Dante’s “Inferno” is not a description of timeless rectitude. It is an expression of meanness and moral perversity.
Dante’s Inferno is the nadir of Christian religion. He tells complex stories clearly and tersely and is great at the visualization of the geography of Hell and Hell’s hierarchical moral structure, but his moral sense is cruel and perverse. Christians are in danger of trying to put Christian generosity into Dante’s constraints. Consider his near contemporary, Chaucer, as more generous and humane and without any need of supernaturalism and still very much a Christian..
If Dante follows Aristotle and so vices and virtues are self enforcing in that people continue to experience what they are, such as sad or happy or envious or generous, then there should be no need to additionally punish people for their characteristics, or else maybe the pains of Hell are just symbolic representations of bad feelings, but that can hardly be the case in that Dante makes Hell vivid enough to believe it to be an accurate picture, more or less, of what the afterlife will be, people suffering forever. Even if Dante simply means a very long time, it is still pretty long, something I would not wish on my worst enemy. I would not even condemn it to Hitler who Chirchill thought, quite correctly, should be shot on sight if captured by British troops because he was so dangerous to humanity, not because of a punishment. I would not want on my conscience the suffering of all those sent to Hell. So punishment in Hell is both gratuitous and cruel, which is a definition of evil. It is paradoxical to think that to put people in Hell is not itself an evil.
Consider the usual reasons for offering punishment and how they stock up against punishment in the afterlife. The most humane reason for punishment in a penal system is incapacitation. If you are in jail, you can’t commit a crime and maybe when you finish your sentence you may have aged out of the tendency to commit crimes again. But that doesn’t apply to those in Hell. They are already out of the way of committing crimes on the Earth and they cannot age out of criminality and Dante does not propose that those in Hell will continue to engage in crimes while in Hell. They are otherwise preoccupied. Another reason for punishment is to discourage others, those alive, from engaging in crime. That might seem plausible since people are engrained in the idea of punishment after death and so it is in their interest to curb evil tendencies for fear of what might happen to them when they die. But deterrence works in actual life only for rational crimes, so that muggers will not touch the muggee so as not to get a higher sentence for aggravated assault. It does not stop men killing their wives for being unfaithful. And since those condemned to Hell have their crimes in their natures, they will not be deterred from revenge or bloodlust or other sins. So deterrence does not apply to Hell. Yet another reason for worldly punishment is rehabilitation, which has a very low success rate in this punishment and the point of Hell is that those people sent to Hell are beyond rehabilitation, their nature regarded as permanent.
The single remaining reason for punishing people in Hell is justice, just as is the case on Earth where people are punished as retribution for their crimes. It seems just to punish people for their sins. But there is no equivalence of the punishment for the sin. The punishment does not compensate or recompense for the sin. It is just another act of violence or incarceration. I once said to a Holocaust survivor who wanted to have shot nazis that it was no use to want revenge because it brought no one of the six million back to life. Vengeance was useless except to extend the experience of misery. Killing Hitler would not make up for the sixty million people killed in World War II. Vengeance is an act of futility in that people want to achieve the impossible, the creation of the status quo ante, and punishment is the result of frustration in that the only thing that can be done is to make someone suffer. But God is not acting out of frustration. He has to have a better purpose and I just don’t know what it could be to make people suffer when He need not command them to undergo pain. Maybe He is just threatening people of Hell so as to deter them, but never carries out His threat because He is so humane, and if He is not humane He is not worthy of being God, only a Greek human like figure call;ed a god.
Here is a similar situation in real life to the permanent holocaust of Hell. Herman Kahn, writing in the Sixties about nuclear warfare, posited that the nation might have available to it a great horde of nuclear weapons but that they were not ever to be launched, and so just a bluff to keep opponents in line. He thought that improbable because the secret never to launch would get leaked and that knowing the arms would not be launched would alter the nation’s behavior, perhaps more likely to flinch if the opponent threatened, Kahn went on to consider first and second strike capabilities and even a doomsday machine which could destroy the world if it were automatically triggered. But, as a matter of fact, the bluff was the strategy of choice in that period for the United States. John Kennedy indicated to Robert MacNamara that he would never launch a nuclear holocaust against the Soviets even if Soviet missiles were incoming. Moreover, no mechanism had ever been developed to inform the President and give him enough time to decide whether to launch during the thirty minutes between the time the US knew the soviet missiles had launched and when they would arrive at their targets. So noone in power ever thought to really launch atomic missiles and destroy te world or maybe only a few hundred million people though the threat of it scared the bejesus out of me.
