Book review: Hell: Dante’s Divine Trilogy Part One, by Alasdair Gray

You can read a proper review of Hell: Dante’s Divine Trilogy Part One, by Alasdair Gray in the Scotsman, and since that says all the proper things and also points you to some others, I won't try to out do it.

But I will make some comments on the theology. Who gets condemned to Hell? Murderers, fraudsters, and so on: well, you can hardly complain about them. Fitting rather less well with our modern views, and I suspect with what the priests told the troops at the time, soldiers seem to go there too. Unsurprisingly given Gray's politics he makes no attempt to redeem those who lend at interest.

Pagans, who lived before Christ, are condemned to Limbo. This is unfair, obvs. It isn't clear if Dante realises this. But the famous ones are not condemned to darkness, that is for peasants only, in whom Dante is uninterested and with whom he does not trouble us.

Suicides are fairly low down in hell. My reading of this is that Dante's times must have been really grim, otherwise there would not have needed to be such a strong prohibition on suicide. Sodomites go to hell. It's against the bible, but then again so is eating weasels, and you don't see any weasel-eaters in Dante's hell.

So Dante's hell in fundamentally unacceptable and unjust. But people seem to be unable to think this; perhaps in a similar way to their inability to think about the Republic.

Afterthought: indeed, if you take away your respect for the original text which exists for it's history, why would you read it at all? There are no obvious startling insights in it, the language is the language of whatever translator wrote it, and the imagery is no longer novel.

Refs

* The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, by C. S. Lewis