Wednesday
Yesterday I discussed Donald Trump in relation to Dante’s seven circles of hell. I noted I was less interested in condemning him to Inferno than in his potential for reform. If I seem too focused on the president, feel free to expand the discussion to anyone who is worrying you at the moment.
You can even use Trump the way Dante uses his sinners: as a symbol of the sin. While Dante may at times appear to be settling personal scores, for the most part he is providing graphic descriptions so that we will grasp the ugliness of the sin and what it does to us. It can’t be quietly normalized.
For Dante, anything that keeps us from God is abhorrent. If you don’t want to use the word “God,” think of the process as rising to your best self. Anything that causes us to miss this mark (to use the archery origins of the word “sin”) must be identified and transcended if we are to make the most of our existence.
But returning to our conman-in-chief, we can expect that the last two circles of hell might be his ultimate destination given that they are reserved for the maliciously fraudulent. Dante considers fraud a worse crime than violence because it involves betrayal. Here are the sinners who appear to match Trump best:
–Simoniacs (Circle 8, Bolgia 3) – Simoniacs, who include a number of popes, are those who have sold ecclesiastic favors and offices. If our equivalent is politicians who have betrayed the public trust and put the government up for sale, Trump certainly qualifies. Since these offenders claim to have been reaching up to God when in actuality they reached down to money, Dante buries them upside down in tubes. Instead of Pentecostal fire loosening their hearts and tongues, fire burns the bottom of their feet.
–The Grafters (Circle 8, Bolgia 5) – I’ve blogged previously about Dante’s grafters, who get hooked by demons just as they themselves hooked others. Despite Congress’s attempts to block Trump properties from getting any of the trillions that have been allotted to save the economy, the president’s grappling hooks appear to be at work.
–Hypocrites (Circle 8, Bolgia 6)—I include Hypocrites here only to absolve Trump of this sin. Francois de La Rochefoucauld famously wrote that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, but Trump doesn’t feel the need to pay homage to virtue. The hypocrites in Inferno are weighed down by leaden garments under their attractive exteriors, but Trump seems as light as the air when he tells his lies. This means that he probably belongs much more with the Evil Counselors in Bolgia 8.
–Evil Counselors (Circle 8, Bolgia 8)—A couple of months ago I reported on a student troubled by how Athena applauds Odysseus for his incessant lying. Virgil and Dante are far less forgiving, grouping Odysseus/Ulysses with the evil counselors—which is to say, with those who lie incessantly to get their way. Ulysses is wrapped in a tongue of flame, which John Ciardi explains as follows:
Their sin was to abuse the gifts fof the Almighty, to steal His virtue for low purposes. And as they stole from God in their lives and worked by hidden ways, so are they stolen from sight and hidden in the great flames which are their own guilty consciences. And as…they sinned by glibness of tongue, so are the flames made into a fiery travesty of tongues.
Ulysses’s most destructive lie was the Trojan horse, which led to the slaughter of thousands. In the tale that he tells Dante about how he and his shipmates died, his glib tongue persuades them to sail with him on a doomed voyage. Our own glib-tongued leader may be taking down his own fervent followers, whether they be bankrupt soybean farmers, struggling small business owners, or Covid protesters.
Sowers of Discord (Circle 8, Bolgia 9)—The sowers of discord have been split down the middle so that they walk around dragging their spilled organs behind them. Many have noted that Trump is the first to have regarded himself as president only of his own faction, not of the entire nation. His political strategy involves inflaming his base, not winning over others. Dante is appalled at the many mangled bodies he witnesses in this pit, all responsible for having encouraged bloody civil wars and other such conflicts:
At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain;
the language of our sense and memory
lacks the vocabulary of such pain.
He describes one figure as follows:
A wine tun when a stave or cant-bar starts
does not split open as wide as one I saw
split from his chin to the mouth with which man farts.
Between his legs all of his red guts hung
with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder,
and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung.
— Traitors to Country (Circle 9, Round 2)—The last circle, which contains traitors—the worst of the fraudulent—is frozen over. Whereas violence arises out of hot anger, betrayal occurs as cold calculation. Trump’s selling out American interests for Russian electoral help (or perhaps for financial gain or because of blackmail) qualify him for this final circle.
The figure Dante encounters here is Antenora, who unsealed the gates of Troy so that the Greeks could enter. Of all the figures that Dante encounters, this is the one that enrages him the most. First he kicks his head, the only part of his body not frozen in ice, and then pulls his hair. Many have noted Trump’s absence of empathy–for country as well as for people–which is captured by this frozen state.
As I noted in yesterday’s post, if Trump were the least little bit remorseful for his failings, in Dante’s eyes he would qualify for Purgatory, where he could work on purging them. Though an old man, he still has time.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, however.
