Abandon All Hope: Dante and the Problems of Hell

“To mortal eyes our justice seems unjust;
that this is so, should serve as evidence
for faith—not heresy’s depravity.”
– Beatrice (Paradiso IV)

“If we once admit that what God means by “goodness” is sheerly different from what we judge to be good, there is no difference left between pure religion and devil worship.”
–C.S. Lewis

Dante’s Comedia is a shocking and audacious work in many respects, yet by far its most shocking aspect is the fact that Dante intends for his readers to take the poem’s content as a literal eyewitness testimony to the actual realms of the afterlife. In his Epistle to Cangrande, Dante states, speaking of his Comedia:

The subject of the whole work, taken only from a literal standpoint, is simply the status of the soul after death, taken simply.

The subject is not, one must note, a vision or fantasy of the soul after death, but the metaphysical truth of the matter, as revealed to Dante by the Holy Spirit (via Virgil, Beatrice, and St. Bernard). We are meant to read the Comedia with this understanding is clear from Dante’s remarks throughout the poem itself, and it is also confirmed by a statement made earlier in the Epistle, namely:

For me to be able to present what I am going to say, you must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called poly-semantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical.

This is to say, incredibly, that Dante expects his readers to read and analyze the Comedia in the four-fold manner previously reserved only for the Bible: the Comedia possesses not only historical (literal) truth, but predictive (allegorical), moral, and soteriological (anagogical) truth. Just as the words of the Bible are to be treated as not only factual, but prophetic, instructive, and revelatory, so too the words of this locally known, politically disgraced Florentine. It is an extraordinary claim, inspired by a conviction of one’s own genius so arrogant it flirts with delusive insanity. Nevertheless, if we are to examine the Comedia seriously, we must do so on Dante’s own terms; if he claims that what he says is the truth, we must measure what he says against a universal standard of truth; if he claims that what he says is moral, we must measure what he says against a universal standard of morality; and if he claims that Hell and damnation work in a certain way, we must examine this claim with theological, not merely literary scrutiny.

Later in the Epistle, Dante reveals his purpose in writing his vast poem:

…the purpose of the whole as well as the parts is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of bliss.”

It would seem that Dante truly believes that through his poem, he can lead others to salvation. For this to be possible requires not only that Dante’s poem be theologically veracious, but that his poem be morally and spiritually convincing enough to ignite piety in his readers. Unfortunately, though the Comedia may be one of the most sublime poems ever written, and though it may brim with moral and spiritual insight, it cannot but fail to inspire loving faith in its readers, at least on Dante’s own terms. Dante’s conception of Hell ensures that his overall conception of the divine moral framework strikes the critical reader as morally repugnant and theologically unsound.

Part I: The Problem of Hell Proper

The theodical question known as the “Problem of Hell” may be formulated as follows: How can God be both omnibenevolent and also sanction that some souls suffer sempiternal torment? To understand the problem, we must understand why the sanction of sempiternal torment is necessarily contrary to benevolence. This is so because a sentence of sempiternal torment constitutes not only a necessarily unfair but ineffectual dispensation of justice. Such a sentence is necessarily unfair because, assuming that the soul in question is allotted sempiternal torment for their previous conduct in life, it provides an infinite punishment for a finite crime or series of crimes. The magnitude of the sentence is thus so infinitely ill-fitted to the magnitude of the crime(s) that one suspects that sadism (even infinite sadism) rather than justice lies behind the verdict. Moreover, even one should argue that some transgressions against God are somehow “infinitely” bad and thus deserve sempiternal punishment (as some theologians do, and as Dante seems to in Paradiso 15:10); one cannot grant that mortal minds have the capacity to grasp the infinitely deep implications of such decisions—therefore, mortal agents cannot reasonably be held fully responsible for such “infinite” offenses.

The sentence is furthermore ineffectual  because it does not lead to any moral improvement in either the one punished or society at large, nor does it offer any secondary benefits to anyone. Unlike the trials in Purgatory, the punishments in Dante’s Hell are retributive rather than rehabilitative—that is, they work not to improve the will and wisdom of the condemned souls, but merely to penalize them—in this case without end, to no end. In the world of the living, retributive justice may be justifiable because: 1) Imprisonment of the guilty prevents further innocents from getting hurt, 2) Punishment encourages better behavior in the future from those punished, and 3) Public knowledge of punishment dissuades people from doing wrong. Sempiternal torment in hell provides none of these benefits. Those in hell are already dead, and they can no longer hurt the living or the dead. Those condemned to Hell are given no opportunities to behave better in the future; and those already condemned cannot be scared into being good in order to avoid Hell’s specific punishments.

Therefore, to sanction sempiternal torment for souls in Hell is not only grossly unfair but causes pointless suffering and is hence incontrovertibly unethical by human standards. It should now be clear that, assuming that God’s benevolence is in some sense analogous to human benevolence (as Aquinas held), the coexistence of an omnibenevolent God and the sanctioning of sempiternal torment as found in Dante’s conception of the universe is untenable. Beatrice (and Dante) would have us take the existence of this paradox as evidence for faith (see epigraph). Unfortunately, not only is it absurd to take a contradiction as evidence for the existence of the contradiction’s constituents (this is the opposite of logic), but given the God we have come to know through Dante’s Inferno, we may be tempted to reply to Dante’s call to faith with the words of Ivan Karamazov: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” Then again, perhaps fear of sempiternal torment may override our moral integrity.

