Any man who looks upon the hideous face of Medusa turns immediately
to stone. One encounters this dramatic physical transformation
of an animate being into a helpless statue in several works
of fiction, and authors throughout the centuries have used
the idea for a variety of purposes, from the ancient myths
of Greece to the more recent stories of C.S. Lewis. Dante
places this idea in the context of The Divine Comedy, a Christian
allegory of a journey for self- knowledge and redemption.
The image of a man turned to stone is crucial to Dante's vision
of the process involved in the recognition of sin (through
actually encountering it in the Inferno) and the subsequent
renunciation of it and humble repentance in the Purgatorio.
In fact, it is part of a much larger theme which Dante makes
clear throughout The Divine Comedy: the hardening and softening
of the heart in man's quest to renew himself, find God, and
follow the Christian faith truly. In order to renounce sin,
man must harden his heart against any pity for it, and Dante
(the poet) emphasizes this point many times during the descent
through Hell. However, the opposite is also necessary in order
to continue along the road which leads to salvation: man must
soften his heart and learn humility if he is to repent sincerely
and receive the forgiveness which will wash his soul of sin.
In Dante's system, anyone who really seeks salvation can obtain
it, but a man who gives in to despair or hardens his heart
against God loses all hope of divine mercy: his heart turns
to stone. Dante's encounter with Medusa in Canto IX of the
Inferno provides a powerful image for the reader to keep in
mind throughout the journey. It links the theme of man's difficult
attempt to harden his heart when faced with sinners in extreme
pain with the theme of softening it for purification.
When Dante (the pilgrim) sees the “hideously distorted” (Canto
XX, line 11) bodies of the fortune tellers and diviners in
the fourth bolgia of Circle Eight in Hell, he cannot help
but weep. These unfortunate sinners have their heads placed
backwards upon their necks as symbolic retribution for their
crimes against God's law, and even their tears of suffering
are degraded, running “down the cleft of their buttocks.”
(Canto XX, line 24). Dante feels sympathy for the image of
humanity which is so warped here, but Virgil reproaches him,
saying,
‘There is no place
for pity here. Who is more arrogant
within his soul, who is more impious
than one who dares to sorrow at God's judgment?’
(Canto XX, lines 27-30)
No matter how much compassion Dante feels for the shades
of the human beings he witnesses in eternal pain, he must
eradicate his sense of pity for sins of those whom God has
damned in His unfailing justice. This is no easy feat, and
Virgil scolds him throughout the journey as Dante tries to
overcome his emotions and weaknesses in preparation for the
longer and more difficult climb that lies ahead at the mountain
of Purgatory. Even at the very beginning of his journey, when
the punishments he observes are not as serious or dehumanizing
as those which he will encounter later, Dante shows emotional
reactions. After speaking with Francesca, a soul doomed to
endless flight in winds which echo the passions of her carnal
sins, Dante feels his ''senses reel/ and faint away with anguish...
swept/ by such a swoon as death is....'' and he falls to the
floor of Hell (Canto V, lines 137-9). In the Circle of the
Gluttons, Dante says to Ciacco, one of the souls tormented
there, “...your agony/ weighs on my heart and calls my soul
to tears...” (Canto VI,
lines 55-6). As Dante and Virgil approach the center of all
evil in their descent through Hell,
Dante’s inclination to pity the sinners becomes more problematic,
and, the purpose of this part of the journey being to renounce
sin, Virgil warns him that his pity is ill-founded. The choice
not to repent is a deliberate one, and, as Virgil explains
to Dante early on, sinners actually ''yearn for what they
fear'' (Canto III, line 123).
Dante seems to waver back and forth between indignation against
sin and pity for those he beholds in eternal torment, but
his general tendency is towards a rejection of all actions
which he comes to understand are against God's will. As early
as his arrival in the Fifth Circle, Dante shows anger towards
Filippo Argenti, a wrathful man who is punished there, crying,
“May you weep and wail to all eternity,/ for l know you, hell-dog,
filthy as you are” (Canto VIII, lines 37-8). Virgil is pleased
with Dante for this display of righteous fury against the
sin of Wrath, and Dante goes even further in denouncing Filippo
and his fault, saying pitilessly, “...it would suit my whim/
to see the wretch scrubbed down into the swill...” (lines
49-50). In the notes to his translation of the Inferno, John
Ciardi points out that ''in being contemptuous of Wrath, Dante
is purging it from his soul. He is thereby growing nearer
to perfection, and Virgil... welcomes this sign of relentless
rejection”(line 85). This marks a significant step in Dante's
advance toward hardening his heart against sin, but it is
by no means the conclusion of Dante's feelings of compassion.
