Dante, Lewis, von Balthasar: Hell in Art and Life

 

   

  Another person’s cruelty or selfishness can seem so complete that we are tempted to see them not merely as flawed, but as lost. At the same time, deeper knowledge of human beings often complicates judgment (I am thinking, for example, of both the film and the book Dead Man Walking). The more we understand a person’s fears, wounds, history, and limitations, the harder it becomes to imagine them as simply evil. Between these two experiences of moral seriousness and compassion for finite creatures lies one of the oldest and most difficult questions for me and many others.

  What I want to explore here by examining an aspect of Dante’s Inferno and C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is whether such images illuminate enduring truths about human beings: our capacity for self-deception, resentment, alienation, moral blindness, and resistance to love. Also the limits of judgment in a world inhabited by finite and wounded creatures. The question of what really happens in a possible afterlife is not my interest here.

. . .

  I wrote in my last entry that I have a lot of ambivalence to Lewis' The Great Divorce, as I do to Dante’s Inferno for the same reason. I think both portray the damned soul or the lost way in a chilling, compelling way, that is not the source of my ambivalence. I find these two pictures of the lost soul scary because they do make sense of my experience of certain people and aspects of myself – and to an extent of House, as I wrote. My ambivalence stems from sense that for a creature, man, mortal to image actual souls damned is a terrible thing (thus my ambivalence also to Dante, whom I love and hate in equal measure). A little Berry poem entitled Dante nails it:

                                If you imagine

                               others are there,

                               you are there yourself.

                               

That seems to capture a central aspect of Christ's love you enemy and judge not lest you be judged teaching. I have the sense that both Lewis and Dante were not just imagining and thinking about the form of a lost soul but imaging Hell full of lost souls, partly, I suspect, to scare non-Christian readers, which inversely makes Christian readers feel good.

     My concern is not skepticism about evil or the possibility of self-destruction. In fact, I think Lewis’s idea is profound, that souls can become closed, hardened, trapped in resentment, pride, fear, unreality. That is why House, and certain real people, aspects of my own life, strike me as spiritually frightening rather than merely mistaken. I do fear ‘losing my soul,’ have come close to that precipice more than once, and I think it is a rational fear.

     The issue for me is whether a finite, fallible human being can rightly place others within a final vision of damnation without spiritually implicating himself in the very judgment he renders, as Berry says in his poem. The force of the poem is spiritual more than doctrinal. The moment one begins imaginatively to inhabit the standpoint of ultimate judgment over others, which you do when you imagine others in Hell, something toxic enters the soul: the feeling of superiority, the hardening of the heart, the loss of pity, the feeling of satisfaction in being included in the elect – in short, the temptation to divide humanity into the saved and the damned with oneself tacitly among the former. And that is deeply connected to Christ’s warnings Judge not, that ye be not judged and Love your enemies. Not because judgment completely disappears – Christ plainly speaks of good and evil, and a rational person recognizes moral reality – but because the stance appropriate to fallen human beings is radically different from detached condemnation. The Christian is called to see even the sinner (i.e. everyone, oneself included) under the aspect of possible redemption and shared fragility.

    This is where my ambivalence toward Dante begins. The Divine Comedy is magnificent as poetry, metaphysics, moral vision, symbolic architecture. But it can also tempt readers into precisely the posture Berry warns against: the imaginative enjoyment of seeing others fixed eternally in their sins. That is even a theme of the poem, the inappropriacy of pity for the damned. Actually, it is bit more complex in the Inferno.

    Thomas Aquinas argues that the blessed in heaven do not grieve over the damned (and their torments in Hell) because their wills are perfectly aligned with divine justice. The damned are not viewed as unfortunate victims in the modern sentimental sense but as persons who have definitively rejected the good. To pity them against God’s judgment and God’s chosen punishments would imply that divine justice is somehow regrettable or mistaken. Aquinas even says that the blessed rejoice in the manifestation of divine justice, though modern readers often recoil from that formulation. It is true that Aquinas also distinguishes kinds of pity. Compassion for sinners in this life is entirely appropriate and indeed necessary. Mercy is one of the highest virtues for creatures like us living within history, uncertainty, weakness, and the possibility of repentance. The issue concerns the final state of souls after judgment, where, in the traditional picture, repentance is no longer possible.

