/lit/ - Literature

So.... what are the best texts to read about sedevacantism?

My family are protestant, are they saved? How can I be saved when even the catholic church is corrupt?

Will the lord guide me to the good?

Over half way through The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Here's my initial thoughts.

I will say, while I think Dante's descriptions are beautiful and his imagination and creativity is extraordinary, I really roll my eyes hard at the symbolic reasons that people are sent to hell. There's an entire Canto dedicated to the sodomites. He gives them the most respect of anyone in the book, and praises them to high heaven, but I can't help but be somewhat taken aback by all the ways people are punished in hell for reasons which sometimes don't even make sense. There's also a place in hell for people who commit suicide, which is stupid. It shows the extremely arbitrary nature of the Christian idea of punishment.

Homer, on the other hand, was completely impartial and just sort of sent his characters around letting the reader judge what the reader may think of the characters. There's no heavy handed moralism in Homer. I admire Dante's boldness in saying who he thinks deserves hell, and to what degree, and it is undoubtedly a beautiful book, which I still rank very highly, but if there is one flaw it would be that Dante ultimately follows his religion like an orthodox imbecile, who acts like his morality soars above everyone else's.

Another issue with the book, is instead of having a story which unfolds, he's essentially just walking from person to person and asking them about their sins, and the good parts are in between these moments when more interesting changes of scenery and hell monsters appear.

Still more, a lot of the references he makes are references which only people who lived in his time would know without needing supplementary notes. Fortunately the editions of the books which contain The Inferno have these notes, but I think moves like that cheapen the universality and timelessness of the book. I do appreciate that a lot of the references were from Greek mythology, which adds to the timelessness, but a lot of the people in hell were people from Dante's own city, who virtually no one but the people who lived there and historians will remember.

That said, the book is a high aesthetic achievement, in terms of the descriptions of hell, the interconnectedness of all the symbolisms and themes, and the meanings which he weaves into everything. I am not trying to be a part of "the school of resentment" as Harold Bloom might call it, I just think this book deserves some criticism because parts of it are too anachronistic, and can't be read without supplementary explanations (a problem Homer didn't have), and Dante is the biggest moralist ever.

>>11782864
This year we read the Inferno, next year the Purgatorio, the year after that Paradiso. Divided into three cycles as Dante would have envisioned it. Then, on the 700th anniversary we reread the entire Divine Comedy, showing the significance of the numbers 3 and 7 at the same time.

>>6175993

Gustave Dore. His work is amazing