Tag Archives: Dante

Fire, Exile, and Vision: The Historical and Spiritual Roots of The Divine Comedy

This article uncovers the historical, political, and spiritual forces behind Dante’s Divine Comedy, including his exile from Florence, critique of Church and Empire, and the influence of Beatrice, Virgil, and Scholastic theology—revealing the poem as both a mystical vision and a personal act of redemption.

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Despair and Doctrine: Suicide Across Religious Traditions

A comparative theological examination of suicide in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, exploring how each tradition interprets suicide through doctrines of will, suffering, afterlife, and divine justice, offering context to Dante’s unyielding vision in Inferno.

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Mapping the Abyss: A Journey Through Dante’s Circles of Hell

This article explores Dante’s Inferno as a structured moral and theological descent, examining the logic behind each of the nine circles of Hell. From lust and gluttony to fraud and treachery, each level reveals how Dante views sin not just as misdeed but as a deformation of the soul and will.

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The Forest and the Hounds: Dante’s Seventh Circle and the Political Economy of Despair

Dante’s Inferno presents the Seventh Circle of Hell as the realm of suicides and profligates, those who destroy the self, whether through despair or excess. This article explores the theological, philosophical, and symbolic dimensions of their punishment, revealing a moral economy where the will, once corrupted, leads to irreversible ruin, the ultimate truth: suicide is irredeemable.

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