Climbing upward
Redemption has always demanded something from us, though we pretend otherwise.
The Book of Job understood this in ways we’ve forgotten, not through neat theological answers but through the raw acknowledgment that existence itself is a kind of debt.
Job suffers not because he deserves it but because living means being perpetually exposed, vulnerable to forces beyond comprehension or control.
He doesn’t transcend his suffering through understanding it. He endures it, and in that endurance, something shifts.
The arbitrary nature of his pain doesn’t diminish its reality or its cost. We’re all living on borrowed time, always one breath away from discovering what we owe.
Dante makes this explicit in ways Job only hints at. You cannot ascend without first descending. The geography of the afterlife mirrors the geography of the soul: Hell isn’t punishment alone but education, purgation, a necessary confrontation with what we are before we can become what we might be.
Virgil leads Dante downward first because wisdom requires intimacy with suffering, not distance from it.
This isn’t masochism or divine cruelty. It’s the recognition that transformation costs something, that redemption isn’t bestowed but earned through direct encounter with darkness.
Perhaps redemption is always retrospective, only visible after the sacrifice has been made. We climb upward not knowing if the journey justifies the descent, trusting provisionally that suffering witnessed, endured, integrated somehow prepares us for grace. The price unclear. The transaction incomplete. Always unfinished.