    Dante turns this theological principle into drama. Early in the Inferno, the pilgrim Dante repeatedly pities the damned. He faints over Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, weeps, hesitates, and responds emotionally to suffering. But as the poem progresses, this pity is increasingly presented as spiritually immature or confused. Virgil often rebukes him. One of the clearest moments comes in Canto XX, where Dante weeps for the diviners whose heads are twisted backward. Virgil sharply tells him: “There is no place for pity here (Ciardi translation).” The meaning is severe: in hell, pity becomes impious if it refuses to acknowledge divine judgment. To continue reacting merely sentimentally, which in Dante’s theological framework is all rationally Dante’s response can be, is to misunderstand reality itself. And yet Dante’s poem simultaneously does seem to invite (and perhaps discipline) pity. The reader is not simply trained into hardness. After all, the Inferno is filled with psychologically vivid, tragic, even recognizable human beings. Dante the poet gives them immense reality and often enormous pathos. One could even argue that the power of the poem depends on our inability fully to extinguish compassion.

     That said, I cannot ignore thinking of Filippo Argenti in the Inferno, Canto VIII, one of the most disturbing moments in the poem precisely because Dante the pilgrim not only ceases to pity but actively delights in the sinner’s humiliation. And this is still early in the journey. Argenti appears among the wrathful submerged in the Styx. He rises from the black marsh and confronts Dante aggressively. Dante responds with open contempt. When Argenti tries to climb into the boat, Virgil pushes him away. Then the other wrathful souls attack Argenti, tearing at him savagely in the mire. What is shocking is Dante’s reaction. He does not merely accept the punishment as just. He expresses satisfaction at seeing Argenti destroyed. Virgil praises Dante for this response, embracing and kissing him as though he has achieved moral progress. Dante even says he still praises God for what happened to Argenti.

It is impossible for me not to see this as evil sadism. The scene, according to many commentators, marks a transition: Dante is learning not merely to suspend pity but to participate emotionally in divine judgment, i.e., righteous indignation replacing sinful softness. Argenti was traditionally understood as a violent, arrogant political enemy of Dante’s faction in Florence, so the scene also carries a personal dimension. So much for loving your enemies and not judging. (I also can’t help of the Nazi attitude toward the condemned souls in their death camps. That fact that the SS knew those deemed unworthy of life were condemned did nothing in many cases to evoke pity but the opposite, encouraged sadism.) Dante stages the argument of Aquinas, and the pilgrim learns to distinguish compassion for the living with hardness toward the damned, learning not to confuse love with sentimental refusal of judgment. I come away haunted by another possibility: that the refusal of pity itself risks becoming spiritually dangerous. I would feel polluted if I shared in Dante’s glee on Argenti’s fate. 

     This is where the poem becomes potentially toxic spiritually and morally. Dante is not merely presenting abstract doctrine. He dramatizes what happens when a human being learns to see reality through the lens of eternal judgment. The question becomes: does this purify love, or corrupt it?

Berry’s belief as expressed in his poem Dante – that imagining others in hell places oneself there – pushes against the emotional logic of the Argenti scene. Berry rightly fears the spiritual deformation that can arise when hatred or contempt are baptized as justice.

     I expect that a defender of Dante would likely answer that modern sentimentality often refuses to take evil seriously enough. Argenti is not merely “flawed.” He represents a soul wholly consumed by wrath and self-assertion. Dante’s hardening reflects the conviction that evil cannot always be met merely with therapeutic compassion. Granted. That does not erase the distinction between hating the sin (and its poisoning of a soul) and the possibility of compassion contained in Christ’s teaching. What is it to love your enemies? Not to have affectionate warm feelings for them. Not to try to like them in spite of their faults and what they are doing to you. Aquinas hits the nail on the head here: to love anyone is to will their good. Pieper takes it to an existential level: to love anyone is to will their existence. Now assume that Argenti was indeed irredeemably wicked, beyond any hope of recovery. He has become an enemy of his neighbor, of nature, of community, of God. He is incapable of love at any level. What can it mean to will his good? To will his continued existence even? Is this where the Christian command to love one’s enemies finally reaches a limit at the threshold of damnation? Or does perhaps the very idea of willing the good of another reveal something deeper about reality than the profane imagination can understand?