In fact, there are several instances after this point which
demonstrate Dante's pity in addition to those which show him
exercising a passionate aversion to sin, and this in itself
indicates the extent to which Dante (the poet) means to stress
the difficulty of a complete transformation. After hearing
the poignant story of Pier delle Vigne, a suicide in the Seventh
Circle, Dante asks Virgil to speak for him, feeling that he
cannot since “such compassion chokes (his) heart'' (line 84).
In Canto XVI, the first impulse of Dante's heart is ''to leap
down and embrace'' sinners whom he had admired in life, and
he feels great compassion “at the thought of (them) tormented''
(lines 51, 54). Even as late in the descent as the last bolgia
of the Eighth Circle, Dante cannot help but pity those who
suffer in He1l:
The sig ht of that parade of broken dead
had left my eyes so sotted with their tears
I longed to stay and weep, but Virgil said:
“What are you waiting for?....”
(Canto XXIX, lines 1-4)
Dante goes on to speak of his pain at seeing the horrors
of the tormented souls in Hell must endure, and he admits
that he does feel pity. At times, the poet even addresses
his audience directly, provoking the reader to contemplate
his own feelings in the face of such suffering.
However, it becomes clear that, although Dante has not lost
his overall sympathy for humanity, he has come to recognize
his abhorrence for evil. This distinction is important; while
he feels sorrow at the fact that human beings end up in such
deplorable states, he becomes strong enough not to make excuses
for the sins themselves. When sinners appear arrogant and
completely disrespectful of God, he denounces them along with
their corruptions, and he proclaims his own respect for God
and His Church on earth. When Dante comes to the bolgia of
the Simoniacs, he speaks passionately against those who make
a travesty of the Holy Office, ending by declaring,
And were it not that I am still constrained
by the reverence l owe to the Great Keys
you held in life, I should not have refrained
from using other words and sharper still...
(Canto XIX, lines 94-7)
So, at the end of the Inferno, Dante has observed sin’s repulsiveness
and its terrible consequences, contemplated, and hardened
his heart against evil. Finally, in a symbolic act of confronting
evil head-on, he and Virgil actually climb on Satan himself,
and the stronger Dante is ready to move on to the process
of purgation.
When a heart turns entirely to stone, salvation in Dante's
Christian sense becomes impossible. Thus, it appears that
of all the dangers that could befall Dante in his travels,
simply glazing at the head of Medusa would be the worst. While
must turn to stone, so to speak, against the temptations of
wickedness and any pity for sin, the instant he hardens himself
against humility and God's love, he is lost. In this way,
succumbing to despair is the one unforgivable sin. Only when
repentance is abandoned and all hope is rejected does it become
impossible to receive God's grace, for, according to Christian
theology, Christ died to save anyone who sincerely wishes
to atone for his sins. Medusa and her potential to turn men
to stone become a major allegorical idea of The Divine Comedy,
and Dante (the poet) places her at a point where both Virgil
and Dante (the pilgrim) are already anxious about the success
of their journey, waiting for Divine Aid in the form of a
Heavenly Messenger to open the Gate of Hell. The Erinyes,
symbols of eternal remorse, scream for Medusa to come and
change Dante to stone, but Virgil puts his hands over Dante's
eyes, telling him,
‘Turn your back and keep your eyes shut tight;
for should the Gorgon come and you look at her,
never again would you return to the light.’
(Canto IX, lines 52-4)
Above all else, Dante cannot allow himself to ‘turn to stone,’
for that would cause his spiritual death. On Dante's allegorical
level, the physical reality of becoming petrified and therefore
unable to move is not nearly as important as the subjective
reality of hardening the thoughts, will, and emotions against
God. Dante (the poet) repeats this idea of a heart turning
to stone in his depiction of Count Ugolino, a soul in the
very last Circle of Hell who died by starvation. Ugolino relates
to Dante what happened when he realized that he and his sons
were locked in a tower and would surely die:
‘I stared at my sons’ faces without a word,
I did not weep: I had turned to stone inside,
....I did not speak a word or shed a tear...
I bit my hands in helpless grief...’
(Canto 11, lines 48-58)
Ugolino finds himself in Dante's conception of Hell because,
in his moment of agony, he did not turn to God. Instead of
throwing himself upon infinite Mercy, he hardened his heart
against God's love and sealed his fate to be trapped forever
in the ice of Antenora, gnawing on the skull of his enemy.
In effect, Ugolino looked at the face of 'Medusa' and lost
all hope of salvation by turning to stone. Instead of begging
forgiveness and asking to be saved, he bit his hands in what
he assumed to be ‘helpless grief,’ not realizing that, even
if his body would perish, he could still be saved spiritually.
Dante illustrates throughout his Divine Comedy that, while
the road to salvation is an arduous one, all a person needs
in order to begin the journey at Purgatory is to have recognized
his sins and demonstrated true feelings of repentance. A hardening
of the heart to evil is certainly necessary, but in Dante's
terms one must never turn to stone completely and give in
to despair.
