It is necessary that Dante travel through all of hell with his eyes and ears wide open. He is pushed and pulled along by his guide Virgil through all of the circles, and must encounter a shade in each level. T his says a lot about what this journey means for Dante, insofar as he must experience what hell is first hand and thereby come to salvation. I really like this idea that one cannot know true salvation unless they know utter desecration. Through experience our moral compass is adjusted and refined. Dante cannot know of the ultimate good unless he can discern what the blackest of evil is, how much more beautiful does that make the good of God?
As much as a shame it seems at times to have to experience tragedy to see beauty in life, it is the one cycle that keeps humanity grounded. Is it possible to know absolute bliss if one has never experienced pain, or rather is it possible in our current human state to know pleasure if there is not the burn of pain? With the fall of
Through reason we can discern that there are two extremes, that of pain and that of pleasure, or that of happiness and unhappiness. To experience that of unhappiness we know that happiness is the preferable of the two, and we become grateful and deliberately willful in bringing about that happiness. Is God not like this, does he not give humans the choice between good and evil, and ideally once we choose evil and know its bitter consequences do we not strive for good? It would seem fitting on a basic level then that from our dabbling with evil we realize how good ought to be our ultimate end.
Dante’s experience of the perverse in hell shows him what God is not, and what path leads to damnation. While I am not a fan of defining things by what they are not, Gods mysterious nature allows for it in Dante’s Inferno. The reason Dante must traverse the regions of hell is ultimately for the glory of God’s saving grace, which Dante can more easily recognize once he has endure
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