In this essay, Yuri Lotman interprets Dante’s Divine Comedy as a vast symbolic and architectural construction of the universe, where spatial orientation reflects moral and metaphysical meaning. Drawing from semiotics, Lotman highlights how Dante encodes cosmic structure into poetic form, making the Comedy a decipherable text in which the ‘top’ symbolizes divine truth and the ‘bottom’ spiritual degradation. The paradox of descending into Hell while spiritually ascending is resolved through Dante’s symbolic framework, where the axis of movement holds both physical and metaphysical weight. Lotman contrasts Dante’s linear, morally-driven quest with Ulysses’ morally indifferent pursuit of knowledge, showing that while both are ‘heroes of the road’ crossing boundaries, only Dante integrates knowledge and virtue within a unified cosmic vision. Ulysses, representing a proto-Renaissance scientific curiosity divorced from ethics, is ultimately condemned. In contrast, Dante—both pilgrim and poet—embodies a worldview in which knowledge, moral ascent, and symbolic meaning are inseparable. Lotman concludes that Dante foresaw a modern crisis: the severance of science from morality, of intellect from conscience—a cultural split he deeply opposed through his integrated poetic cosmology.
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by Yuri M. Lotman
Dante compared himself with a ‘geometer’ (Paradise, XXXIII, 133–4).1 We might rather say cosmologist or astronomer when we think how even in La Vita Nuova there were very complex and specially calculated laws of cosmic movement. But best of all would be to call him an architect, for the whole of the Divine Comedy is a vast architectural complex, a construction of the universe. This approach involves transferring the psychology of individual creation onto the cosmic universe: the world as someone’s creation must have purpose and meaning; and of each detail we can then ask, ‘What does it mean?’ If this question, which is a natural one to ask of a work of architecture, is applied to Nature and the Universe, it assumes that we are treating them as semiotic texts whose meaning is to be deciphered. And as with architecture, the first thing is the semiotics of space.
If the world is like a vast missive from the Creator then there is a mysterious message encoded in the language of its spatial structure. Dante deciphers this message by re-creating this world for a second time in his text; he thereby adopts the position of a transmitter of the message rather than its receiver, and the poetics of the La Divina Commedia is thus oriented towards enciphering. But what is special about Dante’s position as author is that though he adopts the point of view of the Creator, he does not forsake the point of view of humanity. This is the point we shall be illustrating in what follows. We shall be dwelling on the meaning of the spatial axis ‘top/bottom’ in Dante’s created world. This axis, however, has two distinct senses in the Comedy: in the one sense it is relative and operates only in Earth. In this sense the ‘bottom’ is identified with the centre of gravity of the globe, and the ‘top’ with any radius directed away from the centre.
When we were where the thigh turns, just on the swelling of the haunch,
the Leader with labour and strain brought round his head where his legs
had been and grappled on the hair like one climbing, so that I thought we
were returning into Hell again. . . .
And he said to me: ‘Thou imaginest thou art still on the other side of the
centre, where I took hold of the hair of the guilty worm that pierces the
world. Thou wast on that side so long as I descended; when I turned myself
thou didst pass the point to which weights are drawn from every part.’
(Inferno, XXXIV, 76–81, 106–11)
But Dante’s cosmic edifice also has an absolute top and bottom. While people at different poles of the globe ‘face each other with the soles of their feet’ (Convivio, III, v, 12), the absolute vertical is the axis of which Dante wrote in the Convivio: ‘If a stone could fall from the Pole Star it would fall in the Ocean and if a person were on that stone, the Pole Star would always be over his head’ (ibid., 9). This axis penetrates Earth, its lower end being turned to Jerusalem, it passes through Hell, the centre of the Earth, Purgatory and ends in the shining centre of the Empyrean. This is the axis down which Lucifer was cast from heaven.
