
Lucifer.
Here of course we are in the realm of myth.... Dante freely mingles Christian and
classical myth. With the stories of the fall of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve he associates
the story of the rape of Proserpina (or Persephone). For him, no doubt, the latter story
"hides truth under a veil of fiction." The other two he probably accepted as literally true-but it is the inner meaning which concerns him.
In Inferno XXXIV Lucifer is called "il vermo reo che'l mondo fora"--"the wicked
grub which bores through the world." Lucifer is eating away the apple. He is the cause of
that rottenness in the earth's sphere which shows itself on the surface of the northern
hemisphere--the bad half of the apple-- in the tangled, sterile wood. To discover this,
Dante has to descend to where the Worm himself is. Then he sees divine beauty turned to
ugliness, which is the great mystery of evil. Yet by this time the sight of Lucifer is not
altogether strange to him. He only sees more clearly one he has met before.
The first encounter with Lucifer was in the dark forest itself, where the threefaced Devil appeared in the form of three beasts--a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf. If this
seems a novel idea it is, I am sure, one aspect of the truth about the beasts. Various
commentators have given the biblical references which lie behind their presentation:
But they all alike had broken the yoke,
they had burst the bonds.
Therefore a lion from the forest shall slay them,
a wolf from the desert shall destroy them.
A leopard is watching against their cities,
every one who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces.

and
If an one loves the world, love for the
Father is not in him. For all that is in the world,
the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes
and the pride of life, is not of the Father but
is of the world.
It seems certain that Dante had in mind both these passages. The lion would then
represent, as almost everyone agrees, pride, or "the vainglory of life," the she-wolf would
symbolize "the lust of the eyes," or greed in its widest sense, and the leopard "the lust of
the flesh," meaning that enchantment with created things, human or otherwise, which can
cause a man to forget the Creator, who yet lies concealed in them and beyond them....
Dante has not really finished with the three beasts when he leaves the dark wood
to take the journey through hell. They have kept him from the short route up the blessed
mountain, and many encounters lie ahead before his salvation can be secured. The lion,
the leopard and the she-wolf are only the beginning of a series of monstrous apparitions
barring Dante's path and guarding the way to the Tree of Life (or Knowledge). There
remain Minos, Cerberus, Pluto, the Gorgon with her Furies (and the fallen angels), the
Minotaur, Geryon and the figure of Lucifer himself. The encounters link the story of
Dante's descent to hell not only with the death and resurrection of Christ and his victory
over the Devil, but also with myths of the great classical heroes--Hercules, Theseus and
Perseus, and the story of the rape and rescue of Proserpina....
Myths regarding Crete have an important place in the Inferno. The reason for this
becomes most apparent in canto XIV, when Virgil is explaining to Dante the origin of the
infernal rivers:

"In mezzo mar siede un paese guasto" diss'elli allora, "che s'appella Creta,
sotto 'l cui rege fu gia il mondo casto. Una montagna v'e che gia fu lieta
d'acqua e di fronde, che si chiamo Ida: or e diserta come cosa vieta...."
Here, clearly, is a myth of the Fall. Crete under the reign of Saturn with its unspoilt
Mount Ida has the same meaning as Mount Parnassus in the Golden Age, or the Garden
of Eden....
Saturn's reign over Crete yielded to the reign of Jupiter. Mount Ida split, and an
abyss was opened up within it. To reinforce the classical myth of the lost reign of Saturn,
Dante introduces a strange allegorical figure taken from the Book of Daniel. The Old Man
of Crete, whose golden head alone is not cracked, standing up in the deep crater of the
ruined Mount Ida, represents, as all have appreciated, the progressive fall of the human
race from that glory the Creator willed for it. The Old Man is also the source of the
infernal rivers which flow down in a spiral into the lower pit of hell beneath the surface
of the earth. The rivers derive from the tears caused by sin and ruin.
But before the reader has been given this account of the source of hell's rivers he
has already been reminded of the story of the Cretan labyrinth. The labyrinth was
constructed by the orders of Minos, king of Crete, to contain the Minotaur--half human,
half bull, born of the union of Pasiphae, wife of Minos, with the bull of Neptune. The
Minotaur dwelt in the depths of the labyrinth, and to him each year were sacrificed as
food seven of the handsomest youths and seven of the most beautiful maidens of defeated
Athens, which was obliged to send them to Crete as tribute. Theseus, Duke of Athens,
slew the Minotaur and found his way out of the labyrinth again by using a thread given
him by Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphae. The story is very well known, and it
has a great deal to do with the Divine Comedy. Dante's hell is a kind of labyrinth, the
descent into which is a winding away from the light. At the entrance of true hell stands
the "judge" Minos, who sends the souls which appear before him into the depths. Minos
is not of course the real judge of these sinners. God is their judge, but in Minos they see
themselves. Minos is more brute than human, and the tail with which he encircles himself
is a representation of the circles of hell. Minos "rules" now a ruined realm where dark
destructive monsters lurk. He could even be a glimpse of the King of Hell, root of all evil,

