What kind of violence is addressed in canto 12

Dante sees a group of armed Centaurs galloping toward them. Virgil names them and tells a bit of their individual histories. One of the Centaurs, Chiron, moves his beard aside with an arrow and notes that Dante must be alive since he moves things that he touches, such as rocks when he walks.

Virgil gives Chiron an explanation about their journey and asks that one of the Centaurs guide them to a shallow place in the river of blood where Dante can cross, riding on the Centaur's back. Chiron volunteers Nessus, another of the Centaurs.

Nessus explains that the souls boiling in the river of blood were people that were kings of bloodshed and despoilment. Dante turns to Virgil for guidance, but Virgil says that he will let Nessus guide at this point. Nessus goes on to point out the names of some of the souls in the river. Nessus explains that the river grows deep again on the other side of the ford, and he names some of the other souls punished there. Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content.

During the next 6 cantos, we will see a number of kinds of violent sinners. Why do we see so many half-human, half-animal mythological creatures in this section of the Inferno? Which kinds of people do the violent include?

Canto The Suicides are punished in a gloomy wood. Virgil and Dante descend over the rocks of a landslide. When was that landslide caused? What are Centaurs, and what role do they play in this canto? Why are they appropriate guards for this Circle? Identify these Centaurs: Pholus, Nessus, and Chiron. What are their stories? Pholus In Thessaly, the Centaurs were invited to a wedding, but grew drunk and tried to rape the women guests.

Chiron Not all of the Centaurs are violent — Chiron the leader of the Centaurs was the noted tutor of Hercules, Aesculapius an ancient physician , and Achilles — but enough Centaurs are violent that they are appropriate guards of the violent who physically harmed others. How are those who harmed others through violence punished, and why is that punishment appropriate?

Who are a few of the people who are being punished in this part of the 7th Circle of the Inferno? Attila the Hun, another noted warrior, is here. Ezzelino, who burned 11, people at the stake on one occasion, is here. Each of these violent people is up to his neck in boiling blood. How do the Centaurs treat Virgil and Dante? Do you know of any people who are especially violent toward other people?

Any rapist or murderer will do. John Wayne Gacy raped and murdered young men and boys. Why is Dante the Pilgrim completely silent in Canto 12? Share this: Twitter Facebook. Virgil tells the damaged tree-soul to tell his story to Dante so that Dante may spread the story on Earth.

The tree-soul informs them that in life he was Pier della Vigna, an advisor to Emperor Frederick, and that he was a moral and admirable man. But when an envious group of scheming courtiers blackened his name with lies, he felt such shame that he took his own life. Dante then asks how the souls here came to be in their current state.

The tree-soul explains that when Minos first casts souls here, they take root and grow as saplings. They then are wounded and pecked by Harpies—foul creatures that are half woman, half bird. When the time comes for all souls to retrieve their bodies, these souls will not reunite fully with theirs, because they discarded them willingly.

Virgil and Dante then speak to the bush, which is also a soul: it speaks of the suffering that has plagued Florence ever since it decided to make St. John the Baptist its patron, replacing its old patron, Mars a Roman god. The bush-soul adds that he was a Florentine man in life who hanged himself. Noting that the rocks had not yet fallen when he first descended into Hell, in the late first century b. We have lots of blood, including a head immersed in blood, because it so thirsted for blood.

The sociopolitical consequences of pride are evident here too: failed kings, strife, and the culminating image of Troy, the human city destroyed through pride.

Troy becomes an image of Florence, evoked in the simile of San Miniato, a city whose pride is its own corruption. We have a steep slope between ledges. And Dante is yoked like an ox, subduing the animal under the yoke of Christ. A human being is the art of God: it is the self-manifestation or language of the divine, consciousness or spirit made visible. Humans are language, they are art.

But humans can only fully be that if they fulfil their nature: if they know themselves, so that through them the divine becomes conscious of itself in finite form, as in Christ.

Then they are logos , spirit made body, the Word made flesh, consciousness or being made visible, sensible. The Word become image, becomes word. A human being is the perfect nexus or translation between consciousness and form, between word and image, which is why Dante assimilates himself and his poetry to the art of an illuminator.

It undoes the Incarnation, and dissociates language from form, consciousness from body, the human from the divine, as in the Centaurs.

It also destroys community, since it is only in the common consciousness of the one ground of being, recognizing the divine in or as oneself, and thus all possible others as not other than oneself, that humans can be one, that they can fully communicate. Indeed we saw that pride is intrinsically oriented toward the destruction of others, seen as competitors in a zero sum game; one wants to see others lowered, so one can be superior.

Hence the pride of Nimrod results in multiplicities of tongues, a fracturing of community, alienation and exile.

Hence almost every example of the acrostic depicts the destruction of the human form, of the language of God. The examples are all pre-Christian, emphasizing that only the awakening to Christ can undo pride. At the centre of the trio of souls in Purgatorio xi we have Oderisi the illuminator, the counter-image of Dante; in fact at the exact centre of the entire ledge of pride Oderisi evokes Dante, unnamed, as one who may supersede his predecessors Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti in the glory of language.