Commentators have often remarked on the contradiction between Dante’s relative and absolute top and bottom. Pavel Florensky, the philosopher and mathematician, tried to explain it away by using concepts of non-Euclidean geometry and relativistic physics.2 Florensky illustrated his idea from the Divine Comedy. Commenting on the verses from the Inferno quoted above, Florensky wrote:
After this boundary the poet ascends the mountain of Purgatory and is carried up through the heavenly spheres. Now, the question is, in which direction? The underground way by which they came up was formed by the fall of Lucifer flung headlong from heaven. So the place where he was thrown down from is somewhere in heaven in the space that surrounds the earth, and on the side of that hemisphere which the poets reached. The mountain of Purgatory and Sion which are diametrically opposite each other rose up as a result of Lucifer’s fall, but have a reverse meaning. So Dante is always moving in a straight line and in heaven stands with his feet towards the place of his descent; looking around from that spot from the Empyrean at God’s Glory, he finds himself without turning back, inFlorence. . . . So moving forward always in a straight line and turning over once on the way the poet comes back to the same place in the same position as he left it in. So, if he had not turned over on the way, he would have come back in a straight line to the place he set out from but upside down. So the surface which Dante journeyed over was such that a straight line on it, with one turn-over of direction, brings one back to the previous spot in an upright position, and a straight movement without turning over brings the body back to the same place upside down. This surface then is obviously 1) a Riemannian plane since it contains enclosed straight lines, and 2) a single-sided surface since it turns over when moving along it perpendicularly. These two circumstances are sufficient to describe Dante’s space as constructed according to the type of elliptical geometry . . . In 1871 C. F. Klein showed that a spherical surface is like a two-sided surface, while an elliptical surface is one-sided. Dante’s space is extremely like elliptical space. This throws an unexpected light on the medieval notion of the finiteness of the world. But these general geometrical ideas have recently received unexpected concrete rethinking in the principle of relativity.3
Florensky in his eagerness to show how much closer to the twentieth century is the medieval mind than the mechanistic ideology of the Renaissance gets somewhat carried away (for instance the return of Dante to earth [Paradiso, I, 5–6] is only hinted at and there are no grounds for assuming that he travelled in a straight line); but the problem of the contradiction in the Commedia between real-everyday space and cosmic-transcendental space, which he highlights, is a crucial one, although the solution to this contradiction has to be sought in another direction.
According to Aristotle’s ideas, the northern hemisphere, being less perfect, occupies the lower position and the southern hemisphere the upper position of the globe. So when Dante and Virgil move down the relative scale of the earthly ‘top/bottom’ axis, that is when they go deeper from the surface of the Earth towards its centre they are at the same time in relation to the absolute axis rising up. The solution to this paradox is to be found in Dante’s semiotics. In Dante’s belief-system space has meaning, and each spatial category has its own meaning.4 But the relationship of expression and content is not an arbitrary one, unlike semiotic systems based on social conventions. In Saussure’s terminology, we are dealing here not with signs but symbols. For Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the functions of the symbol is to ‘manifest the transcendent world on the level of being. . . However, the function of signification is limited by the constraints of isomorphism, although this isomorphism is in principle different from classical mimesis’.5 The content, the meaning of the symbol is not bound to its expression by convention (as happens with allegory) but shines through it. The closer the text is placed in the hierarchy to the heavenly light which is the true content of all medieval symbolics the brighter the meaning shines through it and the more direct and less conventionalized is its expression. The further the text is from the source of truth, then the more dimly will it be reflected and the more arbitrary will be the relationship of content to expression. Thus on the highest step truth is accessible to direct contemplation through the eye of the spirit, while on the lowest step truth is glimpsed through conventional signs. Because sinners and demons of different degrees use purely conventional signs they can lie, commit perfidy, treachery and deceit – all ways to separate content from expression. The righteous also converse with each other in signs but they do not put convention to ill use, and with recourse to the highest sources of truth they can penetrate into the conventionless symbolic world of meanings.
Thus between one step on the hierarchy and the next the relationship of content to expression alters. The higher one goes the greater the symbolism and the less conventionality. But semantically speaking each new hierarchical level will be isomorphic to all the others and so a relationship of equivalence will be established between elements of different levels having a similar meaning.
All this has direct relevance to our task of understanding Dante’s notions of ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ in the Comedy. The ‘top/bottom’ axis organizes the entire semantic architectonics of the text: all parts and cantos of the Comedy are marked by their position on this basic coordinate. Consequently, movement in Dante’s text is always a descent or an ascent, and these concepts have a symbolic meaning: behind the actual descent or ascent can be glimpsed the spiritual ascent or descent. All sins, which Dante arranges in a strict hierarchy, have spatial attachment so that the weight of the sin corresponds to the depth of the sinner’s position.
