What the Trumpet Will Restore — Inferno, Canto 6

Inferno · Canto 6 · Lines 94–115 · Scene 19

Ciacco has just told Dante what is going to happen to Florence, and then his eyes have gone crooked; he stares at the pilgrim for a moment, bows his head, and falls back into the mud with the other blind souls. It is natural to wait for him to get up. Virgil says he will not. «Più non si desta» (94) — he does not wake again — not on this side of the angel’s trumpet.

Notice the metaphor. Damnation is being described as sleep, which is a biblical way of talking about the dead: they sleep until the last day. But here the usual comfort is turned inside out. Waking will not be a rescue. Waking is the catastrophe. When the trumpet sounds, «la nimica podesta» (96), the hostile power, will come. That is Christ, arriving as judge, and Virgil does not use his name — nobody names Christ in Hell. He calls him the enemy, because for these particular souls that is what he is.

Then three verbs, one to a line: each soul «rivederà la trista tomba, / ripiglierà sua carne e sua figura, / udirà quel ch’in etterno rimbomba» (97–99). He will see his sad tomb again, pick his flesh and his shape back up, and hear the thing that echoes forever. Read the line-ends aloud: tromba, tomba, rimbomba — trumpet, tomb, boom. The rhyme sound is the noise the passage is about.

The two travellers walk on, slowly, through what Dante calls «sozza mistura / de l’ombre e de la pioggia» (100–101), the filthy mixture of shades and rain — the souls and the sleet have blended into one substance. They are talking about the life to come, and the pilgrim asks the obvious question: after the great sentence, will these torments get bigger, or smaller, or stay exactly as scalding as they are?

Virgil’s answer is the doctrinal heart of the canto, and it is startling because of where it comes from. «Ritorna a tua scïenza» (106): go back to your philosophy. The principle is Aristotle’s, as the Middle Ages received him — the more perfect a thing is, the more it feels, both pleasure and pain. Now apply it. A soul without a body is not a whole person; it is a person missing something. At the resurrection the missing part comes back. The damned become more complete, and more complete means more capable of sensation, and more capable of sensation, down here, means more capable of agony.

So Hell gets worse at the end of time. That is the plain content of «di là più che di qua essere aspetta» (111) — they expect to be more, over there, than they are here. And there is a knot in the middle of it that Dante does not untie: «questa gente maladetta / in vera perfezion già mai non vada» (109–110), this cursed people never arrives at true perfection. They will be more perfect and they will never be perfect. Both statements stand in the same sentence.

What is missing from the answer is as interesting as what is in it. The pilgrim asked about the Last Judgment, which is a matter of revelation, and Virgil replied with a proposition from natural philosophy. He mentions no Judge, no grace, no reason why the bodies should come back at all — only the mechanics of what happens once they do. He answers what reason can answer.

Then the road curves. «parlando più assai ch’i’ non ridico» (113): they said much more than the poet is going to repeat, which is the narrator admitting he has cut the conversation short. They come to the place where the ground steps down, «venimmo al punto dove si digrada» (114) — and there is Plutus.

And that is the end of the canto. The great enemy gets a name, an epithet, and not one word of description: no face, no size, no shape. Every other guardian so far has been drawn in detail. This one is simply there, at the edge of a step down, and the reader has to wait. The next canto opens with the noise he makes.

94. E ‘l duca disse a me: "Più non si desta95. di qua dal suon de l’angelica tromba,96. quando verrà la nimica podesta:

literary key: Line 94 — «Più non si desta» — he does not wake again. Virgil answers a question the pilgrim has not asked: Ciacco has just slumped back among the blind souls, and the natural expectation is that he will rise. The verb makes damnation a sleep, which is scriptural idiom for the dead awaiting the last day, but the usual consolation is inverted — waking will be the catastrophe rather than the release. The line also closes the Florentine conversation with a door: no more will be got from him, and the canto’s political matter is finished. [Model knowledge · high]

