A Letter from Fr. Dominik

Inferno Canto V: Francesca and the Meaning of Love

One of the most important cantos of Inferno is Canto V. In this canto, Dante encounters the souls eternally condemned for the sin of lust. Here the souls are punished by being constantly swept in a storm and pushed by the winds in different directions. The symbolism reveals that if you surrender your will to your passions, you are like a man trapped in a storm. You do not move where you want to go, but, instead, you are moved by the winds which you cannot control. Here Dante meets two sinners named Francesca and Paolo and he asks Francesca to tell her story. Francesca tells Dante that she began to have an affair with Paolo, her husband’s brother, after they had spent the night alone reading the story of Lancelot’s own affair with Guinevere. Once her husband discovered the affair, he murdered them both. She justifies her affair because it was love that made her do it. Francesca exclaims:

“Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart, took hold of him because of the fair body taken from me-how that was done: still wounds me. Love, that releases no beloved from loving took hold of me so strongly through his beauty that, as you see, it has not left me yet. Love led the two of us unto one death. Caïna waits for him who took our life.” (Inferno, Canto V).

Like Dante, we can’t help but feel pity for Francesca. Maybe this was an arranged marriage which she never wanted. Perhaps it was such an unhappy situation that her relationship with Paolo and their mutual love for poetry was the only thing that made her feel alive. Yet, for this reason she is punished for all eternity. How can this be justified? It is because her definition and maybe even our own definition of love needs to be challenged. The Yale Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta writes, “Francesca falls completely, squarely, within this tradition of believing that she lives in a world of love where there is no possible resistance to love… She is abdicating the power of her will to the irresistible, omnipotent, presence of this love. It’s part of a strategy of not acknowledging any responsibility for her actions” (Reading Dante, 43).

What is the relationship between desire, free will, and love? For Francesca, there is no involvement of the will. You simply love who you love and you allow that desire to move you as it does. Yet, that idea should not sit right with us. Can love only be reduced to desire? And if it is, then what role does free will have in love? If a husband begins to develop desires for a woman not his wife, can that simply justify the betrayal of his own wedding vows? We should recognize that boundaries are needed in the dynamics of love. In fact, for marital love to be true, it requires the spouse to restrain his or her own desires in order to respect the boundaries their vows have made. Free will and reason needs to control desire and not the other way around. This is not meant to be seen as a form of repression, rather the boundaries are what allow husband and wife to love one another with total freedom which true love demands. Francesca wants to believe that no boundaries exist. This delusion of Francesca, though sympathetic, reveals the twisted nature of lust. She thought the full unleashing of her desire for Paolo would bring liberation, but instead, it brought slavery. A slavery that condemns her soul to be pushed by the winds of lustful desires for all eternity.

The encounter with Francesca serves as a meta-narrative of the whole Divine Comedy. What inspired Francesca’s affair? What formed her understanding of love? It was poetry. Notice now, how this encounter not only poses the question about love, but it also poses the question about art itself and its relationship with love. Like Francesca’s love affair, it is tempting to reduce poetry to become simply an expression of desires without any relationship to beauty, goodness or truth. The history of literature and art is often known to test, push and even eliminate boundaries, but Dante wants to correct this. Bad poetry, like lust, when divorced from freedom, truth, and morality, can lead the soul to a misconception of love. Poetry led Francesca to sin and eventually damnation. Dante, through his poetry, wants to do the opposite. He desires to lead his readers to salvation. The Divine Comedy, this epic poem, is meant to bring us to faith. To read the Divine Comedy is not an exercise of checking it off your To Do list. It is meant to save your soul.