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[Access article in PDF] "O vendetta di Dio": The Motif of Rape and Retaliation in Dante's Inferno Tobias Foster Gittes Concordia University Having considered the full implications of the somber advice "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate'" (Inf. III, 9) inscribed on hell's portal, the sixteenth-century critic Castelvetro, a staunch literalist, wryly observes that this assertion is proven false by Dante himself, "poiche' vuole che i santi padri v'entrassono e n'uscissono, e Cristo similmente ed Enea, e Teseo, ed Ercole e Traiano e Beatrice e l'angelo, che fa aprir la porta a Dite, e Virgilio esce e rientra, ed esso Dante non ritenuto e Catone."1 In short, the door lies! Indeed, there exists a small army of worthies for whom the yawning portal, despite its ominous inscription, marks the road not to perdition, but salvation; for whom the squalid reaches of hell are not a terminus, but a way station on a journey undertaken to free themselves, or others, from infernal bondage. In the Commedia, it is Christ's descent into hell that establishes the ideal point of reference for all other descents; classical descents like that of Hercules or Aeneas may be viewed as "shadowy prefaces" to the central narrative of Christ's harrowing: Christian descents like that of Beatrice and Dante as a variety of postscript.

This jarring juxtaposition of charity and chains is a forceful reminder that the same Christ who stretches forth one hand to draw Adam and his company to freedom (8[24]. I.) wields a chain with the other. Christ's mission in hell is not simply to reward the virtuous, but to punish the wicked; his act of salvation is simultaneously an act of depredation, his gain, a devastating loss to a ravished, and humiliated hell. While Dante's commentators have tended to overlook this violent, punitive component of Christ's harrowing, Dante, I would argue, does not. The pages that follow represent an attempt to recover and restore this long-neglected facet of Dante's Christ: an avenging Christ who, in words that Jacobus de Voragine attributes to [End Page 2] Augustine, arrives in hell as "an invader, not a debtor, a demolisher and destroyer, no sinner, but a predator" (Golden Legend, chap. 54).4