Dante and the Three Beasts

Reading The Inferno can be either very interesting or very confusing. I never read it in the context of an academic course, to tear apart the meaning behind Dante's visions. However, I have read it through the lens of being a Catholic at Heart, meaning I have tried to discern the spiritual message in his work.

At the very beginning, after Dante is ruminating about finding himself lost in the middle of his life, we find him encountering three beasts who guard an alluring path, after finding his way out of a thick, dark wood. But Dante feels and knows this path is where "no one ever left alive." The leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf; all are avatars for the three most deadly self-medications people use to manage their life on their own (Catholics call them sins): anger, pride, and lust. 

Now in Catholic lore, pride is the worst of them all, because it is the hook into all the other sins. Pride fuels one to indulge in "disordered love" as Aquinas calls it. But for Dante, anger, pride, and lust are the worst. One has to wonder if Machiavelli ever read Dante as inspiration for The Prince, which is a handbook about how to be a tyrant.

However, just as Dante is fearful for essentially being torn to shreds by these beasts, Virgil appears and essentially says, "No, you cannot go this way. You must go another way." And thus begins Dante's descent into Hell.

I've often shared this interpretation with others in the attempt to guide people that they must enter into their own Hell in order to be free of it; but they cannot do it alone. They need an interior life, which in the ancient Catholic mystical tradition is contemplative prayer. Why contemplatio, you ask? Because contemplative prayer is very much like resting in the embrace of the Beloved, who is Jesus. Only Jesus can help us heal from all the trauma, betrayal, lies, and unspeakable pain we have endured in life. We cannot do it on our own. Hence why Dante's imagery is so powerful: going down the path where anger, lust, and pride await is a path of self-destruction and annihilation.

However, it makes a lot of sense why people go down this route. I certainly did at one point in my own life. Being stupid is a natural part of life, for no one has perfect information or wisdom at any one point in time. We all make the best decisions based on what we know and what we want. It is natural to want to numb pain.

However...

At the end of Dante's journey into Hell, he reaches the lowest level where there lays a lake of freezing ice. Encased in ice is Satan, unable to move. The ultimate message here is what is true hell is being numb to all, including God. That is true separation from the Divine. 

Now if we look at our modern world, where people are constantly bombarded with advertisements and entrapped in social media loops, is it any wonder our society has become so numb to itself? The illusion of society that we have constructed is in danger of entombing itself in its own lake of freezing ice.

This may be hard to swallow as an atheist or even as an agnostic. What have we lost? We are quickly losing the interior life that connects with God that allows for community and society to even function in the first place. We cannot build a society on economics alone. While resources are necessary for sustaining and nurturing life, we have turned inwards the wrong way. We are using anger, lust, and pride to satisfy our own desires instead of creating a society that helps one another, as Augustine put it, "to stumble along the right road." At least on the right road, God is protecting it, and we have friends along the way who are there to help us be carried so that we can carry others, too. One could not ask for a better road IF we choose it.

We can choose the good if we really want to. The alternative is...bad.