Alright listen up, buckos, it’s time for a public service announcement.
I read books. I read a lot of books. And over the past month or so, two of the books I’ve read have this quote (or some variation thereof) in them, and I know that they’re not the only ones. It goes something like this:
Dante tells us that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those that preserve neutrality in times of great moral crisis.
Or this:
This is, of course, meant to be a reference to Inferno, the only part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy that anyone seems to be aware of. If you’re not aware, The Divine Comedy is a long narrative poem from the Middle Ages, in which the poet, Dante Alighieri, finds himself going on a journey through the three realms of the afterlife according to Catholic belief: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It’s got loads of references to history, classical mythology, medieval folklore, and the people the author knew from home.1
There is a not-baseless argument that it’s self-insert fanfiction. Dante is guided by his favorite author (Virgil) and his childhood crush (Beatrice). It’s wild.
I want to slide in a disclaimer here while I’m at it: The Divine Comedy is not dogma. Despite whatever pop culture tells you, there is no Catholic theologian, or theologian from any major denomination, who takes this text as an accurate depiction of the afterlife. This is not canon. It IS very popular with Christian theologian and historian types, but it’s not canon.
Anyhow, with Inferno, the part that people actually know about because that’s the kind of world we live in, there are nine circles in Hell, and each one is dedicated to punishing a different kind of sin or shortcoming. And many times within those circles there are subdivisions and such. But you know what sin very noticeably doesn’t get its own section of Hell? The people who don’t take sides in moral crises.
This quote wasn’t said or written by Dante Alighieri in any record that survives today. It is not a paraphrase of a quote from Inferno. It is not a summation of part of or an idea presented in the text.
There is a section of Inferno that deals with those that stay neutral in conflicts: it’s at the very beginning. Because those that didn’t take sides aren’t even in Hell, they’re running around outside, along with the angels who didn’t take sides in the War in Heaven, being chased by stinging insects while they try to pursue an ever-shifting banner. Dante clearly didn’t have a high opinion of them, because he thinks them so unworthy that even Hell doesn’t want them.
They are certainly in a horrible place. But the hottest place in Hell? Not by a longshot. They’re not in Hell, and it’s not particularly hot by comparison to the people suffering for heresy. The idea of the worst punishments in Hell being a certain intensity of fire kind of misses the point Dante’s going for. The deepest circle of Hell is actually a frozen lake. And as Jack Sparrow points out in Curse of the Black Pearl, it’s reserved for traitors. [2]
Now this quote, about “The hottest places in Hell” was written or recorded, in fact, by Henry Powell Spring in the 1940’s. At least, according to Wikiquote. The point is, Dante didn’t say or write it. For whatever reason the quote was attributed to Dante even then, and then John F. Kennedy started using it in speeches while claiming that Dante said it.3 And from there it picked up, until you see it all over the place, from Letters to a Young Contrarian to lame Facebook meme posts.
Basically, we have a bunch of would-be intellectuals claiming they’re quoting a famous philosophical text, or a renowned medieval writer, all the while proving that they clearly haven’t read the work they think they’re referring to.
Figures.
Part of why this bugs me is because it’s a quote that’s so ingrained in popular consciousness that it’s trotted out all the time. One of the comics I read recently was a tie-in to Assassin’s Creed in which it’s a plot point that one of the characters has read The Divine Comedy, and the way it’s proven is that he recites this quote. Which again, proves that the character, the author, and the editors aren’t as familiar with the text as they want you to think. It comes up over and over again, even though it’s made up!
And what makes this worse is that you don’t even have to know that much about Inferno to know it’s a false quote! We see the fate of those who didn’t take sides in moral crises–it’s in the beginning of the book, as the journey is getting started. You didn’t need to read far into the book to see that it’s wrong. Heck, if you looked up the book on Wikipedia you’d know that it’s nonsense. But all of these authors, speakers, and meme makers couldn’t be bothered to read even a basic summary of the book, to ask someone who’d actually read it, what it said on the topic.
