900

Sandro Botticelli's Chart of Hell

This is my 900th post, and I have a tradition of posting something somewhat related to the number on round number posts like this.  The last time I posted on 800 area code phone numbers and the concept of "free."  While the obvious choice would be to post on 900 numbers this time around I am going to take a different, more convoluted, and slightly more serious direction with this post.

About twelve years ago I read a translation of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, which was his depiction of Hell, as well as his Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven or Paradise).  The way this is tenuously related to 900 is that Dante's depiction of Hell was that it was a gigantic hole in the ground, and that there were nine (not nine hundred, but I already said this was tenuous) rings that formed the hole, and the closer to the center rings you got the deeper into the hole you were.  Each ring was devoted to specific types of sinners, and so the less bad sinners were tormented on the outer rings while the serious sinners were tormented worse in the inner rings.

I have had a lot of contemplations about Inferno ever since I read it, but I never took the opportunity fully articulate them until now, so this is my chance.

The first thing a person notices when reading Inferno is that Dante had enemies and he enjoyed imagining them suffer.  He fills his Hell with people he personally knew, or who were opposed in some way to Dante (or his city-state), and details in what way those people will suffer that is related to the way they sinned.  He also fills his Hell with historical figures that most people agreed were deserving of punishment (the worst reserved for Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot).  If Dante had a beef with you there was a pretty good chance you were going to end up somewhere in his literary torture fantasy.

The second thing that sticks out to me is how appealing a depiction, woefully inaccurate or not, of Hell is.  Put bluntly, Purgatorio and Paradiso were boring.  Inferno was interesting if only for the creativity with which Dante imagined people's eternal demise.  On further thought, isn't a perfect reflection of human nature?  The idea of being perfected and moving toward Paradise makes for a boring read, but detail how sinners are justly tortured and I can't put the book down.

The third thing that sticks out to me is how damaging the book is to a real belief in Hell.  I have heard multiple people say the opposite.  Interest in Inferno will make people wonder if there really is a Hell, I've heard.  To me, the stories are so specific yet so limited within a human mindset that it feels (and is) contrived.  Hell is real, but it is not something that we can conceive of more than we can conceive of Heaven.  To force a detailed depiction that makes some physical sense to our feeble minds is to make it sound more like a fairy tale than reality.  I couldn't believe that Hell was real if I were forced to accept even 10% of the depiction that Dante presents.

Finally, this trilogy of books is absolute proof that people did not believe the earth was flat in the years prior to Columbus' initial voyage to the Americas.  Typically, when people correctly note that people in Medieval times did not believe that the earth was flat, they point to the writings of the ancient Greeks which note that a flat earth would not allow for ships to sink into the horizon to disappear, and that they would instead just disappear into a tiny speck at a large distance away.  If the 500 B.C. Greeks knew, the 1492 A.D. Portuguese did as well.  I look to Dante instead, who lived about two hundred years before Columbus' voyages.

The reason that Dante presented Hell as a hole in the ground was that he imagined that Hell would be a void in the earth left when Satan was cast down from God's presence and struck the earth like a massive high-speed asteroid.  Dante further surmised that on the other side of the world would be a huge mountain created by land upended from the creation of the hole that was Hell.  This mountain would be Purgatory, and it would rise up into the heavens and be the gateway into Paradise.

So, in summary, Dante's Hell is a hole in the ground caused by Satan striking the earth with incredible force. Also, Purgatory is a mountain on the other side of the earth, which was created by that same force.  This is not a story conceived by someone who believes in a flat earth.  It is a story conceived by someone without a great deal of knowledge of physics or astronomy, however, so there is that.  I just believe that we need to remember that not every belief from an earlier time period is completely ridiculous.  I may have brought harm to that point by mentioning Dante's description of Purgatory as a mountain leading to Paradise, though.