I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE. I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE. I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW. SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT. I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE, PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT. ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND. ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.*
One of the greatest poets who ever lived puts us at the gate of Hell and this brutal set of truths is what Dante puts over the door. The message is profound, worth hours of discussion, but if we are not careful, the obvious meaning will escape us. Just now the obvious is almost treason against an education-for-profit establishment that has cost us so much.
The brave soul must say: Hope is the first reaction of a soul to beauty.
Why is this brave to say?
Who hates hope or love?
So many songs and videos focus on love, and try to drum up hope, that both emotions, both ideas, must be universal. Right?
No.
We have not abandoned hope, but are almost without the virtue. We are not yet in Hell, that is to come, but we are well on our way. Right or left we see only doom and miss the beauty that is present in every human soul. We hate our enemies and hatred is a form of fear that casts out all love. We cannot have hope if we are defined by what we are against and not what we love.
If we love liberty, then we have hope. If we hate statism, and forget liberty, then we abandon hope. If we love holiness and justice, then we have hope. If we see only the decadence of our times, then we abandon hope. The mind needs hope to counter-argue, to claim something better than what is, to reach what might be. Love hopes that the beloved will respond: maybe or maybe not.
Hope still flows.
We are descending from a republic, oft wrong, but redeemable through discourse, to a gibbering set of shades. We are imitations of our republican mothers and fathers, because we have abandoned hope with universal morality. If we do not think an idea like the good is knowable, then asserting a person is bad is merely an expression of preference or power.
How can we know?
We have lost the good of the intellect. The intellect is lively, looking for arguments and counter-arguments. The damned listen to the experts and the mainstream. The dead, mentally dead, look to job training and nothing else.
We are left with power. If you can assert a thing and make it stick, then it is worth discussing. This is a doctrine of demons. If we see beauty, we should hope for the beloved. The damned only look for a way to purchase the pleasure. Hell is for those who “get it” and have no curiosity about what “it” “is.”
Virgil explains:
And he then as initiate to novice: “Here must you put by all division of spirit and gather your soul against all cowardice. This is the place I told you to expect. Here you shall pass among the fallen people, souls who have lost the good of intellect.”
For any reader of Dante, this is not new. I am merely stating what the poet says, but most of us do not know we need Dante. We do need him, badly. I am no medieval Catholic, but then nobody alive is. He makes mistakes no living man is tempted to make, but he has insights, obvious truth seen, that we miss. We have technology that is world class, unprecedented, but that very technology has slowed down the good of our intellects.
Read the book.
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Inferno, Dante (translated by John Ciardi) Canto III.
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