Quote 37
[Bertran de Born]: "Because I severed those so joined, I carry –
alas – my brain dissevered from its source,
which is within my trunk. And thus, in me
one sees the law of counter-penalty." (Inf. XXVIII, 139-142)
Dante’s only explicit mention of contrapasso, or "the law of counter-penalty," occurs late in the poem. Perhaps because this canto best illustrates the concept of contrapasso, Dante mentions it here. Indeed, Bertran de Born’s grotesque punishment – having his head separated from his body for pitting a king and his son, the prince, against each other – neatly depicts the way in which contrapasso functions.
Quote 38
I do not think that there was greater grief
in seeing all Aegina’s people sick
(then, when the air was so infected that
all animals, down to the little worm,
collapsed; and afterward, as poets hold
to be the certain truth, those ancient peoples
received their health again through seed of ants)
than I felt when I saw, in that dark valley,
the spirits languishing in scattered heaps.
Some lay upon their bellies, some upon
the shoulders of another spirit, some
crawled on all fours along that squalid road.
We journeyed step by step without a word,
watching the listening to those sick souls,
who had not strength enough to lift themselves. (Inf. XXIX, 58-72)
Since all the falsifiers suffer a number of diseases which distort their bodies, Dante implies that blatant lying is as serious a condition as an actual malady. If a healthy soul always speaks the truth, these sinners must indeed lie through their teeth since they are so sick they "[have] not the strength enough to lift themselves." Here more than anywhere else, Dante attacks the infectious, social aspect of fraud. Each of the different types of falsifiers corrupts a particular bond that unites individual human beings. Alchemists compromise the material stability of the world, falsifiers of persons degrade men’s relationships with each other, counterfeiters compromise the integrity of currency, and liars debase language. All these falsifiers corrupt the natural fabric of reality, and thus have their naturalness compromised by the scourge of disease.
Quote 39
If he [Lucifer] was once as handsome as he now
is ugly and, despite that, raised his brows
against his Maker, one can understand
how every sorrow has its source in him!
I marveled when I saw that, on his head,
he had three faces: one – in front – bloodred;
and then another two that, just above
the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first…
Beneath each face of his, two wings spread out,
as broad as suited so immense a bird:
I’ve never seen a ship with sails so wide.
They had no feathers, but were fashioned like
a bat’s; and he was agitating them,
so that three winds made their way out from him –
and all Cocytus froze before those winds.
He wept out of six eyes; and down three chins,
tears gushed together with a bloody froth.
Within each mouth – he used it like a grinder –
with gnashing teeth he tore to bits a sinner,
so that he brought much pain to three at once. (Inf. XXXIV, 34-57)
Lucifer, once God’s favorite and the most beautiful angel of them all, "now is ugly" because of the benighted sin he committed against God, betraying the one who created him out of pride. Lucifer is the ultimate traitor and, as such, is trapped in the earth as surely as the lesser traitors; there he creates the freezing winds that trap the Ninth Circle sinners in ice. Lucifer’s immobility is more profound than the others’ because he creates it himself: his "agitating" wings beat to help him escape from his prison, but all in vain. His image too – of three grotesque heads – is a parody of the Holy Trinity. The three vilest traitors suffer their punishment by eternally being chewed by Lucifer’s three heads. This act of eating is sinisterly twisted; it’s not used to gain nourishment and sustain oneself, but instead to deliberately cause pain. Finally, the description of Lucifer’s biting teeth as "a grinder" reinforces – along with the rhythmic beating of his wings – the concept of Lucifer as a massive machine: mechanical, soulless, and essentially anticlimactic.