whom sinners have come to resemble and to call Father. When Dante enters his realm he
enters as another Theseus, and of his association with Theseus the reader is reminded
more than once. Theseus both killed the Minotaur and attempted to rescue Proserpina
(being himself rescued by Hercules).... Dante was not alone in taking the story of
Theseus' victory over the Minotaur as a symbol of Christ's victory over the devil. This to
him was doubtless the inner meaning of the myth. It seems that to Dante's contemporaries
the hero Theseus was a "type" of Christ. Consequently he could also be a type of the
Christian hero, of one who overcomes in the might of Christ.
In the Inferno the Minotaur would seem to be a symbol of the dark violent depths
in man, depths where the human and demonic are mingled, and so represents especially
the sin of the seventh circle, where different types of violence are punished. The centaurs
in the ring of the violent against neighbour represent the aspect of intelligence used in,
yet overruled by, brutish violence--brutishness of a kind of which the beasts are innocent.
The Minotaur is a more general symbol, an image of sheer blind destructiveness eating
up all that is best in man. Yet this does not mean that he is not also an image or
appearance of Lucifer. He is a partial image, though the real Minotaur the hero Dante has
to overcome is met and conquered in the lowest pit....
Of the story of the rape of Proserpina the Inferno gives several reminders.
Hercules is not explicitly mentioned by Dante in connection with the story, though one
version of the classical myth tells how Hercules went to the Underworld to rescue
Theseus and Pirothous, who had attempted to rescue Proserpina and had failed. Another
story of Hercules relates how he dared the entrance to the Underworld and forcibly
brought forth from it Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of Pluto (or Hades), King of
the Underworld. Both stories have to do with the conquering of death and the attainment
of immortality, and a remembrance of both is implicit in the Inferno.
In the meeting between Dante and Virgil and Cerberus in canto VI of the Inferno
there is also of course a clear parallel with the entry of Aeneas to the Underworld as
related by Virgil. In Virgil's story the descent to the Underworld is necessary for Aeneas'
mission of founding Rome. Dante treats Rome as a symbol of the heavenly city. To this
idea we shall return later. Dante's Cerberus has been deposed from being guardian of the
gate of hell and set to guard and torment the gluttonous. He is, however, the dog

belonging to Satan and his army of fallen angels. He has suffered rather in appearance
because Hercules pulled so hard on the chain round his neck when he dragged him out of
hell. Or to put it another way, hell and death lost much of their power when Christ the
hero died and rose again. The Hercules story is referred to by the Angel who lets Dante
and Virgil into Satan's lower kingdom and who addresses the guardian devils thus:
"... Perche recalcitrate a quella voglia a cui non puote il fin mai esser
mozzo, a che piu volte v'ha cresciuta doglia? Che giova nelle fata dar di
cozzo? Cerbeo vostro, se ben vir ricorda, ne porta ancor pelato il mento e'l
gozzo."
Cerberus is Satan's dog, and must obediently do Satan's bidding--or he can be said
to be Satan in one of his forms and activities. By his three chomping heads he obviously
resembles Satan, who is himself an ugly parody of the Trinity. He resembles Satan in
another of his aspects by being an image of greed. Although his throat does not bristle
with serpents as in classical myth, yet he, like Lucifer, is called vermo. Dante, who with
the help of Virgil overcomes Cerberus and passes safely by, is another Hercules, a hero
conquering in the power of Christ.
The next demon Dante meets is Pluto, who guards the avaricious and prodigal.
Dante's Pluto is a complex figure, very intimately linked with Lucifer, and of course with
the Proserpina story. He is in the first place Hades, God of the Underworld. He carried off
the maiden, symbol of life and growth, when she was plucking flowers, and made her
Queen of Death. In Inferno X, 80, she is called "la donna che qui regge." To this act of
violent robbery Virgil probably means to refer when he reminds the menacing Pluto of
God's vengeance on those angels who attempted proud violence against God:
"... Non e sanza cagion l'andare al cupo: vuolsi nell'alto, la dove Michele
fe' la vendetta del superbo strupo."
Pluto's rape of Proserpina would thus be a myth having the same meaning as the
story of Lucifer's pride and fall which brings a blight on all the earth. The close link
between Pluto and Lucifer is strengthened by Pluto's calling on "Pape (Papa?) Satan" in