Once Dante (the pilgrim) has finished his journey through
Hell and climbed on Satan himself in renouncing sin, he leaves
''behind the air of death'' in the beginning of Purgatorio
and sets his ''mind upon the other pole'' (Canto 1, lines
17, 22). Virgil washes Dante's face and wraps a ''smooth rush''
(Canto 1, line 95) around his waist, symbolic of the humility
and 'pliability' Dante must have in order to purify himself
from sin in his approach to Paradise. This image reflects
that the goal is no longer one of hardening towards evil,
but of softening towards the acceptance of God's love and
the purgation of sins. In contrast to the fate of Ugolino,
Dante meets Manfred, a sinner who explains,
...in tears, I then consigned
myself to Him who willingly forgives.
My sins were ghastly, but the Infinite
Goodness has arms so wide that It accepts
who ever would return. imploring It.
(Canto III, lines 119-123)
Manfred exemplifies those sinners who waited until the very
last minute to repent. The fact that he did not harden himself
against God in his final moments makes all the difference;
he is in Purgatory and has essentially won salvation already,
while Ugolino has no hope of anything other than the continuation
of the eternal torment he suffers.
Near the end of Dante's journey through Purgatory, where souls
no longer have even the power to sin, he softens his heart
against the 'hardness' of his own stubbornness and fears and
enters the fire of purification. The imagery in the following
canti underscore this basic idea in the nature of the environment:
A gentle breeze...
...with no greater force than a kind wind's.
a wind that made the trembling boughs - they all
bent eagerly - incline in the direction of morning shadows
frown the holy mountain...
(Canto XXVIII, lines 7-12)
In Purgatory, even Nature undergoes the softening necessary
to receive God's grace. Not only do trees bend eagerly in
the wind, but Dante comes upon a stream whose ''little waves/
bent to the left the grass along its backs'' (lines 26-7).
Exactly the opposite of what Dante observed in Hell, this
bending is not violent in the least; the pliant souls here,
along with Nature, give themselves up to the gentle, saving
power of God rather than to the hard-heartedness which causes
the harsh, painful consequences of sin that those in this
picture of Hell must endure.
In addition to this imagery, Dante makes use of a powerful
extended simile reminiscent of those used so often in ancient
epics which portrays the same idea of inner softening:
Even as snow awning the sap-filled trees
along the spine of Italy will freeze
when gripped by the gusts of the Slavonian winds,
then, as it melts, will trickle through itself...
just as, beneath the flame, the candle melts; so I, before
I'd heard the song...
...was without tears
and sighs; but...
then did the ice that had restrained my heart
become water and breath; and from my breast
and through my lips and eyes they issued - anguished.
(Canto , lines 85.99)
Dante feels ineffably moved by self-pity and the song the
angels sing, and he reacts as the character of Ugolino could
not in a beautiful integration of images: his soul of ice
'melts,' and he weeps. Dante realizes that his heart had been
hardened, and it is through its softening that he finds a
very meaningful form of emotional release. Intellectually,
though, as Beatrice points out, Dante is still 'petrified'
and cannot truly understand what she tries to explain to him:
‘...I see your intellect is made
of stone and, petrified, grown so opaque -
the light of what I say has left you dazed...’
(Canto XXXIII, lines 73-75)
Dante must still overcome the hardness of his intellect in
relying upon his rationalistic learning.
His attempts to understand the spiritual through the limited
faculty of reason, rather than through faith, echoes Ugolino's
obstinacy in not turning to God and the symbolic resignation
to despair of anyone who gazes at Medusa's face. These means
lead only to a dead end, in which, according to Dante (the
poet), salvation is impossible.
It is only in Paradiso that Dante realizes the inadequacy
of words and intellect to describe and understand the Divine,
and it is there that he completes the necessary ‘softening,’
giving himself up to God's divine Love. Thus, perpetually
implying the allegorical image of Medusa, Dante (the poet)
succeeds in illustrating the hardening of the pilgrim Dante's
heart to the evil he confronts as he journeys through Hell
and the softening of it to the humility needed for forgiveness
in Purgatory. In this way, Dante becomes able to recognize
and renounce sin, renewing his understanding of the faith
in which he had previously been lost. The message he imparts
through his symbolic use of the petrifying Gorgon is that
salvation is obtainable for anyone who seeks it and is willing
to harden his heart towards sin, but a person must not allow
himself to lose hope and turn to stone. TBJ
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ciardi, John. Inferno. New York: Mentor, 1982.
Mandelbaum, Allen. Purgatorio. New York: Bantam,
1982.
Ciardi, John. Paradiso. New York: Mentor, 1970.
