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Why all those enter Hell should abandon all hope?

Francisco Miraval

Nobody likes to talk about the torments of Hell, of being punished forever at a place you can’t escape. In fact, I don’t like to talk about this issue either and I seldom do it, except twice a year, at the beginning of each semester in college, the first day of the semester.

That day, thanks for Dante and his Divine Comedy, and begging tolerance from my students, I ask the class the same question that I used as the title for this column, and then I read the first few lines of Canto III of Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy.

I stop reading after the well-known and often repeated line that, according to Dante, hangs above the Gate of Hell: “All hope abandon, you who enter in!”

Then, I ask the students why, in their opinion, those who walk through the Gate of Hell should abandon all hope. Almost immediately, I receive several answers. Usually, the first answer has to do with the anguish created when you know you will be trapped for eternity at a place of endless, constant suffering.

The combination of your eternal lack of freedom with an eternal punishment is reason enough, according to my students, to lose all hope. That’s good, but it’s not Dante’s answer.

Others tell me the eternal suffering doesn’t cause the lack of lack of hope. Abandoning all hope is the result of realizing the opportunities you missed and the bad decisions you made in your life, preventing you from becoming the person you could have been. Interesting answer, but not Dante’s.

Other students say knowing you will be separated forever from everything good and all the persons you once loved will lead you to lose your hope. And the desperation will grow, they say, if for whatever reason you could see from Hell all the good things people enjoy in Heaven. Very good answer, but it is not what Dante said.

In the Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto III, line 18, Dante explains that those in Hell abandon all their hopes because they already and previously lost their ability to think, or, as Dante says, “the good of intellect.” In another book (The Banquet), Dante says that “truth” is “the good of the intellect,” according to Henry Longfellow. And Paradise, or the greatest good, is “the perfection of the intellect.”

We can debate if Dante’s medieval theology and Aristotelian philosophy are still relevant or meaningful in the 21st century, when “Hell” is seldom mentioned in the public discourse and, if anybody dares to mention it, it is assumed it is just an expression of religious fanatism or perhaps irrationalism.

Regardless, it seems there is some truth in the idea that losing our ability to think (not looking for the truth, not distinguishing between reality and illusion) could lead to abandoning all hope. If we stop thinking, we create our own “hell” and we condemn ourselves to a “personal inferno”, less poetic, but not less real than Dante’s.

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