“Inexpressibly happy that even in the utter chaos, Dante was able to say a few words at the party. Not what the quote wall is for, but it will do.” –Darren Fishell (Bowdoin, ’09)
Found at Fumettotex (retrieved on February 10, 2008)
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007)
From Chapter One:
“Lucifer’s sin is what thinkers in the Middle Ages called ‘cupiditas.’ For Dante, the sins that spring from that root are the most extreme ‘sins of the wolf,’ the spiritual condition of having an inner black hole so deep within oneself that no amount of power or money can ever fill it. For those suffering the mortal malady called cupiditas, whatever exists outside of one’s self has worth only as it can be exploited by, or taken into one’s self. In Dante’s Hell those guilty of that sin are in the ninth circle, frozen in the Lake of Ice. Having cared for nothing but self in life, they are encased in icy Self for eternity. By making people focus only on oneself in this way, Satan and his followers turn their eyes away from the harmony of love that unites all living creatures.
The sins of the wolf cause a human being to turn away from grace and to make self his only good–and also his prison. In the ninth circle of the Inferno, the sinners, possessed of the spirit of the insatiable wolf, are frozen in a self-imposed prison where prisoner and guard are fused in an egocentric reality.” –Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect (2007)
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)
“Mafia boss reads Dante Alighieri in prison”
“Bernardo Provenzano, the former Godfather of the Sicilian Mafia who is serving life in prison, is spending his time reading Dante and writing to a pen pal. . . ‘I have read the Inferno,’ he wrote. ‘And especially where it says that on life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.’ The former boss of all the bosses–who ordered the assassination of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, a pair of anti-Mafia investigators–told Bonavota that ‘when reason and force collide, force wins and reason is lacking.'” [. . .] –Malcolm Moore, The Telegraph, January 28, 2008
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)
The 10th Circle
David Owen, “The Afterlife: Cutting Back”
“. . .Keeping murderers and warmakers submerged in boiling blood, for example, is manageable in the near term but cannot be sustained for all eternity, since the energy expenditure required to heat blood forever will eventually constrain even Our ability to undertake other desirable projects, such as the continuance of the universe as a whole. We face a similar energy crisis with regard to evil counsellors, whom We have promised to incinerate everlastingly; with regard to blasphemers, sodomites, usurers, and doers of violence against Us, who must be tortured without end on heated sand; and with regard to Count Ugolino, Archbishop Ruggieri, and others who are permanently frozen in ice. The avaricious could conceivably be put to work ceaselessly twisting the heads of diviners and fortune-tellers, or keeping flatterers covered with filth, or cladding hypocrites in leaden mantles, but not even We can unwrite the terms of Our own first law of thermodynamics.” [. . .] –David Owen, The New Yorker, January 7, 2008
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
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