Inferno, Canto 14

The Text of Canto 14 (Open PDF)

Summary

In a desert of Burning Sand, under a rain of perpetual fire, Dante finds the. Violent against God, Nature, and Art. The Violent against God lie supine, facing the Heaven which they insulted; among these is Capaneus, blasphemous and defiant in death as in life. The Poets pick their way carefully between the forest and the hot sand till they come to the edge of a boiling, red stream. Here Virgil explains the origin of all the rivers of Hell.

The Prepatory Lecture

Click here if video doesn't appear.

Questions for Reflection

• The first half of canto 14 is a study of blasphemy through the heroic figure of the Greek king Capaneus. How might we think of blasphemy as an act of violence? What relation do you see between blasphemy and pride?
• What does Capaneus’ claim that “What I was in life I am in death” reveal to us about the nature of damnation? What do you think Dante intends to show us about the nature of blessedness in contrast to this?
• Why would Dante devote so much space to Virgil’s retelling of the myth of the golden age? Does that myth being told in the context of hell tell us something about human ambition? Does it serve as a warning against a nostalgia for the past?
• How is Virgil a fitting contrast to Capaneus?

Canto 14, © Jan Hearn

The Images

The Sand. “In these circles of the Violent the reader is peculiarly conscious of a sense of sterility. The bloody river, the dreary wood, the harsh sand, which compose them, to some extent are there as symbols of unfruitfulness” (Charles Williams; The Figure of Beatrice, p. 129). The images of the sand and burning rain are derived from the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Blasphemers. Capaneus the Blasphemer is chosen as the particular image of Violence against God: he is an image of Pride, which makes the soul obdurate under judgment. The arrangement of Hell, being classical, allots no special place to Pride (held by Christianity to be the root of all sin), but it offers a whole series of examples of Pride, each worse than the last, as the Pit deepens. Farinata’s pride is dark and silent; that of Capaneus is loud and defiant, but not yet so wholly ignoble as that of Vanni Fucci (Canto XXV. i), far down in the Eighth Circle.

Mark Vernon's Lecture