Envy and love

Going through the Divine Comedy again. What does it say about me that my favorite tends to be the Purgatorio? The Paradiso is certainly grand and lovely, but something about the earthly Purgatorio attracts my feeling more. Perhaps it's because I don't know what it's like to live in perfection; I only know what it is to strive to be better.

At the center of each, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, Dante calls attention to a key concept about that place. In hell the center is a vast void, basically following the line of thinking that sin is a "lack" of goodness; it is emptiness. Sin makes humans less (which is basically the premise of all the souls in hell; they have chosen to be less than what God created in them). When we sin, we decrease our humanity and our potential.

At the center of the Purgatorio is one of my favorite concepts from the Divine Comedy, something quite reflective of human nature. Up the spiral of Purgatory, as the sinners repent for their flaws in life, they must work their way through the seven sins, or whichever applied to them. The souls in life that were envious repent by having their eyes sewn shut. (That's not the part I believe). But the point about sewing their eyes shut is so they cannot see and be envious of others. Envy or "invidia" is better understood in Dante as wishing others misfortune or feeling ill will toward someone. It can be in terms of material things or immaterial. For example, if I felt envious of someone's new car, I would secretly wish for it to have problems. Then I would experience satisfaction and perhaps even joy at the bad luck of the buyer. That's envy. And to Dante, it is one of the darkest sins because it wishes for pain and failure in the world.

The sinners doing penance for envy cure their hearts by feeling charity or love toward others. The antidote for envy is good will. It is a focus on what can be shared and increased, rather than what is limited and depleted. I may want a new car for myself, but if someone else gets one and I don't, I do not wish any harm toward the person. I am happy for him or her. I do not see another's gain as a failure to myself. I realize that life is not a zero sum game where I am trying to win while everyone else loses. Instead, feeling charity tends to focus on things that are increased by giving. Knowledge and love are two things that do not diminish when you share them. If you teach someone something, you don't lose what you knew. Instead two people now have that valuable information. And as with love and affection, the more you give, the more is created and even returned to you. That's the dynamic of charity and the dynamic of moving toward heaven. It's something I wish was more common in the world.

Hell

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?

To Propagate Light

Purgatory, Canto 15:

“What meant Romagna's spirit, when he spake
Of bliss exclusive with no partner shar'd?”
He straight replied: “No wonder, since he knows,
What sorrow waits on his own worst defect,
If he chide others, that they less may mourn.
Because ye point your wishes at a mark,
Where, by communion of possessors, part
Is lessen'd, envy bloweth up the sighs of men.
No fear of that might touch ye, if the love
Of higher sphere exalted your desire.
For there, by how much more they call it ours,
So much propriety of each in good
Increases more, and heighten'd charity
Wraps that fair cloister in a brighter flame.”

“Now lack I satisfaction more,” said I,
“Than if thou hadst been silent at the first,
And doubt more gathers on my lab'ring thought.
How can it chance, that good distributed,
The many, that possess it, makes more rich,
Than if 't were shar'd by few?” He answering thus:
“Thy mind, reverting still to things of earth,
Strikes darkness from true light. The highest good
Unlimited, ineffable, doth so speed
To love, as beam to lucid body darts,
Giving as much of ardour as it finds.
The sempiternal effluence streams abroad
Spreading, wherever charity extends.
So that the more aspirants to that bliss
Are multiplied, more good is there to love,
And more is lov'd; as mirrors, that reflect,
Each unto other, propagated light.