As everybody knows who had Dante forced upon her or him in high school, the Inferno is not only about sufferings in the afterlife, but is also an allegory about the politics of his own time. It is entirely believable to me that the spiraling conflicts of politics were Dante’s chosen vehicle for describing in exquisite detail all the circles of hell and the specific sins of which human beings are capable.

Yes, I believe in hell, and in heaven. I believe it because, like Dante, I see it here on earth. All the way down through each circle of hell in the Inferno, or up through the Paradiso, we are led on the same journey. We journey down into the worst of human nature, what we call hell, and up through the incredible capacity of human beings for redemption, what we call heaven.

I once heard Toni Morrison give a lecture about the thought process that led her to write her astonishing novel, Paradise. She read aloud from Revelation 21 in the Bible and the description of the heavenly Jerusalem in it. “[T] he city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every jewel…And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.”

Morrison asked, “But if heaven is not just high priced real estate, what is it?” This is the question she pursues in that novel. The protagonists, escaped slaves, certainly knew hell on earth in the conditions of their enslavement. They flee slavery and seek to establish heaven on earth. Instead as time passes there is a split in the community and they become engaged in a battle over existence that turns as murderous as the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis.

It has been suggested, in fact, that Cain and Abel are the same person. They are humanity, whole, with our capacity for infinite good and infinite evil. This is the dilemma both Morrison and Dante describe—we can be hell to ourselves and to one another, or the means of our own and one another’s salvation. And sometimes we can be both. This is the freedom God has given us in existence it is the source of the very depth and height of what it means to be human.

Yes, I believe in hell, and in heaven.