Dante has poised himself, unnamed, between a humble praiser of God in words David , and a proud belittler of God in images Arachne , while assimilating himself to an illuminator Oderisi , one who translates between word and image.

This is the balance of all human life, language, representation: poised between surrender and pride, our own body is either the language of God or its eclipse and disfiguration, and our own language or art is either the truth, the Word made flesh made word, or a false idol that eclipses and disfigures reality, its source.

Art and poetry alone address and express the fullness of human nature as the fusion of spirit and body, as Incarnation, which is why they can be an instrument of revelation and purgation.

The acrostic signifies, signs, human pride, as do the images it has translated into words, with Arachne at their centre. In the same way, the fall of Troy the final image leads to the birth of Rome, through which justice and revelation will be restored. In fact acrostics are a scriptural form, from the Psalms, written by David: Dante is assimilating his text to Scripture, and himself to David.

After the acrostic, Dante meets a beautiful angel, in white like the angels at the tomb of the risen Christ, 12 who invites Dante, and us, to fly home. We are situated in the Heaven of the Sun Paradiso x—xiv , which is the fourth of the nine moving heavens, and the first to be out of the shadow cast by the earth.

The Heaven of the Sun thus marks a key new start, and corresponds in some ways to the ledge of pride, the first in Purgatory proper, after the nine cantos devoted to Ante-Purgatory. In Paradiso x a ring of twelve dancing souls forms around Dante and Beatrice. These are wise, illuminated souls, that know themselves as nothing other than pure conscious being, the ground of all reality.

Thus their form, their identity, is perfectly transparent to the light: they are a ring of lights, facets or sparks of the divine, as it projects, seeks, and knows itself. They worked to a single end; to speak of one is to speak of the other. Aquinas then embarks on a panegyric of Francis, bridegroom of Poverty, that is, of renunciation and humility, and he ends by condemning straying Dominicans.

The light is the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure, who in a chiasmus with the Dominican Aquinas praising Francis in Paradiso xi embarks on a panegyric of Saint Dominic, who was born in the Occident Calaruega as Francis was in the Orient Assisi , accompanied by portentous dreams and names, that pointed to what he was, one who belonged entirely to God, the holy warrior of the Christian faith.

From the pope he sought no worldly advancement, but only authority to fight for the seed that has flowered in the twenty four lights: the seed of faith or revelation ll. Like a torrent pressed by a rising spring, he unleashed himself upon the brambles of heresy meaning the Cathars or Albigensians , striking most where there was most resistance ll. Dominic was one wheel of the war chariot with which the Holy Church defended itself; Francis was the other ll.

Then, in Paradiso xiii, Aquinas explains why Solomon is the wisest of men: he is so as king. One could say also that, as judge and author of the Song of Songs , Solomon fuses the chiasmus between intellect and love, faith and renunciation, laid out in Paradiso xi and xii through Francis and Dominic, and enacts it in political-social reality. After this, a third ring of souls, a sfavillar of the Holy Spirit, encompasses the first two, in a culmination of the trinitarian imagery that has permeated this heaven.

As with the Centaurs in Inferno xii, there is lots of military imagery in Paradiso xii: might the Centaurs be a parody of the straying army of Christ in Paradiso xii? We have a catalogue of names in Paradiso xii, as in the acrostic in Purgatorio xii and in the river of blood of Inferno xii. If one adds Dominic, the subject of the panegyric, to the twelve souls introduced here, we have thirteen names, as in the acrostic of Purgatorio xii which is also twelve plus one , and perhaps as in Inferno xii where Chiron is in charge of twelve creatures collectively, whether Centaurs or violent souls.

Twelve plus one implies Christ and his disciples, suggesting that Chiron may be a counter-Christ and his brood in Inferno xii counter-apostles, Dominic an alter-Christ and the circle of sages in Paradiso xii alter-apostles they flower from the seed he fought for.

Strife and violence, represented vividly in Inferno xii and Purgatorio xii, are also clearly implicit in the battle against heresy evoked in Paradiso xii in fact, of course, the Albigensian Crusade was a massacre. Humility, the antithesis of pride on that terrace in Purgatory, is a key undercurrent in the meditation on wisdom in this heaven pride is the most intellectual vice, and the Sun is a heaven of intellectuals.

Giuseppe Ledda observes that at their absolute centre, both the panegyric of Dominic and Paradiso xii itself culminate in the first triple Cristo rhyme of the poem ll. In Purgatorio xii, we saw how that sundering happens: through pride, through the failure of man to be logos , to translate the Word into human image into word, into revelation.

It is the failure to be a finite form through which the divine knows and reveals itself; it is to see oneself not as a sign or signifier, but simply as a material mark. The chiasmus between them the Dominican Aquinas praising Francis, and the Franciscan Bonaventure praising Dominic and between Paradiso xi and xii which makes the two panegyrics contiguous indicates that perfect love Francis is perfect understanding Dominic , and vice versa, and that perfect faith Dominic is perfect renunciation of all greed and worldly ambition Francis , and vice versa.