Dante and Virgil’s descent into Hell has the meaning of a descent downwards. The paradox whereby as they descend they go upwards is emphasized in the verse about the Moon which, passing into the southern hemisphere, floats at the feet of the poets as they journey on: ‘And already the moon is beneath our feet’ (Inferno, XXIX, 10). Consequently in a higher sense this descent is an ascent (by going down into hell and seeing the abyss of sin Dante in an absolute sense is morally uplifted, so his descent is equivalent to an ascent), but at the same time, by earthly criteria, this really is a descent and has all the features of a real descent, including the physical exhaustion of the travellers. This downward journey brings the poets to the ‘woeful city’ (Inferno, III, 1) where they see the torments of hell.
The complex dialectics of conventionality and unconventionality which we are confronted with as soon as we begin to think about the fundamental semiotic axis of Dante’s space, leads us into the centre of the moral hierarchy of the Comedy. Commentators have often pointed out that the positioning of the sins in the circles of hell is significant: Dante departs from the Church norms and from generally accepted ideas. If the fourteenth-century reader could not help being amazed that hypocrites were put in the sixth fissure of the eighth circle and heretics only in the sixth, then the modern reader will be amazed that murder (first round of the seventh circle) is punished less than robbery (seventh ditch of the eighth circle) or counterfeiting (tenth ditch of the eighth circle). But there is a strict logic to this.
We have already mentioned that the further away from the heights of Divine Truth and Love the greater the degree of arbitrariness in the link between expression and content. In earthly life people are guided by divine symbols in questions of Faith and by conventional signs in relations with each other. The conventionality of these signs contains the potentiality for double interpretation: they can be used as a means of truth (when the conventions are observed) or of falsehood (when the conventions are violated or distorted). The Devil is the father of lies, the one who inspires people to violate conventions and any other agreements. When the true association of expression and content is tampered with, this is a sin worse than murder because Truth is harmed and Falsehood, in all its infernal implications, is let loose.6 So there is a profound logic in the fact that Dante judges evil deeds to be less grave than sins involving the falsification of signs, whether the signs are words (and the sins are slander, flattery, false advice, etc.), or valuables (involving the sins of counterfeiters, alchemists, and so on), or documents (forgers), or trust (robbers), or ideas and marks of respect (hypocrites and simoniacs). But worst of all are the traitors, those who break agreements and obligations. A sinful act is a single evil, whereas the violation of preordained semiotic links destroys the very basis of human society and turns the Earth into the kingdom of Satan, into Hell.
In Hell falsehood naturally reigns for the links between sign and content are torn apart, and falsehood is not a deviation from the norm but the rule. The devils lie when they tell Virgil in canto XXI that only the sixth bridge over the ditch has been destroyed, when in fact all bridges have been destroyed. But even Dante in canto XXXIII swears to Alberigo that he will take the ice from his eyes and thereupon breaks his oath: ‘And it was courtesy to be a churl to him’ (Inferno, XXXIII, 150). The worst crime, treachery, is valour in the place where rudeness is courtesy.
