Inferno, Canto 3

The Text of Canto 3 (Open PDF)

Summary

Arriving at the gate of Hell, the Poets read the inscription upon its lintel. They enter and find themselves in the Vestibule of Hell, where the Futile run perpetually after a whirling standard. Passing quickly on, they reach the river Acheron. Here the souls of all the damned come at death to be ferried across by Charon, who refuses to take the living body of Dante till Virgil silences him with a word of power. While they are watching the departure of a boatload of souls the river banks are shaken by an earthquake so violent that Dante swoons away.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• What does the inscription above the gate of hell (3.1-9) tell us about the nature and purpose of Dante’s hell? How might this inscription challenge our contemporary understanding of hell?
• The gate invokes the Trinity (Power, Wisdm, and Primal Love)  as hell’s creator. Is there any reasonable way that we can conceive of hell as an expression of divine Love?
• What is the significance of Dante’s hell being underground, cut off from the sky and the stars?
• Who are the first souls that Dante sees in the vestibule of hell and why is that location so significant for what is being punished in it?
• How do the souls of the damned behave as they move toward their judgment and what does this show us about the human desire for justice (3.124-126)

Canto 3, © Jan Hearn

The Images

Hell-Gate, High and wide and without bars {Inf. viii. 126). the door “whose threshold is denied to none" {Inf. xiv. 87) always waits to receive those who are astray in the Dark Wood. Anyone may enter if he so chooses, but if he does, he must abandon hope, since it leads nowhere but to the City of Desolation. In the story, Hell is filled with the souls of those who died with their wills set to enter by that gate; in the allegory, these souls are the images of sin in the self or in society.

The Vestibule was presumably suggested to Dante by the description in Aeneid vi. (where, however, it is tenanted by rather a different set of people). It does not, I think, occur in any previous Christian eschatology. Heaven and Hell being states in which choice is permanently fixed, there must also be a state in which the refusal of choice is itself fixed, since to refuse choice is in fact to choose indecision. The Vestibule is the abode of the weather-cock mind, the vague tolerance which will neither approve nor condemn, the cautious cowardice for which no decision is ever final. The spirits rush aimlessly after the aimlessly whirling banner, stung and goaded, as of old, by the thought that, in doing anything definite whatsoever, they are missing doing something else.

Acheron, "the joyless", first of the great rivers of Hell whose names Dante took from Virgil and Virgil from Homer. 

Charon, the classical ferryman of the dead. Most of the monstrous organisms by which the formations of Hell are discharged are taken from Greek and Roman mythology. They are neither devils nor damned souls, but the images of perverted appetites, presiding over the circles appropriate to their natures.

Mark Vernon's Lecture