So dear reader, I pass this charge to you: if you see someone say or spread this quote, you need to hit this person. Preferably with a copy of The Divine Comedy, but if you don’t have that on hand (regrettable, but understandable), use whatever you have. Not hard enough to do any permanent damage, because we want this problem fixed, but hit hard enough to get the point across.
This error must absolutely be stamped out. Do not hesitate. Show no second thoughts. Just HIT the darn person in question, because it proves that–in that instant at least–the person using the fake quote is being an ignorant nincompoop trying to look smarter than he or she is.
This has been a public service announcement from your grumpy Internet English major.
1 Something I don’t think is talked about enough is that Dante totally put people he knew in certain parts of Hell for their sins. People who weren’t dead yet when he wrote the poem. Think about that for a second.
2 I’m still absolutely flummoxed that Pirates of the Caribbean of all things did a Divine Comedy reference correctly when so many others can’t.
3 Yes, the sad fact is that here in America, our presidents and politicians have been spouting nonsense for decades. It’s a recurring problem.
Faranae on 9 April 2022, 11:34 said:
“There’s a special place in hell for [noun], according to Dante” is both a perfectly accurate description of the Divine Comedy and a particularly useless statement to make, but “neutral parties burn extra” is so fundamentally Didn’t Do the Homework, I’m rather amazed.
It seems that people started using the beginning of the poem to say “pick a side!(by which I mean mine)” in… World War I. A war which arguably had no righteous side but a great deal of nationalism.
Dante didn’t even put people who didn’t take a side in a “moral crisis” into the wastes outside of Hell, but arguably only those who never took a side in any moral question. It’s a completely unsubtle allegory for those who go whichever way the wind blows and don’t even have enough principles to be called traitors or hypocrites.
Anyway, if one wants to lazily “prove” they’ve read the Divine Comedy, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” will do just as well on recognizability and at least it actually is a quote from the poem!
Stranger on 26 April 2022, 07:45 said:
Glad you’re still around to keep the site alive, Juracan. It does seem pretty lonely here. It took me a little bit to even remember how to use the comments.
Juracan on 29 April 2022, 05:55 said:
You would think. And that’s something at the beginning of the poem so it’s not as if you need to do that much homework.
Yeah, it’s… not great. I’d recommend more people to email staff for writing jobs, but staff has been unresponsive for a while. I’m half-tempted to share my name and password so people can post articles under different names but I don’t know if that would even work, and that has a chance of going very badly…
Stranger on 2 May 2022, 22:59 said:
I’ve been mulling over submitting… something to the site for a few years now, but the last time I ever posted here was almost a decade ago now (ew), and I’m not sure if it would even be appropriate. I fondly remember reading the sporkings of various books when they’d be posted, but it seems to be almost a ghost town now.
Brooklyn on 8 December 2023, 16:26 said:
This actually reminds me a lot of Elie Wiesel (his nobel acceptance speech was titled “The Perils of Indifference”) and I’m now wondering if he was alluding to Dante.
Also it’s a shame when you discover a site and you look at it and it seems amazing and then you discover the most recent post was a month ago.
Juracan on 8 December 2023, 20:29 said:
[shuffles feet awkwardly]
Yeaaaaaaah…. sorry about that, but after the mods left for the Void, it was just me and Apep posting articles, and after he finished his Mortal Instruments sporking he decided to take a break for… however long he’s breaking for.
That being said, there was a massive spam comment a couple of weeks ago that straight-up disappeared, so maybe the mods aren’t completely gone…
In response to this, though, I did actually write most of a post but I decided it was something that absolutely no one would really care about (comparing why, as I’ve said, the colonialist elements of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla didn’t work for me, whereas it’s less egregiously written in a series I like, Obsidian & Blood). Hopefully I’ll get the new sporking chapter up within the month.
Brooklyn on 14 December 2023, 20:20 said:
First of all, I just took a while responding to it too. Second of all, I mean, this is a project everyone seems to be running in their free time, and I’m not paying you. It’s certainly nice when you post, but I can’t very well say, “Okay, so this project you do for fun is going to be expected to be posting regularly, and I won’t pay you for any of it but you’ll be expected to do it.” (That said, your “thing no one would really care about” actually sounds fairly interesting!)