Inferno, Canto III-IV
Backing up a bit from our Valentine special on the circle of the lustful, we have a few noteworthy episodes to consider. Many can remember the famous line “Lay down all hope, you that go in by me” over the entrance gate of hell in Canto III. Yet while we may be drawn to the image of misery which this line evokes, it is only part of a larger text:
Justice moved my great maker; God eternal
Wrought me: the Power, and the unsearchable
High Wisdom, and the Primal Love Supernal.
We might at least understand that Dante imagines “justice” to be wrought in Hell. But how are we to understand the idea that “Primal Love Supernal” had an equal part in making the gates of Hell? Hell becomes simply the soul’s experience of the Love which it rejects. Even Hell is held together, and owes its existence, to the Love Supernal. Hell is simply a rejection of that love. Hell depends on that Love for its very existence.
Some sins to consider: Virgil points Dante to the souls of those “whose lives knew neither praise nor infamy”.(III.36). These are like the lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, who will be spit out of His mouth. Mingled with this “dismal company” are those
Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him
Were faithful, but to self alone were true.
This is an interesting image to consider. In our culture we tend to value a certain kind of disposition we have come to call “integrity”. So long as you are true to what you believe, you are accounted as having “integrity”. However, to be true to self alone is to place oneself at the center. Even the soul which tries to ignore God, neither rebelling nor faithful, cannot postpone the choice forever. To refuse to follow does not mean one will not have an object of worship. It will turn out to be the self. And there will come a point when the soul will realize that it has in fact made a choice.
In Canto IV we meet the virtuous pagans and the souls of the unbaptized. A word about the latter: pretty high view of sacramental grace here. Say no more, unless you are a Calvinist. But back to the virtuous pagans. They are placed in Limbo – a place neither of bliss nor torment. “Perhaps in limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the beatific vision” (Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited). So who do we have here in Limbo? We have the great poets and philosophers who predate Christ – those who did not have the opportunity to rebel or follow Him. Contemporary ears grate against hearing of such souls in Limbo. But let’s consider what Dante is saying, and indeed, what the great pagans themselves have said.
Aristotle, writing of the blessed and divine life, has this to say:
But such a life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of excellence. If intellect is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything. This would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of himself but that of something else. And what we said before will apply now; that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to intellect is best and pleasantest, since intellect more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics X.7
What it boils down to is this: the soul still gets what it asks for. Dante calls Aristotle the “king of men who know”, and yet Aristotle is here in Limbo. Why? Because he failed in his imagination of the goodness of the divine toward humanity. It is the failure of human reason that it cannot imagine such an afterlife and communion with God which the Christian religion speaks of. “But such a life would be too high for man”. And so the virtuous pagans receive the kind of afterlife which they imagined: the spirits of the virtuous pagans have the afterlife which they thought appropriate to humanity. God gives the soul what it truly asks for.
Limbo shows us just how high pure reason, on its own, can be elevated...
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