The other day, not to mention any names, a close friend of mine was expressing the hurt when a cheating-ex texted her. What was maybe at the core of the pain, she thought, was that while she has been emotionally mauled by the experience, her ‘ex’ continues his frat parties in debauchery without a second thought of the ordeal. It’s as if the justice of the universe was not delivered and the innocent victim has yet to be defended.

Relationships are an interesting topic I think for everyone, since they discuss such an intimate corner of our lives. Maybe for college students, you could say that relationships are at the core of their lives; relationships with professors, friends, real friends, classmates, RA’s, priests, parents, and the financial aid office.

Relationships are not only important for the budding romantic or the cheated ex, but also for a 13th century Italian poet.

In Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy,” we have a depiction of Dante himself traveling through three worlds of the spiritual and supernatural world: hell, heaven and purgatory. Inspired by the early renassaince theologian and Docter of the Church Thomas Aquinas and guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante speaks and learns from the spirits in these dimensions, why they are there. Dante’s first chapter in this spiritual journey was hell.

As Dante and Virgil continue through the cirlces of hell, speaking to more miserable and tormented souls, learning of their sins and history, they reach the final circle of hell where traitors are condemned and tortured.

Everyone in this circle is forzen to some degree or another. The reasoning of their punishment is that, just as evil is an absence of goodness, so is cold an absence of heat. In other words, according to Dante’s understanding of Thomistic theology, the sin and crime of betrayal is one of the ultimate crimes against a human.

And I think human experience testifies to this. It leaves us insecure, anxious, worthless.

It left the sinners cold, frozen in a lake up to their heads, frozen as they had no passion on earth, no fire left in them to consider their fellow humans. They were given what they wanted, they were left to their own wills.

Dante is making this moral claim; it takes an interiorly cold and indifferent person to betray someone else. They had to turn their heads away from the other, feel nothing for that person, in order to betray them. They willed it, they desired it. It was in hell that they got what they wanted: indifference, cold cold indifference.

Hell and heaven though, are not so much as places, but as states of the soul, sort of how the soul is living. They are attitudes. Hell can be lived on earth, experienced by the anyone.

So while we may be hurt by our betrayals, we can heal. And it may be that the cheater is having a grand time, a lovely time, they will get what they willed, what they want: themselves, their trapped egos.

They will suffer the indifference that their decisions have brought. It doesn’t have to be hell, theologically the Christian hell. No doubt though, they will suffer the cold chambers that they have entered.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.

And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.

-CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

Let us avoid this disatrous decision of killing our fellow humans emotionally, and like Dante, step out of the dark world of the fruits of our dark decisions:

…until I saw, through a round opening, some of those things of beauty Heaven bears. It was from there that we emerged, to see–once more– the stars.

-Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy Canto XXXIV