From Dr. Thurow:
As the Juniors and Seniors start to read Dante’s Inferno I feel like I need to call on Augustine.
OK, truthfully, I feel like I need to call on St. Augustine all the time, but that is beside the point!
Why study sin? Nine levels of careful examination of the nature of sin in Dante’s Inferno; isn’t this dangerous? Well, it can be. As long as sin appears as what it truly is, however, it is of no danger at all. No human being desires evil; no human being desires ugliness or lies. We desire truth, beauty and goodness, all of which are only perfectly present in God. We mistake evil for good or, as Augustine would argue it, we actually only ever settle for a lesser good. Augustine argues that evil, really, has no existence, but I’ll say more about this in another musing, perhaps.
Dante shows us what our sins really are, under all the glamor. What the souls in his hell suffer is what they have created, a representation of the truth of their own sins. The lustful are blown about without any control, constantly stung by equally uncontrollable pains. Some of them are united with the object of their mutual lust, but only to the dehumanization of both as one loses their voice and the other becomes lost in an endless web of lies told to themselves and others. Beautiful lies, blaming God, but belied by Dante’s careful representation of the sinners’ real state, the real nature of the seemingly beautiful sin.
Dante is despised by some moderns because Inferno has so many scenes of ugliness (Paradiso is another matter!), and who wants to see ugly things? But we live in a culture that is simultaneously willing to beautify and even glorify almost any sin while despising representations of sin (and even hell!) that show it for what it really is. They deceive us for entertainment purposes and so as to enslave us to their products and their world-view. Truth is the crucial thing, however, and the Truth shall set you free. Let the ugly be ugly and the beautiful be beautiful.
August 22, 2025