cultural ref: Line 95 — «l’angelica tromba» — the trumpet of Matthew 24:31 and of 1 Corinthians 15:52, where at the last trumpet the dead rise incorruptible, and of 1 Thessalonians 4:16. The medieval imagination had it fixed liturgically: the Dies irae sequence, thirteenth-century and attributed to Thomas of Celano, rhymes the wondrous trumpet with the tombs of every region, herding all before the throne. Dante’s own rhyme chain does the same work in Italian — tromba (95), tomba (97), rimbomba (99) — so that the sound of the passage is the noise the passage is about. [Model knowledge · high]

history: Line 96 — «la nimica podesta» — the hostile power. Christ returning as judge, designated by office rather than name, since no one in Hell speaks the name. The podestà of a thirteenth-century Italian commune was the chief magistrate, hired from another city precisely so that he owed no local faction anything, and his principal function was judicial. A Florentine hearing this word hears a courtroom, and the vocabulary holds twelve lines later at «la gran sentenza» (104). ‘Nimica’ is relative, not absolute: enemy to these souls, in this aspect, on that day. [Model knowledge · medium]

97. ciascun rivederà la trista tomba,98. ripiglierà sua carne e sua figura,99. udirà quel ch’in etterno rimbomba".

theology: Line 97 — «rivederà la trista tomba» — will see its sad tomb again. The verb treats the grave as a place one returns to, almost domestically. Compare Inferno X.10–12, where Virgil explains that the heretics’ sepulchres stand open and will be shut for ever once their occupants come back from the valley of Jehoshaphat with the bodies that are still above ground. The two passages assume the same choreography of the last day: bodies fetched from tombs, judgment, and then a closing that is permanent. [Source: Inferno X.10-12]

theology: Line 98 — «ripiglierà sua carne e sua figura» — will take back its flesh and its form. The doctrine defined at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was that all rise in their own proper bodies, numerically the same, not merely in bodies of the same kind; the possessive ‘sua’, twice, carries that insistence. ‘Figura’ is the visible shape, the recognisable person. The exception that proves the rule comes in Inferno XIII.103–108, where the suicides will go and fetch their bodies like everyone else but will never wear them again, hanging them instead on their own thorn-trees. [Source: Inferno XIII.103-108; Fourth Lateran Council (1215)]

literary key: Line 99 — «udirà quel ch’in etterno rimbomba» — will hear what resounds eternally. What resounds has never been fixed. Most commentators take it as the sentence of the Judge, the discedite a me maledicti of Matthew 25:41, echoing without end; others hear the undifferentiated roar of Hell itself, of the kind the pilgrim met descending into the second circle. If the first reading is right, Virgil quotes the verdict in advance at 109 when he calls them «questa gente maladetta». The verb contains, phonically, both the trumpet and the tomb. [Model knowledge · medium]

100. Sì trapassammo per sozza mistura101. de l’ombre e de la pioggia, a passi lenti,102. toccando un poco la vita futura;

vocabulary: Line 100 — «sozza mistura» — filthy mixture. The shades and the sleet have blended into a single indistinguishable substance, which is the physical state of this circle: nothing here keeps its edges. The placement is exact. Three lines after a tercet about flesh and form being rejoined to soul — the good mixture, the human composite — the travellers wade through the bad one. Whether the juxtaposition is designed or fortunate is unprovable, but the poem rarely puts its worst noun next to its highest doctrine by accident. [Model knowledge · medium]

literary key: Line 101 — «a passi lenti» — with slow steps. This is the only walking pace specified in the canto, and it belongs to a philosophical conversation: a peripatetic gait for a peripatetic subject. The contrast is with everything else in Inferno VI, which has contained a three-throated dog snapping, a soul sitting bolt upright and dropping flat, and rain that never varies. The pace also gives the exchange its texture — this is a tutorial conducted on the move, not a set-piece delivered from a standing position. [Model knowledge · medium]

translation note: Line 102 — «toccando un poco la vita futura» — touching a little on the life to come. ‘Toccare’ is used here in its technical sense, to treat a topic briefly, corresponding to the Latin attingere in scholastic usage; ‘un poco’ underlines the brevity, and ‘la vita futura’ is the standard phrase for existence after the resurrection rather than for the afterlife in general. The line is the narrator conceding in advance that what follows is a summary — a concession he will repeat, more openly, at 113. [Model knowledge · high]

