22 The Question of an Eternal Hell
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore;
fecemi la divina podestate,
la somma sap1enza e 'l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
(Inferno IIl.1-9)(Through me lies the way into the sorrowful city, /
through me lies the way to eternal misery, / through
me lies the way that passes through the lost people. /
Justice moved my Father on high; / I was fashioned
by divine power, / highest wisdom, and primal
love. / There were no things created before me, /
Save those that are eternal, and I eternally endure: /
Abandon every hope, you who enter in.)Fashioned by primal love. I cannot even guess how often I have
heard those words repeated as an example of some wonder-
ful or terrible paradox of the faith, one that tells us something
astonishingly and miraculously true and profound about the
high, vertiginous dignity of being created in the divine image,
and thus of being granted the power to choose "this very day"
between good and evil, life and death. We see this mystery
played out, supposedly, in the way that each of the punish-
ments Dante observes being inflicted upon the damned is not
only a fitting recompense for that particular sinner's special
transgressions, but fitting precisely because it is clearly in some
sense a self-imposed penalty; each chastisement is an inverted
expression of the violence that the sinner worked upon the
world during his or her life, and thereby worked upon himself
or herself in eternity. Divine mercy, you see, has provided an