A Journey Through Hell

Midway through our Spring semester, I found myself in a conference room in the Core office with dozens of students and faculty, participating in a marathon reading of Dante’s Inferno.

Some participants read in Italian, the rolling Rs and the rhythm of Dante’s terza rima holding all of us in thrall, whether we understood the language or not. Others performed dramatic readings — giving different voices to Vergil and to the many sinners, scoundrels and monsters Dante encounters on his journey through the nine circles of Hell. I confess that I, too, hammed it up when I took my turn at the podium. When not reading aloud, students followed along with pencils in hand, nary an electronic device in sight.

Inferno is one of three works that have never left the Literature Humanities syllabus since the course became a requirement in 1937. Like many of my colleagues, I find it a challenging text to teach; the myriad historical references to 13th- and early 14th-century Florence can be daunting. Yet it is also one of the most satisfying works on the syllabus to read, and one of the best suited to Lit Hum.

Dante’s guide through Hell is Vergil (il miglior fabbro: the better craftsman), an ancient poet whom students encounter as an author when reading the Aeneid during the Fall semester. Much of Inferno’s depiction of Hell is based on the katabasis — the journey to the underworld — in Book VI of the Aeneid, which itself drew on Homer’s Odyssey and Plato’s Republic.

Dante’s fictional persona is as much a reader as he is a pilgrim. In Canto V, he encounters the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, whose transgression followed their reading of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. The canto closes with a subtle joke that refutes any suggestion that the book was to blame for their indiscretion: Dante faints like a damsel in a chivalric romance. He, too, has read these works — and he remains uncorrupted by them.

Dante’s cosmos contains multitudes — sinners and saints, the sacred and the scatological. There are moments of compassion and affection, as when he encounters his beloved teacher Brunetto Latini or the disgraced diplomat Pier delle Vigne. There is also enmity, as when he tears out the hair from the nape of Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed Dante’s Florentine political faction, the White Guelphs, and now lies frozen in the ninth circle of Hell.

Yet Dante allows even his enemies to tell their tales, because at the heart of Inferno is a reverence for the written and spoken word — an attitude incompatible with suppressing the voices of others. Reverence for words and ideas also requires respect for the material objects that transmit them — the book itself — just as moral recognition of other people entails respect for their bodies. It was the reverence for books on display at our marathon reading that made the event feel so important.

Two months earlier, administrators at Texas A&M University told a professor to remove Plato’s Symposium — read in Lit Hum nearly as often as Inferno — from his syllabus because of its depiction of gender and sexuality. Around the same time, The Washington Post reported that AI giant Anthropic shredded millions of books while training its AI models. Dark woods, indeed.

There is, however, a way out. It requires the courage to make Vergil, Dante, Plato, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison and the many other authors we read in Lit Hum our guides through the rough terrain of thinking. Not because they confirm our beliefs, but because when we read their works, we encounter experiences and perspectives as numerous as the stars that Dante and Vergil gaze at as they emerge from Hell. We see the forgotten good in villains, the overlooked flaws in heroes, the uncomfortable truths we try to hide from ourselves. Literary works give us insight into the complexity of the human condition across continents, through centuries and even within ourselves.

Books also fill us with an ardent desire to discuss them with others, to share our feelings, questions and interpretations — and that, too, is morally and politically significant. The antidote to the societal forces that are pulling us apart and dulling our intellects is the practice of intelligence in community with others, which is what the experience of reading and discussing books offers us.

I have always understood Dante’s poem to be a testament to the power of humanistic works to confront — and perhaps even redeem — the inhumane. That means cultivating compassion for the condemned, inspiring indignation at those who abuse power without accountability and, above all, celebrating our capacity to think, imagine and create worlds different from our own.

Inferno affirms a belief that some might dismiss as naive, but that we prove in the Core Curriculum each day: that reading and talking about books are among the most important things we can do.