DANTE'S STAIRWAY

by Mel Ohlinger

Continuing my search for true schools of thought, and influenced by the work of Arthur Pontynen, I turned to Dante’s Divine Comedy—a book still profoundly relevant more than 700 years later because it wrestles with the question of how to understand evil. Dante writes from a medieval Christian perspective, but the question transcends religion; you only have to look around at the world to wonder about cruelty, weakness, and hope. At the time, I was grappling with some deeply painful experiences of my own, and immersing myself in something this complex gave me a way to step back and breathe.

Inferno begins by examining evil in all its forms, from the everyday to the horrific, as an eternal prison of suffering. Purgatorio turns to human nature and the possibility of transcendence—how we might rise above our flaws. And Paradiso is a meditation on goodness: virtue, redemption, and the beauty of transcendence. Dante’s journey is ultimately one of love. Guided by Beatrice, who personifies love itself, he shows that love is the greatest force in life—the thing most worth living for and being shaped by.



This painting began as a meditation on the levels of hell. But one day, when I accidentally hung the canvas upside down, the forms shifted. Suddenly, it no longer looked like descent but a stairway rising upward. That moment felt like serendipity—what began as a meditation on evil became an image of redemption and ascent, a stairway to heaven. And honestly, Dante would have been just as thrilled to see Beatrice whether it was in heaven or hell—because in the end, love itself is enough..