An Evil Steadfastly Pursued
Count Ugolino’s Motive for Cannibalism in Dante’s Inferno
by Philip Peckson
When Dante plunges into the dark, he grasps the very bottom. When he reaches up, he goes beyond the stars. Other poets are equally broad in their oeuvres, but only Dante achieves this breadth in a single episode of 94 lines—the penultimate canto of Inferno, XXXIII, in which Dante and Virgil come upon Count Ugolino della Gherardesca eating Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini.
When the loathsome cannibal speaks to Dante, we expect that this grisly scene will rise no higher than the pathos other damned souls have so skillfully evoked. But the scene displays not just the worst of humanity but also our apotheosis in Christ, and it does this not allegorically but dramatically. The hateful Ugolino, whose teeth tear eternally at the flesh of his enemy, could have been an alter Christus and, in fact, came close to it. The canto contains all we can become. No poet is as catholic as Dante.
The Question of Cannibalism
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Philip Peckson is an assistant professor at the University of Asia and the Pacific in Manila, the Philippines, where he has taught the Divine Comedy in English translation for more than ten years.
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