    For Aquinas, the answer is relatively clear within his metaphysical framework. To will the good of a person is to will the fulfillment proper to rational nature: union with God, truth, beatitude. If a soul has definitively rejected that end, then the order of justice requires assent to the consequences of that rejection. One no longer wills for the damned what cannot now be had. One wills the order of the universe as a whole, including justice. The existence of the damned manifests something real about freedom, sin, and divine order.

     But the Berry poem that speaks to me presses beneath this framework. It asks whether there remains some residue of love irreducible even to justice. Pieper’s formulation sharpens the issue enormously: to love someone is to say, “It is good that you exist.” Not merely that they possess this or that quality, nor that they are useful, nor even morally admirable, but that their being itself is a good.

    If Argenti has become pure self-assertion, pure hatred, a destroyer of community and neighbor, then two possibilities seem to present themselves.

Either his continued existence itself has become an evil. In that case, love would seem to reach its limit. One might still acknowledge the justice of his punishment while no longer willing his being as such. This seems close to the emotional logic of parts of Dante. Better that he just cease to exist, however, than to subject him to eternal sadistic tortures than the elect are supposed to rejoice over.

   Or his existence remains metaphysically good even if morally ruined. Evil would then never become a positive substance, never fully erase the ontological goodness of creaturehood. Even those deserving damnation – as in a sense we all do according to some theologians – would remain, in some terrible and wounded sense, beings whose existence proceeds from divine love. This second possibility seems closer to the Berry poem. For if existence itself is a gift grounded in divine love, then to will the annihilation or even the sheer non-being of another person seems close to consenting to hatred itself. One can condemn the corruption of the soul while still trembling before the mystery that this being was called into existence at all.

   This may partly explain why some Christians have affirmed universal hope (more on this below), even when refusing dogmatic universalism. Not because evil is unreal, nor because justice is sentimentalized away, but because love seems metaphysically deeper than condemnation. The Cross appears not merely as judgment but as divine solidarity with ruined creatures. That is perhaps the crucial difference between tragic diagnosis and self-righteous condemnation.

     But this example is not the right one because we assumed for the sake of argument that Argenti had lost his soul. In real life, we cannot know any such thing. We might suspect that certain individuals (Hitler, Stalin, on a different plane Trump; or even Dr. House, who cannot choose to love) have lost their souls but we are in no position to know such thing. We cannot finally stand outside the human condition as neutral observers. The line between clarity and pride is thin. To imagine ourselves fully capable of seeing who belongs in Hell already involves a spiritual distortion, a forgetting of our own dependence on mercy. That is why Dante’s (and Lewis’, who I will discuss next) audacity is so disturbing. They poetically imagine Hell full, in Dante’s case of real individuals like Argenti. And perhaps this is why figures like Wendell Berry, Raimond Gaita, or Iris Murdoch appeal to me more deeply than some harder-edged apologetic traditions. They tend to preserve moral seriousness while resisting the temptation to convert insight into superiority.

    I think Berry’s poem could function as a spiritual rule against metaphysical pride. It does not imply a denial of evil, nor does it imply sentimental universalism. At bottom it is a refusal to let one’s vision of judgment eclipse compassion, humility, and awareness of one’s own vulnerability to blindness.

 

. . .

 

   The Great Divorce tries to solve precisely the problem that troubles me in Inferno: how can damnation exist without turning heaven into cruelty? Lewis softens the emotional and metaphysical structure of hell compared to Dante. Hell in The Great Divorce is not primarily a place of externally imposed torture or divine vengeance. It is a condition above all of self-enclosure; thus of resentment, pride, illusion, and refusal of joy. The damned are not mainly punished by God; they increasingly imprison themselves within habits of soul they refuse to surrender. That is why Lewis’s famous line is: “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” The ghosts are repeatedly invited toward reality, joy, and communion. Almost all refuse because they cling to some ruling attachment: self-pity, control, intellectual vanity, possessiveness, resentment, erotic fixation, artistic ego, or the desire to preserve the autonomous self against transformation. As I said, I think that is a profound insight.

