hope

Continuing to act justly and lovingly because what one does on earth still matters.

A form of arrogance or agency: believing that you matter and that your actions affect the universe. Here hope becomes a society's willingness to reproduce itself and invest in the future rather than merely a private virtue.

The second theological virtue Dante is about to be examined on after successfully answering the first test on faith. The theological virtue examined by James through three questions about definition, personal object, and source.

The future-facing confidence that the task will be completed and that completion itself can be enough.

Jiang defines hope as responsibility and persistence even when outcomes are uncertain, and love as action that prays for another for eternity.

Jiang says Inferno's circles punish ways of disrupting the capacities for faith, love, and hope, which is why Purgatory becomes the difficult unresolved part of the cosmology.

He says Dante's system is hopeful because even bad people can still gain access to Purgatory through repentance, love from others, or prior acts of goodness.

He interprets Dante as rejecting absolute eternal damnation in practice: one may choose hell, but one can also leave if one makes the effort, which is what Purgatory will reveal against Virgil's more absolute framework.

When the student asks what happens to readers who only inherit Virgil's closed underworld, Jiang says Dante had to write the Divine Comedy in order to give hope to the world.

Jiang says poetry, not empire, is the real hope of the world because political order only buys temporary peace, while poetry can expand human consciousness and thereby answer Virgil rather than merely replace him.

Jiang says the real contrast between Limbo and Purgatory is emotional and existential rather than scenic: Limbo is pleasant but hopeless, while Purgatory is hard but animated by hope, curiosity, and song.

Jiang argues that this hope has a social effect: when people believe their loved ones are in Purgatory, they pray instead of feeding church corruption through bribes and anxious transactions.