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3 - Inferno as Anti-narrative

from Part I - Hell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2022

Denys Turner
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut

Summary

Some find the theology of an eternal punishment to be morally repugnant and theologically without warrant. But even if such is true of traditional doctrines of Hell, typified by those of Aquinas, it is not implausible to read Inferno as an “anti-narrative,” among other reasons because the literatures that write of a truly infernal mentality – for example,that of Dr. Faustus in Marlowe’s play – are vastly significant and their significance would not be lost even were Hell as an eternal condition impossible. For an infernal will is psychologically possible, even if the Hell willed is impossible as an existent state of affairs.

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Type
Chapter
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Dante the Theologian , pp. 79 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

3 Inferno as Anti-narrative

Is This True?

The theologian asks, can the theology of Hell on the accounts of Aquinas and Dante be true? The reader of Inferno asks, is Dante’s narrative true only on condition that there actually exists a Hell of the kind that he and Aquinas describe, a place of eternal punishment for those who die, unrepentant, in sin?

An immediate reason for asking arises from the case proposed in David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall be Saved,Footnote 1 in which in an intemperate polemic he declares there is not and could not be any such eternal damnation as Aquinas describes formally,Footnote 2 or as Dante’s Inferno tells of it in the narrative of his journey through Hell.Footnote 3 Hart rules out doctrines of eternal damnation in Hell on the grounds that it is in flagrant inconsistency with Christian faith, perhaps the weightiest argument for that inconsistency being that doctrines of eternal punishment have no warrant in the New Testament sources;Footnote 4 and then, on moral terms, on the ground that belief in eternal condemnation in Hell and in a God who condemns unrepentant sinners to an everlasting stay therein displays a casually vicious cast of mind that, he thinks, better spirits even some among card-carrying Western Christian traditionalists don’t in any serious way truly believe – witness the theological embarrassments of Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Karl Barth and others, at the thought of such doctrines.

But what is more to the point in raising these questions about Hell and judgment, is that Hart believes those teachings in their different formulations in Aquinas and Dante to be not only false, nor only testimony to a morally repugnant cast of mind and spirit projected upon a morally repugnant God; they are also simply incoherent and describe nothing that could possibly exist.Footnote 5 In short, Hart raises a critical question about the overall conceptions of divine justice that are proposed formally by Aquinas and are embodied concretely in Dante’s narrative. My question is: Were Hart right in all this would that reduce to zero any theological interest in Dante’s Inferno? Would the first cantica of the Comedy fail and hopelessly mislead theologically? And if so, would not the poetic and theological purposes of the Comedy fall apart upon its first step?

Hart seems to think that in all three ways Inferno fails. The tragedy of the first cantica, he says, lies precisely in its powerfully imaginative reconstruction of that inherently vicious but also impossible terminal outcome of eternal torture for at least some members of the human race. Dante-author has Dante-pilgrim together with Virgil travel through Hell from top to bottom, observing its occupants and enumerating in detail their cruel and unusual punishments in an imaginative narrative that in many ways corresponds with Aquinas’s formal teachings. Such teachings, whether poetically narrated or formally defended, cause Hart to ascribe to Dante-poet and to Aquinas-theologian alike – and therefore to their God – a moral sensibility that descends to levels so wretchedly cruel and morally perverted as to situate their imaginative powers and its work in that very place deep in the bowels of Hell to which Dante himself assigns the mythical Ulysses in canto 26 of Inferno; and there the poetic conceit itself manifests the same mentality it condemns in the very act of its description. On this account, Dante’s Inferno is a story told on terms that are the same, but inverted, as those of Chaucer’s Pardoner. For to believe in Dante’s Hell of endless torment is already to inhabit the mental world of which Inferno is the fictional realization: The only Hell is in the belief in the minds of the likes of Aquinas and Dante. And their infernalisms are themselves pathological.

In that canto 26 of Inferno Dante describes the fate of the false counsellors, and in particular the fate of those who have betrayed the moral responsibilities of intellect itself. We could say that at stake in this canto are the values of the writers, the poets, the scientists, the historians, the philosophers, the theologians, and so, very typically, the values of the academics, of university people – more generally, then, of intellectuals. Ulysses is the intellectual’s antitype: He sets out, Dante tells us, on a journey, on just the same quest on which the intellectuals have embarked, in search for “all knowledge and virtue” – our universitas – but in such a way as to betray the values he seeks in the very manner of his seeking them. Ulysses’ voyage is a value-free fantasy, frivolously disengaging intellectual pursuits from any moral purpose – fittingly Dante has him reduced in Hell to a flickering flame, a fickle and cold light, a wonderfully precise image of us professors when we have surrendered to the ideal type of a morally rootless intellect and have become false counsellors. For in this endeavor of knowledge Ulysses ventures out beyond the ends of the earth and further out into uncharted waters, into an unpeopled universe, into a world, as Ulysses himself says, that is sanza gente, “where no one dwells” – such is an intellect torn away from its responsibilities owed to wider communities. This is not some vapid case against the abstraction required of specialization. But it is a case against the knowledge and virtue that Ulysses seeks having in this way been ripped up by their true roots in a repentant community of fellows, and, in his pursuit of this lonely Promethean quest, in his having ruthlessly abandoned all the responsibilities he owes to others, above all to his wife Penelope and their children, he is lost with all hands in a whirlpool of morally and intellectually empty ambition.

One might well think the opposite of what Hart credits to Dante, and that Dante tells of Ulysses’ fate for a crucial reason of his own as poet-author of the Comedy and that is precisely in order to distinguish his own quest as poet from that of Ulysses, because he does need to know how to pursue that quest on altogether different terms, on terms of moral and spiritual responsibility that he will finally learn only from Beatrice as the climax of a painful journey through Purgatory. Only then will he be able to represent his journey of writing as being but a passing through Hell and out on the other side of it, if shocked to the core at what he has witnessed, himself morally unscathed by the experience.

