1. To reach the place allotted to the traitors, Dante and his guide are obliged to cross a deep chasm inhabited by sinners of giant stature who have been guilty of rebellion against God. The chief of these are Nimrod and the giants of classical mythology, Ephialtes, Briareus, and Antaeus. The last-named takes the poets in his hand and gently deposits them in the abyss of the lowest circle.[225] Dante delights in describing the giants in terms of hyperbole. The head of Nimrod appears to him as large as the Cone of St. Peter’s, or rather more than five fathoms in height and width; his other members are in proportion, so that his total stature, according to the commentators, would be forty-three fathoms.
The Christian works prior to the Divine Comedy provide no satisfactory explanation of this scene. True, the personality of the giants is well defined in the Bible and in mythology, but none of these sources warrants their being placed in hell. The Moslem sources, however, at once furnish a key to the riddle. The eschatological books of Islam devote whole chapters to the tales of the Prophet describing the enormous stature of the infidels who, like Dante’s giants, occupy the lowest circle of hell and whose proportions are measured, hyperbolically indeed, but with a mathematical exactitude similar to that displayed by Dante.[226]
“On the Day of Judgment the infidels will appear with black faces, their stature increased to a height of sixty fathoms and their heads crowned with a diadem of fire....” “The bodies of the sinners are of the size of mountains.... Each of their teeth is as large as a man and the rest of their body is in proportion. Their thighs are as big as Mount Albaida (three miles distant from Mecca). The space they fill when seated is as the distance from Mecca to Medina. Their bodies are so massive that a roaring noise, as of wild beasts, is heard between the skin and the flesh. Their total stature is forty-two fathoms.”
The object of giving the victim this monstrous size is simply to provide more material for torture. Finally, the hypothesis of the Moslem origin of Dante’s picture is supported by two facts—the one, that Iblis lies in the lowest circle chained in the same curious manner as the giant Ephialtes, with one hand in front and the other behind[227]; the other, that Islam relegates Nimrod and Pharaoh, as the prototypes of Satanic pride, to the same region in which Iblis suffers punishment for his rebellion.[228] Dante accuses Nimrod of the same sin of rebellion and places him at the entrance to the lowest circle, that of Lucifer.
2. One and the same torture, that of cold, is suffered by all sinners in this lowest circle. The lake Cocytus, which fills the entire space, is kept frozen by the icy blast from the wings of Lucifer; and in its congealed waters traitors of four different classes are shown in diverse attitudes.[229]
It need hardly be remarked that Biblical eschatology makes no mention of any torture of cold in hell. The Moslem doctrine, however, places this torture on the same footing as torture by fire.[230] True, the Koran alludes to it but vaguely in saying that the blessed shall suffer neither from the heat of the sun nor the cold of zamharir.[231] But, as comment on this passage, there arose a number of traditions, attributed to Mahomet, in which intense cold is acknowledged as a torture of hell and, indeed, a torture more painful even than that of heat.[232] Its introduction into the Moslem scheme of hell was due, not merely to a desire for symmetry and antithesis in torture, but rather to the assimilation by Islam of a Zoroastrian belief. The theologian Jahiz, writing in the ninth century, says that this torture is peculiar to the Persian hell of Zoroaster, by whose religion fire is held sacred.[233] If, therefore, it is accepted unhesitatingly by Tabari a century later, it is probable that it had in the meantime been introduced by Zoroastrians converted to Islam. More interesting, however, than the question of the remote origin, is the fact that some of the traditions interpret the Koranic zamharir as a frozen lake.[234] “What is the zamharir of hell?” they asked Mahomet, and he replied, “It is a pit into which the unbeliever is cast, in which his members are rent asunder by intense cold.” If it is borne in mind that the word had the scientific meaning of “glacial wind” or “air of the atmospheric region intermediate between the earth and the sphere of the moon”[235] it will be seen that, as in Dante’s hell, the sinners of Islam suffered the double torment of exposure to an icy blast of wind and contact with frozen water.