The opposition of Truth to Falsehood in the spatial model is realized in the opposition of the straight line directed upwards and the circular movement on a horizontal plane. It was a common idea that circular movement was a feature of sorcery and magic, and from the medieval Christian point of view, concerned the Devil. Compare St Augustine who denied the circular movement of time and the cyclical repetition of events, contrasting them with the idea of the linear movement of time ‘for Christ died once for our sins’.7
The ethical model of space Dante relates with his cosmic model. Dante’s cosmic model was influenced by the ideas of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Al-Fergani and Albert the Great, and especially by those of Pythagoras. In the light of Pythagorean ideas about the perfection of the circle and the sphere among geometrical figures and bodies, we can explain the circular construction of Hell as follows: the circle is the image of perfection; a circle set at the top is the perfection of good, but the circle at the bottom is the ultimate evil. So the architecture of Hell is ultimate evil. The Pythagorean system of binary oppositions had its influence on Dante, and in particular the opposition of the straight line taken as equivalent to good, to the curve which is the equivalent of evil. The movement of the sinners in Hell is round closed curves, while that of Dante is along an ascending spiral which eventually becomes a straight vertical. But of course Dante’s individuality stands out against the Pythagorean background, for it is not the centre of the sphere but the top of the Axis that is his point of spatial and ethico-religious orientation. The Pythagoreans selected a number of basic binary oppositions such as ‘odd/even’, ‘left/right’, ‘finite/infinite’, ‘male/female’, ‘single/multiple’ and ‘light/dark’, but for Dante the basic opposition was that of ‘top/bottom’ which was not important to the Pythagoreans.8
So the spatial model of Dante’s world forms a continuum onto which are inscribed trajectories of individual paths and fates. After death a soul makes its journey through this continuum of the World Construction and arrives at the spot corresponding to its moral value. The souls of the blessed are in eternal peace, while sinners are in constant cyclical motion: sometimes this takes the form of movement through space (endless flights and circling), and sometimes the form of repeated transformations — those who are cut in pieces are made whole only to be cut up again; those who are burnt are reconstituted out of the ash only to be burnt again; those who are flayed grow new skin and are flayed again, and so on.9
The figure of Dante stands out against all of this: he is free to move in all directions since his upward path includes the knowledge of all the ways of falsehood as well. But besides Dante another person in the Commedia has the right to move freely, and that is Ulysses. The Ulysses episode is unique as many scholars have pointed out.10
The image of Ulysses in the Comedy is a dual one. Ulysses finds himself in the ‘ditches of the evil ones’ because he has given false counsel. In view of what we discussed above, this fact should not surprise us. Our interest is rather Ulysses’ story of his journey and his death. Ulysses and Dante both are granted individual paths, and their journeys share a common feature — they are heroes of the straight line.11 The similarity is apparent also in the fact that their journeys are open-ended, they both plunge into infinity; starting from precisely named places they move in a preordained direction though without a previously indicated destination. But there is an essential difference between them: the point of Dante’s journey is summed up in his striving upwards, each step he takes is judged on that scale either as a step down or as a step up. Ulysses’ journey is the only one in the Comedy for which the top/bottom axis is not relevant: his whole journey is along the horizontal. While Dante is placed within the crystal cosmic globe whose three-dimensional space is transsected by the vertical axis (the fact that Dante points out and even measures its decline does not detract from its metaphysical meaning — Purgatory IV, 15–16, 67–9, 137–8), Ulysses journeys as it were on a map. So when Dante from Gemini looks down on Earth he sees ‘beyond Cadiz the mad track of Ulysses’ (Paradise, XXVII, 82–3).
Ulysses in two respects is like Dante’s double. First, both of them are ‘heroes of the road’, unlike the other characters, whose sins or virtues pin them to certain places in the Dantean universe. Dante and Ulysses are constantly in movement and, what is more important, they cross the boundaries of forbidden spaces. The crowd of other characters either stay in one place or hasten to some appointed place, the boundaries of which define their place in the Universe. Only Dante and Ulysses are voluntary or forced exiles, driven by passion, crossing the boundaries which separate one area of the cosmos from another. Second, both of them cover the same route in the same direction as they make their way to Purgatory – Dante through Hell and through the caves formed by Lucifer’s body when he fell, Ulysses over the sea past Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco. Although Dante’s journey takes place in the infernal world and Ulysses’ in real geographical space, they have the same goal. This is confirmed by the fact that Dante in his journey through Purgatory and Paradise as it were takes over the dead Ulysses’ baton. Twice the poet recalls the drowned hero and both reminiscences are full of significance.
During the second night in Purgatory the Siren appears to him and says: ‘I turned Ulysses, eager on his way, to my song’ (Purgatory XIX, 22–3). The image of the Siren brings to mind Ulysses’ bravery during his sea adventures of the Odyssey, but the Siren’s duplicity, her ability to separate outward form from inner essence and to conceal what is repugnant under her beauty (the capacity to transform is for Dante a sign of falsehood: this is why liars and deceivers are punished in hell) is a reference to the world of deceit and the ditches of evil in which Dante set Ulysses.
