Dante's Divine Comedy

File: rn98I39.jpg (84KB, 480x760px) Image search: [Google]

84KB, 480x760px

>>8805798
He explained it: because Beatrice, a redeemed soul straight from the Empyrean, cared about saving Dante's soul so much that she left the perfect contemplation of God's face and descended into Hell itself to find the one man Dante respected most, living or dead, and entreated him to help save Dante's soul. Virgil, who of course died before Christ and can never pass through the fire atop Purgatory to Eden, let alone proceed to Heaven, is still the noblest of the pagan souls in Limbo. He leaves the Hall of Kings and helps Dante like a loving stern father because:
1. A blessed lady asked him to.
2. He respects Dante as a poet (the new greatest voice of his beloved Italy) and wants him to win the salvation Virgil can never have (as he died shortly before Christ came).
3. He gets to go see Purgatory, and take a vacation from Limbo.
4. Beatrice has an ass like my ex.

>>8805880

The "limbo" for those before christ never made a lot of sense to me.

>>8805885
Just limbo until the second coming. Relax Anon.

>>8805885
Well, only the saved Christians can go to Heaven, and Jesus's Harrowing of Hell only included personally saving all of the righteous from the Old Testament. So to mollify those grumpy at the thought of all those good pagans burning for eternity, they were given the nicest mildest version of Hell: a neutral afterlife basically similar to pagan afterlifes like Hades.

>>8805880
Give this man a phd.

>>8805917
>you can only get to heaven if you were lucky enough to be born at the right time in a civilization that has heard about Christianity
Nice one Dante

>>8806007
To be honest Dante's version of Limbo really makes no sense as far as Catholic theology and dying in mortal sin goes.
He's already of very dubious orthodoxy.

>>8805880
Name?

>>8806072
Just to explain-
One'd have to be an idiot to imagine that all the figures in Limbo somehow died without having comitted a mortal sin once; indeed Dante certainly knew that Cæsar was an adulterer, and so on.
So to avoid the flames of hell, they'd have to have repented and been absolved. But how they could have achieved that without the sacraments is beyond me.
And that's ignoring the obvious sin of idolatry.
Not to mention, how he imagines Ovid or Saladin or even the Queen of Bithynia as "virtuous" at all is beyond me.
Obviously one could find a way to weasel it all end but it's pretty clear that Dante wasn't thinking things through or just didn't care.
>>8805880
Name?

>>8805880
God bless, dude. I guess I don't remember the part where he talked about Beatrice going down from Paradise to tell Virgil what's up. I'll have to watch out for it in this next read-through. Thanks for laying it out for the rest of us.

>>8805798
One facet of Virgil is that he is an allegory for human reason without the guiding light of faith. That can only get you so far.

Virgil btw is one of my favourite characters in literature, I feel more attracted to his tragic journey than Dante's comedic one. He is intelligent, brave and selfless, but is ultimately lost and tinged with melancholy, especially when they get to Purgatory. There are so many brilliant moments involving Virgil, like when Dante grabs onto his hair while they descend down the flanks of Satan at the end of Inferno, or when he shoots Dante a look saying "don't give me away" when Statius begins praising the Aeneid, and Dante does anyway, or at the climax of Purgatory when Beatrice comes down from heaven Dante turns to Virgil in fear "like a child running to his mama when afraid or in distress" and finds him disappeared back to Limbo. The most powerful moment I've ever read in literature, made me weep uncontrollably.

Man, Dante is such an incredible writer.

>>8805885
It doesn't make sense because the Christian doctrine of salvation (everyone who never hears the gospel goes to hell) doesn't make sense. I'm sure Dante would have loved to put Virgil in Paradise like he managed to invent a tale to justify Statius in there, but even the whole Limbo thing for virtuous pagans was a big enough fudge as it was.