Dante's Inferno: A Reflection on Lessons Learned

Dante’s Crux of the matter

A few summer’s ago, I joined a book study of Dante’s Inferno by a friend’s daughter who was in a doctoral theology program.  The Inferno is part of Dante’s trilogy of the afterlife (heaven, hell, and purgatory), Dante gives us a view of hell from the perspective of rings of relative evil.  In this story is much food for thought and the two aspects of hell he presents include 

1) that sin becomes increasingly more evil as it becomes more intellectual and 

2) the most inner level of hell contains those who sinned with their intellect and is frozen.  

I have always imagined hell to be a place of everlasting flame so why would Dante imagine that the deepest recess of hell where the fallen angel Lucifer resides is a frozen lake of immobility? 

The depth of hell is a frozen lake in which no movement can occur. In this sense the sinner is frozen with only the evil of their own thoughts.  The passion of their life, the emotion, the capacity for feeling is completely dead and the only thing left are their evil thoughts.  To Dante, sin completely surrounds and permeates the person to the point where no other reality exists.  In hell, the sinner is perpetually in their state of sin. 

The outer rings of hell, while still hell, is inhabited by people who committed the sins of passion.  Adultery, murder, etc.  the “crimes of passion” that weren’t thought out in an intricate plan but committed by humans who let their guard down.  These sinners are suffering the everlasting awareness of how they succumbed to their passions.  They are usually tormented by the very passion they experienced in life but with the reality that there can never be any fulfillment in the passions since the passion is disordered. 

Why would Dante choose to demonstrate this reality about sin?  Why are intellectually driven sins a greater evil than those from passion?  Well, how are we most like God?  How are we most like animals?  In our intellect, we image God most fully, not completely because we are mere humans and He is…. not.  In our passions, we imitate the animal world.  We are given, above all other animals on the earth, the ability to learn and know good from evil.  God already provided humans in the garden the knowledge of good and evil.  All humans have to do to know good and evil and to live in happiness is accept God’s definition.  By using our intellect to reject God’s description and decide for ourselves what is acceptable, we sin. 

Now, back to intellect vs. passion.  Can we sin through our passions?  Yes.  We see this every day.  Those impulsive decisions we know are wrong but we “allow” ourselves to partake of evil.  This is how we reduce ourselves and become more like animals.  We succumb to our instincts, our “distorted” nature since the fall.  Often our punishment is continued slavery to our passions.  We might become addicted or dependent or the consequences for a fleeting moment of pleasure last a lifetime.  Our “deadness” is in our passionate misery.

But when we use our reason to sin, we consciously reject God and make ourselves our own little god.   In the garden, the two were not impulsively sinning.  They listened to reason by the serpent and they allowed the temptation to twist their knowledge and trust of God.  They put their own judgment above the love they should have shown God who gave them the very garden they kept.  Their behavior immediately following their sin demonstrates their knowledge of what they had done.   

This knowledge leads to the deadening of that part that identifies us as fully human.  In both situations, the person is in misery because there is something missing that makes them in the image and likeness of God.  For the passionate sinner, it is their reason that helped them to control their passions.  For the intellectual sinner, because they abused the gift of intellect given to man above every living creature, they lose the ability to feel and can only wallow in a frozen state of rumination of their evil.  The passionate sinner must perpetually relive their passion with no fulfillment.  For the intellectual sinner, they must think of what they did perpetually realizing they do not have the intellectual ability to allow for their escape for this frozen condition.  Their attempt at complete freedom to do whatever they wanted has left  them frozen and helpless.  That is truly Hell.