Compared to modern times, it seems the average person in the Middle Ages was much more concerned about God, particularly divine opinion of the individual in question. Perhaps this stems from the fact that, if one's life is spent worrying about marauding Vikings or the Black Plague, one places much more hope in attaining a pleasant afterlife while, if one's barcalounger is adjustable and one's TV larger than 32 inches, there seems to be little point in hoping for something better. A predictable but interesting side effect of this heavenly pondering is exploration of the paradox of sin. How can a world created by a supremely good God contain evil? What is sin and, if everything was created by God, where did it come from? Intellectuals in the Middle Ages explored these questions and each arrived at their own shade of conclusion. To use a chromatic analogy, all could be called red, but with their own tints and tinges.
For example, Dante Alighieri's masterpiece The Divine Comedy can be thought of as an explication of his conception on sin. He spends two-thirds of the work explaining his thoughts on what happens to the vast majority of people he believes will not go straight to heaven. Interestingly, Dante comments in great length on the nature of sin in Purgatorio, the area reserved for those who will eventually make it to heaven. As evidenced by Inferno, Dante agrees with the traditional concept of sin as action contrary to God's will but, in Purgatory, his definition becomes more nuanced. Dante's afterlife tour-guide, Virgil, explains much while commenting on the structure of Purgatory;
The natural love is just and cannot rove.
The soul's love strays if it desires what's wrong
or loves with too much strength, or...
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...ferent media - poetry, prose, and plays - Dante, Augustine, and Marlowe all explore a major question that pervaded the Middle Ages and remains prevalent today: What is the nature of sin? They come to similar conclusions yet they each add something new and different: misguided love, misused agency, and lack of responsibility. While their concepts similar, each adds his own signature, or touch, tailor fitting their sense of sin to their own lives. Each conclusion is a slightly different hue reflecting the minds that created them.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante, Gustave Doré, and Anthony Esolen. Purgatory. Modern Library, 2004. Print.
Augustine of Hippo. Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 1998. Print.
Marlowe, Christopher, Frank Romany, and Robert Lindsey. The Complete Plays. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Print.
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (Lewis, 1994, p. 91). Throughout history man has had to struggle with the problem of evil. It is one of the greatest problems of the world. Unquestionably, there is no greater challenge to man’s faith then the existence of evil and a suffering world. The problem can be stated simply: If God is an all-knowing and all-loving God, how can He allow evil? If God is so good, how can He allow such bad things to happen?Why does He allow bad things to happen to good people? These are fundamental questions that many Christians and non-Christians set out to answer.
In analyzing this gradient of morality, it is useful first to examine a work from early literature whose strong purity of morality is unwavering; for the purposes of this discussion, Dante’s Inferno provides this model. It is fairly straightforward to discover Dante’s dualistic construction of morality in his winding caverns of Hell; each stern, finite circle of Hell is associated with a clear sin that is both definable and directly punishable. As Dante moves downwards in this moral machination, he notes that
In Purgatorio, Dante’s journey continues under Virgil’s guidance from preparing to ascend the mountain of Purgatory until reaching the garden of earthly paradise, at which point Beatrice arrives to take on the role of guide through the rest of purgatory. However, along the way, Dante interacts with several other secondary guides on brief portions of his journey. Individually, Cato, Sordello, Statius, and Matelda serve as corrected counterparts to other characters in the Divine Comedy, classical mythology, and the Bible. Collectively, Cato, Sordello, Statius, and Matelda serve to bridge classical and Christian teachings, both of which are critical in defining the values of Dante-author’s Purgatory, and in shaping Dante-character’s will as the purpose of the journey through purgatory.
He had meticulously described it to illuminate the Bible’s interpretation, especially for the degrees of sin. For instance, during his journey through Hell, he had traveled through nine rings, each containing different forms of sin. Within the rings, Dante had met individuals who were cast into Hell for adultery and heretical beliefs. However, Dante had not only described who he saw, but also the quality of their lives in Hell. D’Epiro states, “The poet’s most famous portrait of flawed grandeur is that of Ulysses, whose sins as a false counselor have caused him to be enveloped in flames like a human torch.” (99) Dante had wanted to put an emphasis on how perilous Hell was because of the time period’s grasp on religion in 1320.
Philosophers of the Medieval period struggled with the problem of evil - specifically, the existence of evil brought a question to the fore: if the world was created by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, then how was it that evil existed? To further complicate the matter, a second question branched off of the first as individuals pondered over whether or not God was ultimately the cause of evil. If God created everything, and evil exists as part of everything, then God, logically, had created evil. But this presented yet another issue, in that if God had knowingly created evil, then he could not truly be all-good. And it is these concerns that philosophers addressed.
Dante Alighieri's The Inferno is a first-person poem that tells the story of Dante’s journey through the nine circles of Hell after he strays from the rightful path. Each circle of Hell contains sinners who have committed different sins during their lifetime and are punished based on the severity of their sins. When taking the beliefs and moral teachings of the Catholic Church into consideration, these punishments seem especially unfair and extreme. Souls residing in Purgatory receive punishments despite the fact that this level is not considered part of Hell. As Dante and his guide, Virgil, enter Ante-Inferno (also known as Purgatory), Virgil explains to him that this is where the souls of those who did not take a side between God and Satan or did not do anything during their lifetime that would determine whether they would go to Hell or Heaven (III. 30-37.