The second time Ulysses is referred to is when the poet approaches the constellation of Gemini. Finding himself at the spot which is the antipode to the place where Ulysses perished, Dante flies to the meridian of the Pillars of Hercules and on and up into the infinite, repeating Ulysses’ journey until he comes to the place where he died on the meridian of Sion–purgatory. Here on the axis of the fall of Lucifer which passes through the place where Ulysses’ ship was wrecked, he rises to the Empyrean. So Dante’s journey as it were carries on Ulysses’ journey from the moment of his shipwreck. But up to that moment they have been doubling each other.
But the point of any reduplication is to show up the differences on the base of the similarity. And this is our intention here.
Like Dante, Ulysses combines a longing to know humanity with a desire to understand the secrets of the world: ‘this so brief vigil of the senses that remains to us, choose not to deny experience, in the sun’s track, of the unpeopled world’ (Inferno, XXVI, 115–18). Dante is obviously inspired by this noble hunger for knowledge. In the Comedy there is a frequently made comparison between genuine people and beast-like beings in human form (see in the XIV canto of Purgatory the enumeration of the people living along the Arno, the swine-like inhabitants of Porciano, the dog-like Aretinians, the wolf-like Florentines, and fox-like Pisans). Many of the torments of hell are realized metaphors of bestiality. So Ulysses’ words reminding his companions that they are people and not beasts and are called to noble knowledge and not for animal-like existence have significance for the poet: ‘Take thought of the seed from which you spring. You were not born to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge’ (Inferno, XXVI, 118–20).
But Dante and Ulysses have different paths to knowledge. For Dante knowledge is always linked with a constant ascent along the axis of moral values, it is knowledge which comes through the moral perfection of the seeker. Knowledge elevates and the higher morality enlightens the mind. But Ulysses’ thirst for knowledge is indifferent to morals, it is not linked either to morality or immorality, it lies in another plane and has no concern with ethical problems. Even Purgatory for him is just a white patch on the map, and the aim of reaching it just a journey for the sake of geographical discovery. Dante is a pilgrim, while Ulysses is a traveller. This is why Dante in his pilgrimage through the infernal and cosmic regions always has a Guide, while Ulysses is led only by his boldness and valour. With the mind and character of the seeker after adventures he joins the rebelliousness of Farinata. The rogue of the epic, the deceitful hero of the folktale who in Homer became the wily king of Ithaca, becomes in Dante the man of the Renaissance, the first discoverer and the traveller. This image appeals to Dante by its integrity and its strength, but repels him by its moral indifference. But in this image of the heroic adventurer of his time, of the seeker, of the one who is inquisitive in all areas except that of morals, Dante discerned something else, not just the features of the immediate future, the scientific mind and cultural attitudes of the modern age; he saw the coming separation of knowledge from morality, of discovery from its results, of science from the human personality.
So the differences between Dante and Ulysses are not merely a conflict which is now past history between the psychology of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance.
In the history of world culture we often find that thinkers who stand at the threshold of a new epoch see its sense and results more clearly than succeeding generations who are already involved in it. Standing on the threshold of the modern age, Dante saw one of the greatest dangers of the future. Integrity was essential to his ideal: his encyclopedic knowledge which included virtually the entire arsenal of science of his time, was not kept in his mind as a collection of isolated bits of information, but formed a single integrated edifice which in its turn merged with the ideal of the world empire and the harmonious construction of the cosmos. At the centre of this vast construction was humanity, powerful, like the giants of the Renaissance, but integrated into the surrounding world and therefore steeped in moral feeling. Dante had a presentiment of our modern tendency to exclude the individual person, to over-specialization, which has led to the separation of mind from conscience and of science from morality, and this tendency was deeply alien to him.
It would of course be naive to identify Dante, the hero of the Comedy, with Dante its author. Dante the hero is the antipode of Ulysses for he reminds us that none of those in hell should be pitied; whereas Dante the author cannot help feeling sorry for Ulysses and emotionally involved with him. Dante’s thinking derives from the complex dialogic relationship between these images.
