"COMPASSION FOR THE SOULS WHO INHABIT HELL"

Dante's Inferno is a 14th- century poem that seems calculated to cause the greatest possible pain to a 20th-century humanist, or to anyone who is attracted to Christianity because of its compassion and belief in the possibility of redemption. The God of the Inferno has precious little compassion and no forgiveness. He was the God who not only turned a blind eye to Belsen, but also exercised great ingenuity in constructing His own blood-chilling concentration camp, where sinners should suffer, not only during their brief lives, but for all eternity.

What is particular about Dante's God is that He consigns sinners to their particular circle in Hell according to an immutable tariff of offences. No attention is paid to mitigating circumstances, or the idea of doing justice to the individual soul before the Divine Court. Hell, in short, was made on exactly the lines that the present Home Secretary would wish to impose on our present sentencing system.

How do we reconcile the enjoyment of a great poem with what must seem, to many of us today, a repellent theology? Ulysses may best capture our own views in his speech to his sailors. He celebrates the dignity of man and says: "You were not bornto live as a mere brute does/ But for the pursuit of knowledge and the good". But such sensible humanism is, apparently, no better than the excuses of the gluttons and the adulterers. Ulysses is condemned as a thief and must suffer in Hell.

In an admirable Preface to Robert Pinsky's translation, John Freccero deals with past attempts to enjoy the poem without revulsion. Coleridge advised us to "suspend disbelief" and enjoy the poetry without accepting the theology. Erich Auerbach suggested we separate "Dante's didactic intent from his power of representation", and held that the reality of the condemned characters overwhelmed their allegorical meaning. Perhaps we should simply remember how Dante suffered from the ruthless power-seeking and political intrigue in Florence and take Hell as an accurate picture of politics today.

George Steiner, the distinguished critic and polymath, has suggested in his

book In Bluebeard's Castle that the Holocaust is the Christian idea of hell made real and that the most knowledgeable guide to the camps is actually Dante.

Robert Pinsky, the recently appointed poet laureate of the United States, was asked to comment on this notion in an interview in The Forward that marked the publication of the poet's acclaimed translation of Dante's Inferno.

"In magnitude, in challenge to the imagination, in

degree of horror, in terrifying questions it raises, that's an appropriate

analogy. But we must never forget the defect of the analogy. Souls are

assigned in the Inferno according to a system of justice; souls were

assigned in the camps according to a system of injustice."

Of all the concentration camps in the Nazis' vast empire, the one that

perhaps most clearly resembled Dante's Hell was Dora, the underground camp composed of a series of massive tunnels actually built into the side of a mountain, where the V-1 and V-2 rockets were manufactured through the most horrific use of slave labor in all of the Reich. There were many Jews among them, but the prisoners represented a cross- section of all the nationalities and religions in Europe. In these camps sadism exercised without constraint. The prisoners were exposed to extremes of suffering, constant physical misery and sickness, all of it aggravated by a starvation diet. There was a conspicuous gallows where inmates were hanged, usually for suspected sabotaging of the missile parts, but often just for the sport of the SS men. The other inmates were forced to watch these especially brutal executions. If an inmate managed to survive the starvation diet, the accidents with machinery or the hangman's noose, there were still sadistic SS men waiting in the shadows. "Ironface" was one of the most dreaded of these murderers, an individual said to be able to kill even a healthy man with a single well-placed blow of his club.

More people were killed making rockets than by the rockets themselves. This was established in London. Less than 5,000 people were killed and 4,000 were injured. More than 20,000 died in Dora.

Dante' inferno poem is the passive agitation against the Nazism and the way it made people life------------ HELL