Hell is Yourself

My main problem with teaching Dante is pacing. The Commedia is such an overwhelming treasure that it is hard to keep making forward progress. As such, I am miserably behind schedule. To wit, we are three weeks in and I am still trying to get us into the latter half of Inferno. Oh well. Here's a moment from Canto 14 that I find true of sin and sinners.

They are in Circle 7, a three-tiered level that punishes crimes against God (blasphemy), crimes against nature (homosexuality), and crimes against art (usurers, or people who charge interest). In this canto we're in the first of these tiers with the blasphemers. The spirit that the pilgrim Dante slows down to talk to here is Capaneus, a mythological warrior most famous from a play by Aeschylus. 

Capaneus is a member of a faction trying to overthrow Thebes. Imagining himself unbeatable, he declares that not even Zeus could stop his action and save Thebes. Zeus takes that challenge and lays Capaneus flat with a lightning bolt. Dante encounters Capaneus in this level where sinners are punished by either lying down or walking around on burning sand (depending on the severity of their sin) while fire-rain pours down on them, and rather than trying to ameliorate his fate Capaneus "sets his face against the fire in scorn." He disdains the punishment, refusing to give Zeus (Jupiter in Dante's Roman pantheon) the "small satisfaction" of pleading for relief.

There is something pathetically heroic about Capaneus' stand. In the midst of the fires of hell he refuses to repent or cry out. His pathetic heroism is redolent of another character in epic literature, and not a flattering analogue: Satan in Paradise Lost who likewise refuses to "bow and sue for grace/ With suppliant knee." Neither will bend to God's will, his power, or his judgment. The adverb before heroic, though, is important. And heroism here is pathetic. Moreover, it only serves to darkly affirm Capaneus' earlier self-serving words that "[w]hat I was living, the same am I now, dead." He imagines this to be an assertion of his independence and his integrity, but it is hard to see how the very characteristic that ended him up in hell is worth extolling. It is amazing what people will cling to.

Virgil, Dante's guide, chimes in helpfully here to rebuke Capaneus' vaunting pride:

"O Capaneus, by your insolence
you are made to suffer as much fire inside
as falls upon you. Only your own rage
could be fit torment for your sullen pride."

These lines remind me of the playground taunt from my childhood years: sucks to be you. Virgil is telling Capaneus basically that: "Capaneus, it sucks to be you. And now you're stuck with you forever." The heat of his rage only highlights the abject condition in which Capaneus now finds himself. And the fire burns inside of him in a more brutal way than that which rains down on his supine body.

And how true this is of us and our sin. We cling to it, cherish it, apologize for it, pretend it requires no apology. I know and have known people who are alive who are just like Capaneus. Scorning the flames. Refusing to bow. Carrying a hell within themselves. A hallmark of Christian theology that I imagine I read for the first time in C.S. Lewis is that every resident of hell is there by choice. The choice to deny God, hate truth, and exalt self is forever enshrined in hell. You are free there to worship at your own altar.