But in truth, asks Hart, can Dante-author come out of his Inferno himself unscathed by what he has described therein? Hart’s polemic would have us believe that Dante’s narrative is itself an infernalism about the infernal, it is the authorial equivalent of Chaucer’s utterly cynical Pardoner, Dante’s Inferno being swallowed up in the same moral whirlpool that he describes Ulysses as having been swept into. For Dante’s story of Hell – just in his believing it to be conceivable that the divine will would commit anyone at all to interminable pain therein – ascribes to the divine a mentality and judgment that belongs only within the Hell that it describes. And so, as one might say in the spirit of Hart’s critique, Dante’s God who condemns some to Hell, and the Satan who rules in sullen silence in the Hell God has made, have merged into one another in a shared debased narrative of the demands of justice and love. Thus do all distinctions between Dante and Ulysses, in particular the crucial distinction in respect of the moral character of their respective quests for all knowledge and virtue, disappear. And were that true then Dante’s Inferno would deserve the same judgment that is sometimes visited upon Milton’s Paradise Lost, namely of having in effect eliminated any other distinction between God and Satan than that of God’s being in possession of an infinite degree of the same purely arbitrary and deeply amoral power that, if only in finite and diminished terms, Satan himself possesses.

Hart has caught Inferno in a very tight theological vice, though the theological and biblical grounds for his critique of the doctrines of eternal punishment in Hell need not concern us directly. Nonetheless, it must concern us whether Dante’s literary imagination does truly depend directly upon a moral disposition so evilly perverted as Hart believes it to be. Does it? May we read Inferno on any other terms than those on which Hart judges it theologically?

Truth by Way of Counterfactual Fictions

Let us start again with Dante’s narrative of a journey through Hell, and with a question about the nature of truth and falsity as relevant to fictional stories. What we need to know is whether, as narratives go, Dante’s Inferno meets the minimum conditions required for a truthful one. I have in mind once again the sort of issue raised by Charles Singleton when he said of the Comedy that it is the construction of the fiction that it is not a fiction. At one level Singleton’s point is trivial: after all, such is a general truth about any fictional narrative. It is true even of some impossible narratives, like Gulliver’s Travels, in which the people Gulliver meets are either too short to exist, as are those in Lilliput, or else are impossibly tall, as in Brobdingnag. And as for the Comedy, even were it false to say that there is an existent interminable condition called Hell, the construction of a narrative describing it could be a defensible and illuminating thing to do; for a certain kind of improbable narrative, a demonstrably false narrative, and even a palpably impossible one, may be justified precisely in the light of the demands specific to truthful narration. As my friend and colleague in Princeton University, Philip Pettit, once said,Footnote 6 there may be a good test of the quality of a philosopher’s argument in the quality of the novel that corresponds with it, in the plausibility of its correlative narrative. I suppose that on this account Sartre’s novelette La Nausée, and perhaps even more so his terse little play Huis Clos, do stand in some such relationship of verification to the incontinently wordy Being and Nothingness, perhaps in the same way that Camus’s The Outsider stands more concisely to his Myth of Sisyphus, or George Eliot’s Middlemarch to her reductively Feuerbachian account of religion. And as, conversely, if you hadn’t got Noam Chomsky’s famous review to pull you back from the brink of the crude behaviorism of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,Footnote 7 you would be able to tell for yourself what was wrong with it from his truly awful novel-form rendering of it in Walden Two: The narrative’s badness on its own is evidence enough against the philosophy it fictionalizes.Footnote 8 For if there are very few novels that are in some way direct products of their corresponding philosophies there are many that are tests of the plausibility of implied philosophical underpinnings precisely in the degree to which they succeed or fail to convince as narratives. And as to Dante’s Inferno, notwithstanding Hart’s arguments from Scripture and from his general moral rejection of doctrines of Hell, its character as an anti-narrative (as we might call it) would still serve a critical purpose. For while anti-narratives make a story of what is not so, sometimes even of what cannot be so and why, they do so in such a way as to disclose something that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to see about what can be and about what there actually is. In short, we might be able to see the point of the Inferno as an anti-narrative whether there is a Hell in fact or not.

Anti-narratives

Anti-narratives abound in variety across a wide spectrum, and here I abbreviate the diversity to just three general types, one revealingly benign, the other two revealingly destructive. Benign is the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, of which Christian exegetes from Origen in the third century to our times have known the formal impossibility, given that its narrative structure is self-contradictory. Nor is the contradiction hidden, merely implied. It is there on the surface, obvious for all to see. How, asks Origen, could Adam and Eve have experienced even the temptation to seek the “knowledge of good and evil” unless they had been in possession of that knowledge in the first place, still less possible being their having given in to the temptation in the event?Footnote 9 At one level the contradiction is simple and obvious: You must have already conceded to the fallen condition if you are to be tempted by sin’s apparently better prospects.

Of course, you can’t always formally resolve an apparent contradiction of such a kind; but that need not matter, for you can sometimes narrate one away, as the French theoretical anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said Genesis does, and sometimes that is all you can do. The lesson of Genesis is, he said, clear: There can be no consistent narrative account of the origins of sin, since any explanation of sin’s origin – any account, that is, of a first sin – must presuppose that fallenness as a prior condition of its being committed, that being the reason why some will say that it is unbridled freedom of choice between good and evil that is truly “original,” and that, given it, sin is inevitable.Footnote 10 Not that it was Levi-Strauss’s purpose to debunk the Genesis story; on the contrary, his point was show that you cannot just put it all down to some general proposition concerning a primordial freedom; for in its self-undermining character the Genesis story belongs with all such truly foundational and second-order stories that, told as if itself in a primitive first-order narrative, the origins and determining conditions of all subsequent first-order narratives. It is in the nature of the case that such narratives themselves presuppose the conditions of which they narrate the origin. And he argued that such is the way it is – and must be – with the narrative of the Fall. For its circularity goes with the character that such stories possess of being indeed original. Thus does Genesis tell a rattling good yarn that gets to a fundamental truth about human nature; but it is based on a contradiction that at one and the same time disguises and discloses the impossibility it contains. And for all that it is therefore a sort of self-refuting narrative it does a real job – that of illuminating by way of an impossible myth the foundational origins of a condition of human fallenness. And it does that job in the only way available, in an inevitable circularity that, because it is inevitable, is also benign.

In a similar way self-defeating but far from benign is the argumentative ploy of Thrasymachus in book 1 of Plato’s Republic. What, Socrates had asked, is justice? “I will tell you,” Thrasymachus retorts angrily, impatient with all talk of essences and definitions and foundations as is implied in Socrates’s question; for, he says, justice is nothing materially constant, nothing definable in terms of given actions, for it is no more than the prevailing will of the strongest party, whatever that may be. In principle abstract definitions determining formal essences such as Socrates calls for are irrelevant. Worse than irrelevant, Thrasymachus adds, the pursuit of them is the last resort of the powerless seeking by way of appeal to the essential natures of things to wrest for themselves some control of their lives from the grip of the ruling classes – Thrasymachus is a sort of Nietzschean anti-essentialist avant la lettre, and in universities he is quite recognizable today. What answers to the definition of justice, they say, is not an essence that you could seek out in some spirit of objective inquiry, for there can be no such essence; nor in any way is it to be found otherwise than in the will of the de facto ruler, the one who as it happens has the power to define its content.

