Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true. How hard a thing it is to tell about, that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh, even to think of it renews my fear! It is so bitter, death is hardly more -- but to reveal the good that came to me, I shall relate the other things I saw.
And so, Dante begins his magnum opus. This first canto of Inferno relates how the journey through Hell came about. Dante is oblique about the meaning of this opening situation and continues the literal scene of being in a terrifying wilderness, having strayed from te “straight and true.” But I cannot but take it to be at the same time metaphorical for a spiritual crisis. The wilderness could be within the space of his own heart. But, like any good story, the metaphor and the literal narrative work together wonderfully. The reader can suspend the desire for one or the other way of reading it and allow both to overlap at the same time. The underlying metaphor is never openly admitted to, and so it lurks beneath the verse and impregnates it with poigancy. Anyone who has traversed such a crisis can understand without much prodding. Others can enter an understanding through empathy. Either way, Dante is relating to us that he found himself in a grave situation. One which he could not find his own way out of. He needed help to do so. And he received it.
Dante survives the night journey through the wilderness and emerges to gaze upon the Sun at daybreak. Before him rises the Mountain (which we will later find is the mount of repentance: Purgatory). But his path is blocked by first a hungry leopard on one side and then a starving wolf on the other. Dante hints that the wolf represents craving and the leopard wrath. Despondent and hopeless, he begins to turn back and return to the dark wilderness again. But he is stopped by a stranger.
"I was a poet, and I sang of how that just son of Anchises came from Troy when her proud towers and walls were burnt to dust. But you, why do you turn back to such pain? Why don't you climb that hills that brings delight, the origin and cause of every joy?" "Then are you -- are you Virgil? And that spring swelling into so rich a stream of verse?" I answered him, my forehead full of shame. "Honor and light of every poet, may my long study avail me, and the love that made me search the volume of your work. You are my teacher, my authority; you alone are the one from whom I took the style whose loveliness has honored me."
The metaphor continues. It is perhaps no accident that Virgil is coming to Dante’s rescue in the narrative. Virgil does more than inspire Dante, he carries him through bearing witness to Hell and the trek up the mount to repentance. Indeed, it is not a mere accident that Virgil does this: Virgil has been dispatched by an Angel to rescue him from his spiritual danger. Virgil is to bring Dante to her. There is richness to this metaphor. There is rarely so concrete a way of express how the wisdom and inspiration of classic genius spans the mists of history to touch our lives in the present. And consider the spiritual lineage we now have: Who shall Dante come and rescue today? For now Dante is the classic genius who left his soliloquy to fertilize the hearts of those who read and reflect on it today.
Virgil explains to Dante that the direct route to the mountain is impassable. The wolf will check a man’s progress until he dies and she never tires of feasting on such souls. Instead, the roundabout route to safety is to go down to the very pit of Hell where there is a passage to Purgatory.
"Should you then wish to rise go to them, another soul will come, worthier than I -- with her I'll leave you when I go my way."
And, so it happens, Beatrice is the door to Dante’s repentance and his guide through Heaven.
