The meaning of the punishment of the suicides is evident: In Hell, those who on Earth deprived themselves of their bodies are deprived of human form. At the Last Judgment the suicides will rise, like all the other souls, to claim their bodies, but they will never wear them. Their bodies will remain suspended on the trees that enclose the spirits of their owners.
One of the greatest changes brought on by the advent of Christianity is the change that took place in judging the suicide. In classical times, when a person could no longer live in freedom, or heroically, it was considered a stoic virtue to die by one’s own hand. The last great act that a person could perform was to take his or her own life, which was the last free choice that person could make.
With the coming of Christianity, however, Jesus preached the concept that a man is free inwardly, and no amount of imprisonment or disgrace could destroy one’s spiritual self. Thus, where the suicide was a virtue in the ancient days, for the Christian, it became one of the cardinal sins; murdering the body that God gave unto one.
Dante is naturally very confused when he arrives at the wood of suicides and hears human sounds but sees no human forms. Consequently, Virgil has to do something that seems extremely cruel. He has Dante pick off a branch from one of the trees, which causes the tree to bleed. Dante has previously shown that he is a person of infinite pity; therefore, the words of the tree evoke an unexpected response—surprise and sympathy.
The entire scene becomes a fantasy as Dante breaks the branch, the tree bleeds, and a voice comes from the tree. It seems almost as though Dante is unconscious of the actual words spoken by the tree. Instead, the startling fact that a tree speaks is the factor that evokes his feeling of awe and disbelief.
The story of Pier delle Vigne is related so that Dante, on his return to Earth, can justify the man’s loyalty—though not his suicide. The greatness of the episode comes when Pier delle Vigne says that in order to make himself a just individual, he has made himself forever unjust, by one stroke of the knife. Here is a gentleman, a man of honesty, elegance, and breeding; a cultured and intellectual man; and a poet, who has condemned himself forever to damnation and cut off all hope of repentance, by a single act.
This is one of the great poetic concepts in the Inferno. The spirit is not seen as a mean or evil or vicious man. Instead, he is a man who, in a moment of weakness, has taken his own life. Most of the other characters in Hell have something despicable about them, but Pier delle Vigne rouses a sense of sympathy. He is a man of obvious greatness that, in a moment of weakness of will, took the irretrievable action, and after a life of noble service and devotions, he is condemned forever.
The naked men pursued and torn to pieces by hounds are Spendthrifts, reckless squanderers, who did not actually take their own lives, but destroyed themselves by destroying the means of life. The difference between these sinners and the Spendthrifts of the fourth circle is that the earlier cases arise from weakness, and the later cases from a deliberate act of the will.
The Harpies were winged creatures with the faces of women and were symbolic of the whirlwind or the violent storm. They stole anything; hence, in the woods, they symbolize the violence of the suicide and the stealing away of his soul.