Justice, then, is exhibited only in a definition-defying tautology: You can’t tell what justice is until there is someone powerful enough to enforce upon you their account of what it is, or you your account upon them. For to have any power at all to do a thing is to have more power than anyone else to do it, and, more specifically, to be in possession of first-order power is to be in possession of the second-order power to define what just power is. If rulers can successfully exert that power, then there is no more to justice than in their exercise of it. And if they can’t do it then theirs is no justice, for there is no justice in impotence.

Plato’s reply to this challenge takes him beyond book 1 of Republic into a further six books of Socratic argument – and extended as that argument is, it is worth noting here the general lines of it. Thrasymachus, Plato says, has proposed not so much a morally unworthy story of the republic’s origins, though that is what Plato thinks indeed it is; nor does Plato respond to it by telling of more adequately moral foundations of a good society, not at first, though in due course he will; his first objection to Thrasymachus’s brutal voluntarism is tactical and purely ad hominem: it is to deny him his merely willful attitudinizing. For all Thrasymachus’s ranting on behalf of the superior will to power, in fact so vacuous is the tautology that defines it – you have any power only so long as you have more power than anyone else in relevantly similar circumstances – and so unstable in consequence is your hold on it – for everyone else’s desire for power is a threat to the excess of yours over theirs – that his notion of power is far from establishing the possessor of it in preeminence; in truth it is the expression of a form of dependent weakness.

For, in a long sorites extending from Republic book 1 all the way up to book 7, Plato argues that the naked voluntarism of Thrasymachus’s account of justice is conceivable at all only when in a manner that is self-defeating it is carried on the back of social stabilities guaranteed by other means and by other people. For in the absence of a stable social base in some sufficient proportion of the population, who, unlike the Thrasymachean ruler, have an interest in serving the interests of others for their sakes and not merely for their own, there is no social world within which the tyrant can exercise his power, nor can there be any power for the subject-peoples to subordinate themselves to. And in fact, the exercise of the Thrasymachean ruler’s arbitrary and self-referring exceptionalism is itself parasitical in that it feeds off the conventional normality of the general, and it is powerless without that consenting social foundation. The tyrannical ruler is therefore like the thief who needs a stable property-owning society in which to carry out his theft, for without property assumed there is no stealing; he is like the adulterer who needs there to be an expectation of marital fidelity else there are no thrills to his faithlessness.

That being so, Socrates says, far from his possessing supreme political power, the power of the Thrasymachean tyrant is in fact utterly contingent and parasitical upon independent sources of social stability. When, therefore, in Republic book 2 Socrates invites Glaucon and Adeimantos to take up Thrasymachus’s argument and to defend it in a calmer and more critically reflective way, their restated defense gets lost all the deeper in the self-refuting dilemma: For their defense rests on the proposition that the best form of life for me must be one in which I can count on everyone else subordinating their wills to the interests of the community, just so long as when they do it I don’t. Were he, Glaucon says, to be in possession of the ring of Gyges that could render him invisible at will, such would be possible. But the point of what Plato demonstrates is, again, not that pure egoism extended universally is morally unworthy, or that there is in fact no Gyges’s ring to be had; his point is that no society is possible at all on the basis that there is no more to it than the superior power of the tyrant, and in consequence no fixed theater on whose stage of routine moral convention he can play his arbitrary amoral part. Thrasymachus’s is a fantasy of superior power impossible to exercise otherwise than in dependence on those prior conditions that others provide for him, those prior conditions being what he wills for others just so as not to have to will them for himself. The Thrasymachean “realism” is shown to be a fantasy just by its implications being clearly expounded.

Next, imagine a third anti-narrative that, like that of Thrasymachus, is far from benign, a narrative that likewise describes a state of affairs that is at once impossible and revealing. The logic of this sort of impossible conjunction is well articulated in one way in the person of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and in more formal terms in Søren Kierkegaard’s version of the same Don Juan in his Fear and Trembling.Footnote 11 For Kierkegaard’s Don Juan is an entirely value-free person. He is not just immoral, though he will be when and where it suits him, just as he will act consistently with moral principles when that suits him; he is ideally amoral, careless of moral distinctions as such, and the word “moral” has a meaning for him only in scare quotes. Indeed, he, like the Thrasymachean tyrant, is not so much a person as an ideal type who is utterly without moral center of gravity, and, being altogether bereft of moral motivation, he is wholly shameless and incapable of remorse. And that is why, Kierkegaard says, there is no possible argument or motivation internal to his condition that can rescue him from it: He is forever fixed in it. Don Juan has no fixed ground on which even minimal moral levers can get a grip, for any reason Don Juan might have for behaving in accordance with a stabilizing and universally binding moral principle – for making the transition from his egoism to the minimum moral level of a Socrates, as Kierkegaard puts it – could not proceed from any motive available internal to the unmitigated egoism in which he is entirely enclosed, since just that motivation would subvert the moral motive supposedly derived from it. The principle here is that you can, on the one hand, have a self-interested reason for acting in a way that in fact serves the interests of others, but such a reason gets you nowhere morally, its motivation of self-interest leaves you where you were, still stuck in your amoral rut. On the other hand, to have a reason that does get you from pure egoism to properly moral ought, a reason that gets you across the gap between the amoral libertine Don Juan and the morally principled Socrates, requires that you are already there, there being no bridges that can stretch across the existential gaps. For there is absolutely no such self-transcending openness within the enclosed, static, and morally empty world of Don Juan: You might say that he is pure psychopath. Only an unprecedented leap in the dark, Kierkegaard says, can get him to the other side. And that is why, if the condition of Don Juan can be taken to describe that of souls in Hell as Dante understands them, you would have to conclude with Sartre and Dante as to the inner nature of infernal logic. For both of them the hypothetical is valid: If there is a Hell then once in it there truly is, as Sartre says, “no exit,” Huis clos. There is nothing in Hell to motivate a reason to be out of it.Footnote 12 If Hell is where you are going, Hell is where forever you are staying. There can be no non-eternal Hell.