The problem only deepens from here. According to Dante, not only do the damned suffer sempiternal torment, but they have no prospect of escaping their condition even at the Last Judgment. In a brutal passage from Inferno VI, Dante and Virgil have the following exchange:

“‘Master,’ I asked, ‘after the great Judgment
will these torments be greater, less,
or will they stay as harsh as they are now?’

And he replied: ‘Return to your science,
which has it that, in measure of a thing’s perfection,
it feels both more of pleasure and of pain.

‘Although these accursed people
will never come to true perfection,
they will be nearer it than they are now.’”

With bone-dry, pitch-black humor, Virgil reveals to Dante that once the souls of the damned regain their bodies at the Last Judgment, they will feel even more pain than they currently do; it will be for the state of greater “perfection,” which they will attain by repossessing their bodies, allowing them to appreciate their imperfections and suffering yet more intensely. According to Dante then, the ideal state to which God will bring the world at the Last Judgment has not only a place for continued suffering, but even more suffering than before. Needless to say, if a human were to act as God (and will always act) towards those He does not like, and hold, as God holds, such unabating wrath in his heart, that human would (if they did not confess before death) be swiftly condemned to Hell.

Those theodical arguments that do not weasel out of the Problem of Hell by insisting that Hell will be harrowed at the Last Judgment, or that Hell is actually an extension of Purgatory, typically attempt to justify eternal damnation by insisting, as C.S. Lewis did in The Problem of Pain, that “the doors of Hell are (only) locked on the inside.” By this, Lewis and others mean that those who are damned are damned only by the exercise of their own free will, so intent are they on resisting God’s grace. Because the gift of free will is not one God will ever revoke, these souls may very well choose to stay in Hell eternally. This explanation is a psychologically insightful take on the general problem, but it does not help us deal with Dante’s Hell. After all, we are only too aware that many in the Hell of the Comedia, particularly those in Limbo, desperately wish they could be redeemed, yet cannot be. As Virgil tragically puts it in Inferno IV, “without hope, we live in longing.”

Part II: Other Infernal Problems

Punishments, and Those Punished

One of the most celebrated poetic innovations of Inferno is its creative use of contrapasso, the narrative technique whereby the punishment for a particular vice involves a procedure which mimics or inverts the vice in question. Some of these contrapassi are more deftly accomplished than others: the transfiguration of suicides— those who mutilated and threw away their bodies— into gnarled trees, which are continually ravaged by rampaging souls, is a poignant and compelling instantiation of this trope; by contrast, the punishment for flatterers, which involves boiling in a pit of excrement, is merely crude. As the designer of Hell, one would expect God to exact punishments more elegant and psychologically subtle than this. This criticism is a rather small gripe however compared to what one might say about the arrangement of Hell. It surely makes sense that crimes of incontinence are punished less severely than crimes of malice; it hardly makes sense that crimes of sadistic violence are judged to be less severe than the petty crime of counterfeiting coins. According to Dante’s scheme, a garden-variety con man would occupy a lower place in Hell than a serial torturer-rapist-killer like Jeffrey Dahmer. Is this just? Surely not. If Inferno is meant to show us a veracious pageant of divine justice (and it is), it fails to convince our God-given moral compass.

The most egregious example of questionable punishment is found near the very end of Inferno. Understandably, Satan gnaws upon Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ, but he also gnaws upon the shades of Brutus and Cassius with only slightly less ferocity. We are right to be baffled at this discovery, especially considering that Cato, who “betrayed” Caesar with just as much vehemence as Brutus and Cassius, is—beyond all expectations for a pagan—miraculously saved! Clearly Dante has no love for Caesar; he bewilderingly insists on punishing Caesar’s murderers as severely as possible. Dante scholars (ex. Robert Hollander) have argued that Brutus and Cassius are treated so harshly because they were treasonous toward their “rightful lord,” and this is all the worse because this lord was, according to Dante’s understanding, the first emperor of the divinely-sanctioned Roman Empire. Dante may well have operated with this understanding, but we mustn’t overlook the fact that Brutus and Cassius, though allied to Caesar, were never politically or personally bound to serve Caesar as their lord—to them, he was a would-be tyrant who threatened the existence of the Republic, and who, after crossing the Rubicon, might very well be seen as a traitor himself. To condemn Brutus and Cassius for betraying Caesar seems historically suspect and grossly unfair to the pair’s intentions, but it is, given Cato’s salvation, infuriatingly (even absurdly) arbitrary.

Furthermore, the notion that the deepest place in Hell is reserved for those who betray their “rightful lords,” regardless of how virtuous these lords are (Caesar was certainly no saint) is immensely troubling. Should we expect to find Claus von Stauffenberg, the Nazi officer who plotted against Hitler’s life, freezing endlessly in Cocytus for his transgression against the Fuhrer? Our conscience tells us no. While Dante may very often convince us aesthetically of his testimony, he cannot, in the end, convince us of it morally.

