Our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, walk beyond hell's entrance to encounter, well, the sort of hell we thought we were going to get all along. Maybe not the wasps. But the rest of it? The chaos and pain, the darkness and the suffering? Yep, that hell.

We've come to the place of the angels and humans who refused to make a choice in this life. In other words, we've come to the place for those who quite literally didn't do anything!

The imagery may be fairly standard, but this passage is the wild west of Christian theology. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we follow the pilgrim into the first dedicated space in the hell.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[02:17] My English translation of INFERNO, Canto III, Lines 22 - 69

[05:12] A little pep talk from me to spur you on in reading the COMEDY.

[08:41] "I began to weep"--the pilgrim's first response to hell. It's not equivalent to Virgil's smile.

[13:48] A first glance at the damned--and a first glance at the expansive nature of Dante-the-poet's imagination: He can make up celestial beings that exist nowhere else in Christianity, angels who neither fought for God nor chose to side with Lucifer.

[18:02] What is the nature of sin? Is it a choice, an act of the will? Or a state of being? Our poet seems to be choosing "choice." Problem is, the church doesn't at this point in history.

[20:34] A little bit of existential reality from this medieval poet.

[23:00] Who is the shade who made "the great refusal"?

[28:22] One final problem: Maybe not giving us adequate clues to solve the matter of who made "the great refusal" shows us our pilgrim's cowardice. Maybe his refusal to name this person shows us that he's still trying to remain neutral.

[30:20] We got the hell we wanted. We got it out of the way. Now the poet's imagination can be fully engaged.

Mentioned in this episode:

A brief introduction to the walk ahead