Satan

Dante’s Inferno is one of the most striking studies of evil, of its logic and of its psychology, in the whole of the Western canon. Dante in his own terms captures the logic of Hell’s hypothetical perfectly: Once through the gates of Hell there can be no hope.Footnote 13 And because there is then no hope there is no possibility of moving forward, there are no possible leaps in the dark.Footnote 14 As to the infernal psychology, at the center of this Hell, its cause and victim, is the figure of Satan – a wonderfully impossible figure, impossible because he is the embodiment of a single, impossible, desire. Milton’s Paradise Lost gives expression to that desire’s impossibility in this its ultimate form when, thrust down to Hell by divine decree, Satan cries, “So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear. | Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; | Evil, be thou my good.”Footnote 15

Note here exactly what Milton’s Satan says: He does not say, as a mortal human might, be this evil a good for me, may this adultery give me the missing pleasure, may this theft from the poor provide the financial security I seek for my billions’ sake; and even the general defiance of our pathetically finite blasphemies is directed at a particular God. We humans are underperformers of evil because we are no angels, and the will for particular evils is all we are capable of within our limited agendas of evil action. Satan, though, wills the impossible, the infinite evil. Satan is not a simple sinner, a doer of this or that evil deed. Satan has one desire only, and that is to displace God and reverse the good. He is not to be satisfied with evil actions, howsoever many, not even spectacular world-historical evils on the scale of the Holocaust, for they too fall short of the evil that embodies a fallen angel’s malice – they are focused campaigns of evil, too concrete, too particular, they are the targeted strategies that are the best humans can do in imitation of Satan. Satan is not just a terribly bad person, worse, say, than Hitler. Bad actions cannot be enough for Satan himself who demands a universal evil as the formal principle of his agency. Possibly the Holocaust is the nearest a particular human will get to a universal evil, and certainly as we know of such things it seems unsurpassably evil. But even the Holocaust stops short of a fallen angel’s defiance.

For if Satan seeks only the infinite evil his defiance is accordingly purely abstract and unconditional in character: He wants nothing at all that falls short of absolute evil, an evil that has not only no good consequences in fact but is intrinsically and intentionally without them, for he can will only to turn the tables on God absolutely, that is to say, not on anyone or anything in particular, not on any particular persons, states of affairs or conditions, but only in a formal defiance of the good itself. He is at the still center of Dante’s Hell. There, the scope of Satan’s desire is beyond even the dualistic aspiration of a Manichee – for the evil God of the Manichees wills to be an alternative God alongside and equal with the good God; and Satan’s evil intent is the more absolute, since he not only denies the priority of the good but also all equality between good and evil. He wants to make the abstract unqualified evil to be the one and only true concrete. Satan therefore wills the reversal of the very order of existence itself and not merely to turn the moral world upside down with a bit, or even a lot, of very bad practice. Satan resents evil’s being the subplot, its being no more than the privation of the good. Milton’s Satan imitates Dante’s, for their Satans want evil to be the real existent and the whole story and the good to be the fantasy. For that reason, Satan’s desire is inherently impossible, what he desires has no possible object. For evil is essentially parasitical. And so is the devil, Dante capturing the logic of this with a characteristically telling image of an impotent Satan, no “roaring lion” he (as St. Peter had it) “seeking whom he may devour.”Footnote 16 Dante’s Satan is but a frozen, immobile, silent, sullen, cannibal, capable of nothing but the mastication of his own progeny. Dante’s Satan is in fact the very opposite of the raging agent of evil. He is exactly as Dante has him, a being absolutely without agency. Paradoxically, there is nothing he can do, that is to say, he can do only nothing. For no agency is possible except in the light of some good to be done, and Satan would spurn all good. He is all impossible will. And because he is defined by his impossible will, Satan is impossible.

We human beings, hard as we might try, can’t get to be that bad, we can manage only to be more or less evil, for not being angels we cannot achieve Satan’s exalted level of pure evil desire. But we can absurdly wish for it. In every one of Dante’s descending scales of Inferno’s evils, progressing in a downward sweep from Francesca and Paolo’s lust in canto 5 to the malicious political hatreds of Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri in cantos 32–33, there is only the stale repetition of particular evils willed, the descending scales of Hell’s evil marking variation only in the degree of malice, in the severity of the punishments, and in the ingenious savagery of the mind that devised them. Beyond that there are no true narratives in Hell because for those condemned souls within Hell memory has but one dimension: They can recount only the past. That is why their stories simply tail off – perhaps the most bitterly, hopelessly, inconclusive is Ugolino’s, that culminates with the hint that, starving, he had fed on the corpse of his son before his own death. But none of them can have a resolution. For the condemned have no true future, nothing ever new, but only a single unchanging narrative within which they are forever trapped. Hell’s is the true Nietzschean “eternal return.” There is fascination for us in their stories, fascination in their degree of self-awareness, fascination too in Dante’s construction of the vices into a downward spiral of progressive degrees of evil. We are fascinated because all of that evil we know as a possibility in ourselves. But the infernal sinners’ consciousness of their sinfulness issues not, as it may for all premortem, in a well-grounded moral judgment of it: For though they know of that for which they are condemned they belong to no moral community that is the bearer of the judgment that condemns them. Here again the Pardoner’s false-truthfulness says it all and serves for nothing. Every one of Dante’s sinners is entirely alone, even when many populate the same bolgia. They know exactly what has them in Hell. And they know their sin only in those terms. They are, in short, enclosed by their failure of repentance, they are like cogs disengaged from the machinery, frictionlessly spinning in their own tight circle as endlessly as pointlessly. Only in Dante’s account of his own journey with Virgil is there interest, because though in Hell he is not of it, and so he can learn from the experience of passing through; for the rest, the literary miracle of Inferno lies in the fascination we readers can find in Dante’s tale of those successive conditions of an unutterable tedium that must be the worst Hell of all, a tedium more cruel than is the ingeniously constructed torturer’s manual of a satanically efficient pain infliction – your head in the ground and the balls of your feet forever baked in the glowing coals,Footnote 17 the champing jaw of your political enemy forever clamped on the back of your skull.Footnote 18 The description of these physical humiliations is almost a relief from the truly ultimate pain of utter hopelessness inflicted in an eternally unchanging recurrence. The absence of historically successive time – for such time as there is in Hell consists in endlessly circular loops – rules out any possibility of change; and with the unending repetition of a past the elimination of all hope goes inseparably. That is why Dante’s Satan has no narrative at all, he is anti-story incarnate, frozen stiff at absolute zero – the impossible temperature at which even the movement of atoms ceases and matter itself ceases to exist. As for whether there is, or is not, such a place as Hell, this is exactly what it would have to be like.

