Day 3: The Undecided

This summer I was traveling and wanted to good "summer travel" novel.  You know what I mean.  One of those books easily available in airports and one's you would be scoffed at for reading by snobbish bookies.  I choose one by the current lord and master of the critically scorned, mass media beloved Dan Brown.  His newest is called "Inferno" and is centered around the Divine Comedy.  Well, not really centered, but Dante and the Divine Comedy play an important role in the narrative, guiding the decisions by both the protagonist (Robert Langdon, aka Tom Hanks) and the Antagonist, who is yet another Brown villain ensconced in a global conspiracy hell bent on the destruction of modern life.  This is not a book review.  While there were many things is dislike about Mr. Brown's stylistic choices, he certainly knows his way around a blockbuster novel, and the backdrops he chooses are pretty interesting. 
He opens the novel stating "the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in times of moral crises." It's a compelling statement, one that plays instrumental in the action of the novel.  Unfortunately it is categorically incorrect, if he is referring to the architecture of Dante's Inferno. 
In the beginning of Canto 3, Dante and Virgil are confronted with an inscription on the gateway to hell.  It is a pretty harrowing statement, saying abandon your hope all who enter.  You aren't getting out of here ever.  Yet before they take this first step into the true underworld, Dante is dsitracted by the sounds of countless wails and sighs.  He asks Virgil about this, and he explains that what he is hearing are the sounds of the souls rejected by hell.  They "lived without disgrace and without praise."  They have become shadows, ghosts, not good enough for purgatory or heaven, but also not bad enough for hell.  This may seem curious to the modern mind.  Why would any soul cry out, yearning for the torments beyond the gateway to inferno?  But for Dante and the medieval mind, to just exist is a failed life.  Dante has no need for those who cannot make a stand for anything in life.  Those that just live he dsregards as worthless.  The souls in Hell, while despicable, are still more worthy of mention than those who didn't choose between a virtous of malicious life.  They share this space with the angels who, during the era when Lucifer Morningstar rejected God, neglected to side with either God or Lucifer.  I am reminded of the famous quote in Paradise Lost where Lucifer claims it is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.  Infamy is apparently more desirable than anonymity.  One wonders what Dante would think of the Buddhist Zen mindset of detachment from the worldly virtues and vices.
So those indecisive souls don't even get into the afterlife.  They aren't invited to the dance, even if the dance includes eternal torture and damnation.  According to the ferry man, Charon, who guides Dante and Virgil across the river Acheronte, the souls who have incurred the wrath of God desire punishment.  "Celestial justice spurs them on, so that their fear is turned to desire."  But these lost souls, when hearing Charon's speech gnash their teeth and wince, knowing that as they abandoned God in their waking life, they in turn are denied by God the afterlife.