Inferno, Canto 12

The Text of Canto 12 (Open PDF)

Summary

At the point where the sheer precipice leading down to the Seventh Circle is made negotiable by a pile of tumbled rock, Virgil and Dante are faced by the Minotaur. A taunt from Virgil throws him into a fit of blind fury, and while he is thrashing wildly about the Poets slip past him. Virgil tells Dante how the rocks were dislodged by the earthquake which took place at the hour of Christ's descent into limbo. At the foot of the cliff they come to Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood, in which the Violent against their Neighbours are immersed, and whose banks are guarded by Centaurs. At Virgil's request, Chiron, the chief Centaur, sends Nessus to guide them to the ford and carry Dante over on his back. On the way, Nessus points out a number of notable tyrants and robbers.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• Dante meets many mythical creatures in the rings of the Violent. Interestingly, they are all hybrid creatures: half human, half beast. In canto 12 we meet the Minotaur and the centaurs, for example. What does this fusion of human and beast reveal about Dante’s theology of violence? How does he depict violence as undoing the human person and the possibility of human flourishing?
• How might the hybrid creatures in these circles be ironic or perverse images or invocations of Christ?
• Commenting on the earthquake that shook hell at Christ’s resurrection, Virgil ascribes it to the theory of Empedocles that the world goes through endless cycles of the concord and chaos of its various elements. In Virgil’s explanation, the event of Christ’s resurrection was when the world “felt love” (12.42) before cycling back into dissolution and discord. Why is this not an adequate account of the nature of the world and of history for Dante’s Christian imagination? And yet, is there anything in this account that anticipates the Christian truth of the world?
• What contrapasso must the violent against others suffer? Why are the centaurs the ones who hunt violent souls like mounted cavalry on the shore of the river of blood?
• Why does Dante depict centaurs like Chiron and Nessus the way he does? Does he mean for them to be more rational and humane than the humans being punished in this circle?
• How does Dante the poet draw attention to the human body throughout this canto and why is that an important focus for the themes of this infernal ring?

 Canto 12, © Jan Hearn

The Images

The Circle of Violence. From now to the end of Canto XVII we are in the circle devoted to Violence or Bestiality (the “sins of the Lion”) which, together with the Circle of the Heretics, makes up the first division of Nether Hell.

The Minotaur and The Centaurs. In this and the next ring we find demon-guardians compounded of man and brute. They are the types of perverted appetite - the human reason subdued to animal passion. The Minotaur had the body of a man and the head of a bull; the Centaurs were half-man, half-horse.

River Phlegethon - “the fiery” - is the third chief river ofHell. Like Acheron and Styx, it forms a complete circuit about the abyss, and it is deep at one side and shallow at the other. The sinners whose fiery passions caused them to shed man’s blood are here plunged in that blood-bath for ever.

Mark Vernon's Lecture