Marriage can be hell....if we make it that way. This week we offer the introductory chapter to to the section of our book that describes marriages in Hell...
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!" These words in somber color I beheld written upon the summit of a gate...
— Dante
The gates of Hell are locked from the inside.
— C.S. Lewis
In Catholic theology Hell is not really so much a place as it is a state of being. Hell, say the theologians, is an absence of God, which is to say, an absence of love in our lives. Hell is a definitive self-exclusion from love. If it is a place, it is the place we find ourselves in when we have become so centered on ourselves that we have cut self-giving love completely out of our lives.
In spite of the many popular culture references both modern and medieval that describe Hell as a place to which you are condemned by God’s judgment due to your bad behavior, the teaching of the church is that we put ourselves in that dark lonely place. We are called over and over throughout our lives to love, and each time we hear that call we make a choice: to will our own good or to will the good of the other. To act selfishly or to act with love.
The more we answer the call to love ourselves rather than another, the more we lose the ability to practice love until in the end we find we can't do it at all.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, which takes the author on a journey through Hell and Purgatory into Heaven, is a brilliant epic poem about the quest for love, Dante conceives of Hell as a great cavern of vast concentric circles, gloomy and dark and cold save for a few areas where fires are used to torture lost souls. Each circle is filled with those who cut themselves off from love by committing particular sins that can be ultimately grouped together, roughly, as falling under one of the seven deadly sins.
At the very center, imprisoned in the ice created by his own freezing pride is a gigantic Satan, futilely beating his great bat wings and sending gusts of cold air up and through the great cavern of Hell.
Hell, in Dante's poem, is made up of people who got what they sought.
Couple at the Gates of Hell. Image created by Dawna Peterson in the style of Gustav Dore using the Bing Image Generator AI.
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