the beginning of canto VII, and the reference to Pluto as "il gran nemico" at the end of the
preceding canto.
He is "il gran nemico" because he is also Mammon, God of Riches, or God of
Covetousness. N. Sapegno in his edition of the Inferno points out that Cicero in his De
natura deorum identifies Pluto and Dis, saying that both names mean "rich." In Inferno
VII, 8, Pluto is called "maladetto lupo," an image of covetousness like the lupa of
Inferno I. But Dis is of course the name Dante gives to Lucifer himself. The city of Dis is
Satan's city. If Pluto is God of Riches as well as God of the Underworld, so is Satan, who
when he grabbed at divinity fell to become Mammon "the god of this world." The simile
of Pluto falling like a broken mast in Inferno VII, 13-15, is possibly meant to parallel the
fall of Lucifer....
The most elaborate allegory in the Inferno is associated with Dante's entrance to the
strongly guarded city of Dis, Satan's lower and special kingdom which imprisons those
who have wilfully chosen him to be their king. To the defence of the entrance there come
first a legion of fallen angels who have become devils. They are Satan's army. Next there
appear three Furies with serpent hair and snakes wound round them. The symbolism of
three is here undoubtedly linked with the meaning it has in the three-faced Lucifer and
the three-headed Cerberus. These Furies or Erinyes who tear their breasts with claws and
who seem, as is usual in Greek myth, to represent useless remorse are called
le meschine
della regina dell'etterno pianto.
They are handmaids of Proserpina (or Hecate) as Queen of the Underworld, and so queen
of death. These lines, together with the mention of "la donna che qui regge" by Farinata
in canto X, 80, are the only direct references to Proserpina in the Inferno.... Proserpina,
Hecate, and moon are all one. Hell is under the sway of the moon or the night. Perhaps
we have to think of the moon in her three nights' absence, like Christ's lying in the tomb
or Dante's descent to hell. Proserpina in hell represents death, death of the body and death
of the soul.

The three handmaids of Proserpina call to their aid in preventing Dante's entry one
greater than themselves. She is not named Proserpina or Hecate. She is named Medusa,
the Gorgon, the terrible snaky-haired beauty the sight of whose face turns any man to
stone. Virgil keeps Dante from looking at her, for he is not ready for this encounter. Only
when he meets Satan face to face in the bottom of the pit is he able to look steadily at the
Evil One:
io non mori', e non rimasi vivo
and afterwards leave him and revive. If he is not to lose his soul at this
point and he stopped in his journey he must have divine aid in banishing
the forces of evil arraigned against him, just as the hero Perseus slew the
Gorgon with the aid of Hermes, or Mercury, and Pallas Athene. Medusa
had once been a beautiful maiden whose greatest glory was her hair, but
after she had profaned the temple of Pallas the goddess turned her beauty
into terror and her hair into snakes. The myth is not unrelated perhaps to
the story of Proserpina, a story of life and beauty turned to destructiveness.
At any rate, Dante's Medusa with her death- dealing power would seem to
be the queen of the Furies and of the army of devils fallen with Lucifer.
She is perhaps the wife of Dis--or even Dis (Lucifer) in female form.
Perseus would then be another figure for Christ conquering the Devil--or
for the Christian hero....
Geryon, named from a monster whom Hercules slew to take away his red cattle,
does not seem in the Inferno to have much to do directly with classical myth. J. Sinclair
points out in a note to his edition of the Inferno that medieval legend represented him as
enticing strangers to his den and killing them. Dante gives him the appearance suited to
what he represents-- deceit. He is a "sozza imagine de froda" and the last monster Dante
meets before his direct encounter with the "padre di menzogna." The symbolism of his
appearance is too obvious to need discussion. He is violent, greedy, deceitful, all the
things that Satan is. His apparent beauty is a cheat and blots out the true Beauty. He is a
venomous snake like the Snake in the Garden of Eden. Satan is his real name.

