Dante’s Law
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
President John F. Kennedy attributed this law to Dante in a talk that he gave in Bonn on June 24th 1963. The occasion was the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps. JFK had been struck by the quote some years before. In A Thousand Days, Arthur M. Schlesinger reported finding this line along with others from Burke, Churchill, Jefferson, and so on in a loose-leaf notebook that Kennedy kept in 1945-46. This particular line does not appear in Dante’s works, however, and the young Kennedy’s citations sometimes left something to be desired. (For example he attributed Hiram Johnson’s Law to Aeschylus.) Perhaps JFK telescoped the somewhat similar thought that does appear in Canto III of The Inferno when Virgil tells Dante just after the two pass through the gates of Hell (in John Ciardi’s translation):
They [the nearly soulless] are mixed here with that despicable corps
of angels who were neither for God nor Satan
but only for themselves. The High Creator
scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty
and Hell will not receive them since the wicked
might feel some glory over them.
While those who profess neutrality may be barred from hell, the road there is broad and remarkably easy to follow. As C.S. Lewis noted in The Screwtape Letters (1941): “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” This was Mr. Lewis’s update in effect of the Bible: “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction” (Matthew: 7:13).
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