The Mercilessness of the Virtuous

Speaking of his deceased wife who has been damned to Hell, the aforementioned (and somehow saved) Cato says:

Now that she dwells beyond the evil stream
she cannot move me any longer,
according to the law laid down at my deliverance.

Prior to this point (Purgatorio I), we have seen Virgil scold Dante many times for the natural human compassion he shows toward the suffering sinners he encounters in hell; we have seen him reward Dante with a kiss for refusing to show pity to Filippo Argenti (Inferno V); and we have seen an angel come down to the gates of Dis to ensure Dante’s safe passage without acknowledging the suffering around it in any way (Inferno IX). Now, Cato confirms what we have long suspected—that the saved (and the almost-saved, like Virgil) are not only discouraged from showing pity to the damned, but are forbidden to do so, either due to divine sanction or due to a natural inclination resulting from the “perfection” of their will after death.

This is a difficult pill to swallow: the saintliest among us, according to Dante’s testimony, are those least compassionate to souls condemned to endless suffering, because those closest to God understand that such people do not deserve any pity. Who among us would call such a view— bereft of mercy, numb to human pain— humane, much less a spiritually enlightened view? Dante’s view of God’s justice borders on the psychopathic and seems not only antithetical to the spirit of Jesus’ teachings, but completely unattuned to the human fallibility and propensity to error for which God-as-Christ died and redeemed humankind on the cross. It is one thing to claim the obvious truth that God’s ways are alien to us—it is another to portray God’s ways as being merciless, arbitrary, and spiteful, while at the same time claiming that God is Love and possesses “omnibenevolence” in a sense which does not render the term completely meaningless or tautological.

The Damnation of Innocents

Here we reach the problem which is the most obvious one to first-time readers of the Comedia, and to Dante himself: how can a just God condemn good souls (whether unbaptized infants or ignorant pagans) for a deficiency (not knowing Christ) which is not their fault? Even if one is willing to give Dante (and Dante’s God) the benefit of the doubt that some souls really do deserve endless punishment and zero pity, the fact that God condemns good and innocent people to Limbo seems utterly indefensible and patently unfair. This question troubled Dante enough that he spends considerable time addressing it in Paradiso XIX, wherein he interrogates the Jovian Eagle, the personification of divine justice. How can it can be that, say, a righteous Indian who has never heard of Christ deserves damnation? The eagle’s response is essentially the response given to Job: who are you, puny mortal, to question the ways of God? The eagle then goes on, as if to make up for this non-answer, by asserting that many Christians will, in the final reckoning, be farther from God than the righteous pagans. This last bit of good news does not tell us anything we do not already know, for we have seen the righteous pagans occupying the penthouse suite, so to speak, of Hell, far above the suffering of many Christian sinners. It is surely cold comfort to know that, though one is denied God’s grace forever through no fault of one’s own, at least one is better off than the guy frying in feces.

It is worth dwelling on the eagle’s Job-like answer for a moment. In The Book of Job, God comes down from a whirlwind to inform Job, who has suffered horribly for no good reason, and has subsequently accused God of foul play, that Job is in no position to question or understand the ways of God. This is fair enough, and in fact, in this writer’s opinion, The Book of Job is not only one of the greatest poems but one of the greatest works of theodicy ever written. Its message accords with human experience: life often seems absurd, and suffering afflicts the righteous just as often if not more often than the iniquitous. However, what is sublime in Job’s God is unsatisfactory in Dante’s God. This is so for at least a couple reasons. Firstly, because Job’s God is a Jewish God, not a Christian God, and therefore is not bound to the same theological expectations of love, mercy, and intimate affinity with and for mankind. Secondly, the action in Job deals with mortal life, not the afterlife, and thus what God’s “final say” is remains a mystery. In Dante, by contrast, we find the blueprint of God’s justice laid out in full, His eternal judgments lain bare, and we do not like what we see. Virgil in Hell, but Ripheus in Heaven? The souls of babies barred from God’s light forever? Sempiternal torment for the majority of souls, which only increases in intensity after the Last Judgment? In Job, the answer “because I said so” leaves us filled with wonder. In Dante, it can only leave us indignant at the illogical and unjust state of eternity.

Railing at the absurdities and problematic choices in the Comedia may seem like bad sportsmanship. The work is after all a poem, meant not only to educate, but to entertain, entrance, and shock. I believe that Dante, for having written such a magnificent, difficult poem, one of the best we have or ever will have, deserves to be taken seriously, and Dante would like us to read his poem as a revealed text. When we try, we recoil in horror and frustration, and cannot accept it as such. In this regard, the work is a failure; as a moral, aesthetic, and spiritual work, it is of course a massive (if imperfect) triumph. Dante’s grand statement on the human and divine condition may help make religious believers out of some of us— but if it does so, it will not be because of the perceived truth of his account, but rather because of the beauty of his verse and the cogency of his insight.

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