There is no need to say much about the Giants. They fought presumptuously against the
gods. Nimrod raised himself proudly against God in seeking to build the tower of Babel
to reach Heaven. The giants have an affinity with the fallen angels. They have no power
over Dante, who must meet their King in his naked being and without disguise.
Dante trembles in the eternal cold that comes from Lucifer's wings--once seraph's
wings--as he approaches. He has been almost turned to ice himself. His utmost courage is
needed to make him raise his eyes and look. This is his moment of supreme danger and of
victory. The experience is expressed in one line:
Io non mori', e non rimasi vivo.
What that state was is a mystery--but a mystery joining him fast to Christ buried and
risen.
Once the first moment of confrontation is past, the hero can then look steadily and
describe all he sees, for he is no longer in danger. Then he can see that Lucifer is hatred,
ignorance and impotence. He is Father of Lies because he does not know the Truth, and
hates what he dimly discerns. He is conquered, and he is a prisoner. The Conqueror is one
mightier than Dante. Yet each soul that would be saved must pass the same way as the
Conqueror and enter the tomb where Lucifer is held fast. The way of life is guarded still
by the great serpent....
Dante plainly implies from the beginning of the journey that he is called to be
another Aeneas, and the guide given to him for part of his journey is the poet who related
the adventures of Aeneas. While Dante is hesitating to undertake the journey Virgil has
proposed to him, thinking it may be a presumptuous--folle--undertaking and doubting his
own calling, he ponders the meaning of the excursions into the condition of the hereafter
attributed to Aeneas and to St. Paul. If Aeneas was allowed to visit the place of departed
souls it was for the sake of the founding of Rome, the cause of all his journeyings since
leaving Troy and the reason why he had had to leave Queen Dido in Carthage. He had to
found Rome for the sake of the great mission to humanity of Empire and Papacy ordained
for the eternal salvation of souls. But Rome is a greater symbol even than this, and
probably for Virgil too it stood for much more than the earthly city of Rome....
Deep in the pit of hell [Dante] encounters another great voyager who came to
grief--Ulysses, whose story this other traveller is passionately anxious to hear. Dante

knew the stories of the Odyssey only at second hand through Latin writers. Many of the
commentators on the Inferno consider it probable that he had not heard the happy ending
of the story, when Ulysses at last returns to his home and wife and son. Whether he did or
not his own imagined end to the story related in Inferno, canto XXXVI, is vital to the
structure of the Commedia. Aeneas stands as a type of the hero called by God, meeting
difficulties, yielding to temptation, repenting and finally triumphant. Dido was for Aeneas
what the sirens were for Ulysses. Yet in Dante's version the story of Ulysses is
fundamentally different in its meaning. The part of it which interests him and which he
invents himself is the end, where instead of continuing homeward the voyager persuades
his men to sail with him beyond the bounds of the known world, past the pillars set up by
Hercules to mark the limit beyond which humans must not sail. In Homer's story the
return home could well stand for the reaching of man's true Homeland. Mount Purgatory,
before which Ulysses drowns in Dante's story, could have the same meaning, for it rises
up to Heaven. Ulysses does not reach his goal--because he is not called.
This is the lesson of the Ulysses story, and it is one which Dante himself found
hard. The heavenly city must not be sought presumptuously--the word folle
(presumptuous) is important in the story--trusting to one's own powers (virtute) in search
of canoscenza. This is to repeat the sin of Lucifer and Adam. Both of them sought to grab
for themselves what belonged only to God and could be received only as a gift. Adam
violated the ban put upon the Tree of Knowledge. Ulysses violated the similar ban
symbolized by the pillars of Hercules. He stands as a warning to Dante and to all others
who seek true Wisdom, the attainment of which gives citizenship in the City of God. If
Aeneas attains it and if Dante attains it, it is by the grace of the Traveller who shows the
way to all travellers, of Him who is "the way, and the truth and the life." Dante the
Christian poet and prophet teaches that true journeying involves a dying with Christ and a
rising with Christ, in whom alone the dangers of the way are overcome.