What Lies at the Bottom of Hell?
Dante and the darkest sin...
Dante’s 9 circles of Hell are filled with every evil imaginable. It covers every sin in the book — from lust and gluttony, to violence and wrath, and everything in between. There’s also a simple logic to Dante’s Hell:
The deeper you go, the darker the crimes.
Therefore, by the time you reach the bottom layers of Hell, you’re rightfully expecting to find the most twisted abominations, and the evilest of sinners, that could ever be conceived of. Yet the bottom of Dante’s Hell often surprises first-time readers. You won’t find fire and brimstone, demons with pitchforks, nor even the typical villains you’d expect. Instead, you find an evil and torment so simplistic, it nearly defies imagination. Today, we’ll discuss the logic, reason, and genius behind the bottom of Dante’s Hell, and the icy horrors behind the crimes of humanity’s greatest sinners.
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We’re diving into the second and final part of Dante’s Inferno tomorrow — don’t miss it.
We’ll discuss each level of Dante’s Hell, understand why it’s necessary to journey through it in the first place, and find out what lessons a 700-year-old poem can offer the modern reader…
Sign-up below to attend — it’s free to listen, and all paid members can join the discussion up on stage!
The Logic of the Inferno
First, let’s recap the structure of Dante’s Hell, which consists of 9 circles.
The first circle is limbo — a peaceful but sorrowful realm reserved for virtuous pagans. The remaining layers are where the punishments begin. They’re mapped onto 3 subdivisions:
Upper Hell (circles 2-5) are the sins of incontinence. These belong to the sins of lust, gluttony, greed, and sloth and wrath respectively
Middle Hell (circles 6-7) is for the heretics and violent
Lower Hell (circles 8-9) is reserved for… the fraudulent and the betrayers
Again, this structure often surprises first-time readers. According to Dante, a fraudulent con artist suffers a worse punishment than a murderer. Why exactly do the fraudulent and betrayers have such a harsh time?
As surprising as the structure may appear, it’s far from arbitrary. Dante’s vision of Hell was shaped by 1,500 years of Greek Philosophy, synthesized by Thomistic metaphysics. In other words, there’s a calculating genius behind the “madness,” of the Inferno.
First, let’s consider the lesser crimes of Hell.
Upper Hell is for sins of incontinence. These are the least heinous crimes because they’re perversions of otherwise natural desires. For instance, it’s good to desire wealth, but bad to idolize money. The latter places you in Dante’s Hell.
Middle Hell are unnatural sins of passion. The violent are not just consumed by passions, but actively Will destruction against self, neighbor, or God. This is not just a perversion of natural goods, but a corruption of your spirit.
Finally, the fraudulent and betrayers are at the bottom of Hell because these sinners are liars. They pervert the most sacred aspect of their humanity — the intellect. Unlike middle and upper hell, no passion is involved with these crimes. These sinners are cold-hearted intellectuals, rebelling against God, neighbor, and the moral order with full consent and awareness of their evils. The rebellious nature of these sins are “Luciferian,” in the truest sense.
But that’s just the explanation of Hell’s structure. Now let’s see what Lower Hell actually looks like.
Touring Lower Hell
The 8th circle of Hell, filled with the fraudulent, is the most complex of all Dante’s circles, with 10 subdivisions. Amongst these sinners you’ll find seducers, flatterers, thieves, corrupt politicians and more. The commonality amongst all of them is deceit. They knowingly lie to their neighbor.
Why is lying so devastating?
Well, it’s far more than a mere betrayal of trust between 2 people.
Lying doesn’t just harm the soul, it fundamentally erodes trust, the social fabric, and the inherent moral order of the universe. All human relationships — whether personal, familial or civil — rely on trust to operate, the same trust that is the basis of commerce, friendship, and love. Any relationship built on lies, then, is doomed to die. This is true for marriage, friendship, and civilization at large.
As Gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn himself asserted — lying was the fuel of the terror of the Soviet Union, and all dystopias. Hell on Earth is literally fueled by lies. This is why fraud is worse than murder for Dante. The sins of wrath are extravagant, but the poison of fraud runs deep to the essence of beings itself.
Yet the horrors of the 8th circle pale in comparison to what lies beneath…
The Belly of the Beast
The bottom circle of Hell is horrifyingly… quiet. There’s no lava pits, no demons with pitchforks, nor even cries of agony and anguish. Dante finds nothing but silence, darkness, and ice. Literally, everything is covered in ice, and a frigid wind swirls around this pit.
When Dante and his guide Virgil walk deeper into the circle, they discover the ultimate terror — Satan himself. Yet Dante’s portrayal of Satan is starkly different from all other poets.
Modern portrayals of Satan show a slick and charismatic gentleman, and Milton’s Satan was a romanticized rebel, while ancient depictions associate Satan with the cunning evils of a Serpent. Yet in Dante’s Inferno, Satan is, well, quite pathetic.
He’s a giant, 3-headed demon who’s trapped in ice from the waist down, while his upper half flaps his wings in vain. His 3 mouths are gnawing on 3 sinners — Judas, Cassius and Brutus — for eternity. Yet most surprisingly of all, Satan is crying. All these sinners here betrayed the loved ones who held them dearest, with Judas and Satan betraying God, and Cassius and Brutus betraying Caesar.
Why is personal betrayal the worst sin? And why is Satan silent and pathetic?
Already, Dante is teaching us the true nature of evil — no matter how powerful it appears at first, it’s ultimately self-defeating. Satan, once the grandest creature in creation, is now reduced to tears and a vain flapping of wings.
Satan’s betrayal was so self-destructive it deprived him of speech; he betrayed his intellect, and is now deprived of language — the tangible expression of the logos. The once brightest creature in creation is now a sniveling beast.
This is why Hell is icy and still. For Dante, Paradise is an ecstatic motion fueled by the fire of God’s love. Hell, deprived of God’s love, is a frigid, icy stillness. The sinners are deprived of life, love, motion, and left with nothing but the terrors of their contorted souls… It's the final fruit of choosing self-love over selfless love.
Therefore, Dante asserts that nothing is more Satanic than personal betrayal. It corrupts what’s most sacred in your soul, and ruins the very relationships that should fuel love — a love that is the essence of God himself.
Conclusion
Dante first enters the Inferno to escape the wilderness he was entrapped in. His life and soul were in danger because he had “wandered from the straight and true,” and needed to brave the Inferno to grow in sanctity. It’s in Lower Hell where he finally announces a full-hearted hatred of not just his sins, but evil itself.
After looking upon Satan, Dante and Virgil make their great escape. They sneak past the silent demon, climb through a narrow hole, and emerge to fresh air and a calm evening night on Earth. Here, Dante emerges with his eyes fixated on the stars — his mind, body, and soul now desiring Heaven. His mission is accomplished.
Dante wrote the Inferno to help us do the same. We’re meant to read this book as fellow pilgrims, learning to hate evil such that our gaze may aim for the stars.
Dante suggests that if you find yourself feeling lost and uncertain of the “straight and true,” then perhaps you must brave the Inferno. If you dare travel where you’re most scared to go, your soul will grow in sanctity. To brave these fears, and gaze into the abyss like Dante did, is to train your gaze back to virtue and Goodness. Only after braving a dark night of the soul can you experience the full grandeur of life’s goodness.
At this time in this culture lying and deceit are considered traits of intelligence and optimal survival aptitude. The prevalent philosophy is influenced by the pseudoscience of psychology so that obscuration, and omission of truth is considered kindness and acceptable, even virtuous behavior. People have slipped into playing God by “deciding” when truth is “appropriate, thereby disregarding the natural respect for their own and one another’s soul.
Well done! The Inferno reflects the interpretation of Dante's time, and I have my own view of what Heaven and Hell are really like. But you have done a great job at translating the old poem into a clear synopsis.