Framing the Question 23
arena of moral freedom, so the story goes, one in which every
fallen soul can become fully what it has chosen to be. And so
there really is a logic oflove at work here, a kind of divine mag-
nanimity. The soul that prefers having hell to surrendering to
God's love receives the hell it asked for.
At least, that is the way a good many theologians insist on
describing the first third of the Commedia. And, of course, one
wants to be convinced, especially if one has been bewitched
by the beauty of Dante's verse and the majesty of his narra-
tive gifts (particularly from the point of the encounter with
the shade of Ulysses onward). I am not sure, however, that the
text quite bears this picture out. For his part, at least, Dante
gives no indication of seeing the matter this way at all. Once
the poem has brought us into the "sorrowful city" and we have
begun the descent along the terraces of hell, down to the devil's
prison of ice, what unfolds before us is an almost unbearable
succession of cunningly exotic savageries. If the torments of
the damned that the poem describes have any sort of moral
logic about them whatsoever, it is of at once the most inflex-
ibly mechanical and the most inventively sadistic kind: an iron
law of cause and effect, quite impersonal in its exactitude, and
yet one expressing itself in a gaudy pageant of ever more in-
genious, ever more inventive, ever more theatrically grotesque
mockery, all of it plainly bereft of the least element of mercy.
So, yes, perhaps the various torments described in the poem
are in some way self-induced; but they nevertheless reflect an
especially vindictive kind of proportional logic, and are, by
virtue of their eternity, infinitely disproportionate to any fi-
nite deed. By the Inferno's end, then, the only creator in the
poem for whom one feels any spontaneous natural admiration
is Dante; for Dante's God, if one is more or less emotionally in-
tact, one can feel only a kind of remote, vacuous loathing. And,