Absolute Evil

And whether there could be such a place, Dante is right about one thing to do with it, which some cheerful universalists seem too squeamish morally to allow. Dante’s Hell is not humanly unimaginable, and we need to know how correctly to imagine it. It is a condition to which you could come to consent, even aspire to it. It is not inconceivable that, like Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play, you might throw all caution to the winds and flaunt a heroic infernal rebellion, a sort of ultimate two fingers to God, to God true or false, to all gods, and be willing to live with the consequences, knowing what they are. Faustus knows that Hell is the place to which he is increasingly committed by his compact with Satan, as choice after choice of evil removes from him the carapace of self-deception, drawing him to the point at which his will falls finally over the edge into that paralyzing void of empty clarity from which there is no longer any return. Poised just before that point, as yet on the nihilistic cliff-edge, Faustus believes that he is owed just one last dividend on his bargain with the devil; there he begs to see “the face that launched a thousand ships” – “Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss,” he cries, even though by then he knows that Helen’s beauty can no longer give him pleasure, not even the memory of it, for he has evacuated all pleasure of any power to attract.Footnote 19 Here is Marlowe’s version of Dante’s Francesca and Paolo. Faustus, like them, came to know that there is nothing to what he wished for but a fantasy in which he has now finally entrapped himself; and fantasy it was even when he made the originating fateful bargain, though then he but deceived himself about the moral abyss to which he was opening himself. Now, too late, the veil of self-deception is torn away. And what are we to say about Faustus’s condition of mind, and, more relevantly, about the psychology of Dante’s condemned? Is it impossible? Can they not knowingly will to be in Hell? To be thus trapped by your own desires, bound by your free choices, enclosed in circle of willed self-destruction – is that a condition impossible positively to desire, at least as a price willingly paid in pursuit of a fantasy of freedom? Is not the possibility of willing it always there, whether on the margin of moral thought or at the center of it? Is not the will for a terminal condition of self-entrapment all too possible if in the meantime there are rewards enough in an infinite defiance?

Is it possible to imagine yourself willing what Dr. Faustus says he wills? Is it impossible that Pope Boniface VIII or Pope Martin knowingly pursue what they know will have them in Hell? Or, to put the question in that other way that I envisaged in the case of Kierkegaard’s Don Juan: Can Marlowe’s play work? The Tragicall Historie of Dr Faustus is an imperfect but terrifying drama; Faustus scares the wits out of you, and so he should, just because it is possible to imagine willing what he wills, because we know today what Marlowe knew at the end of the sixteenth century: That two centuries of voluntarist philosophies had in his time turned into the shape and form of a society and of its accompanying social morality for which an ideal of pure willing is its primary ethic. But as to this figure of the naked will, if it is possible to will thus absolutely as Faustus does, is what Faustus wills possible? I ask, that is, not about the willing but whether its object, the thing willed, is realizable. For the pursuit of an ideal act of pure willing, of wanting will to be ultimate, demonstrably is possible, as Marlowe’s play convincingly shows us. And showing what that world would be like that corresponds with so unconditional a will is perhaps the point of Dante’s Inferno. The world entailed by that will is Hell. As Dante journeys through Hell, he takes you one after the other not just through a cycle of vices but through the ever-deeper pit of evil to which the pursuit of them brings the sinner. The journey tells of the desires that take you all the way, as it were, down to that ideal type of willing that is, paradoxically, the wordless, meaningless paralysis of will that is Satan.

But is the thing willed possible? To that the answer must be, no, it is not. For though you can will to be in Hell, the thing willed, Hell, is not possible. Hell is a fantasy, a telling anti-narrative, and the fantasy in Marlowe’s play is the same as that of Kierkegaard’s Don Juan, and of Plato’s Thrasymachus, it is the fantasy that wills an impossible freedom for itself, it wills a condition of purely abstract personal autonomy that is as impossible to realize as a general choice for humans as it is for Satan, because its realization for me requires, as it does for a Thrasymachean pure will, the existence of a world in which others provide the non-egoistic theater, the stage on which I can play out the pure drama of my unqualified egoism. And so it is that such an act of pure psychotic and morally empty willing is possible only within a stabilizing moral world as its condition: As one might put it, a manic Hitler is possible, even conceivable, only on condition of a default commonplace and nonpsychopathic general compliance, as Hannah Arendt said.Footnote 20

Given that the narrative of Inferno works as a story of progressive moral collapse, does Dante think that the narrative requires that the Hell he imagines exists in reality? Probably he does. But does it in truth? Even if it doesn’t exist is it impossible to envisage Dante seeing the point of composing an anti-narrative, a story that needs telling of an impossibly evil will? For even if it could not be true as described, nonetheless it vividly contains a truth about the psychopathology of evil and of the infernal regime that it entails. What is without question is that his description of Hell tells explicitly of the world that goes with that will, a description that teases out in analogical detail the intimate connections between the shape and form of a social world and the shape and form of an individual will that is the impetus calling it into being, exhibiting, therefore, the social logic of a wholly evil will. However unlikely it is that Dante is to be read on such a supposition as to fact, what we can say is that there is a point in it either way, and though it is clearly not up to us to read Dante just as we like in some fit of postmodern jeu d’esprit, or on other grounds to force the poetic narrative to conform to some universalist presumptions as to what actually or possibly exists, still we can legitimately read Inferno as an anti-narrative, impossible but frighteningly illuminating, because to do so is at least not inconsistent with what we must concede is essential to Dante’s purposes – and you wouldn’t have to change a word of Inferno in consequence of doing so.

And those purposes are to spell out what things would be like were we to imagine Dr. Faustus, Don Juan, Francesca da Rimini, and Paolo impossibly getting exactly what they ask for. Dante says that thus imagined they tell us – in fact the whole of Inferno says just this and really nothing else – that there is not and never was anything at all that answers to those desires as they know them, nor could there be; and Hell is the construction of the counterfactual fantasy made by the would-be but impossible choices of its inhabitants. Were it to exist, necessarily it would be a place of eternal frustration from which there could be no recall.

Indeed, Dante’s Hell does have all the apparatus of a self-sufficient regime. It has a power structure, it has its hierarchies, it has its enforcers, and it has its ideologies: It looks like a very evil regime, the one and only regime that fits with a wholly evil world, a world that, as Dante describes it, is to all appearances, complete and self-sufficient. But all that is pure illusion.