  So Lewis removes the overt sadism or punitive triumph one sometimes feels in Dante. There is no equivalent of the Filippo Argenti scene. The saved do not delight in torment. Indeed, many of the heavenly figures are gentle, patient, sorrowful, and loving toward the ghosts. The heavenly figures always seem lucid, stable, and ultimately correct; the ghosts are often recognizable caricatures of moral or intellectual failure. The reader is subtly maneuvered into consenting to the rejection of the ghosts. One begins by sympathizing with them, then gradually sees why they “cannot” remain in heaven without surrendering the very thing constituting their identity, their ruling passion, so to speak. That process can feel spiritually coercive. The alternatives are framed so starkly that refusal appears tragic but also somehow inevitable. The damned become intelligible as damned. Thus no overt sadism, but a metaphysical setup in which certain forms of soul become progressively incapable of love, reality, or joy. Hell becomes psychologically believable. And once hell becomes psychologically believable, a terrible implication emerges: one can begin to recognize actual persons – perhaps even oneself – in these patterns of refusal. That is where the book becomes frightening. I saw this happening to House. Lewis’s damned souls are often not monsters but persons whose self-protective structures harden into metaphysical barriers. Pride, irony, intellectual superiority, grievance, the refusal to become vulnerable become eternalizing tendencies. Lewis’s horror is not medieval torture but spiritual ossification.

   I have always thought Lewis gets closer to Hell than Dante. Why then does the book still feel somewhat sadistic to me? Because the narrative can seem to require the reader to assent emotionally to the exclusion of certain souls. Even if no one is actively tortured, the structure still asks the reader to acknowledge that some persons may forever refuse love and thus separate themselves from reality itself. And there can be a subtle satisfaction in recognizing the ghosts’ evasions and watching them exposed. That is what Berry rightly fears, i.e., the moral danger of imaginatively consenting to another’s damnation at all. Lewis seems aware of the danger. The book is suffused less with triumph than with sadness. But the metaphysical confidence of the setup – the apparent inevitability with which souls reveal what they truly are – is still spiritually chilling, especially to someone deeply committed to charity and the mystery of persons.

 

. . .

 

The line of thought I am trying to pursue here is less a denial that hell could exist and more like a moral suspicion toward the artistic representation of damnation, especially when it invites the spectator into a stable perspective of judgment over others. Good art normally deepens reality by deepening vision, sympathy, participation in being. Even tragedy does this. In Sophocles or William Shakespeare, terrible suffering does not finally strip characters of their humanity. Tragic art tends to preserve some mysterious remainder: pity, grandeur, vulnerability, lost possibility. The spectator is enlarged through compassion and fear.

    But a fully realized hell seems to resist this. Why? Because the damned, if truly damned, would no longer be tragic in the classical sense. Tragedy presupposes remaining humanity, remaining depth, remaining possibility of recognition. But a soul wholly fixed in hatred or self-enclosure becomes difficult to portray without either turning evil into spectacle, inviting contempt, or aestheticizing damnation itself. Perhaps that is what troubles me about Dante and Lewis. Not just that they portray hell, but that the reader risks acquiring a quasi-divine vantage point over souls. The idea is that finite creatures should perhaps tremble before the mystery of judgment rather than imaginatively inhabit it too confidently.

   That does not imply that art cannot imagine hell indirectly. Some of the greatest modern works do that by refusing closure. Think of Dostoevsky, where damnation appears as spiritual isolation, resentment, or refusal of love, but without final certainty; or Kafka, where judgment becomes opaque and terrifying precisely because no secure moral standpoint is granted to the reader; or T. S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men,” where spiritual emptiness is rendered as exhaustion and fragmentation rather than infernal spectacle; or even aspects of House, where self-protective irony and wounded intelligence threaten to calcify into incapacity for communion. These works often feel morally safer because they do not ask the audience to rejoice in exclusion.

    Perhaps what I am trying to get at is that hell may be representable only under conditions of radical humility such that the artist never fully claims the authority to see another soul as definitively abandoned by love. I might even want to argue that the Christian imagination is safest artistically when portraying hell phenomenologically rather than ontologically: i.e., not “these people are damned,” but “this is what alienation from love begins to look like.” That preserves warning without requiring imaginative triumph over the lost.

 

. . .

 

I think theologically Hans Urs von Balthasar's little book Ein kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle expresses the view I judge to be most Christ-like. He attempts to preserve simultaneously the full seriousness of evil and damnation, the reality of human freedom, the warnings of Christ, and yet the Christian obligation never to cease hoping for the salvation of every person. He refuses both easy universalism (“of course everyone is saved”) and the spiritually dangerous confidence of assigning persons to damnation. His position, often simplified as “dare we hope that all men be saved?”, is not really a doctrinal assertion about the final population of Hell. It is more a discipline of hope and charity. The Christian must never presume salvation, but neither may he cease willing and hoping the good of every soul. That fits very closely with the Berry poem and my unease before Dante’s and Lewis’s imaginative certainty.