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NOTES
1. All references are to The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair, Oxford, 1961.
2. Pavel Florensky, Mnimosti v geometrii. Rasshirenie oblast’ dvukhmernykh obrazov (opyt novogo istolkovaniya mnimostei) [Illusions in Geometry. The Extension of the Domain of Two-Dimensional Images (An Attempt at a New Interpretation of Illusions)], Moscow, 1922, pp. 43–44. “The turnover of a normal is determined by whether we are staying on the same side (i.e. on a single-sided surface) or whether we go on to the other side, one coordinate of which is actual, and the other illusory (a two-sided surface). … And now with regard to this very one and the same transformation, the one-sided surface and the two-sided surface behave in opposite ways. If it turns over the normal on one surface it will not turn it over on the other, and vice versa” (Florensky’s emphasis).
3. Ibid., pp. 46–8.
4. On the semiotic saturation of the Comedy, see D’Arco Silvio Avalle, Modelli semiologici nella Commedia di Dante, Milan, 1975, especially the section ‘Ulysses’ last journey’; for further literature on the theme ‘Dante and semiotics’ see the bibliography prepared by Simonetta Salvestroni in Ju. M. Lotman and S. Salvestroni, “Il viaggio di Ulisse nella Divina Commedia di Dante,” in Yury M. Lotman, Testo e contesto. Semiotica dell’arte e della cultura, Rome/Bari, 1980. The present chapter is a shortened version of the latter.
5. V. V. Bychkov, Vizantiiskaya estetika. Teoreticheskie problemy [Byzantine Aesthetics. Theoretical Problems], Moscow, 1977, p. 129.
6. “But because fraud is a sin peculiar to man it is more offensive to God, and for that reason the fraudulent have their place lower and more pain assails them” (Inferno, XI, 25–8).
7. [St Augustine] Tvoreniya blazhennogo Avgustina, episkop Ipponiiskogo [The Works of the Blessed Augustine, Bishop of Hippo], 2nd edition, Kiev, 1905, p. 258.
8. P. Vinassa de Regny, Dante e Pitagora [Dante and Pythagorus], Milan, 1955. None the less it is indicative that in Purgatory movement upwards is allowed only during sunlight, during the hours of darkness it is allowed only to go down or to go in a circle around the mountain (Purgatory, VII, 52–9). The association of circular movement with darkness and direct movement and ascent with the light is an indication of the sinfulness of the former and the righteousness of the latter. In Purgatory circular movements are made to the right (Purgatory, XIII, 13–16) while in Hell, with two exceptions they are to the left.
9. The sinfulness of circular movement is felt only in Hell since it is associated with ever-increasing spatial confinement, as against the ever-widening spaciousness of the heavenly spheres and the infinity of the shining Empyrean.
The space of Hell is not only confined but coarsely material. It is to be contrasted with the ideal space which is both infinitely reduced to a single Point (Paradise, XXVIII, 16, 22–5; XXIX, 16–18) and infinitely expanded. This opposition is supplemented by those of light/darkness, fragrance/stench, warmth/extreme heat or cold, which all add up to the semiotic structure of Dante’s universe.
10. A. Hartmann, Untersuchungen über die Sagen vom Tod des Odysseus, Munich, 1917; W. Standford, “Dante’s Conception of Ulysses,” The Cambridge Journal, 4, 1953; idem, The Ulysses Theme. A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1966 (bibliography); see also, M. Grabar-Passek, Antichnye syuzhety i formy v zapadnoevropeiskoi literature [Classical Plots and Forms in West European Literature], Moscow, 1966; D’Arco Silvio Avalle, op. cit., pp. 33–64; E. Forti, Magnanimitade, Bologna, 1977, pp. 162–206.
11. The actual line of Dante’s movement through the circles of Hell is a spiral, i.e. it goes in two directions: around and down, and the line of his movement in the heavenly spheres is a complex one, but the semantics of his movements in the code structure of Dantean space is an ascent. Ulysses’ path is slightly distorted by the surface of the earth and the inclination of his ship to left (“always gaining on the left” Inferno, XXVI, 126). But in the code sense he also travels in a straight line.
Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. Introduction by Umberto Eco. London: I.B. Tauris, 1990.