And over our heads the hollow seas closed up

This is from an essay by Gilbert Meilaender called "Bioethics and the Character of Human Life."

Mr. Meilaender holds the Richard and Phyllis Duesenberg Chair in Theological Ethics at Valparaiso University and is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. This essay was originally prepared as a discussion paper for the President’s Council on Bioethics.

In Canto XXVI of [Dante's] Inferno, with Vergil still his guide, Dante encounters the “false counselors,” those who had used their gift of great intellect in ways that ultimately led others astray. Here it is that Dante meets Ulysses (Odysseus) and hears his story. In a passage that Dorothy Sayers called “perhaps the most beautiful thing in the whole Inferno,” a passage that is evidently Dante’s own invention and is certainly found neither in Homer nor in Vergil, Dante describes the last voyage of Ulysses.


Ulysses has made it safely home from years of wandering after the Trojan Wars. He has returned to his home—and to Ithaca, which he is to rule. But, in this invention of Dante’s, he does not remain there.

No tenderness for my son, nor piety
To my old father, nor the wedded love
That should have comforted Penelope

Could conquer in me the restless itch to rove
And rummage through the world exploring it,
All human worth and wickedness to prove.

And so, Ulysses gathers together a crew to set sail once more. They reach the very boundary of the inhabited world as they know it, and Ulysses urges his shipmates on that they may have the new experience

Of the uninhabited world behind the sun.
Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.

They forge ahead, only to sail into a storm which whirls the ship around three times, then lifts the poop high and plunges the prow down into the water.

And over our heads the hollow seas closed up.

When we remember that Ulysses is in hell, that as a false counselor he has used his great intellect to lead others astray, the point of the passage might seem clear. As a warning to Dante’s readers it depicts, in the words of John Sinclair, “an eternal and insatiable human hunger and quest after knowledge of the world.” The restless desire to know without limit, the will to sail uncharted waters, disastrously overcomes even the deepest loyalties of our finite life: to home, to father, to wife, to son. The passage is, I said, a warning; yet, Sinclair immediately adds: “and as we read it we forget the sin in contemplation of the sinner’s greatness.”

It is evidently one of the puzzles Dante scholars face: that Ulysses’ proud and dignified description of his last voyage, a tale told quite literally by one who is damned, should have been made so enticing and compelling an account of the human need “to follow after knowledge and excellence.” But that, perhaps, is the truth we have to ponder. Our finitude and freedom are not easily reconciled. The goods of life compete with each other, and if we do evil it may be done with great dignity and appeal—done even in the service of some good. The wisdom bioethics seeks is the wisdom to discern right order among such competing goods.