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ETIKA A |
Dante |
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22DANT51 |
Dante vs. Goethe |
4.9.2007 |
From: Dante’s Inferno
Translated from the Original of Dante Alighieri by Henry Francis Cary, M. A.
and illustrated by Gustave Doré
Edited by Henry C. Walsh, A. M., Editor of American Notes and Queries.
John W. Lovell Company,
(without year, probably 19th century)
Life of Dante. Page VI
The Divina Commedia exemplifies Dante’s–and, indeed, the Christian–idea
of the genesis and development of good and evil. The Inferno … teaches that the germ of all sin lies in the substitution
of self for God. … Man is free, and himself holds the measures of his doom: each soul creates
for itself its own hell by allying itself with sin.
This teaching of the old mystic is
directyl opposed to the materialistic thought of our day, and to that of many
of our modern poets–of Goethe, for
instance, whose Faust allies himself
with the incarnation of sin and makes the devil the instrument of his
salvation.
Dante’s teaching will, however, be
found to accord with that of One greater than Goethe who came “to take away the
sin of the world”, not to nourish it as an instrument of man’s salvation.
Read:
Vicente F. Delmonte: Jedem nach seinen Taten (a
voyage through hell, only in German language)