What Divine Comedy Reveals About Christianity
What Divine Comedy Reveals About Christianity
The truth about the soul of man and his justice after death can be debated among all types of religions ranging from Hinduism to Christianity. However, in Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy: Inferno, the author takes the liberty of unveiling a different and extremely intricate view of one of the greatest questions of humanity: the existence of an afterlife and the consequences of our lives on earth. The Holy Bible explains how man should live his life and the results of it. The Divine Comedy: Inferno reiterates that doctrine as well, yet it is different in its view of divine judgment and also promotes another viewpoint for Christian readers about the eternal justice of God.
This Comedy is a work that displays the many facets of Hell that one would not be able to extract from simply reading the Holy Bible; it also provides plausible explanations for aspects of the Bible that are somewhat ambiguous. For example, when one contemplates the possible fates of infants and people who die without ever knowing God, you have to wonder if they still suffer eternal damnation of fire and brimstone, which is a result normally projected for those who do go to Hell. This thought, however, can be clarified when Dante describes what exactly happens to such people, "……..The sighs rose from sorrow without torments out of the crowds of infants, women and men…………they did not sin and yet they did not have merits, that's not enough, because they lacked the baptism, the portal of faith that you embrace, and if they lived before Christianity, they did not worship God in fitting ways" (Alighieri 1313). This particular phrase uncovers the uncertainty of what happens to souls in that situation, whereas in the Bible Christian readers would still be left to ponder. The Bible being a figurative text is direct and indirect with the messages it delivers, and therefore leaves readers a bit perplexed. However, the obscurity of the Bible may possibly have been created that way in order to make man actually think about life and what it encompasses instead of just drifting through it. God blessed mankind with ability to learn and acquire knowledge, if he gave man a straightforward mandate displaying what we need to do to attain divine justice, then there wouldn't be room for thought. Dante possibly took the liberty of addressing such intricacy...