Why Does Dante Consider Sodomy Worse Than Homicide & Suicide?

Dante’s Divine Comedy, the most sublime religious poem the Christian West has produced in two thousand years, provides us to this day with profound insights into human nature. In the Inferno Dante provides us with a vivid, unforgettable image of what Christians have always believed about sodomites. He places them in the seventh circle of Hell, the fiery circle of the violent, far below the lustful heterosexuals of the second circle. Why this big separation? The answer is extremely important and revealing. Dante wants us to understand that homosexuals do not suffer in life from a deficiency of the will, as lustful heterosexuals do in failing to control their natural urges. Rather, they engage in a willful defiance of Nature. Indeed, Dante presents them as violent against Nature.

It is Dante’s geography that contains the central meaning of his great poem. So first, let us see the sinners who are found above the sodomites in his Inferno — that is to say, those punished for lesser offenses. The realm of the damned begins in the second circle of Hell (the first circle is Limbo — a place of rest where virtuous pagans remain unpunished, but are deprived of the vision of God). In the second circle, Dante discovers pairs of lustful heterosexuals who are tossed around like birds caught in a storm. From this circle down to the fifth one, he meets intemperate sinners, one after the other. They all yielded to their natural passions instead of exercising restraint, and so they are all punished by natural things: air, water, mud. The life they chose was below the dignity and calling of a human being, but they are in the circles of incontinence, not violence, because what they did was not malicious. Their penalty represents what they chose: They subjected their higher nature to their lower urges. And they died without repenting. So the whirlwind of passion into which lustful heterosexuals threw themselves in life now whips and drives them forever through the air in Hell; the swill into which the gluttons and drunkards sank envelops them without end; a pointless rage still drives the misers and spendthrifts to butt against each other, while the wrathful and sullen bear their grudges eternally in a muddy swamp. Dante, however, sees no devils and no hellfire afflicting these weak sinners, only natural torments.

After the circles of the incontinent, Dante comes to a wall surrounding the deeper circles of Hell, and this wall is guarded by devils. The sodomites are well below this wall. The point of Dante’s geography is that those who fall below the fifth circle did not just yield to natural passion, but were willfully rebellious against God’s order, like the fallen angels who are watching on the walls. After Dante passes the gate of Dis, the first whom he meets among the damned are those who insisted that there was nothing beyond the grave. Ironically, they asserted that everything ends with death, yet here they are in the sixth circle, each consciously fixed in his fiery grave. This sixth circle provides a transition to the lower circles. For to go further down into serious sin, it is necessary to delude oneself into believing that no eternal punishment awaits the unrepentant sinner after death.

Dante finds the sodomites at the bottom of the seventh circle, a circle that contains three rings. Again, his geography is very revealing. In the top ring of the seventh circle are those who killed for gain, whether in empire-building or in robbing travelers on the highway. Appropriately enough, mass murderers such as Alexander are up to their eyebrows in boiling blood, while common robbers are only ankle deep. Below them in the second ring are those who committed suicide because they lost money, reputation, or status. They are below the homicides, because they willfully violated the law of self-preservation, an even more basic law of Nature than love of neighbor. Since they set a lower value on their life than on worldly additions to it, they are now deprived of their human form and reduced to thorny trees oppressed by nightmarish Harpies.

But Dante places sodomy in the bottom-most ring of the seventh circle, below homicide and suicide, suggesting that this sin is an even worse form of violence. The implication here is that sodomy involves an even more thoroughgoing hostility to Nature than defying the laws of self-preservation or love of neighbor; that it is a culmination of violence in being destructive to neighbor, violating self-love, and at the same time undermining family and community. Note that the suicides in the first ring damned themselves alone, while the sodomites damned themselves with others. Therefore, sodomites must run in a band forever on the burning plain. The burning sands on which they run represent their sterility. With this detail Dante shows that the intimacies of sodomy lead to a lack of posterity and put an end to one’s family line. The sodomites, as represented by Dante’s friend Brunetto Latini, chose continuity through fame, not through children. Brunetto points out that the men in his company were all famous scholars and literary celebrities who raised themselves in the eyes of the world by their talents while they dragged one another down into Hell. Thus, they sum up the previous rings: They were violent both to others and themselves in that they destroyed their own souls and that of one another, and they were violent to family life by their choice of sterility.