I'm going through
The Divine Comedy right now.
If you just read The Inferno there's little to love or even like. I'm not one for relishing the descriptions of people drowning forever in pits of filth. I suppose you can find humor in the fact that flatterers are buried past their noses in excrement, but eternal torture, however poetically fitted to one's crimes, reveals no Divinity but merely the God of Cruelty and Spitefulness. Even as allegory, the combined spirit of revenge and despair of The Inferno is soul-crushing. Perhaps that was my lesson from it. Although, like William Blake, I did find the image of the forest of suicides in a terrifying way beautiful. The "self-murderers" turn into trees that bleed when their branches break. I suppose they destroyed their humanity and in hell lose it further.
At least on Mount Purgatory the sufferers have the possibility for redemption. They suffer and work toward forgiveness. They have the potential to ascend and in that very hope, they practice faith. The darkest torture of Hell is precisely believing the command to "Abandon All Hope." I wondered what would happen if someone challenged the hopelessness and asked for God's forgiveness anyway, even in the depths of hell?
Satan is at hell's core, frozen in extreme exile. He furiously beats his giant wings, always attempting to break free, which only further ices the frigid air and locks him in more. What if even Satan asked for mercy? What if Satan could stop the fury of his own heart and be still? Would the ice around him melt? Would God's heart melt?
4 comments:
Interesting thoughts.....especially since I was noticing that the new opener to The Simpsons features God fighting Satan.
Of course, you put it far more eloquently.
This reminds me of what Claudia and I once did, way back in high school (I think)....we had a lark placing different peeps in the different circles of hell....I know, kinda devious, if you think about it.
I'll call you later,
Catherine
That's hilarious you put people in different circles of hell! It makes sense because that's exactly what Dante does with his enemies. Rather cathartic I suppose, at least entertaining. ;)
I think I remember this picture. It might have just been one I saw in a class once, but I saw many of Blake's illustrations for the Inferno when I went on my class trip to London. It was 2000, so the British Museum had a special display on images of the apocalypse. They had several illustrations people had done of The Inferno and Revelations. There was also a huge sculpture with Mexican Day of the Dead figures done as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and a section with movie stills from a handful of apocalyptic films, including Ingmar Bergman's classic The Seventh Seal and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man scene from Ghostbusters.
That's cool Lora. I wish I could have seen it in person!
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