Señor Codo - Your Apathy Is Killing Me
I was at a John Butler Trio concert recently and he mentioned that a quote had stuck in his mind from a video he saw on YouTube of a speech given by Martin Luther King.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality
It was originally said by JFK paraphrasing Dante’s ‘Inferno’. It is sometimes quoted as being the ‘hottest fires’ but more apt would be ‘the darkest places in hell’ as incisively argued by one reader:
In Canto III of Inferno, Dante and Virgil just pass the gate of Hell when they see a horde swatting at wasps and flies, their faces streaming with the blood of stings. Virgil explains (in Longfellow’s translation) that these are the “sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise” — those who did not take a side in some great moral conflict. Some are people who stayed neutral or otherwise abdicated responsibility for choice (one may in fact be a pope who abdicated); some are angels who refused to take a side in the war in Heaven and have been cast out.It’s not a “hot” place; heat in Dante is about passion, and these folks exactly lack passion.
It could be argued that, though not hot, theirs is an especially ignoble situation in Hell. Virgil tells Dante that the damned long to cross the river, even though it leads to their torment, because they have just enough divinity left in them to long for divine justice. These cowardly neutrals don’t even get justice. They are barely inside Hell, and not allowed justice; their stings are like anticipation unanswered.
I don’t believe in hell, but I believe in the metaphor. The last thing that this world we live in should evoke from us is neutrality.
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