For Dante’s Hell shows that a self-sufficient regime of sin alone is impossible. That is common ground between a theology that allows for Hell within a dispensation of divine providence and a theology that, like Hart’s, rules Hell altogether out as entailing a morally and conceptually repugnant theodicy. The condemned in Hell tell of the personal journeys that brought them there, the stories telling of their sin from the inside of it, the trajectory that their particular sin followed. In Hell, they do not come to see that they were mistaken about their desires in the way that we are when in our premortem existence we discover that we don’t in the event want something that in anticipation we thought we wanted, and so repent of the false construction of desire that had impelled us to make wrong choices. What Dante imagines for Francesca and Paolo is that they get exactly what they wanted, to be together for all eternity in the lust they longed for, floating like dry leaves on the fierce hot winds of their own desires, wafted first this way and then that until, no longer able to repent of that desire, they are trapped in the fantasy-world that is the product of it. It is, then, not the frustration of guilty desire that makes their hell intolerable; on the contrary, what is intolerable is their being trapped wholly on the inside of their fantasy’s being eternally met. As we all know, sometimes the true disaster is when we do get just what we want, the sheer contingency of premortem life mercifully ensuring that for the most part we don’t in fact get it and can learn before it is too late. So it is that within the unconditional nature of their desire it is they in Hell who desire its eternity. They can’t any longer repent of it, and Inferno tells of the world that desire creates, the world you would have to live with were you to desire above all a known evil and get it.

Far from unhappily guilt-ridden, then, Dante’s Francesca and Paolo are at once wholly sad and entirely without remorse. Their misery is not the unhappy consciousness of persons who know of and admit to their moral failures and are forever condemned by them. But it is just for that reason that the doubt arises as to its possibility in fact. For you can construe Francesca and Paolo as being in an irreversible trap only upon a construction of them as having no desires other than those the satisfaction of which got them there. Hell’s people would have fallen into a trap that could hold them forever in its grip only if they were no longer persons, but only personalized embodiments of a particular sin. That is why their condition is eternal. For persons can always know their guilt; and for as long as you can know your guilt the possibility of repentance must remain open. Therefore, were you to insist, as Aquinas does, that persons in Hell do retain some remnants of conscience,Footnote 21 then you will have to accept as a consequence that they are held there forever only because an infinite punishment is imposed upon the finite creature willy-nilly, that is, because God holds them there so as, contrary to their essential natures, they cannot in fact repent, come what may – or that, even if they do repent, it will be of no consequence to their eternal fate, because it is too late. For Hell to be a fate necessarily eternal Hell’s people would have to have become nothing beyond the guilty fact of their sin, which, as it were, they incarnate, being wholly defined by it.

Accept, then, Dante tells us, what must be accepted as moral and psychological fact. Life is like that; it is such that you can envisage Hell’s awful possibility as something you might choose. It is possible to hate, reject, even despise, the mentality of the universalist who tells me that I am damn well going to be saved whatever I say or do about it. And can I not want to tell those universalists that that is where I mean to go and that they cannot trick me out of it by way of their universalist fantasy? Dante’s Inferno is the narration of that apparent choice, and if your last word has been to make that choice then that will have been the end of the matter. But, if it is right to interpret him so, Dante sets out that idealized mentality of evil in such a way as to make apparent in the whole sweep of the Comedy’s narrative that, as, bit by bit it sets out the dramas of salvation, so bit by bit as he progresses out of Hell through to Purgatory the choice of Hell is evacuated of any meaning because Hell is the place of meaning’s evacuation; and in the end his journey serves to demonstrate its impossibility – whether Dante likes that conclusion or not, understands it to follow, or doesn’t. And it is just because those supposed inhabitants of Hell died willingly unrepentant, and just because they wished to exist forever as if defined by their guilt, as if they were no more than abstract and impossible embodiments of a psychopathology, that their condition cannot possibly exist. Theirs is a fantasy of defiance that can never be fulfilled. But then as we know, human beings are up for even an ultimate fantasy.

Even if we do begin there, in a position contrary to what seems to be Dante’s substantive belief, with the proposition that no such infernal world is possible, then not all is lost for Dante’s narrative. For then the story of Inferno appears as the construction of an antitype, it tells of an impossible state of affairs that illuminates the truth it inverts precisely by way of its inversion; and then we see that its role within the Comedy not only does not require that there is any such place, but more: Its role for the reader is that you can now see it as demonstrating just that impossibility, the impossibility of a state of affairs that could exist only within an unrealizable fantasy of evil, and that, in truth, the evil is in the fantasy. In that finite fantasy of sin, the condemned but mock Satan’s absolute embodiment of evil, willing in their pathetically finite way the impossibility that Satan, in his malice, wills unconditionally.

Postlude: Is Aquinas Inconsistent?

And so, as finally we come back to where we began, with that theological assertion, unchanged throughout Aquinas’s writings, of the real existence of an eternal Hell, we meet a paradox: As with Dante, so on Aquinas’s own account, the Hell he described is shown to be impossible. Undoubtedly Aquinas himself is a stout infernalist and does not doubt Hell’s existence: He thinks that eternal damnation in Hell is possible, indeed is warranted by Scripture. Even were it plausible to imagine Dante being open to persuasion and to abandoning his prima facie infernalist position – universalism is at least consistent with Inferno – there seems not to be any such way round for a reading of Aquinas. And yet it seems not impossibly inconsistent with Aquinas’s known views, indeed in one important connection it seems to be entailed by them, namely that the eternity of Hell is indefensible, since it is on his own account of Hell that souls eternally in Hell without the possibility of parole would be not persons; they would be at best person-fragments, actually existent “Horcruxes,” as Harry Potter would have called them, bits and pieces of persons incapable of meeting on their own necessary conditions of personal identity, as bits and pieces of metal and rubber don’t add up to parts of my bicycle until put back together in due workable form, or as a surgically removed arm is no one’s – functionally it’s not even an arm – until surgically reattached to a living body. And in the same way such infernal person-fragments would be unable to meet conditions for continuity of personhood between premortem and postmortem selves. If in Hell Denys Turner cannot be a person at all, then in Hell there can be no such person as the Denys Turner who died. And if there can be no such persons in Hell, then there can be no such actual place as Hell for a person to be in, not even a place empty of people, as Von Balthasar and Karl Barth suppose.

