Possessed by the Organization? Dante’s Inferno on Earth

Abstract

‘Abandon all hope you who enter here’ (Inf. 3:9)¹ — such is the warning that is inscribed on the gate to Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy; Saint Francis of Assisi was to say that ‘now is the time of mercy, and afterwards of justice’ (Bonaventure, 1968, p. 284). In Dante’s poem, however, not only the souls entering Hell need to forget about God’s mercy, the reader is also asked to ‘abandon all hope’ for understanding when reading Inferno. If understanding involves a ‘movement of the mind from the sign to its significance’ (Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, quoted in Freccero, 1986, p. 100), then in Hell no such movement is supposed to be possible. It is a place of stasis, meaninglessness, of the literal. As pure infernal chaos is impossible to be poetically represented, Dante uses an ironic trick — reverses everything. Instead of lack of order a reversed order is presented — Hell becomes an organization.