REPUBLICANISM:

This year marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, one of the great authors of Western civilization. A mind formed in the Middle Ages might seem to have little to say to us today, but Dante's magnificent mix of the traditions of antiquity, Christianity, and medievalism make him an ideal companion especially in our enlightened, secular age. One outstanding example of his enduring relevance is in his portrayal of liberty--and its absence--in Inferno, the first canticle of his Divine Comedy.

We think of liberty today primarily in a political register. To be free is to live in a republic, to vote, speak freely, assemble freely, and so on. But there is another form of liberty that is equally important, which focuses on how an individual exercises his free will and judgment. At first glance, since we are all equally endowed with free will and the ability to judge freely, we must all be equally free. But even in the 14th century this was a misconception that Dante sought to correct. Dante argues that judgment consists in knowing and pursuing the good. Those who err in either respect are not free. Every sinner in Hell has judged incorrectly and has therefore impaired his freedom in some way.

Liberty is a cornerstone of The Divine Comedy. "He's in search of liberty," Virgil says of Dante in Purgatory. And in Paradise, where man is truly free, we see liberty closely tied to motion and God's love. But before Dante can ascend to God, he must descend into Hell. He must see what it means to be deprived of God's love and the manifold ways we can be enslaved. He must understand that liberty is possible only with order. Every sinner in Hell is an example of a life without order. Dante's encounter with these very human sinners shows him how evil can assume many different forms, how sins beget sins, and how easily we can reject liberty without even knowing it.

Hell is rigidly ordered in accordance with God's will, consisting of nine circles divided into three broad types of evil, listed in order of increasing severity: incontinence, violence, and deceit. It is important to note that the punishments meted out in Hell are less divine vengeance than they are the inevitable outcome of the way the sinners lived their lives. They freely chose to do this to themselves. Their punishment in Hell--the contrapasso--is the logical extension of what they were doing in life. A sinner on earth who fails to repent and change his ways is already living his own punishment. We need not subscribe to Dante's religious worldview to acknowledge that our vices or insecurities can imprison and devour us.

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