The Epistle of James in ‘Inferno’ 26

Abstract

The fundamental interpretative difficulty in cantos 26 and 27 of the Inferno, especially in recent years, has been to reconcile the diverse crimes of two characters as unlike each other as Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro, by identifying one sin that would account for their common collocation in the eighth degree of the circle of fraud. Guido da Montefeltro, a relatively pedestrian brand of con artist and a near contemporary of Dante's, is dwarfed by his juxtaposition with the great hero of antiquity, Ulysses, whose epic adventure beyond the known world tends to trivialize any of his particular fraudulent acts enumerated by Dante's guide Virgil (Inf. 26.58–63). Classification is no idle issue, especially for a figure who, apart from his ancient notoriety, has enormous appeal for our own age, an attractiveness he acquired by the grace of the same literary creator who condemned him to hell. Dante's Ulysses, epitome of the most ambitious of secular aspirations — a believer, we might say, in the promise of science and technology, pioneer of research and exploration, and figurehead of enlightened humanism — burns in a tongue of flame as does Guido, a wily military strategist, little more than a common crook. Even if we can organize the various crimes of Ulysses and Guido under one heading of sin, the inescapable focus of both cantos is not on each character's lifetime of trickery but on the moment of his death, where the magnanimity of Ulysses and the pusillanimity of Guido appear most opposed. One of the harshest ironies of the Inferno is that such a gaping discrepancy in chronology, grandeur, historical importance, and apparent moral fiber can be cancelled out completely by a single form of torment. Such a stratification means, in other words, that from the divine perspective Ulysses and Guido are without differentiation.