Transgenderism and Perfect Freedom
There are many reasons to read Dante’s Divine Comedy, not least the pleasure of encountering sheer imaginative genius. But in the end, the most important reason is one he identifies in a letter to a patron, Can Grande della Scala: “the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice.”
This choice becomes stark in the fate of Lucifer. You can get tangled up trying to figure out how certain sinners warrant specific punishments in Dante’s Hell. But Satan in Dante represents one large choice.
He’s not Milton’s romantic rebel in Paradise Lost or some clever tempter like C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape. He’s the being who has – radically, purely, eternally – rejected God and the whole order of the universe He created. Satan thinks he’s struck out on the path to total freedom from all that, but he literally could not be more wrong.
Dante shows this in an unforgettable image. Satan is frozen in ice at the very bottom of the universe, the lowest reaches of Hell. He flaps bat-like wings seeking to free himself. But the wind they create only freezes him further. It’s like the old “Chinese handcuffs” that we used to play with as children. You stick your fingers into the ends of a kind of tube, and the harder you try to pull them out the tighter it gets.
For rebels against God, it can’t be any other way.
Click here to read the rest of Dr. Royal’s column at The Catholic Thing . . .