The Inferno is a pawnshop in which all the countries and cities known to Dante were left unredeemed. Hell hangs suspended on the wire of urban egoism. Hell contains nothing inside itself and has no dimensions; like an epidemic, an infectious disease or the plague, it spreads like a contagion, even though it is not spatial. Love of the city, passion for the city, hatred for the city - these serve as the materials of the Inferno.
Repentance is forbidden in Hell.
Satan is the engineer of ruin.
Limbo ... is the realm of vagueness.
What is the action of the Inferno? To go through this entire world, all the way through into Hell at the world's core, and on thoruogh all of Hell to come out on the other side of the world. This physical action as well: to penetrate the world's ways and behold the realm of pain; to go through all the inferno spectacle of sin and suffering, and to emerge from that spectacle newly situated, on a terrain opposite from the beginning.
The moral action, in other words, is to go into the world of evil and through its core, to experience the nature of sin in order to come out of it, in some spiritual sense newly situated. To penetrate the dark in order to emerge in brightness on the other side.
What is the action of the Inferno? To go through this entire world, all the way through into Hell at the world's core, and on thoruogh all of Hell to come out on the other side of the world. This physical action as well: to penetrate the world's ways and behold the realm of pain; to go through all the inferno spectacle of sin and suffering, and to emerge from that spectacle newly situated, on a terrain opposite from the beginning.
The moral action, in other words, is to go into the world of evil and through its core, to experience the nature of sin in order to come out of it, in some spiritual sense newly situated. To penetrate the dark in order to emerge in brightness on the other side.
The Inferno portrays the locked, unalterable ego, form after form of it, the self and its despair forever inseparable. The terrors and pain, the absence of any hope, are the ground of the drama of Inferno.
Hell is the grimly familiar landscape of most human desire and action, and it sounds, too, are familiar. This is our language. This is what we have made of the Word that was in the beginning, and was with God, and was God.
Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff, The Poet's Dante
The descent into hell ... is the first step on the journey to the truth. It has the effect of shattering the inverted values of this life ... and transforming death into authentic life.
As hell is the realm of those who have lost the good, who in their lives inverted the order of reason and desire, subjecting the former to the latter, so is hell's structure patterned on that of human appetite, albeit in horrible inversion. Malice, bestiality, and incontenence, the disposition in incarnate in fraud, violence, and lust, corresponding to disorders in the rational, irascible, and concupiscent appetites.
The will and the will alone, is the locus of sin and hell therefore is patterned on its threefold division: the rational, the irascible, and the concupiscent.
John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
The descent into hell ... is the first step on the journey to the truth. It has the effect of shattering the inverted values of this life ... and transforming death into authentic life.
As hell is the realm of those who have lost the good, who in their lives inverted the order of reason and desire, subjecting the former to the latter, so is hell's structure patterned on that of human appetite, albeit in horrible inversion. Malice, bestiality, and incontenence, the disposition in incarnate in fraud, violence, and lust, corresponding to disorders in the rational, irascible, and concupiscent appetites.
The will and the will alone, is the locus of sin and hell therefore is patterned on its threefold division: the rational, the irascible, and the concupiscent.
John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
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