Inferno, Canto 10

The Text of Canto 10 (Open PDF)

Summary

As the Poets are passing along beneath the city walls, Dante is hailed by Farinata from one of the burning tombs, and goes to speak to him. Their conversation is interrupted by Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti with a question about his son. Farinata prophesies Dante's exile and explains how the souls in Hell know nothing of the present, though they can remember the past and dimly foresee the future.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• The sixth circle of hell is dedicated to the punishment of Heresy, a vice of the intellect and the will: it is obstinacy in error. There Dante meets the souls of the Epicurean philosophers who live eternally in burning tombs for having denied the immortality of the soul. Why would this intellectual vice be the first (even foundational) sin for the city of Dis?
• How, by way of contrast with the damned we encounter in this canto, does believing in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body grant the human person an eternal dignity that can and should be reflected in our shared life together?
• For Dante, sin involves some kind of distortion, disordering, or misapplication of love. The loves of the damned are often good things, but good things that have been bent out of shape and have become disproportionate to justice, often squeezing God out of the picture. How does Farinata’s patriotism and Cavalcante’s filial love, together with their heretical beliefs, contribute to their damnation? If the soul dies with the body, what does that mean for political and familial relationships?
• The damned can know the past and the future but they don’t know the present. According to Mary Carruthers, the souls in Inferno cannot form new memories because they are deprived of their (physical) bodies; the damned are stuck in their “recollected pasts.” How do we see this phenomenon at play in Dante’s meeting with Farinata and Cavalcante?
• What does the inability to form new memories in hell mean for the possibility of interpersonal relationships among the damned and what does this mean for what we should expect for the social life of the city of Dis?

 Canto 10 © Jan Hearn

The Images

The Heretics. “It is necessary to remember what Dante meant by heresy. He meant an obduracy of the mind; a spiritual state which defied, consciously, ‘a power to which trust and obedi- ence are due’; an intellectual obstinacy. A heretic, strictly, was a man who knew what he was doing; he accepted the Church, but at the same time he preferred his own judgment to that of the Church. This would seem to be impossible, except that it is apt to happen in all of us after our manner.” 

The tombs of the intellectually obdurate - iron without and fire within - thus fittingly open the circles of Nether Hell: the circles of deliberately willed sin.

Mark Vernon's Lecture