But why on Aquinas’s own account would Denys Turner in Hell not be a person at all, and so not Denys Turner? The reason is that, on Aquinas’s own say-so, among the conditions for being any person, howsoever evil, is the possession of a minimum of fundamental moral orientation, an ineradicable tendency to the good. Just as on the side of speculative reason there are ineradicable conditions of truth – such as those set out by the principles of contradiction and identity – so on the side of practical reason there are fundamental orientations toward the good that go together with simply being a person at all, with not being that pure antitype that is the idealized psychopath.Footnote 22 Such is the principle that “the good is to be done and evil avoided” together with “all the other principles that go along with it,”Footnote 23 the first and most general principles of the natural law, or for that matter of any sort of law.

On the side of speculative knowledge, the principle of noncontradiction is a principle constitutive of all possible thought, not, to employ a Kantian distinction, merely regulative of it, as if you could, like Walt Whitman in a mood of grand and speculative defiance, declare yourself to be “large” and, thus “containing multitudes,” happily contradict yourself at will. You can’t workably defy the principle of contradiction without self-entrapment into fundamental obedience to it: Contradiction and consequent meaninglessness will catch you out as you compose your self-deluding skeptical strategies, for, like some infallible sleuth whose undetectable presence bears down upon every thought or proposition you could possibly entertain, the principle is always there behind you however quickly you turn around to catch it at work and, having thus caught it, could then “happily contradict” it.Footnote 24 As Aristotle puts it, the attempt to deny the principle of contradiction serves only to confirm it, since for the denial to have any meaning it must obey that principle first.

And Aquinas agrees with this. Moreover, he adds that the equivalent is true of practical reasoning: It too has its ineradicable starting points without which there can be no moral thought at all, one way or another. You can make all sorts of moral moves, ranging across a spectrum from those of the pure, untroubled, sure moral elegance of the saintly, through the heroically gritty and inelegant struggles of the strong-willed who by the skin of their moral teeth hold out against temptation, down through the morally weak, who would resist temptation if only they could but don’t seem able to do so, down the slippery moral slope further still through the plain ignorance of the morally immature to the self-delusion of the chronically morally benighted, and so finally to the moral rock-bottom occupied by the entirely morally dumb: Aristotle takes you through all these moral states in book 7 of his Nicomachean Ethics. But of the condition of the psychopath he says nothing, except for the mention in book 1 of a Persian king Sardanapalus, who, in the legend, so delights in the pairing of the colors red and green that he arranges daily for slaves to be bloodily slaughtered on the lawn in front of his palace just for the aesthetic pleasure of the contrasting color scheme.Footnote 25 But Sardanapalus is not at the bottom end of the scale of moral decline; he is simply off the moral scale altogether. In short in his Sardanapalus is the nearest Aristotle gets to our psychopath. Were such an ideal type of a person to exist, he wouldn’t belong within any moral world at all, which means that there would be no world of its own of any kind for him to occupy, but only an imaginary one parasitical upon a world constituted by others who are properly moral agents. And that, for Aristotle, is to say that there isn’t enough of a human being in him for moral thought even to begin to engage.

And it is the same for Aquinas. What he calls synderesis,Footnote 26 the general capacity for moral distinctions that underlies our particular judgments of conscience, operates at the practical level as the principle of contradiction does at the theoretical: As absolutely you can’t think at all without obedience to the one, so absolutely you can’t be a human agent without at least implied obedience to the other.Footnote 27 That primitive practical orientation toward the good is, Aquinas says, what puts you on a moral scale of any kind, and without it you are not on the scale of personhood at all. And so, before there can be any practical judgment for good or for ill, whether you hit the mark of the morally heroic or collapse morally into a settled condition of vice, or anywhere in between, the judgment of good as being prior in itself, and that of evil subsequent and dependent, simply cannot be unconditionally eradicated; and ineradicably implicated in that judgment is the orientation of will to the good. It is thus that given that orientation no human being is immoral beyond recall; and without that orientation no agent is more than in a purely biological sense human – if physiologically continuous with the person that existed premortem, not on that account personally identical with them. For that degree of moral sense is ineradicable in a human. In short, it is Aquinas himself who shows that there are minimum moral conditions for being a person, and that an eternal existence in Hell would be possible only for those in whom those conditions are no longer met at all. It follows from this that to conceive of God willing some human beings to be eternally punished therein without possibility of amendment is to conceive of God punishing them by willing their destruction as human, and of Hell being a version of Harry Potter’s Azkaban, populated by organisms that once were persons but are persons no more.Footnote 28 In short, either the souls in Hell are persons, in which case they can truly repent, or else it is by God’s eternal decree that, whether they would repent or not, they are stuck with an eternal punishment. And that, as Hart says, is a pretty unpleasant God.

It is here that the doubts begin to intrude as to the consistency of Aquinas’s moral psychology, his account, that is, of the necessary conditions for human moral agency on the one hand, and the description of the condition of the souls in Hell on the other. For it seems hard to match them up with any consistency. Either the souls in Hell are not moral agents, in which case they are not persons at all and so not the persons who died in sin, or, if they are moral agents, then they cannot be held in Hell otherwise than by a divine decree that requires repentance’s being simply forbidden them, coming too late. Dante can at least potentially resolve the conflict by demonstrating that there would be theological point in the hypothesis of an unchangeable infernal will, even were it impossible in fact.Footnote 29 Aquinas doesn’t resolve it, though I think he too could have done so: For it is on his own principles of moral psychology that a noninfernalist way is open to him. You can make sense of Dante’s narrative of a journey through Hell, of his encounter with the damned, of his converse with souls held captive there by way of their own self-condemning desires, telling within the narrative he constructs for them the tale of their damnation; and Dante can tell of all this as if in a coherent story, and he could do so for good reason even were it no more than the fictional construction of a conceptual impossibility, an anti-narrative. Of that impossible narrative Aquinas attempts to describe the consistent practical reality: But in doing so he sets up the contradiction that goes along with it, making to be impossible that which Dante could say is but an idealized and telling narrative, though it be contrary to fact and even impossible.

How, then, are we to answer the first question I raised at the beginning of this chapter, about the existence of Dante’s Hell? Perhaps it is that there is no such place. And as to the second: On the supposition that there is no Hell what are we to make of Dante’s Inferno? To that the answer is that it is at least a powerful and necessary conceit, a fiction that portrays a moral faction, a possibility of which there is a hint at the end of Inferno. Hand in hand with Virgil, seeming to climb down on the scaly thighs of Satan’s inert body, Dante comes to see that in truth he was upside down all the time and is now climbing the right way up to the foothills of Mount Purgatory – that Hell therefore is life’s judgment upside down and Purgatory is the truth of Hell when turned the right way up. For it is on those now ascending slopes that the anti-narrative of eternal despair in Hell is retold, its truth now rescued from the infernal suffering, and made secure in the time-limited story of Purgatory’s hope.

