Dante’s Regressive Body Politics: How Dante Brought an Ableist, Misogynist, and Domineering Hell to Earth
By Meghan R. Henning.
September 2021 marked the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. And Pope Francis encouraged the church to study Dante’s Divine Comedy as a way to navigate the upheaval that is being experienced globally as a result of the pandemic. Pope Francis’ suggestion is aimed at encouraging personal and corporate reflection, part of the Catholic church’s centuries long reverence for Dante and his piety. At the same time, as a scholar of early Christian history who has recently published a book about hell and disability, I think we need to be careful about the way that we reflect on the Divine Comedy, a text with ableist roots, in the midst of a global pandemic.
Dante completed his Divine Comedy, just a year before his death, in 1320. The Divine Comedy has become a western literary classic, and continues to be read widely by Christians and non-Christians. As a result, many of Dante’s depictions of hell, purgatory, and heaven are seared in our collective memory.
But how did Dante dream up the nine circles of hell? Dante sees the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his predecessor, modeling his own tour of hell in the Inferno after book six of Virgil’s Aeneid, and even taking Virgil along on his trip. In spite of the prominent place of Virgil in his oeuvre, the graphic descriptions of punishments and their association with specific sins are modeled after the Apocalypse of Paul, an early Christian text that was very popular at the time when Dante wrote.
For Dante and his readers these lines of influence are part of what “authorizes” his vision, but they should give today’s readers pause. The Apocalypse of Paul and other tours of hell like it took ancient Roman modes of torture and ideas about the body and gave them God’s stamp of approval in an eternal system of justice. The punishments we find in early Christian hell are the punishments that Romans reserved for those of low social status: imprisonment in dark mines, hanging, beheading, being thrown to wild beasts, or burning alive. These punishments played upon persistent ancient fears of sickness and disability that can be seen in the wide range of ancient thinkers (medical, philosophical, theological) who focused on how to attain and maintain the ideal body.
The ideal body in antiquity is also the masculine body. So hell’s damned inhabit leaky, weak, disabled, and effeminate bodies. The overlap between disability and stigmatized femininity is not unique to antiquity, but has persisted to the present day. As pioneering Disability Studies scholar, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argued in her work on 19th and 20th century “freak shows,” “the non-normate status accorded disability feminizes all disabled figures,” and again states, “Indeed the discursive equation of femaleness with disability is common, sometimes to denigrate women and sometimes to defend them” (Extraordinary Bodies, 9, 19). In short, the stigma associated with femininity is used to mark the disabled body as non-normative. In turn, association with disability impacts the cultural value of the female body. It is at this intersection between class, gender, disability, (and occasionally race), that the punishments of hell occur, leveraging intersecting forms of marginalization to depict the damned as the worst of the worst.
On earth, the spectacle of these punishments generated fear that was thought to deter criminal behaviors and keep the enslaved and others of low-status in subjugation. In hell, these punishments were meant to scare everyone sinless. But in the process hell made disabled bodies emblematic of sin. In the Apocalypse of Paul blindness is a punishment for giving alms conspicuously, but not knowing God. This punishment makes concrete the links that ancient thinkers like Plato (Timeaus 45) made between vision, light, cognition, and the soul. But the blind are not alone in the Apocalypse of Paul: they dwell alongside those with intestinal worms (a deadly and common illness), lacerated lips and tongues that impair speech, and amputated hands and feet. In early Christian hell the damned body is disabled and the disabled body is damned.
Dante uses different punishments, but he keeps alive the tradition of using elaborate descriptions of torture and impaired bodies to shame audiences into self-reflection. Bodies crying out in chronic pain, stung by hornets and wasps, eaten by worms, gasping for air or rolling around in smelly muck, like pigs (the punishment for gluttony) are on display as emblems of sin, all spectacles aimed at encouraging “self-control.” In the eighth circle of hell Dante and Virgil see the “falsifiers,” who are explicitly punished with disease, they “see the spirits lying heaped on one another in the dank bottom of that fetid valley. One lay gasping on another’s shoulder, one on another’s belly; and some were crawling on hands and knees among the broken boulders” (Canto 29, translation by John Ciardi). Here disease and disability are explicitly framed as punishments. Christian fantasies of torture like Dante’s have kept alive for millennia the ancient Roman enslaver’s ethics of social control and fixations on preserving a narrowly defined “ideal” body.
As in Paul and Dante’s hellscapes, the disabled body today is held up as a threat to the social ideals of self-control and health. In 2020 as the world grappled with the global pandemic the disabled body took center stage once again as the self-affirming image of the normative body. In the U.S., leaders who wanted to assure citizens of their safety used ableist language to do so, telling people that the virus would only be deadly for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. The not-so-subtle suggestion was there in plain sight: the deaths of persons with disabilities was preferable to economic collapse.
After vaccines became available and many people gleefully declared the pandemic “over,” the disability community has had new challenges to navigate, namely how to safely go to work, school, and the grocery store when only a portion of the population is vaccinated, many are not masked, and the vaccine is not effective for the immunocompromised. The global pandemic has at best placed increased socio-economic pressures on the disabled and at worst led to eugenicist cries for their death so that others can return to mask-less shopping with impunity.
For the so called able-bodied the pandemic has taken a different toll: persons with all manner of bodies find themselves to be vulnerable to something that they can’t see, and public health measures heighten the collective awareness of bodily vulnerability-something that persons with disabilities have always known and defenders of the “normal body” work hard to ignore. Disability studies scholars have argued that the disabled body makes the non-disabled uncomfortable because it reminds them of their own bodily vulnerability, that someday their body very likely will be disabled. In the pandemic those who cling most tightly to the ideals of bodily invulnerability, resisting public health measures like masking, social distancing, and vaccination have proven again and again that this ableist myth is not only “toxic,” it is deadly.
Today few people are crafting Dante-esque hellscapes in which the disabled body symbolizes sin, but society has projected fears of the sick body onto disabled bodies and effectively placed the majority of the burden of the pandemic on those bodies. The disabled are forced to stay home, or are left out of the public health conversation altogether. In the exuberance to leave the pandemic behind we are creating a world in which “individual responsibility” allows us to gloss over our collective responsibilities to each other. Although much has changed since Dante dreamed up his Inferno, the narrowly defined “normal body” is still inhabited by a select few white, hetero, cis, abled, males, and yet our conversations around how to create an ideal world still center those bodies. As we celebrate Dante’s legacy, I suggest we take seriously the consequences of bringing that hell to earth.
Meghan Henning is an Associate Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Dayton. She specializes in New Testament and Early Christianity, and holds an undergraduate degree in Religion and Economics from Denison University, a Masters degree in Biblical Studies from Yale Divinity School, and a doctorate in New Testament from Emory University.
Meghan’s first book (Mohr Siebeck) on the pedagogical function of Hell in antiquity is entitled Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell. She has written a number of articles, essays, and invited papers on Hell, the New Testament, apocalyptic literature, apocryphal literature, ancient rhetoric, disability studies, and pedagogy. In addition to the New Testament she is interested in the theme of suffering in antiquity, women in early Christianity, Petrine literature, historiography, contemporary philosophy, the work of Michel Foucault, disability studies, feminist hermeneutics, and post-colonial theory. Meghan’s second book is about the conceptualization of gender, disability and the body in the early Christian apocalypses (Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Hell, Yale University Press, 2021).
She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Jacob K. Javits foundation, the Society of Biblical Literature, Yale Divinity School, and Emory University. Dr. Henning has been interviewed by the Daily Beast, has written for Christian Century, and has appeared in a documentary for the National Geographic Channel, and on CNN.