At first sight...

At first sight, being in Limbo seems painful, but as the canto proceeds, Dante subtly and quietly starts to modify the first impression we get of Limbo and to mitigate the punishment embodied there. As Dante enters Limbo, he notes the suffering of the inhabitants: Here, for as much as hearing could discover, there was no outcry louder than the sighs that caused the everlasting air to tremble.

The sighs arose from sorrow without torments, [End Page 141] out of the crowds--the many multitudes-- of infants and of women and of men. (iv, 25­30) But when we get to the middle of canto iv, the intensity of suffering in Limbo has evidently diminished. This is how Dante describes his encounter with the great poets of antiquity: I saw four giant shades approaching us; in aspect, they were neither sad nor joyous.

(iv, 83­84) From initially appearing as a place of sorrow, Limbo now seems a purely neutral state ("né trista né lieta").9 In the space of fewer than one hundred lines, Dante appears to contradict himself, and we want to ask him: "Which is it?

Are the figures in Limbo in pain or merely 'neither sad nor joyous'?" This kind of apparent contradiction can be explained as a deliberate rhetorical strategy on Dante's part, one made necessary by the intellectually represssive climate in which he was writing. During the Middle Ages, religious heresy was, to say the least, not well received, and could be punished severely, with excommunication, imprisonment, and even death.

Dante came under suspicion of heretical views during his lifetime, and at least one passage in the Divine Comedy shows that he was writing under the shadow of doubts about his piety.10 Under these circumstances, if Dante was intent on putting forth any form of heretical views in the Divine Comedy, he could not do so openly but had to go about the task very circumspectly.11 At the most exposed point in canto iv, the opening, where his readers are forming their crucial first impressions of what he is up to, he puts the orthodox among them at ease by telling them what they want to hear, that he may be offering the virtuous pagans an alternative to outright hell in Limbo, but they will still be enduring pain.