Sordid Sorcery
These are all people who attempted to use magic to see the future or dictate what might happen or manipulate hidden knowledge, all for their own wish fulfillment. Within the Christian context in the Middle Ages all is to be done to expand God’s reign in this world and any efforts to manipulate or control time and / or events to enrich one’s self or boost one’s image in the public eye is considered sinful. Indeed, it is to place one’s self in God’s place. Only God has the right to know the future and in this Medieval worldview, everything is to be done in His time and at His discretion, so it is to go against that divine will to try and circumvent or discover ways to detour around what has been ordained to happen.
The moral landscape here is staggeringly inventive and yet quite appropriate. As they tried to see ahead into the future using magical means so they could get to where they wanted to go to protect themselves [re: Amphiaraus trying to escape battle only to be swallowed up in an earthquake lines 31 – 38], or to satisfy inappropriate desires and needs [re: Tiresias who changed himself through magic from a man into a woman lines 40 – 42], they are now forced to pace slowly, with heads turned in the opposite direction of God’s wise creation.
I found the beginning to be appropriate too, in a paradoxical way, for the procession is at first similar to a holy liturgy with slow steps and heads bowed, save the heads are looking down to be sure they don’t trip as they have to view the ground ahead of them through the flow of their tears and beyond their own backsides. There is no sound but quiet weeping. There is no dashing about to flee from flying flames, but simple plodding in a direction they are forced to move without any progress being made; progress being the one thing they desired most of all using magical means to get themselves ahead, and all they can see is behind, their own.
Dante the Pilgrim, viewing this shocking scene, is staggered and attempts to justify his reactionary weeping with the following:
19 Reader, so may God let you gather fruit
20 from reading this, imagine, if you can,
21 how I could have kept from weeping
22 when I saw, up close, our human likeness
23 so contorted that tears from their eyes
24 ran down their buttocks, down into the cleft.
25 Yes, I wept, leaning against a spur
26 of the rough crag…
And yet, Virgil the guide gives him a tongue lashing that is fierce and yet also wondrously subtle.
26 … my escort said:
27 'Are you still witless as the rest?
28 'Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.
The piety one is supposed to have in honoring God must include trusting the judgment given out by that selfsame God. To be overcome by pity at God’s judgment means true and loving piety has died. These three lines, 28, 29 and 30 are even more subtle in the Italian, and one can find different attempts to translate it:
[Hollander]
28 'Here piety lives when pity is quite dead.
29 Who is more impious than one who thinks
30 that God shows passion in His judgment?
[Sayers]
28 Here pity, or here piety, must die
29 If the other lives: who’s wickeder than one
30 That’s agonized by God’s high equity?
[Ciardi]
27b … There is no place
28 for pity here. Who is more arrogant
29 within his soul, who is more impious,
30 than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?
Within the harsh times of Dante the Poet, suffering is not the issue, but the reason for the suffering remains central. We will suffer. We do suffer. That is without question and is lifted up time and again in the Psalter, the Gospels, in all of literature and art and mystical teaching across the ages and in all traditions.
Therefore Dante the Poet asks these two questions that come from the Italian sentence and subtle syntax: which one is the most sinful and is the most antagonistic toward God? Is it the one who disobeyed and refused to repent and is therefore now suffering here in this ring of Hell? Or is the one who protests and weeps over God’s punishment of the sinner more wicked than the actual sinner who is being punished in the first place?
At one level, there is compassion and love and sorrow in the Commedia, but at a far deeper level, those attributes are only acceptable in their proper place and context. To be filled with sadness at the wrong time and in the wrong place is to be dismissive of God and the moral qualities that guide this world.