103. per ch’io dissi: "Maestro, esti tormenti104. crescerann’ei dopo la gran sentenza,105. o fier minori, o saran sì cocenti?".

vocabulary: Line 103 — «esti tormenti» — these torments. ‘Esti’ is an apocopated form of questi, current in older Tuscan and printed here in Petrocchi’s text; modern readers routinely mis-hear it as a typographical oddity rather than as ordinary thirteenth-century speech. Note also the address «Maestro», which is the pilgrim’s habitual vocative when he is asking Virgil for doctrine rather than for direction — the schoolroom title, used at exactly the moment the exchange turns into a quaestio. [Model knowledge · medium]

wordplay: Line 105 — «o saran sì cocenti» — or will they be as scalding. ‘Cocente’ is a heat word, from cuocere, to cook or burn, and the third circle has no fire in it whatever: the punishment is cold rain, hail and dirty snow falling on souls lying in slush. Some read the adjective as a dead metaphor, simply meaning sharp or searing pain; others hear a genuine dissonance, the pilgrim instinctively reaching for a fire that is not there because fire is what he expects Hell to be. The commentary tradition has never had to decide, and has not. [Model knowledge · low]

106. Ed elli a me: "Ritorna a tua scïenza,107. che vuol, quanto la cosa è più perfetta,108. più senta il bene, e così la doglienza.

literary key: Line 106 — «Ritorna a tua scïenza» — go back to your philosophy. The diaeresis gives scïenza three syllables and a certain formality of delivery. Two things are pointed. ‘Tua’: the learning the pilgrim already owns, Aristotle as received in the schools, not a revelation being handed down. And ‘ritorna’: the imperative treats the answer as retrieval rather than instruction, which is what a teacher says when the student already has what he needs. Virgil answers a question about the Last Judgment by sending Dante to his own bookshelf. [Model knowledge · high]

theology: Line 107 — «quanto la cosa è più perfetta, / più senta il bene, e così la doglienza» — the axiom that perfection increases the capacity for feeling, indifferently for good and for pain. It is a scholastic commonplace, and the conclusion drawn from it — that the punishment of the damned will be greater after the resurrection than before — is argued in the Supplementum to the Summa theologiae, q. 98, itself a posthumous compilation from Aquinas’s earlier commentary on the Sentences. No verbatim Aristotelian source has ever been securely identified; commentators have pointed to the De anima and to the Ethics without agreement. [Model knowledge · medium]

theology: Line 108 — «più senta il bene, e così la doglienza» — the good and, likewise, the grief. The axiom is symmetrical, and Dante means it to be. Paradiso XIV.43–60 gives Solomon the identical principle running upward: when the glorified flesh is resumed the person will be more complete, and therefore the vision will grow, the ardour that is kindled from it will grow, and the ray that comes from the ardour will grow. Heaven and Hell operate on one physics. The arithmetic that will enlarge beatitude is the arithmetic that enlarges torment, and the pilgrim is taught it first standing in slush. [Source: Paradiso XIV.43-60]