Footnotes

1 David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.

2 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

3 Ibid., pp. 21ff.

4 Ibid., pp. 92–129. To show that there is no positive support in Scripture for an “infernalist” doctrine of Hell is not by itself to show that Scripture rules such a doctrine out. Hart attaches little weight, and certainly no decisive weight, to the fact that almost uniformly the Western Church has taught some doctrine of eternal punishment of unrepentant sinners, as, for the most part, have the Eastern Churches. At the best, his argument that the scriptural texts adduced in support of traditional infernalism offer alternative noninfernalist interpretations is plausible, but hardly decisive. And what little he has to say by way of his peremptory rejection of Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Hell misses the point, that, for Aquinas, it is the finality of death as such that determines the outcome in eternity, not some arbitrary and merely willful divine decree. Generally speaking the least plausible critique of Aquinas’s position is that it derives from some merely voluntaristic account of the exercise of divine will – though see note 28.

5 Though that, of course, should mean that infernalism doesn’t say enough coherently to be even false, as 2+2=5 isn’t false, the result of bad counting, it’s just meaningless.

6 When in the late 1960s we were colleagues in philosophy at University College, Dublin. Now that he is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, we are colleagues once more.

7 B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957. See Noam Chomsky’s famous review of Skinner’s book, “BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Language, 35, no. 1 (1959), pp. 26–38.

8 There is a good case for saying that the very possibility of the novel form, structuring in so many different ways as it does ineliminable dimensions of subjectivity and objectivity, is dependent on Skinner’s behaviorism being false.

9 On First Principles IV, 3, in Origen Selected Works, trans. and intro. Rowan Greer, New York: Paulist Press, 1979, p. 189.

10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his way said something similar: The Fall, as one might put it in a deliberately paradoxical phrase, is a “fall up” into a fully reflective humanity open to all the possibilities of action, not a fall down from it into the dehumanization of sin. On this account the story of the origin of the knowledge of good and evil is the story of a true human nature, or true human “experience,” as William Blake was to put it, from a prehuman condition of naive “innocence.” This amounts to a sort of “theodicy” of freedom: If you want freedom you need to pay its price, which is the Fall, sin. In Chapter 4 we will see that Dante’s understanding of sin represents the order of causality the other way round: It is sin that motivates the quest for just that false conception of freedom.

11 In Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death, trans and notes, Walter Lowrie, intro. Gordon Marino, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.

12 Put in that way the proposition is a tautology: You describe Hell in such terms that there could not be any way out of it but only by construing its inhabitants as being so motivated that they could not want to be out of it.

13 Inferno 3.1–9.

14 That is, unless appeal is made to an entirely arbitrary exercise of divine power to extract sinners from its clutches. If eternal existence in Hell is the natural outcome of a life lived then God’s relieving people of the punishment that God created Hell to inflict upon them argues not for a merciful God but for a God hopelessly indecisive and pathetically incompetent, roughly Von Balthasar’s.

15 Paradise Lost, IV, lines 108–110.

16 1 Peter 1:8.

17 Inferno 19.

18 Ibid., 33.

19 Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus, Act 5, scene 1, in The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, eds. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.

20 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2006.

21 Aquinas maintains that the condemned in Hell can regret their sins but only in as much as they are the cause of their punishment. They do not properly repent them: see Summa theologiae, Supplementum q 98 a3 corp.

22 Of course, it is true that not all psychopaths are nothing but psychopaths; but for a psychopath when in a psychotic condition there is nothing else outside it.

23 Summa theologiae, 1–2ae q94 a2 corp.

24 Such principles are not direct objects of knowledge in the way that I know which way you are facing – say toward me – for I can see that. They are known “without observation” in the sort of way in which I know which way I am facing – say, toward you: I don’t observe which way I am facing, that knowledge just goes with the facing itself as an intentional act. Thus, the principle of contradiction is operative within any coherent structure of thought. It cannot be correctly stated formally without its truth being assumed.

25 Nicomachean Ethics I, 1095b 18–21. I think it is possible I invented this account of Sardanapalus. But if so, I am quite pleased with my invention.

26 He borrows the term from St. Jerome’s corruption of the Greek suneidesis.

27 Summa theologiae 1–2ae q94 a2.

28 Commenting on a draft of this chapter, Nate Gadiano, then an undergraduate student in Princeton University, responded that souls in Hell do retain a grip on moral conscience: They would have to if they are to be human at all, and this does appear to be Aquinas’s view – see Compendium theologiae, cap. 174, where he says that souls in Hell do retain freedom of choice. But if that is so it should follow that the will to repent cannot be ruled out in the nature of the case. If, however, on Aquinas’s account it is too late for souls in Hell to take up that option of repentance, then, contrary to what his position seemed to be in the account of it I proposed in Chapter 2 – that those in Hell are self-condemned – it can only be because it is laid down by God’s decree that Hell’s punishment is to be eternally irreversible, regardless. But this can only make things worse for the theology of God underlying the infernalist position, leaving it wholly vulnerable to Hart’s critique. Gadiano has been of immense help to me by way of commentary on earlier drafts of this manuscript, but on this matter I am unpersuaded by his defense of Aquinas.

29 Vittorio Montemaggi has suggested that Dante in fact allows for the possibility of Hell’s judgment not being irreversible, as in the case of Trajan, whom Dante allows has been rescued from Hell and is in Purgatory, see Paradiso, 20. In the Middle Ages there are other legends than Dante’s of a soul’s being postmortem rescued from Hell, for it is there in the legend of St. Erkenwald told by the fourteenth-century Middle English Pearl poet. Such speculative cases, however, serve more to confirm the irreversibility of death’s judgment. For both Trajan’s case and that of St. Erkenwald’s recovery of a pre-Christian king from the grave require their being brought back to life, thereupon being baptized, and then dying again, the second time in grace, if they are to be thus redeemed. In short, both legends require an impossible second death precisely so as to confirm the intrinsic nature of death’s judgment, not so as to allow exceptions to it.

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  • Inferno as Anti-narrative
  • Denys Turner, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Dante the Theologian
  • Online publication: 02 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168687.006
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  • Inferno as Anti-narrative
  • Denys Turner, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Dante the Theologian
  • Online publication: 02 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168687.006
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  • Inferno as Anti-narrative
  • Denys Turner, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book: Dante the Theologian
  • Online publication: 02 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168687.006
Available formats
×