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August 19, 2009
Dante Blogging - Inferno Canto III
Canto III
The inscription over the Gate of Hell:
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE,
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
I AM THE WAY TO GO AMONG THE LOST.JUSTICE CAUSED MY HIGH ARCHITECT TO MOVE
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.BEFORE ME THERE WERE NO CREATED THINGS
BUT THOSE THAT LAST FOREVER -- AS DO I.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
The hard thing is not to show students that Hell is hopeless, but that Love created it. Virgil gives us a help in the 6th tercet:
We have come to the place I spoke about,
where you would see the souls who dwell in pain,
for they have lost the good of intellect. (16-19)
Esolen's Appendix C will also be a help - a big dose of Aquinas. The people in Hell have gotten what they sought - separation from God, the Trinity described as Omnipotence, Wisdom and Love. If Love is to give someone, finally, what he wants then Love has to create a place like Hell. Hard lines, but it makes an intellectual sense. It won't satisfy them - I know I was one of two people out of about 18 who got it the first time when I took Dante as an undergraduate - but there we go. Maybe one of the course outcomes should be "Students will realize the way they want the world to be has consequences."
I, too, prefer the idea that Hell is not eternal - that it's really just a harder version of Purgatory, but so far as I've heard the only major 20th Century Catholic theologian to think about that possibility seriously was Hans Urs von Balthasar (Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"?), but I'm not really interested in reading theology much. I'll wager with Aquinas and try to scrape in to Heaven.*
By the way, the line immediately before "We have come to the place I spoke about" reminds us of Canto II. Virgil tells Dante, "here you must put all cowardice to death" (15). Dante is going to have trouble doing that. Like us his feelings are going to get in the way of understanding again and again.
Indeed, the first time he hears the wails of damned souls he weeps - and these are the souls who, like Dante in Canto II, unwilled what they willed, changed every plan with every thought. Angels who were neither rebels nor faithful, people who never lived well or badly. Dante, and Justice, respect more those who sin boldly. This is also the first example of a punishment to fit the crime: these souls are damned to follow a banner moving fast - to finally follow, not hang back and consider what they might or might not do.
In this Canto, too, we get the first example of Dante putting people in Hell because he doesn't like their politics. Most of those are tedious factional problems of Florence, but one soul Dante recognizes "che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto," "the craven one, who made the great denial" (61). He almost certainly means Pope Celestine V, who abdicated the papacy in 1294 and left the way open for Dante's least favorite pope, Boniface VIII. Dante's hatred of Celestine is based on hearsay, and much of his hatred of Boniface is based on narrow Florentine patriotism (though Benedetto Caetani was hardly a pleasant man). Remember, Dante is not dogma!
*That is, I will be leaving money for Masses for my miserable soul in Purgatory.
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Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 19, 2009 8:18 AM