109. Tutto che questa gente maladetta110. in vera perfezion già mai non vada,111. di là più che di qua essere aspetta".

cultural ref: Line 109 — «questa gente maladetta» — this cursed people. The adjective is the vocabulary of the sentence itself: maledicti, in the verdict of Matthew 25:41 that separates the goats and consigns them to eternal fire. If the thing that «in etterno rimbomba» at 99 is that verdict, then Virgil is here using the Judge’s own word for them, ten lines in advance of the day on which it will be pronounced. It is also, in its ordinary sense, simply the standard periphrasis for the damned, and the two readings do not exclude each other. [Model knowledge · medium]

theology: Line 110 — «in vera perfezion già mai non vada» — never goes on to true perfection. The standard resolution of the paradox distinguishes perfection of nature, the integrity of a human being as soul and body restored, which the damned will possess, from perfection in the absolute sense, the possession of the last end, which they never will. Early commentators supply the distinction readily. What none can supply is a reason why Dante buries it in a concessive clause and changes the subject: the sentence holds both halves of the contradiction and moves on within three lines. [Model knowledge · medium]

literary key: Line 111 — «di là più che di qua essere aspetta» — it expects to be, over there, more than here. ‘Essere’ stands as a noun: what is awaited is more being. The balance of «di là» against «di qua» reprises the temporal-spatial idiom of 95. ‘Aspetta’ can mean awaits, with the certainty of fact, or expects, with the openness of an opinion held by the subject; the first is standard and doctrinally correct, but the grammar permits the second, and Inferno III.124–126 has already shown the damned pressing toward judgment with fear turned into desire. [Source: Inferno III.124-126]

112. Noi aggirammo a tondo quella strada,113. parlando più assai ch’i’ non ridico;114. venimmo al punto dove si digrada:

vocabulary: Line 112 — «Noi aggirammo a tondo quella strada» — we circled that road round. The phrase is deliberately redundant: aggirare already contains the turning, and ‘a tondo’ adds the circle again. Dante uses this doubling when he wants the reader to feel the geometry as labour rather than as diagram — the travellers are walking an arc of a ring, and the arc is long enough for a conversation the poet then declines to report in full. The circular movement ends, as it always does in Hell, at a place where the ground fails. [Model knowledge · medium]

literary key: Line 113 — «parlando più assai ch’i’ non ridico» — talking of far more than I retell. A reticence formula, of the kind used among the poets of Limbo, where the narrator states that they spoke of things it is as well to keep silent about (Inf. IV.104). Here the effect is different: not decorum but abridgement. The doctrine just delivered is an excerpt from a longer tutorial, and the admission comes two lines before the canto refuses to describe its own final figure. Twice in four lines the text announces that it is withholding. [Source: Inferno IV.104]

vocabulary: Line 114 — «venimmo al punto dove si digrada» — we came to the point where it steps down. ‘Digradare’ derives from grado, a step or degree: the architecture of the pit understood as a staircase, each circle a tread. The impersonal reflexive makes the descent a property of the place rather than an action of the travellers. Note that the canto ends at the top of the step and not at the bottom: the poem stops on the threshold, which is where it has chosen to leave the reader. [Model knowledge · high]

115. quivi trovammo Pluto, il gran nemico.

cultural ref: Line 115 — «quivi trovammo Pluto, il gran nemico» — a name, an epithet, and nothing else. The form of the name is that of the classical lord of the underworld, but the function — guarding the circle of avarice and prodigality — belongs to Plutus, god of wealth, a different figure with whom he was already being confused in late antiquity. Early commentators split, and the tradition has never converged; some treat the ambiguity as deliberate. ‘Il gran nemico’ is equally unfixed: enemy of God, of humankind, or of this journey. Every previous guardian was described in detail. This one is not, and the deferral holds through the opening of the next canto, which begins with a cry no reader has confidently construed. [Model knowledge · medium]

Reason Reaches This Far

The passage is straightforward doctrine, correctly stated by the guide who exists in the poem to state it. The increase of infernal pain after the resurrection is orthodox theology, argued in the same terms in the Thomist tradition; the axiom about perfection and sensation is a school commonplace that no Christian authority contested; and Dante confirms his commitment to it by building the whole of Solomon’s discourse on glorified flesh in Paradiso XIV out of the identical principle, running in the opposite direction. Heaven and Hell operate on one physics, and the poem says so twice. Virgil’s appeal to philosophy rather than Scripture is not a limitation but a demonstration: on this particular point, the consequences of the resurrection once granted, unaided reason genuinely does arrive at the truth, and Dante the philosopher — the Dante whose Aristotelianism Bruno Nardi insisted on treating as his own and not as borrowed Thomism — believed exactly that. The compression at 109–111 is economy, not embarrassment; the distinction between natural perfection and perfection in the absolute sense was so familiar that stating it would have been pedantry.

