Inferno: Canto 12 -- Circle 7, Round 1

2004-09-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

"Run now! While he is blind with Rage!/ Into the pass, quick, and get over the side!" (26-7), Virgil urges Dante after he confounds the Minotaur, the half-bull, half man of Crete. That we're still seeing mythical monsters past the walls of Dis is a nod to the reality of violence as a bestial act in which both passion and reason play a part. We contemplate war and aggression as much as we lash out in anger without thinking about what we are doing, and the Minotaur, a beast without reason is contrasted strongly against the Centaurs, beasts generally noted for their cool reason and wisdom. It is because of this that violence is a good transition between the incontinence of upper hell and the fraudulence of lower hell.

Since the gates of Dis, Dante and Virgil have demonstrated acts of fear (tempered by a great deal of courage) based on their being susceptible to harm. At the gate, Virgil held Dante's eyes away from Medusa and was told that Dante would have to go back the way he came and that he, Virgil, could come only to stay. In the confrontation with the minotaur, Virgil realizes that human reason will only serve to confound the beast, and it will not delay him long. This is different from the encounters with Charon, Cerberus, Plutos, and Phlegyas, none of whom posed any physical danger. Virgil treats these other guardians differently because he knows that on the other side of human reason lies madness, and that violence is fundamentally an act of madness at best and a perversion of human reason at worst. As a result, he cannot trust the Minotaur to act rationally in the face of his explanation.

Once safe, Virgil recounts once more the harrowing (what Fr. Brennan calls the plundering) of hell, an event that still plays largely in his mind, in part because the poets are always passing evidence of the fact. This explanation of Virgil's gives us the chance to examine one of the technical devices at play in the poem. Dante the Poet always takes opportunities to describe natural phenomena, philosophy, or mythology in relation to the cartography through which the Dante the pilgrim and Virgil travel. It is no accident, then, that Virgil interprets the fallen rock around them by making allusion to the love that filled the universe with harmony while "the world of matter . . . has often plunged to chaos" -- this is where we're headed -- to a place where reason (order) and passion (chaos) clash, and we don't have to wait too long to get there because in the next breath, Virgil points out the river of blood.

Phlegethon, according to myth, was a river of fire, which suits Dante's purpose quite well because he can change the lava to blood without losing any of the imagery of the myth -- in fact, he enriches it. The river of the violent (of those who succumbed to passion in lashing out against others) is guarded by Centaurs (symbols of reason) who patrol the sinners immersed in the river according to their level of guilt. Any sinner who raises himself higher than his guilt allows gets shot with arrows (we should have come by this yesterday, in fact, since yesterday was St. Sebastian's day, and his image is one of being shot with arrows) --

-- so that it is reason that eternally presides over passion. What will need to be abused from this point out is the dominant power, so we find in the circles lower than this one every form in which the abuse of reason can take. Of all the beasts in hell, moreover, Virgil gets along best with the Centaurs for obvious reasons, and directs his energies to the most reasonable of the group -- Chiron, who at one point was Achilles' teacher of the natural sciences. That Chiron's reasoning faculties govern over his passions is evidenced by the fact that he draws his arrow in a pause, studying the two, and remarks to his colleagues, "Have you noticed/ how the one who walks behind moves what he touches? That is not how the dead go" (80-2). After Virgil explains the mystery, Chiron assigns Nessus to carry the poets across the river of blood, which is appropriate on a number of levels, but the point of interest here is that Virgil's first address to Nessus is to chastise him for his wrath (the very thing against which he was reacting when he blessed Dante's righteous indignation against Filippo Argenti -- and the pattern of Virgil's blessing becomes more clear, for consumptive wrath is antithetical to human reason as it clouds the mind and paralyzes the ability to act).

As the poets descend with Nessus, the river becomes shallower, until they see people whose feet alone are covered by the river, and it is here they cross and are reminded that hell is a funnel and that the river gets deeper again until it joins with the other side. Among the people in this place is Alexander the Great, the conqueror of the world and the propaganidizer of hellenistic culture who, at the age of 20, put down a rebellion in Thebes and killed, by some estimates, 90,000 of its inhabitants. This violence on his part is in stark contrast to the cool reason of his own teacher -- Aristotle, the master of all who knows.

S.