“Justice urged on my high artificer; My maker was divine authority, The highest wisdom jointed the primal love. Before me nothing but eternal things were made, And I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, ye who enter here.” –Dante Alighieri
Throughout 13th and 14th centuries, the political struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire caused tremendous tumult and turbulence in Florence, Italy. Actively involved in the complex political scenes, the prestigious poet, Dante Alighieri, was exiled after his political enemies gained power. During his exiled days, Dante began his most productive artistic periods, during which Dante created his masterpiece—the divine comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Strongly cultivated by the profound impact of Christian ideologies in the late 13th century, the Divine Comedy served as a valuable source to gain insights into the world views of Florentines at that time period. It is especially essential to take the first canticle, Inferno, as a lens to explore the religious and theological aspects of their lives. In Inferno, pilgrim Dante journeyed through nine circles of Hell to seek salvation from God under the guidance of his respectful roman poet, Virgil. The divine justice that was regarded as the fundamental rule to reign the world of death embodied the prevailing ideals of Christianity that dominated the world of living. Abiding by the moral values of dark ages, those who contradicted the paramount will of God or violated the guiding doctrines of Christianity would be condemned as convicted sinners or evil forces. Epitomizing the theological theories and ideas governing its time, Inferno illuminated why divine justice of Christianity was perfect by clarifying three points: the appropriate match between the degree of punishment and the gravity of the sin; the impersonal, objective, and even cold-blooded execution of punishments; the inclusive and universal nature of the divine justice system. Moreover, the portrait of characters visionary trip to the horrific Hell meant to reflect the degraded living condition of Florentine society and to warn the corrupted forces to steer themselves to the righteous paths before it was too late for them to seek redemption.
The suitability of divine punishments in the underworld beautifully demonstrated the fairness of God’s justice system. The punishments that tortured the sinners mirrored the sins they committed on earth. In the second circle of hell, Dante “came to place where no light shone at all, bellowing like the sea racked by a tempest, when warring winds attack it from both sides. The infernal storm, eternal in its rage, sweeps and drives the spirits with its blast: it whirls them, lashing them with punishment” (Canto V, 28-33). The lustful were unceasingly tortured by the external tempests, because they were obsessed with the allure of flash and failed to control their internal storms of emotions and voracity. Sinful souls suffered penalties to a scale that embodied the severity of their sins. Beyond theoretical and abstract images of the underworld, God’s just judgements were exhibited by the gripping topography of Hell: the conical structure and vivid geography phenomenon exemplified the organizations of diversified sins. As Dante and Virgil walked through the underworld, they progressed from the facial layers to deep layers, which corresponded with minor misdemeanors to more grave crimes. Trapped among the deepest regions of Hell, the Thieves and the Suicides suffered more grievously just in correspondence with the worse sins they committed: having been stealing for all their lives, the thieves were forced to transform into the monstrous reptiles and painfully reformed into their human forms in an endless circle. Disrespecting the human bodies and its immortality bestowed by God, the self-violent souls who committed suicide were castigated by constraining in the form of vulnerable trees for the rest of eternity. In addition, to pose the ruler of Hell, Lucifer, at the center of earth, Dante exposed the fact that the medieval knowledge of astronomy was relied on the “geo-centric view” of the world, which again underlined superior status of the Christianity principles. As a personification of reasoning, Virgil drew ideas from Ethics by Aristotle, a work that played a key role in Dante’s formulation of his personal philosophy, that “the three conditions that the heavens hate, incontinence, malice, and bestiality. Do you not remember how incontinence offends God least, and merits the least blame…they are separated from the malicious ones, and why God’s vengeance beats down upon their souls less heavily” (VI 79-90). Virgil’s words showed that God managed his justice in a balanced manner: each guilty soul who deformed the perfection of divine values would be allocated to different hierarchies of Hell, befitting the extremity and seriousness of their sins as living beings.
The dispassionate and cruel nature of punishments in Hell revealed the perfection of the divine justice as well. The images displayed in Hell were atrocious and brutal. It seemed like the justice system was so cold-blooded and objective, that God showed no mercy towards his offspring at all. As the Minor assigned each culpable soul to its suitable afflictive region by curling his tail, his systematic behavior showed that the application of divine justice was precise and even mechanical. Thus, when Dante character just had a taste of Hell, there was a severe tension between the impersonal characteristic of God’s justice and Dante’s humanistic pity towards the anguishing souls. As Dante and
Virgil went down to the lower circle of Hell, which were the “the primer chambers” reserved for the most evil and malicious, Dante became less sympathetic towards the sinful souls and started to realize the essence of God’s will: the rigidly “impersonal and objective” nature of divine justice just illuminated the perfect fairness and balance of God’s judgements. The torments designated to the convicted souls were in scale to their misdeeds. There were no extenuating cases in Hell, and the execution process nearly took the form of scientific formulas. The graver their sins were, the more merciless and callous their ordeals would be. As stated by Virgil, “the closer a thing comes to its perfection, more keen will be its pleasure or its pain. Although this cursed race of punished souls shall never know the joy of true perfection, more perfect will their pain be then than now” (VI, 107-111). The closer one was to perfection, the better he understood the key of pleasure and pain. Thus, on the Last Judgement Day, the sinful would suffer more torments later than now and the virtuous would enjoy more God’s beatitude. The drastic differences of treatments the damned and the blessed souls received from God once again emphasized how fair the divine justice were.
