Chapter 2 · The Gate and the Antehellone of the damnedPlayable

The One of the Great Refusal

The shade Dante recognises and does not name, sitting outside the circuit of the banner.

The body the game gives to the damned, turning on itself: sixteen views rendered from the game itself. — Not a portrait of this one. The game gives almost every damned soul the same body, and this is it: what tells them apart is where they stand and what they do.

L’ombra di colui «che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto» (III, 60). Dante lo riconosce e non lo nomina, e da settecento anni si discute chi sia: quasi tutti dicono Celestino V, il papa che abdicò. Qui il nome non c’è perché è lui a negarlo, ed è la sua pena: sta col «cattivo coro de li angeli» che non furono né ribelli né fedeli a Dio, «ma per sé fuoro» (III, 37-39). Il cielo li caccia per non essere meno bello, e l’inferno non li prende per non averne vanto. È l’unica anima del gioco che, se glielo prometti, ti dice di no.

What the game says

vidi e conobbi l’ombra di coluiche fece per viltade il gran rifiuto

Inf. III 59-60

Revealswhat he answers if you promise to carry his name out.

«vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui / che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto» (Inf. III 59-60): Dante recognises him and does not name him, and for seven hundred years people have argued over who he is. In the game he sits just below the circuit of the banner, where the ring of runners can be seen going past. He sits rather than stands on purpose: the neutrals all run after the banner, and he is the only one who does not, because a man who would not even choose to follow is the bottom of the bottom of this canto.

The book of names is the currency of the game, and he is its exact reverse. The man who refused to choose in life refuses here the one thing he would have left: offering to carry his name out is the most valuable thing the player has to offer, and he is told no. It is the one time in the whole game that a promise kept fills no line, and the page keeps a place that will never be filled.

He stands in one of the two empty stretches that measuring the forced route had found in this chapter, and an empty stretch gets filled with what that place means, not with whatever is left over. The note the game prints adds the old reading, Celestine V, the pope who abdicated, and the reason the name is missing: it is missing because he is the one refusing it.

The One of the Great Refusal

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