Hell is Frigid and Heaven on Fire: Shared Imagery in Dante and T.S Eliot, Pt. 2
Both Dante and Eliot use fiery imagery to as a symbol of passion, but the context and effect of fire differs between poems — sometimes it’s destructive, sometimes purgative, sometimes exhilarating. Passion causes fire and flames. Heat results from high energy. The source of this passion is God and Paradise is aflame with Divine Love.
Hellfire or Heaven-fire?
Despite the typical association of fire with Hell, fiery imagery appears most frequently in Paradise, where Dante uses flames to evoke feelings of passion for God (Paradise 30.70–71). Divine love is uncontrollable and outside the range of human experience. Dante says, “My mind . . . / bursts itself and its limits like that flame” (Paradise 23.43–44). Christian love is not puritanical piety, but a vivacious and overwhelming passion. Not lust, but love fueled by God’s energy. This love pushes Dante towards deeper understanding. “And in that light then must our vision grow, / grow then the ardent love it sets aflame” (Paradise 14.49–50).
Like Dante, Eliot knows that the reality of Eternal Love is beyond our ordinary understanding. “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the / living” (Little Gidding 1.50–52). He concludes his poem, “All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one” (Little Gidding 5.255–258). In the end, we shall join in the fire — not to be destroyed, but to exist in perfect beauty and goodness.
Learning to Withstand the Heat
For a soul that has reached Heaven, the fire is illuminating. For the souls in Purgatory, the fire is present, but painful and purgative. Souls still caked by sinful habits can’t bear the full heat of God’s love — just as eyes take time to adjust to sunlight after a long time in darkness. Dante passes through flames in Purgatory (Purgatory 27.49–50). Pain reminds the will of its inability to control everything — and humility is healing. As fire refines gold, Purgatory purifies the soul to meet God.
In The Four Quartets, Eliot places his readers between two flames — one of annihilation and one of purification. “The only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre — / To be redeemed from fire by fire” (Little Gidding 4.204–206). If we’re to avoid being burned by our petty passions, then we must surrender to the flames of God, which will be painful. “If to be warmed, then I must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires” (East Coker 4.149–165).
The Cold Arms of Hell
The deepest point of Inferno is furthest from God — and it’s a sheet of ice. Some of Inferno’s circles feature a fiery punishment — those who committed violent crimes experience the burning pain of fire’s uncontrollable destruction on themselves (Inferno 14.29) — but the fire is human, not divine. Imprudent human passion is destructive instead of refining.
Eliot’s The Waste Land features bored lovers, droughts, and burned-out mothers. He describes an adulterous tryst that is anything but exciting, “Hardly aware of her departed lover; / Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: / Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over” (The Waste Land 3.249–253). Intimacy barely raises any emotion — sin isn’t motivated by passion, but by apathy.
Eliot does invoke the Buddhist Fire Sermon — “Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out” (The Waste Land 3.308–309). In Buddhist teaching, fire purifies by destruction. If the self is to be purified, it must be destroyed to achieve Nirvana. Instead of improving the self, destroy the self. Freedom is found in negation. In a world where there is no purpose to improvement or satisfaction to passion, fire is merely destructive.
Passionate Love
It is not an excess of passion that fuels Dante’s mid-life crisis and the existentialism Eliot critiques, but a lack of passion. As C.S Lewis commented, our desires aren’t too strong, they’re too weak.
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”
Passion totally separate from divine love creates a petty backfire that flares up and out — leaving only a grey wasteland. Hell has the frigid atmosphere of a loveless home or a sterilizing room. Heaven is full of the energy and passion of Divine Love — a flame that lights the world on fire.