The picturesque description of the various attitudes in which Dante depicts the different groups of traitors is a feature that constantly recurs in the pictures of the Moslem hell, though not indeed in connection with the torture of cold. Thus, a tradition attributed to Ibn Abbas says that “some are punished standing, some lying on their sides; others lie stretched out on their backs, or stand leaning on their elbows; while many are to be seen hanging head downwards.”[236] A very popular legend of hell adds:
“The fire will be well aware of the guilt of the sinners and the suffering they deserve.... Thus, in some it will reach the ankles; in others, the knees, the waist, the chest, and even the neck.”[237]
One Moslem scene of torture is even identical with the most violent of the postures in which Dante places the sinners in the frozen lake of Cocytus:
“The fiends will seize the sinner from behind, will break his ribs in twain and, bending back his belly, with his hair will tie his feet.”[238]
3. At the bottom of the lowest pit of hell, that is to say, at the centre of the earth, Dante places Lucifer, the king of the realm of pain, set in the ice from the lower part of his chest downwards. Of gigantic stature and monstrously misshapen, he bears on the trunk three faces, underneath which are enormous wings shaped like the wings of a bat; the flapping of these wings produces the icy wind that blows in this region. With his three mouths he devours three traitors. Dante in terror manages to slip between the hairy shoulders of Lucifer and the ice and reach the southern hemisphere through a long subterranean passage. As he escapes, he beholds the enormous legs of Lucifer hanging unsupported in the air; and Virgil explains how the fallen angel, on being cast out of heaven, with his head had struck the surface of the southern hemisphere and, penetrating to the centre of the earth, had remained fixed there to that day.[239]
The originality of this picture has always been greatly admired. Graf, bringing all his erudition and insight to bear on the subject, detects three elements in the demonology of Dante—theological elements, based on Thomistic doctrine; popular elements, in harmony with opinion current at his time; and elements peculiar to Dante, such as he may have acquired in exile, particularly at the University of Bologna.[240] Among the last-named he includes this description, saying, “Questa mirabile immaginazione è, per quanto io so, tutta propria di Dante.”
4. However much the power and beauty of Dante’s description are to be admired, prototypes of it are not lacking in the theological literature of Islam.
The position of Lucifer, fixed in the lowest pit of hell, has been shown to be common to many Moslem descriptions. Nor, given the principle of the division of sinners, could he be conceived in any other place; for the Iblis of Islam being, like Lucifer, the father of all rebellion against God, must necessarily suffer the severest torture.
But the similarity of the two conceptions extends even to the very nature of the torture. Ibn Arabi definitely states that Iblis is exposed to the torture of ice, and this assertion he bases on the fact that Iblis, like all demons, is a genie and thus was created from fire; his punishment, he infers, must therefore by contrast consist in exposure to the severest cold, or zamharir.[241] Contemporaries of Ibn Arabi had on similar grounds accounted for the immunity of the fiends from the effect of the fire of hell. Thus, Abu-l-Hasan al-Ashari argues that the demons, being fallen angels, were created from light and, accordingly, are insensible to torture by fire.[242]
As to Lucifer’s monstrous appearance, the multiplicity of faces is the very stigma that for their double-dealing is imposed upon traitors in the Moslem hell; and Lucifer, it must be remembered, as a rebel against God, is the arch-traitor and, as such, is confined by Dante in the traitors’ pit. An early apocryphal tradition says: “He who in this world has a double face and a double tongue, to him shall God give two faces and two tongues in hell.”[243] Other early legends depict the fiends also as two-headed monsters.[244] Even hell itself, considered not as the place, but as the embodiment of tortures, is vividly represented as a hydra-headed monster in Moslem legends of the Day of Judgment; with its many mouths this monster devours sinners of different categories, and some versions even fix the number at three.[245] Finally, the many popular tales of fantastic voyages frequently describe similar monsters—such as the beast named Malikan, which has two wings and numerous heads and faces and devours the animals of the sea that land upon its island; or Dahlan, which is depicted as a fiend that rides upon a bird like an ostrich and seizes on all men that set foot upon its isle in the Indian Ocean.[246]
There remains to be considered Dante’s description of the fall of Lucifer from heaven. The only allusion in pre-Dante Christian literature to the fall of Lucifer is the brief passage in the Gospel according to St. Luke (X, 18): “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” The Koran, on the other hand, describes the rebellion and expulsion from heaven of Iblis in more than seven passages[247]; and, though no details of his descent are given, these were filled in by the traditions depicting the punishment God inflicted on Adam and Eve, the serpent and Iblis.[248] In addition, there exists a cycle of cosmogonical legends, which serve to complete the myth of the fall of Iblis.
Mention has been made in a former chapter of tales describing the division of the earth into seven floors or stages, which were identified with the seven mansions of hell.[249] These tales were intended to explain the cosmogonical legends above referred to; and all are in the end but comment on a passage of the Koran to the effect that heaven and earth were created as one sole mass and only later were separated and each divided into several strata.[250]
“Immediately after their division,” the legend says, “God sent an angel from His throne, who, falling upon the earth, penetrated the seven strata thereof and there remained, sustaining them upon his shoulders, with one hand stretched towards the East and the other towards the West, his feet lacking all support.”[251]
The legend does not indeed identify Iblis with this angel, but the fact that he was sent from the very throne of God and fell to earth would seem to favour the suggestion.
The two myths, blended together, may well have served as a model for Dante’s picture. That there exist grounds for this hypothesis may be shown by a review of the different features of resemblance furnished by the Moslem descriptions. Iblis is an angel cast out of heaven for rebellion against God, who, in falling to the earth, penetrates its several strata and is embedded in the ice, with his feet unsupported; although of gigantic stature—he supports the different strata—he is yet an angel and thus provided with wings; but sin has changed his beauty into hideousness and thus he appears as a many-headed beast that devours men, as a monster that is half man, half ostrich.[252]