"" is the opening line of Canto VII of Dante Alighieri's . The line, consisting of three words, is famous for the uncertainty of its meaning, and there have been many attempts to interpret it. Modern commentators on the view it as some kind of demonic invocation to Satan.Dorothy L. Sayers, Hell: notes on Canto VII, Penguin, 1949, .Mark Musa, Inferno: notes on Canto VII, Penguin, 2002, .

Text The line is a shout by Plutus. Plutus was originally the Roman god of wealth, but in the , Dante has made Plutus into a repulsive demon who guards the fourth circle, where souls who have abused their wealth through greed or improvidence are punished. The full strophe, plus the following four, which describe Dante's and Virgil's entire meeting and confrontation with Plutus reads:

The scant information that can be gleaned from the text is this:

Virgil understands the meaning ("And that benignant Sage, who all things knew..."), and is replying. That the line is just the beginning of something else ("Thus Plutus with his clucking voice began..."). It is an expression of anger ("And said: "Be silent, thou accursed wolf / Consume within thyself with thine own rage."). That it has the effect of a threat to Dante ("And that benignant Sage, who all things knew, / Said, to encourage me: "Let not thy fear / Harm thee; for any power that he may have / Shall not prevent thy going down this crag.").

Possible explanations

The only word with fairly obvious meaning is "", namely Satan; which comes from the Hebrew word (), which translated literally means "the adversary".

The earliest interpretations

Some interpretations from the earliest commentators on the Divine Comedy include: The word "pape" might be a rendering of Latin , or from Greek (). Both words are interjections of anger or surprise, attested in ancient authors (comparable to the English "damn!", or just "oh!").Vittorio Sermonti, Inferno, Rizzoli 2001, p. 134.Berthe M. Marti, "A Crux in Dante's Inferno," Speculum, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan 1952), pp. 67–70. The word "" could be an Italian version of the word for "", the Hebrew letter () (compare Phoenician and Greek ). The consonant shift here is comparable to that in , the Italian version of the name Joseph. In Hebrew, also means "number one" or "the origin that contains everything". It may also be interpreted as a metaphor for the "head", "the first and foremost". This was an attribute for God in late medieval expressions, meaning "the majesty" (of God). "Alef" was also a medieval interjection (like "Oh God!").

With these interpretations, the verse would mean "Oh, Satan, o Satan, god, king!".

The prayer theory

The word "pape" might come from Latin , an old Roman term for "emperor", or "father". The double mention of "pape" together with "Satan" (here interpreted as the fallen angel Satan) and the break (the comma) in the hendecasyllable, gives it a tone of a prayer or an invocation to Satan, although there is no apparent verb. It might be also an invocation of the evil within the intruders.

Domenico Guerri's theory

Domenico Guerri researched medieval glossaries thoroughly in 1908, and interpreted it as "Oh Satan, oh Satan, God", which he wrote was meant as an invocation against travellers.Domenico Guerri, Di alcuni versi dotti nella "Divina Commedia", Città di Castello, 1908

Abboud Rashid's theory

Abboud Abu Rashid, the first translator of the Divine Comedy into Arabic (1930–1933), interpreted this verse as a phonetic translation of the spoken Arabic, "", meaning "The door of Satan, the door of Satan, proceed downward!". According to some scholars, although Dante did not speak Arabic, he could have drawn some inspiration from Islamic sources.Philip K. Hitti, "Recent Publications in Arabic or Dealing with the Arabic World," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Dec 1934), pp. 435–438. Doubts arise, however, because the meaning of this interpretation does not really match the reaction of Dante and Virgil (anger and fear), nor Virgil's answer, and Dante directly indicts Muhammad (or Mahomet) as a spreader of religious schism.

The Hebrew theory Some commentatorsErnesto Manara , in Il Propugnatore, 1888. claim that the sentence is phonetic Hebrew, "". This would be the opposite of the sentence that Jesus spoke in the Gospel according to St Matthew 16:18, "...and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it". The meaning of this utterance would be that Hell (Satan) has conquered.

The French theories

Two suggestions have been proposed interpreting the words of Plutus as French.

The first reads: "" ("Peace, peace, Satan, peace, peace, Satan, come on, peace!"). The latter phrase can be interpreted as "Satan, make peace!". Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography, reports hearing the phrase in Paris, transliterating it as "" and interpreting it as "Be quiet! Be quiet Satan, get out of here and be quiet."Benvenuto Cellini (tr. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter E. Bondanella), My Life, Oxford University Press, 2002, , p. 262 and note on p. 438.

The second interpretation, elaborating on the first, is: "" ("No peace, Satan! No peace, Satan! To the sword!").L'incompreso verso di Dante, by Giovanni Ventura, 1868. According to Giovanni Ventura, Dante's intention was to hide Philip IV of France behind Plutus, god of greed, and that was the reason why Plutus was made to speak French instead of Greek. Dante considered Philip the Handsome as the enemy of Christianity, and of Papacy, due to his rapacity. The words of Plutus are also a blaspheme quotation of Jesus' words in the Gospel Matthew 10:34 ("Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send [or bring] peace, but a sword."). KJV This interpretation implies a transposition of the tonic accent, for metrical purposes, from the 11th to the 10th syllable, from "" to "", similarly to what happens at line 28, where the tonic accent shifts from "pur lì" to "pùr li".

The Flemish theory Another solution published by Giancarlo Lombardi in April 2021 asserts that the words are the phonetic transcription of a sentence in the medieval Flemish dialect of Bruges (), written as "" or "" and pronounced as "" or "" (This pronunciation, characteristic of Bruges and its region of West Flanders, is attested since 1150–1200 until the present day.) Dante would clearly indicate that he heard these words "with clucking voice" because of the guttural pronunciation of "" (especially the "L" — in Flemish/Dutch as in English, "" is indeed the ""), typical of that dialect. By the phenomena known as anaptyxis and perhaps paragogy, typical of the Tuscan dialect of his day (as in "salamelecco" from As-salamu alaykum, also in modern Italian usage, and in "amecche" from Hebrew "amech" or "amcha" in Inf., XXXI, 67), Dante arrives at the transcription found in the poem. Dante might have used specifically the Flemish dialect of Bruges because of the intense commercial relationships that existed between Florence and Bruges since the 13th century (Plutus being the god of wealth). The poem includes two references to Bruges in Inf, XV and in Purg, XX and further references to the Tuscan families involved in business there. The meaning in Flemish would be "Father Satan, father Satan, help!", where "Pape" refers to the priest at the head of a parish. (The word for "Pope" would be , but it is very unlikely that Dante would have known Flemish.) The verse would then allude to the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 16 and Matthew 21–23), and its intended meaning would be to condemn the exercising of temporal power by the Western Church.

Sources

External links

Pictures from Divine Comedy by Gustave Doré