[Greetings, friends, from Austin! At the start of every year, I read my favorite philosophy book, Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.1 This year, because I am preparing to teach a small group on Zoom through Dante’s Inferno in the coming weeks (which you can join by replying to this email with your email address), my reading of Dante and Boethius just happened to overlap.
To my benefit, this overlap opened me up to observe a few connections I’m not sure I otherwise would have made. The first is personal: Boethius is my Virgil—my guide whenever I am lost in a dark forest and need to come back to myself. It’s why I start the year with Consolation and why it is the book I recommend most to others.
The second is philosophical: in addition to being geniuses, both Dante and Boethius lived in a cosmos animated and ordered by eternal ideas. I think I am drawn to their work (and the Medieval worldview in general—see On the Discarded Image for more on that) because they synthesize and capture, in story, all of the best wisdom and insights of the Ancient worlds. Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Homer. They are all ever present in the works of Boethius and Dante.
Living 800 years before Dante (1265-1321), it is apparent throughout the Inferno that Dante was influenced by and admired Boethius (480-524). In the last installment of the Divine Comedy, Paradise, Dante makes that admiration explicit: “Now if your mind will follow upon my praise, / you eyes proceeding on from light to light, / you’ll thirst to know about the eighth [Boethius]. Because / He saw all that was good, now in delight / shimmers that spirit who made manifest / how the world cheats—to all who hear him right.” (Paradise, Canto X, lines 121-126).
Of all the ways Dante and Boethius overlap, perhaps my favorite is on man’s end—the end toward which we all bend by nature. It is a topic touched on by Plato and Aristotle. And it is the topic to which we devote the remainder of today’s essay.]
At the bottom of the Inferno, Virgil stops Dante and says, “Behold there, Dis! Behold the place / where you must arm yourself with fortitude.”2 Looking out, Dante sees Satan, not engulfed in flame as the modern imagination often pictures, but encased in ice, like the rest of the souls in this circle. Frozen from the waist down, Satan has wings that flap endlessly, tears that fall ceaselessly, and a mouth that eats constantly:
The emperor of the reign of misery
from his chest up emerges from the ice:
… [Once] He was as fair as he is ugly now,
… three faces in his head,
… Beneath each face extended two huge wings, /
large enough to suffice for such a bird.
I never saw a sail at sea so broad.
They had no feathers, but were black and scaled
like a bat’s wings, and those he flapped, and flapped,
and from his flapping raised three gales that swept
Cocytus, and reduced it all to ice.
With six eyes he wept…3
With this image, Dante attempted to paint Satan as the soul most suffering in Hell, as “the source of every woe.” 4 But to understand why this is a punishment fit for the one who rebelled against God, we must hyperlink back to a few earlier portions of the Inferno, which in turn point further back to Plato, Aristotle, and Boethius.
Back closer to the beginning of Dante’s journey into Hell, we are told that the souls who dwell below are like leaves that separate themselves from the tree. Near the end of Canto XI, where the gluttons are punished, Virgil urges Dante to remember his philosophy, which reveals a central insight regarding all of the punishments found in the Inferno:
‘Turn to your philosophy again,
which shows that when a thing at last is whole
it feels more pleasure—so [souls in the Inferno] feel[] more pain.
For all that these accursed folk cannot
come to their true perfection and man’s end...’5
Those familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle recognize it here in Dante’s reference to “true perfection” and “man’s end.” For Aristotle, all things had a telos—an end toward which they went by nature or something it was uniquely designed to do. The telos of an acorn, for example, is an oak. The degree to which something is aligned with its telos is the degree to which something can be said to be excellent. And the degree to which something is excellent (or virtuous) is the degree to which it experiences the fulfillment of flourishing.
As for Dante’s talk of true perfection, we look back to Plato. In Timaeus (see On the Stars as a Guide), Plato describes the world as the creation of a Craftsman—who fashioned the world according to the eternal Forms and the divine mind, separating undifferentiated chaos into perfect parts of a perfect whole and then releasing the world soul throughout to bind it all together. As subjects separated from perfection, Plato thought (through Timaeus), our deepest longing was to be reunited with the source from which we sprang. “The sight of Thee is beginning and end; one guide, leader, path, and goal.”6
Building off Aristotle and Plato, Boethius worked these ideas into his Consolation of Philosophy: “Thus all things seek again their proper courses, and rejoice when they return to them. The only stable order in things is that which connects the beginning to the end and keeps itself on a steady course.”7 But Boethius didn’t just regurgitate the greats; he also fully Christianized their ideas, making the case that Biblical God is what the two great Greek philosophers were pointing toward.
God, thought Boethius, was the beginning and end of man, the true perfection and peace we long to be reunited with. It’s one of the first medicines administered by Lady Philosophy as she tries to counsel Boethius back to spiritual health after his exile (the main plotline of the Consolation):
‘But tell me, do you remember what the end, or goal of all things is—the goal toward which all nature is directed?’
‘I heard it once,’ [Boethius] answered, ‘but the grief has dulled my memory.’
‘Well, do you know where all things come from?’
I answered that I knew all things come from God.
‘How then,’ she went on, ‘is it possible that you can know the origin of all things and still be ignorant of their purpose? But this is the usual result of anxiety; it can change a man, but it cannot break him and cannot destroy him.’8
With all this background in mind, we are now equipped to understand the punishment of Satan in Dante’s deepest pit of Hell. If we subscribe to the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, and Boethius (as Dante did), we can understand that Satan—frozen in the place furthest from God—is the most tortured soul in the cosmos.
Satan, like all the souls in Dante’s Hell, have been forever separated from their end (God). They are forever doomed to feel the angst of a soul that wants to go somewhere it cannot. Cut off from the source, they wither into nothing and are drained of life. If, as Saint Augustine put it, “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” then the punishment of the souls of those in Hell is that they will never be at rest.
That’s why Dante’s Satan forever flaps his wings. He was made to be beautiful and made to fly—something his wings that flap and eyes that weep remember. He wants to ascend toward something, but for his transgressions, he cannot move. In Satan, we see a creature who has completely cut against the nature that was built into it and, in resisting and rebelling against it, disfigured himself.
In Satan, we see the fate of those who separate themselves from and rebel against their natural end.
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P.S. As mentioned above, I am teaching a small class on Dante’s Inferno over Zoom. Reply to this email or comment below if you want an invite (or the outline I am preparing). The class will meet every Monday, 6-7 PM Central Time, starting January 15th, and will last six weeks (tentatively) following this format:
Week 1 (Jan. 15th) - The Dark Forest and Journey Into Hell (Cantos 1-3)
Week 2 (Jan. 22nd) - The Upper Tiers (Cantos 4-8)
Week 3 (Jan. 29th) - The Inner Gates (Cantos 9-12)
Week 4 (Feb. 5th) - The Violent Against Self and God (Cantos 13-17)
Week 5 (Feb. 12th) - The Ditches of Malebolge (Cantos 18-30)
Week 6 (Feb. 19th) - The Deepest Pit (Cantos 31-34)
Books I read every year: Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, Abolition of Man and Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Canto XXXIV, lines 20-21.
Canto XXXIV, lines 28-53.
Canto XXXIV, line 36.
Canto VI, lines 106-111.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Book III, Poem 9 (hereinafter, “Consolation”).
Consolation, Book Book III, Poem 2.
Consolation, Book I, Prose 6.