   Balthasar recognizes that the moment Hell becomes psychologically satisfying, imaginatively populated with one’s enemies, or integrated into a posture of superiority, something toxic has entered the soul. And yet he also refuses sentimentality. He does not deny the terrifying possibility of radical self-closure, the reality of evil, or the possibility that freedom can reject love. Indeed, in some ways his account may make Hell more frightening, not less, because it is understood less as externally imposed punishment and more as the mystery of a creature refusing communion with the Good itself, which is literally demonic. That connects  to my last entry on House and The Great Divorce. The danger is progressively losing the capacity to receive reality as gift, to love, to trust, to rejoice in what is outside the self.

    Balthasar adds an essential corrective to certain imaginings of damnation: the Christian stance toward even the most lost person must remain one of sorrow, hope, prayer, and humility and not metaphysical triumphalism. This is probably why his view feels spiritually safer to me than some stronger infernal traditions. It leaves judgment to God while preserving existential seriousness. And this also is consistent with my attraction for thinkers like Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch. There is in all of them a refusal to sever truth from love. One does not truly see another person while ceasing to see them under the aspect of pity, fragility, and possible redemption.

My position seems neither liberal sentimentalism nor rigid orthodoxy in the caricatured sense. It is closer to a theology of radical seriousness joined to radical humility.

     And as we are all finite, that is radically conditioned, that is not angels (pure unconditioned spirit, little centers of absolute consciousness), mercy corresponds to our nature. We are indeed responsible for our lives, but not in an absolute sense that precludes mercy. Humans cannot really be demonic except analogously. A human being never becomes pure negation, pure hatred, pure spirit. Even the worst person retains traces of creatureliness: dependency, fragmentation, vulnerability, some wounded relation to the good. Human evil is parasitic and unstable. It lacks the terrible purity attributed to fallen angels in traditional theology.

    If this is true, then one implication is that final damnation becomes extraordinarily difficult to imagine concretely for human persons. Not logically impossible perhaps – one could still say freedom includes the fearful possibility of radical refusal – but existentially mysterious in a way that should produce trembling rather than confident imaginative representation. For how could a finite, radically conditioned creature perform the kind of utterly lucid, total, irrevocable self-enclosure that eternal damnation seems to require?

   This does not lead straightforwardly to universalism. One may still insist, as I do, that human evil is real, that freedom matters, that persons can deform themselves terribly, that alienation from God is possible. But it shifts emphasis away from infernal certainty and toward humility, mercy, and hope. It also sheds light on why the harsh infernal imagination is spiritually dangerous. It risks treating human beings as though they were already pure moral essences rather than tragic mixtures of freedom and woundedness.

      Thus mercy may correspond not merely to divine kindness but to metaphysical truth about what human beings are. Perhaps this is why the Incarnation matters so much here. Christianity does not proclaim salvation through an angelic judge standing outside human frailty. It proclaims God entering finitude itself: hunger, exhaustion, temptation, abandonment, bodily suffering, historical existence. The Cross then becomes not merely a legal mechanism satisfying justice, but divine solidarity with conditioned existence.

    Perhaps the final judgment, whatever else it may be, cannot simply resemble the moral sorting procedures imagined by finite and frightened creatures. Perhaps that is contained in Christ’s teaching of loving your enemies and not judging other people.

 

. . .

 

   The question of hell is inseparable from the question: what kind of beings are human beings? Even someone who does not believe in God, revelation, or a literal afterlife can still recognize the underlying anthropological issue. Are human beings best understood as radically autonomous centers of choice, wholly responsible for themselves in isolation from history, psychology, embodiment, and social formation? Or are we finite, vulnerable, conditioned creatures whose freedom is real but always entangled with dependence, blindness, need, and woundedness? Once posed in those terms, the discussion ceases to be merely “religious.” It becomes a meditation on guilt, responsibility, mercy, punishment, resentment, forgiveness, and the limits of judgment, which are questions unavoidable in every human society.