The diversified souls of all sorts in the Christian Hell exhibited the universal and inclusive feature of God’s divine power, which reinforced the core concept of Inferno—the perfection of the Christian justice mechanism. The Christian Hell contained all kinds of sinners from all times and from all sources, with examples shown such as contemporary politicians, historical figures, and even Greek mythical characters. As portrayed in the Third Circle of Hell, where the Gluttons were tortured, Dante encountered Cerberus, “a ruthless and fantastic beast, with all three throats howls out his doglike sounds above the drowning sinners of this place…rips the spirits, flays and mangles them.” (Canto VI, 13-18), who happened to be a famous monster from Greek mythologies. By comprising classical literary materials and mythological stories in Inferno, Dante intended to expound the underlying rationale of Christian doctrine by applying scholastic thinking pattern. The mythical, spiritual and cultural elements involved in his poem helped Dante to articulate the Christian theological origins and ideals in a more creative and pluralistic framework. The justification of Christian principles served to further strengthened how perfect the divine justice system performed. In addition, there were two primary reasons for Dante to incorporate other religious traditions in a Christian style afterlife. Firstly, Dante aimed to highlight the significance to explore one of the greatest quests that all human race concerned, no matter what types of religious beliefs they held: how the standard of living for the Christian afterlife in the realm of dead was interrelated with consequences of their behaviors on earth. The second point Dante attempted to elaborate was that the values of Christianity would surpass virtues of all other religious entities. For instance, in the eighth pouch of the Eight Hell, Ulysses, the legendary hero from Greece, was cast into the deep abyss of Hell, reflecting his past sins on earth. His most sinful deed of all as the Trojan Horse, in which “[Ulysses] lament inside one flame the ambush of the horse become the gateway that allowed the Romans noble seed to issue forth” (XXVI, 58-60). Directly causing the Fall of Troy, the heroic deeds of Ulysses to the Greeks were disdained to be fraudulent and excessive based on the moral standards of Christianity. Therefore, Inferno beautifully revealed the prevalent ideologies of its society: Christian God had the supreme power and absolute authority to decide the destiny for every single individual no matter when they lived and where they came from.
Dante’s epic poem, Inferno, established an exalted status in European literature. Delineated in a vivid and indelible manner, the visional experiences in the Christian Hell were unprecedented and grotesque. Widely known as a prevalent classic in the western world, Dante’s Inferno generated a revolutionary torrent in Christian theology by addressing many valuable questions, such as the compositions of moral system, allegorical meaning of human afterlife, and the complicated and ordinal nature of sins. Creating a whole new world in his poem, Dante spent a great effort to meditate and analyze all forms of human evils from the perspectives of Christianity in medieval times. Profoundly influenced by the dominant ideologies at his time, Dante believed that the Christian doctrines possessed transcendent power to define virtues or ethics of any society. Therefore, the Christian justice served as the perfect system to regulate the underworld as well. The perfection of divine justice was reflected in the three following aspects: the impeccably apt and individualized punishments were in conformity with different intensities of sins and crimes; the implied meaning of seemly brutal and impersonal execution of divine penalty system; and, the disparate elements were innovatively combined to the Christian underworld, such as contemporary figures, mythological characters, and pagan gods and monsters. Resonated with the horrifying scenes in Hell, Inferno decried how corrupted and depraved the medieval Catholic Church was the economic deterioration of the simony, the money-driven religious orders, dissipated and proliferate life style of the clergy, the common practices of pluralism and absenteeism, and the political conspiracies of the papacy. These scenes all vividly portrayed the corruption present in the Church at that time. Seven hundred years had passed, Inferno has elicited strong responses from fascination to revulsion, any but apathetic. By epitomizing the grandiose world images of his era and raising the thought-provoking ideas, Inferno casted tremendous impact on the western civilization and inspired countless individuals to examine the truth of their souls. The essence of Dante’s legacy would remain for all eternity.