an excerpt from my paper

I have been writing this paper since 9pm tonight, and I think it might be done. College has made me a much faster writer, although perhaps not a better one. (I kid. Definitely, probably, maybe a better one.) Warning: this excerpt may be extraordinarily boring. I am probably only posting this because it is an ungodly hour of the night. You have been warned.

This places a heavy value on intellectual pursuits and the souls of more intellectually active individuals. Because the hostlers cannot engage on an academic level with the potential and power of black magic, they also are essentially unworthy of Hell. They lack the mental capacity to provoke God and Satan into taking serious note of them. In fact, in addition to not “warranting” Hell, the hostlers are even demoted down the great chain of being from human beings to animals. This inability of the hostlers (and, less prominently, the clown) to be sent to Hell also suggests an intellectual aspect to Hell as a punishment. The less intellectual a character in Marlowe’s universe is, the less capable of punishment in Hell he becomes. The hellish quality of Hell is not the physical punishment of purgatory, but rather the absence of the blessing of God. Therefore, a sufferer must be capable of fully comprehending what such a spiritual abandonment means in order to “appreciate” Hell for the torture it is. A less intelligent or intellectual character might miss the true essence of deprivation that lends Hell its power as a threat, and so he is not worthy of the threat itself. An uncomprehending member of the damned lessens the psychological power of the entire institution of Hell, and therefore it would be actually detrimental for Hell as a whole to punish a person who was incapable of fully comprehending it.