Damning Lust And Then Confusing It With Love: Inferno, Canto V, Lines 52 - 87

When we left Virgil and Dante in the last passage from Canto 5 of INFERNO, the pilgrim had just asked who was being tossed in the winds of lust.

Virgil answers with a surprising list of the "great" sinners out on the wind: figures from shadowy antiquity, through the Trojan War, and up to medieval romance.

In so doing, Virgil redefines lust, away from a "simple" sin to something more earth-shattering and socially disruptive.

Then both he and the pilgrim (and maybe the poet in the background) make a crucial mistake: they confuse love and lust.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take a slow walk through THE DIVINE COMEDY, passage by passage, and here stop to gawk at the great figures of lust with the pilgrim Dante and his guide, the ever-surprising Virgil.

Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:42] My English translation of the passage from INFERNO for this episode: Canto V, lines 52 - 87. It's so complicated, I read it twice. If you'd like to see my translation, look for it on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[06:13] Virgil's catalogue of seven great, historical figures on the winds of lust--and the shocking movement in the passage from an orthodox definition of lust to the invocation of love, the greatest Christian virtue.

[27:30] Dante-the-pilgrim's request: can I talk to the two who are so light on the wind? Why are the "light"? What does that mean?

[30:16] Irony invades the passage in two ways: irony tints its rhetorical structure (a chiasmus, as I'll explain) and irony invades the simile: doves are on the wind, a traditional symbol for the third person of the Christian trinity.