#spot is so blorbo material good lord .

[lycanthrop-ee]

i always wanted him

[unicorn-elvis]

Saying Dante had "no theological basis" is deeply unfair because the theology is antethetical to having a physical basis at all. This isn't a Dante problem, it's a theology problem.

From what I can tell, it’s almost impossible to produce any image of the afterlife, particularly Hell and Purgatory, with any theological grounding because the theology is very deliberately vague on the matter.

Imagine being a B-movie horror special effects guy, and you’re working on movie that’s based on an H.P. Lovecraft story. You’ve been handed the job of coming up with the physical representation of unknowable cosmic horror working from original story, which issome vague mentions of‘unspeakable tendrils’ or some shit and a lot of description about how poor Howie feels about them.

Folks have (with reason) criticized Lovecraft for his trick of avoiding describing the Big Cosmic Horror by describing his reaction to it. He paints a couple of vague strokes of the Unknowable Evil then goes into detail of his reaction to it, how it made him feel, his emotions of confusion and revulsion and attraction and etc etc. I mean yeah once you know the game it’s a pretty transparent way to dodge the problem of how you describe the indescribable. But what happens when to the guy whose job it is to describe it?

That’s how Catholic art is. The strict theological descriptions of Hell and Purgatory are deliberately vague, mostly focused on the effects on the person-- the pain and torment of Hell, the boredom and hope of Purgatory, etc. All the fire and brimstone stuff? Non-canon descriptions, pretty repetitve and often against the actual theology. Those in Hell do not have physical bodies; descriptions of physical pain are generally understood to be metaphors of existential torment-- torment which, the theology insists, are worse than physical pain, but theology is free to make vague assertions without grounding them. Selling that assertion in a drama is a different matter.

So, back to the Dante and our hypothetical B-movie special effects guy. Neither of these folks are breaking new ground. Before Dante, there have been literal centuries of dramatic represenations of Hell-- fromn apocryphal Gospels to mystery plays to folktales and romances. Special effects guy also has previous works to draw on-- lots of Lovecraft movies before him, with rubber suits and floppy tentacles and cuttlefish-looking things. The preceding body of work, in both cases, is generally forgettable. Heavy on the cliche, to the extent that the cliches often drown out the original works.

Dante breaks the mold. He comes up with a transcendant version of Hell. He takes the metaphors and the theology and intertwines them in a new way. He breathes new life into old metaphors. He gives insights into how the torment of hell is supposed to work. He takes the cliches and actually uses them to prop up the underlying theology, which of course the theologians love.

This is where my B-movie metaphor breaks down because I can't think of a transcendently good Lovecraft movie adaptation.

But since I started talking about movies, I might point to the difference between, say, a Rankin-Bass or Bakshi Lord of the Rings cartoon and Peter Jackson's movie versions of the same**.

The theology wants to deal with hypothetical absolutes that absolutely defy clear communication and, if we're being honest, logic. He's in the same spot as the B-movie dude who has to take Lovecraft's verbose ways of saying "indescribable" and "unknowable" and make them described and known.

**If you don't like Jackson's movies-- well, you're probably in the same boat as a strict Catholic theologian in regard to Dante. Both Jackson's LOTR and Dante's Divine Comedy deviate from the source material, but that ship has sailed-- both are too embedded in the popular mind to separate. The strict Tolkien fan is in the same boat as the strict Catholic theologian: their Blorbos are now wildly popular but that popularity rests on works that deviate from the canon material in significant ways. Virgil and Virtuous Pagans are not figures in Catholic theology, Arwen never picks up a sword in the original LoTR, but really no one cares except a vocal core of fanatics for the source material.

The fact that Dante created the most popular image of the afterlife with absolutely no theological basis for it will still be the funniest thing to me