Incontinence, Malice, Bestiality

Explaining the moral structure of hell in Canto 11 of Dante’s Comedy, Virgil lays out three general categories of sin: incontinence, malice, and mad bestiality (lines 83-4). That’s not quite what we expect, or what most commentators see. It seems more like incontinence, violence, and fraud. Incontinent sins arise from immoderate or weak love of good things; malice aims at injustice. Where does “bestiality” come in?

Virgil seems to be talking about the lower circles of hell, the circles of fraud. That he calls these sins “bestial” is ironic because these sins are ones the worst because only human beings can commit them. They represent “mad bestiality” because they make men worse than beasts. The corruption of the best is the worst.

Rodney Payton (A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Inferno, 84) reaches this conclusion by noting that each category of sin is set against an opposite. The opposite of incontinence is self-control; virtue is the opposite of malice. And the opposite of bestiality is godlikeness: “Bestiality, then, is the opposite of godliness, a conception amenable to Dante’s view of the universe as a chain of existence stretching from the Most High to the most ignoble thing in existence. And where to find the ignoble but in Hell? Humans, because they are the only mortal beings with reason, are the only beings capable of misusing it. No matter how bestial a beast might be it cannot suffer guilt because of its nature. Aristotle comments ‘the badness of a beast is different in kind from our vice.’ It follows that if the depths of ignobility are to be reached, they must be reached by something possessing reason and that being must be found in Hell.”