When in canto XI
Virgil explained to Dante the subdivisions of the lower part of the Inferno, I didn't
feel that suicides and homosexuals did not belong in there (in view
of the banks bailout I believe, like Dante, that moneylenders do
belong in Hell).
What were the views
on these subjects in Dante's times? According to Benigni, homosexual
behavior was so widespread that the word for “gay” was
“Florentine.” As to suicide, for the Greeks and the Romans
suicide to protect one's reputation was honorable. Socrates and
Seneca could easily have gone into exile instead of committing
suicide. Lucretia, who killed herself because she was raped and her
honor was compromised, was considered a model of virtue. (Dante
places all three in Limbo).
According to the
church suicide was wrong because life does not belong to us but to
God. That idea is rather irksome: a brutal God, after making people
suffer in life, places them in Hell?
After Virgil's
explanation I was afraid that, in canto XIII, I would encounter some
equivalent of Dido - someone who committed suicide out of grief -
stuck in the depth of Hell with Dante shaking his finger at her. But
Dido is placed in the second circle and not in the seventh.
Here we find a
different kind of suicide: a political one. The anonymous Florentine
who uses his houses (note the plural) to kill himself is a symbol,
according to Durling, of Florence's civil war. Florence is both the
killer and the killed, and this, says the Florentine, is due to greed
(the factions are devoted to the saint imprinted on the Florin, their
currency). This reminds me of American CEO’s outsourcing jobs and
creating massive unemployment in America. Basically they are
destroying the country from within.
But the central
part of this canto is about the suicide of Pier delle Vigne, the
minister of Emperor Frederick II. He was very powerful, but he was
accused by other courtiers of enriching himself, and he was
imprisoned and his reputation was discredited. He probably would have
been condemned to death anyway and wanted to beat his executioners,
but Dante focuses not on his political predicament but on his
psychology. Pier delle Vigne in Dante's story killed himself because
he was disgusted with the people who betrayed him, and he valued his
reputation more than his body.
Dante's
circumstances were very similar. He too was a political figure, who
was unjustly accused of monetary fraud and condemned to death (which
he escaped by not returning to Florence).
I wonder if Dante,
who had lost his homeland and his reputation, whose possessions were
confiscated, whose family had stayed behind in Florence, and whose
great love (Beatrice) had died... did he ever contemplate suicide?
I bet he did, and
in Pier delle Vigne he sees what would have happened to him, had he
given in to temptation (like in Paolo and Francesca he sees what
would have happened to him and Beatrice if they had gone beyond
Platonic love).
His case against
suicide is that the mind should not turn against the body. In the
canto the suicides are fond of abstractions of the mind – (i.e.
reputation is killed by Envy, or people preferred the saint on their
coins, etc) and the souls talk with Virgil, a shadow, not with Dante.
It is remarkable
that Dante stresses the importance of the body. Most of his
contemporaries, and especially the church, espoused the Neo-Platonic
doctrine that the world of ideas is perfect, and the body, and
anything material, is foul. When in French universities people
started preferring Aristotle to Plato, the church tried to ban
Aristotle's texts, and students rioted for the right to read them.
Dante espouses
Aristotle's ethics, and in this canto he shows the danger, implicit
in the Christian doctrine, of despising the body. If it was right to
self flagellate and mortify the body, why would it be wrong to kill
it? As usual Dante does not preach; he shows the consequences of
considering one's fleeting public reputation to be more important
than the physical world.
The transformation
of people into plants wasn't new. Ovid told the stories of almost a
dozen people transformed into trees in the “Metamorphoses.”
Sometimes it was an act of mercy; at others it was a punishment. I
was horrified when I read the “Metamorphoses.”
Ovid did not think
losing one's body was a big deal. He too, like Dante, had been
permanently exiled. His bitterness comes through in his writing.
Dante, instead, feels the tragedy of these people imprisoned in trees
(he gathers the leaves for one). As to the homosexuals, according to
Esolen, Brunetto Latini is one of only two people in Hell whom Dante
addresses with the respectful form “voi” instead of “tu”
(the other is Farinata).
Dante's humanity is
never destroyed by his own tribulations. He never gets a wooden
heart, and considering what he went through, it is truly a miracle.
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