Tag: dante

Seven-hundred years on, the first part of the Divine Comedy continues to express a very human sense of justice.

Imagine Hell were real, and you were condemned to suffer eternity there. Just for the sake of argument, where exactly do you think you would end up? We’ll assume you haven’t done anything truly monstrous. Not yet. So would you join the lustful? The gluttonous? If you feel strongly about the non-existence of Hell and turn out to be badly mistaken, maybe you’ll burn with the other heretics. Or is it something worse than that? Are you capable of complicity in unspeakable horrors? Could you betray a sacred trust?…