My claim that we have evil in this world because of our libertarian freedom does not fully answer the notion of “the problem of evil”. Saying we have evil in this world is just like saying we have bad decisions in this world. Bad decisions just like evil do not have a form. Every decision that God makes is a good decision therefore God cannot do evil. Human beings initiated evil. In fact, the first human beings (Adam and Eve) gave ongoing birth to evil because everyone ultimately came from them. So everyone after Adam and Eve is inherently evil. This idea is evident in our lives because every human being has committed evil. The ultimate problem is not how an all-powerful God can exist while evil exist, the ultimate dilemma is how a holy God can accept human beings that are not holy. Stephen T. Davis in “Free Will and Evil” writes, “All the moral evil that exists in the world is due to the choices of free moral agents whom God created” (Davis). Davis argues that free will is the answer to the problem of evil. This is consistent with my view that evil exists because of our libertarian freedom. Unlike Hick, Davis is consistent with my answer for evil and he is also consistent with how evil is solved in regards to heaven and hell. Davis states, “I do believe hell exists, but I do not hold that it is a place where protesting people are led against their will to be tortured vengefully. I believe that the people who will end up separated from God freely choose hell and would be unhappy in God’s presence. Having lived their lives apart from God, they will choose eternally—to go on doing so. So it is not a bad thing that they do not spend eternity in the presence of God. People who will prove to be incorrigibly evil will never come to th...
...ards monstrous figures and sympathy towards those who seem to be tortured unjustly. In his perverse education, with instruction from Virgil and the shades, Dante learns to replace mercy with brutality, because sympathy in Hell condones sin and denies divine justice. The ancient philosopher Plato, present in the first level of Hell, argues in The Allegory of the Cave that truth is possible via knowledge of the Form of the Good. Similarly, Dante acquires truth through a gradual understanding of contrapasso and the recognition of divine justice in the afterlife. Ultimately, Dante recognizes that the actions of the earthly fresh are important because the soul lives on afterwards to face the ramifications. By expressing his ideas on morality and righteousness, Dante writes a work worth reading, immortalizes his name, and exalts the beliefs of his Christian audience.
“…And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6:9-13) As it says in the Bible, we wish to be led astray from evil. However, evil is a very curious subject. For most intensive purposes, evil can be described as cruel, heinous, and unnecessary punishment. Evil is a relatively accepted concept in the world today, although it is not completely understood. Evil is supposedly all around us, and at all times. It is more often than not associated with a figure we deem Satan. Satan is said to be a fallen angel, at one point God’s favorite. Supposedly Satan tries to spite God by influencing our choices, and therefore our lives. However, this presents a problem: The Problem of Evil. This argues against the existence of God. Can God and evil coexist?
Dante Alighieri presents a vivid and awakening view of the depths of Hell in the first book of his Divine Comedy, the Inferno. The reader is allowed to contemplate the state of his own soul as Dante "visits" and views the state of the souls of those eternally assigned to Hell's hallows. While any one of the cantos written in Inferno will offer an excellent description of the suffering and justice of hell, Canto V offers a poignant view of the assignment of punishment based on the committed sin. Through this close reading, we will examine three distinct areas of Dante's hell: the geography and punishment the sinner is restricted to, the character of the sinner, and the "fairness" or justice of the punishment in relation to the sin. Dante's Inferno is an ordered and descriptive journey that allows the reader the chance to see his own shortcomings in the sinners presented in the text.
Dante’s The Divine Comedy illustrates one man’s quest for the knowledge of how to avoid the repercussions of his actions in life so that he may seek salvation in the afterlife. The Divine Comedy establishes a set of moral principles that one must live by in order to reach paradise. Dante presents these principles in Inferno, where each level of Hell has people suffering for the sins they committed during their life. As Dante gets deeper into Hell, the degrees of sin get progressively worse, as do the severity of punishment.
The world is filled with many different words, some harder to define than other. One of these difficult words is considered by many to be evil. The definition of the word evil depends entirely upon the reader or writers perspective upon the word. The most innocent and simple ways that of would define evil is by simply saying that evil is the exact opposite of good, but what is good? In order to understand the true meaning of evil, we must first be able to describe what good is, what has goodness produced, and what has evil truly defied.
“By one man 's disobedience, many were made sinners” (Rom. V. 5:19). First articulated by Augustine (A.D. 354–430), the doctrine of original sin holds that all of Adam’s descendants inherit the guilt of Adam’s sin and thus incur the punishment for Adam’s sin. To understand sin entirely you must first know the background of the first ever sin. Original sin can differ in the different branches of Christianity like Catholicism and Protestantism. Questions are raised more and more about original sin through the writings of theologians. Questioning sin is something that is raised throughout culture and time. A thought could be brought up years earlier and then could be proven right or right in our culture and time. This paper is to not only teach
David Lummus. Dante’s Inferno: Critical reception and Influence. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/cgi-bin/web/files/lummus-inferno-influence.pdf. [Last Accessed e.g. 10 December 13].
When considering morality, worthy to note first is that similar to Christian ethics, morality also embodies a specifically Christian distinction. Studying a master theologian such as St. Thomas Aquinas and gathering modern perspectives from James Keenan, S. J. and David Cloutier serve to build a foundation of the high goal of Christian morality. Morality is a primary goal of the faith community, because it is the vehicle for reaching human fulfillment and happiness. Therefore, great value can be placed on foundations of Christian morality such as the breakdown of law from Aquinas, the cultivation of virtues, the role of conscience in achieving morality, and the subject of sin described by Keenan.