Dante on the Evil of Treachery

Abstract

Dante is a superb Thomist; and, in his Divine Comedy, he puts flesh on Aquinas’s sophisticated philosophical and theological views by means of an allegory with novelistic elements. In the Inferno, Dante the traveler exemplifies the way in which to do well what the sinner in hell did horribly. The punishment of the sinner shows the ugliness of a particular evil, and the actions of Dante the traveler show something powerfully good that is the alternative, the near neighbor, of the evil. By this twinned means, the nature of the seven deadly sins is vividly exposed, and true goodness and love, opposed to all the seven deadly sins, is illuminated and poignantly depicted. Furthermore, Dante is not only a superb Thomist and an insightful philosopher in his own right, but he incarnates the philosophy in narrative; and that makes all the difference in the world to his ability to give us insight into evil.