You’ll never get to heaven…

While exploring the translation history of Dante’s epistles today (‘for a friend’), I happened on the Dante’s Inferno Test. It is curiously long, which entranced me immediately. Occasionally it did make me stop and think about an answer. Where I ended up…I think I probably am a bit wrathful; I’m glad that food and lust were running wrath hard for its money 😉

Doing the quiz reminded me that the Inferno was one of the first audiobooks I adopted to lull me to sleep at night, and also recalled a reason why I found Dante’s work so compelling as an early twenty-something. Dante’s work, across its polyphony, represents a world in which broken order signifies an extensive system, mapping deeply acculturated challenges to norms. It is a world in which the dead speak clamorously into silence; it is a world where teleology and entropy make bickering, door-slamming sense as a couple.

Looking back now, I can also see how Dante’s determined dialogue with the classical past was already transforming the classical world into an authoritative Other that would colour my own ongoing engagement. The quest(ion)ing model which Dante embraces speaks clear as a bell to those still hopeful that the right knowledge, acquired by the ideal adept, can make everything intelligible—albeit still uncomfortable.

Obviously (in my test results) I choose to ignore the horrors promised (but avoided) by Circles 8 & 9…But proceed (to the quiz) with caution!

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Fifth Level of Hell!

Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test