[302] The happy land: Heaven.
[303] Her claws: Dante speaks of Fortune as if she were a brutal and somewhat malicious power. In Virgil’s answer there is a refutation of the opinion of Fortune given by Dante himself, in the Convito (iv. 11). After describing three ways in which the goods of Fortune come to men he says: ‘In each of these three ways her injustice is manifest.’ This part of the Convito Fraticelli seems almost to prove was written in 1297.
[304] Framing, etc.: According to the scholastic theory of the world, each of the nine heavens was directed in its motion by intelligences, called angels by the vulgar, and by the heathen, gods (Convito ii. 5). As these spheres and the influences they exercise on human affairs are under the guidance of divinely-appointed ministers, so, Virgil says, is the distribution of worldly wealth ruled by Providence through Fortune.
[305] Some races failing: It was long believed, nor is the belief quite obsolete, that one community can gain only at the expense of another. Sir Thomas Browne says: ‘All cannot be happy at once; for because the glory of one state depends upon the ruin of another, there is a revolution and vicissitude of their greatness, and all must obey the swing of that wheel, not moved by intelligences, but by the hand of God, whereby all states arise to their zeniths and vertical points according to their predestinated periods.’—Rel. Med. i. 17.
[306] Necessity, etc.: Suggested, perhaps, by Horace’s Te semper anteit sæva necessitas (Od. i. 35). The question of how men can be free in the face of necessity, here associated with Fortune, more than once emerges in the Comedy. Dante’s belief on the subject was substantially that of his favourite author Boethius, who holds that ultimately ‘it is Providence that turns the wheel of all things;’ and who says, that ‘if you spread your sails to the wind you will be carried, not where you would, but whither you are driven by the gale: if you choose to commit yourself to Fortune, you must endure the manners of your mistress.’
[307] Whom they so often, etc.: Treat with contumely.
[308] The stars, etc.: It is now past midnight, and towards the morning of Saturday, the 26th of March 1300. Only a few hours have been employed as yet upon the journey.
[309] Perse: ‘Perse is a colour between purple and black, but the black predominates’ (Conv. iv. 20). The hue of the waters of Styx agrees with the gloomy temper of the sinners plunged in them.
[310] The place: They are now in the Fifth Circle, where the wrathful are punished.
[311] In gloom: These submerged spirits are, according to the older commentators, the slothful—those guilty of the sin of slackness in the pursuit of good, as, e.g. neglect of the means of grace. This is, theologically speaking, the sin directly opposed to the active grace of charity. By more modern critics it has been ingeniously sought to find in this circle a place not only for the slothful but for the proud and envious as well. To each of these classes of sinners—such of them as have repented in this life—a terrace of Purgatory is assigned, and at first sight it does seem natural to expect that the impenitent among them should be found in Inferno. But, while in Purgatory souls purge themselves of every kind of mortal sin, Inferno, as Dante conceived of it, contains only such sinners as have been guilty of wicked acts. Drift and bent of heart and mind are taken no account of. The evil seed must have borne a harvest, and the guilt of every victim of Justice must be plain and open. Now, pride and envy are sins indeed, but sins that a man may keep to himself. If they have betrayed the subject of them into the commission of crimes, in those crimes they are punished lower down, as is indicated at xii. 49. And so we find that Lucifer is condemned as a traitor, though his treachery sprang from envy: the greater guilt includes the less. For sluggishness in the pursuit of good the vestibule of the caitiffs seems the appropriate place.—There are two kinds of wrath. One is vehement, and declares itself in violent acts; the other does not blaze out, but is grudging and adverse to all social good—the wrath that is nursed. One as much as the other affects behaviour. So in this circle, as in the preceding, we have represented the two excesses of one sin.—Dante’s theory of sins is ably treated of in Witte’s Dante-Forschungen, vol. ii. p. 121.