Dante's Hell, Aquinas's Moral Theory, and the Love of God

Abstract

‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ is, as we all recognize, the inscription over the gate of Dante's hell; but we perhaps forget what precedes that memorable line. Hell, the inscription says, was built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love. Those of us who remember Dante's vivid picture of Farinata in the perpetually burning tombs or Ulysses in the unending and yet unconsuming flames may be able to credit Dante's idea that Hell was constructed by divine power; and if we understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as denoting an intellectual virtue only (and not as connoting a mixed moral and intellectual one), then we might agree that only divine wisdom is capable of making something like Dante's hell.