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| Satan is Boring |
Hell is boring. Dante understood this in a way that still impacts us with its power: in hell, you do the same damned thing over and over both because you want to and because you have to.
At the very center hell--and at the bottom, stuck in the drain of the cosmos as it were-- Satan stands encased in ice, miserably chewing sinners, flapping his wings, his face a mess of tears, blood, and snot, endlessly and mindlessly rebelling against God. Satan is boring, not frightful, in Dante's scheme. At first sight, Satan is pretty scary, but if you stood watching him for a few days or even a few hours, you'd get tired of it. "Let's move on, ok?" you would ask Virgil.
All the other sinners are boring, too, ultimately. If Dante the pilgrim had stuck around talking to them much longer than he did, he would have run out of things to say, and the damned would have said the same thing over and over. Imagine talking to Farinata for more than, say, 15 minutes. He would drone on and on about his family and how important he is, and you'd want to tell him to shut up but he wouldn't. Because he's is damned and so he will be talking about himself forever. How boring.
C. S. Lewis captured something of this cyclic element of forever turning against God's love in his magnificent The Great Divorce. In the endlessly sprawling city of Hell, people re-live their obsessions again and again, making everyone else want to move away from everyone else to some more distant point where you don't have to listen to others talk about themselves all the time, though you will continue to talk about yourself to anyone nearby. Artists, mothers, skeptics, everyone, yammer on and on. One reason they can't handle heaven is that they would have to forget themselves to stay in heaven , and by definition being damned is being incurvatus est for all eternity. And we all know how boring self absorbed people are because we are all self-absorbed and damned to that incurving if it weren't for God's grace busting us loose.
Dante manages to tell a good story because he keeps moving through hell, seeing the sights on his way back into the light, back to daytime on Mount Purgatory, and ultimately to the astonishing paradox of lighted nighttime in heaven as he ascends through levels of light up through the circles of stars, and then finally to see the love that moves the sun and stars. His movement as pilgrim allows him (and us) to keep the story-line moving, and this parallels our own pilgrimage through this present time. We move through time, never pausing for long because we are temporal creatures and are incapable of standing still, even if we wanted to. Though it sometimes feels as if our lives are passing far too quickly, that brief life is better than being frozen in an eternity of hateful repetition--being stuck in hell.
Dante the artist pulls off something marvelous--showing the spiritual truth of sin by telling a story of a man's movement through the immobility of hell. Yes, Francesca is moving, and yes the damned souls in the tar can jump in and out of it, and others can walk, crawl, or chew, but they make these motions over and over, mindlessly, without respite, and this is a kind of immobility. Dante tells us the truth of hell's boredom by coming up with the expedience of his journey. Part of Dante's artistic brilliance is to come up with this plot: the Inferno is a swiftly moving story about a place of ultimate boredom where nothing changes.
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| Hell, where everything is always the same |