Key passage: Paradiso XIV.43–60 applies the same axiom to the blessed and treats it as certain; Virgil’s proposition is doctrinally correct by the standards of every school Dante knew; and the poem never corrects it, in Purgatorio XXV’s long discourse on the aerial body or anywhere else.

The Guide at His Ceiling

The scene is arranged to show reason answering an eschatological question in the only vocabulary it owns. Virgil describes the return of Christ as a hostile magistracy and cannot say the name, exactly as he could not say it in Limbo; he grounds a doctrine of resurrection in an axiom about sensation, saying nothing of grace, of the reason bodies are restored, or of the justice of restoring them for punishment; and the sentence he produces contains an unreconciled contradiction — never perfect, yet more perfect — which he neither notices nor resolves. Then the poem does something structural: it tells us the conversation was longer than reported, walks the pair to a step down, and confronts them with a guardian it declines to describe, whose first utterance in the next canto is an unintelligible noise that Virgil will have to talk past rather than translate. On this reading, the passage is the last stretch of ground where philosophy is adequate, and the canto ends by walking off it.

Key passage: Christ is unnamed at 96 as at Inferno IV.53–54; the authority cited at 106 is the pilgrim’s own learning and nothing else; the paradox at 109–110 is stated and dropped; and the canto closes on a named guardian given no description at all, in a poem that had described every previous one.

On the page: Christ is designated by an office and an adjective, «la nimica podesta» (96), and is not named. Virgil’s authority for his answer is «tua scïenza» (106) — the pilgrim’s own philosophical learning — and no scriptural or ecclesiastical authority is cited anywhere in the passage. Lines 109–111 contain both the assertion that the damned never reach true perfection and the assertion that they await more being after the Judgment, joined by the concessive «Tutto che», with no distinction drawn between senses of perfection. The same axiom about perfection and capacity governs Solomon’s speech on the glorified flesh at Paradiso XIV.43–60. Inferno XIII.103–108 makes the suicides an explicit exception to the rule stated here at 98. Line 113 states that the conversation reported is an abridgement. Line 115 names Plutus and gives him no described attribute; the immediately preceding guardians of Inferno III, V and VI each receive physical description.

What scholars dispute: Whether Virgil functions here as a fully authoritative expositor or as a guide operating at the limit of his competence is contested and has been since at least the mid-twentieth century; the reading of «tua scïenza» as an endorsement of natural reason’s reach and the reading of it as a demonstration of its ceiling are both defensible from the same eleven lines. The Aristotelian source of the axiom has never been securely identified, so calling it ‘Aristotle’ is already an interpretative act. The construction of «aspetta» (111) as certain futurity rather than as the damned’s own expectation is standard but not compelled by the grammar.

How the damned can be more perfect and never truly perfect at once, and whether the increase they await is a fact of the poem’s cosmology or a state of mind belonging to «questa gente maladetta»; whether Virgil’s recourse to philosophy in the absence of any named Judge is the poem’s endorsement of reason or its demonstration of what reason cannot say; and what Plutus is, since the text gives a name and an epithet and refuses, at the moment of maximum expectation, to give anything else.

The Open Question

The pilgrim asks what will happen to the torments of Hell at the Last Judgment — a question about revelation, about the return of Christ and the raising of the dead — and Virgil answers with a proposition from natural philosophy, never naming the Judge and never explaining why the bodies return at all. Is that the poem speaking its own settled doctrine, confident that reason reaches this far unaided? Or is it the moment when reason is shown handling a revealed mystery with instruments not built for it, four lines before it arrives at something on the road it cannot even describe?

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