    Modern culture often adopts a harshly moralistic language of condemnation, treating persons as though they were reducible to their worst acts or beliefs. On the other hand, psychology, sociology, and trauma theory increasingly reveal how deeply human action is conditioned by forces not fully chosen by the self. The result is tension: we continue to judge absolutely while simultaneously recognizing how little of ourselves we fully author. That tension is already present in the theological problem of hell. The line of thought I am trying to work outcould therefore be framed not as a doctrinal dispute about the afterlife but as an exploration of the moral meaning of finitude. To what extent can finite beings deserve absolute judgment? What would an utterly lucid and final rejection of the good even look like in a creature whose consciousness is never fully transparent to itself? Can mercy be something deeper than the suspension of justice: namely, a truthful response to the kind of beings we actually are? In ordinary life we condemn, yet when we come to know a person deeply – their childhood, fears, loneliness, humiliations, confusions – condemnation often becomes more difficult without disappearing entirely. Understanding complicates judgment.

    This does not abolish moral seriousness. In some ways it intensifies it. Evil remains real. People can become cruel, manipulative, destructive, spiritually deadened. But the more concretely human a person appears, the harder it becomes to imagine them as a pure embodiment of evil. That may be the deepest anthropological challenge this line of thought poses to certain infernal imaginations, i.e., they risk presupposing a conception of the person more angelic or demonic than human.Again, this partly explains why thinkers as different as Dostoevsky, Weil, Murdoch, Gaita, and even von Balthasar continue to matter even outside explicitly religious contexts. They treat moral life not as the operation of isolated wills but as something woven through attention, suffering, love, blindness, formation, and the overall fragility of human life.

. . .

 

 I read the Inferno or The Great Divorce symbolically. In my reading, as I suppose for nearly every other reader, I don’t see hell not first as a geographical afterlife location but as the imaginative unveiling of spiritual and anthropological truths already partially visible within ordinary human existence. Perhaps Dante wrote it in that spirit. I want to understand what truths about the soul, freedom, love, self-deception, and alienation are being disclosed through these images. Dante’s punishments are symbolic enactments of inner realities. The poetic justice – the punishment mirroring the sin – expresses the idea that actions form the soul from within. Sin is not merely rule-breaking followed by external punishment. It is a way of becoming. The wrathful tearing at one another in the Styx symbolize anger taking over one’s soul. The fraudulent are trapped in worlds of deception because deception has become their mode of being. The frozen hell around Judas Iscariot symbolizes the absolute coldness of betrayal and lovelessness. Read symbolically, the poem says that you eventually inhabit the moral and spiritual reality you cultivate.

    Likewise, in The Great Divorce, the ghosts symbolize structures of soul recognizable in ordinary life such as resentment that cannot relinquish grievance, intelligence that uses irony to avoid vulnerability, possessive love that consumes the beloved, self-pity that secretly enjoys its own suffering,

aestheticism detached from reality, and moral superiority masking fear.

The point for me as a reader at least then is not that these particular people are literally damned but these tendencies, if absolutized, cut us off from reality, joy, communion, and love. Hell becomes less a divine torture chamber than a vision of what radical self-enclosure would mean existentially.

    This kind of reading allows me to love the works in spite of my deep ambivalence about them. If we read Dante and Lewis as literal cartographers of eternity – and they did not see themselves as such – we pressured into adopting a quasi-divine standpoint over souls. We start classifying the damned. Compassion becomes spiritually suspect. The imaginative act itself can feel morally dangerous. The damned are not “other people.” They are possibilities within the self and within human communities. Then Filippo Argenti is not merely a man in hell, for instance; he is wrath becoming flesh. The frozen traitors are betrayals of love hardened into spiritual paralysis. Lewis’s ghosts are evasions of reality already putting pressure on ordinary consciousness. Such a reading preserves the moral seriousness of the works without requiring certainty about final judgment. And symbol itself may be the proper mode here given that the realities involved exceed literal comprehension. Symbol allows us to approach truths too large, inward, or terrifying for straightforward conceptual language. A symbol both reveals and protects mystery. It points without fully possessing. A symbolic inferno can picture alienation, self-deformation, and resistance to love without claiming exhaustive knowledge of any actual soul’s final state. Dante and Lewis are at their greatest not when read as phenomenologists of spiritual possibility.

    This lessens but does not remove my ambivalence.