Inferno: Canto 6 -- Circle 3

2004-09-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

As we continue to descend in our journey through upper hell, we find the gluttons, those consumed by their physical appetites, wallowing in garbage -- the kind of stuff you find in your garbage disposal when it clogs. The food that ought to have nurtured their growth and sustained their lives became the thing they sought above all other goods, and this excess in attention, desire, and deed prevented their proper engagement of relationships with themselves, with their society, and with G-d. This kind of an addiction represents our appetites in a most direct way -- mouth to stomach in satisfaction of the flesh. The more a person consumes, the more a person must consume to run the growing mass. Were Dante to rewrite this circle today, he would focus on other addictions of the flesh (like drug use, alcoholism, smoking) in which immoderation in appetite brought us to spiritual putrifaction.

Of course, we've already seen physical immoderation in the circle above this one with the tornados of star-crossed lovers, but there are a couple of strong elements in this canto that do a great deal to advance the plot. The first is the realization that we're heading down a funnel. We didn't get that realization in our move from the circle of the virtuous pagans to the circle of the carnal because the state of being was different in both places -- those in limbo were, as Virgil describes, sinless in the sense that they lived their lives well but did so without the light of G-d's grace to guide them while those in the circle of lust were baptized Christians who rejected the sacred light of G-d's love for the profane light of sexual attraction (which, while it has its proper sphere in human intercourse, is flaccid and dry when mistakenly pursued in place of our real goal). Lovers, too much caught up in one another, are at least caught up in an unhealthy relationship and can see beyond themselves at the very time they're focusing on satisfying their own desires. Gluttons, however, can eat alone just as facilely as they can eat with others -- the glutton has a stronger motivation, in fact, to satisfy at least part of his or her gluttony in private since it also consumes the body in the absence of company. As we continue our descent, we'll see more and more clearly that overbearing inwardness until we reach people who speak not at all.

The second plot development for which we owe this canto a debt is that of prophecy, the guilt of which Dante the writer (though he places diviners and fortune tellers near the bottom of the pit) excuses himself based on the fact that he's writing several years after 1300 and has only to predict the future he knows will happen. Dante the pilgrim, though, knows nothing about the far-sightedness of the dead until Ciacco utters against him a dark prophecy of his exile and homelessness. (It's at this point that you might want to take a look at the history of which Dante is speaking and understand the relationships between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines and between the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs). His understanding of this phenomenon of prophecy will grow throughout hell as he'll learn more fully from Farinata in the sixth circle how the dead see and how their eyes will be shut.

That this prophecy of his loss of that which provides his sustenance should appear in this canto as he watches Ciacco suffer for the overindulgence in his is not accidental on Dante's part. The cosmos is a great clock with all its minor gears turning at a human pace while operating bigger gears at an eternal one. Nothing Dante introduces into a canto is irrelevant to that canto or to the ones it affects either contiguously or hyperspatially.

S.