Some theologians argue similarly, Really there are no people assigned to Hell. It is vacant because God is too loving to do that to anyone. But there is a problem. Presidents are expected to lie about matters of state when it is in the national interest though most Presidents think that should be rare because it causes distrust in the populace, But the Pope should not lie about matters of faith, the repository about belief in the supernatural, because that is what the believers cherish: the faith based certainty declared by the Church. If they are shamming about Hell they might be shamming about everything. So there is no getting around that millions and millions of people will endure for eternity the holocaust of those who have died with considerable sin. Hardly the standard of the prince of peace.
Putting aside whether people should be punished at all for their misdeeds, consider how to make judgment on some particular individuals. Some people continually engage in some evil and so can be considered characteristic of that voice. That is the case of those who continually drown in blood because they are responsible for wars. But there are also those who have engaged in some very serious but single crime, like Brutus who as Shakespeare might later say, was otherwise an admirable man. Should he be judged for his singular failing? Perhaps there should be a balancing act whereby people are judged on whether on the whole they have done good or evil. Most people have entries on both sides of the ledger. Or God might be even more generous than that. Let us say a person has few or only one redeeming feature. Maybe that should be enough to earn that person grace. In that case, we would use as our measure of a person, as that person’s essence, the best the person does rather than the worst a person does. That, after all, is the way saints are treated. They don’t have to be perfect people, just people who in some glorious moment did something saintly, such as giving forgiveness to someone who had recently tormented them, even if they also didn’t like dogs or a childhood playmate. Dante is at odds with present day Catholic morality.
The best defense of Dante is that he is just showing people to stay by their own traits, what are their inevitable moral shortcomings, which means gluttons act like gluttons. But in most of these cases, the punishments are not appropriate to the shortcomings of their vices. Famously, the couples engaged in the sin of lust are represented by a couple entwined with one another who are wafted about by the winds because they have no anchors in social life. But that is to misunderstand illicit love. It is the result of people each so entwined with their own social life that it is painful and even painful to overcome the differences between those groups. Romeo and Juliet are mired in the war between the Montagues and the Capulets. Jane Eyre is forever separated from Lord Rochester because of the difference of their social classes. Humbert Humbert is fully aware that he wanders with Lolita because the society within which he lives finds this love for her to be disgusting. Similarly, the nonbelievers are put in burning coffins to punish them for their disbelief as if to show them, to stick their noses in the face of the fact that the afterlife is eternal. But those sinners could claim they had just been mistaken and so not be punished for disbelief. A better image, I dare to offer, would be to have the unbelievers be deaf or blind so as to indicate that they could not perceive the visions offered byChristianity. The lowest circle of Hell is occupied by the betrayers, as if that is the worst possible failing but disloyalty against friends or to a spouse are too common to rank as the worst possible sin. Moreover, Brutus and Judas are put in the same level which is an affront to Christianity, where there are political alliances where people turn against one or the other, while there is a different order of things where God himself is the one who is betrayed. There is an enormity of violation, of betraying not just a person but the order of things, of morality itse;lf, and that would seem to deserve wandering in the void alone without any prospect of existence, though the idea of the vastless void is part of the modern imagination. Dante couldn’t have thought of that except as an educated man he could have considered from Lucretius a universe devoid ofGod, butDante was too narrow to think of that possibility because the emotions he considered were everyday vices, and so had reduced the true killer of Christ as an ordinary failure.
Apply rethinking what seems an antiquated sin in “The Inferno”. Simonics are people who took money for doing a holy thing. Dabte points our that Peter did not get money for accepting Jesus. He just git the reward of service. We might think of child abuse as the equivalent of simony because the glory of God and His Church are being sold for sexual exploitation ratheer than greed. The punishment of the simonics is that they are turned upside down and their feet are burned in fire. But that punishment is very general and could be applied to any transgression. A more appropriate sentence would turn a joke into a torture. Scrooge McDuck dives into his swimming pool filled with coins so he can swim in his wealth. But coins are hard and not soft. So a punishment for avarice would be to try to swim in hard things and be perpetually torn apart by the coins. That would represent avarice but not the betrayal of trust to those entrusted with faith, and so a shortcoming of this answer to this particular vice.
What is behind Dante’s punishments are not excruciating pain or appropriateness is the emotion of humiliation, that the persons have their self respectlessoned even if, when these characters speak, they seem to retain their self respect while enduring their agony. They do not cry or plead and so the punishment is to make them blush. The punishment for gluttony is not the immobility that might result from being overweight, or being forced to eat endless food. It is that feces drip down on them, which is an insult more than a pain. These nonbelievers might be punished by always being Tantalus- like, ever separated from what is now known to be real, but is made into a joke, a reminder that you thought the dead might have coffins where your consciousness would live. Brutus the betrayer is humiliated by being associated with the most stellar betrayer, which is of God, when Brutus merely portrayed a political rival. And so on. But if that were the case, that God was cackling about the unfortunates rather than resolute about the need for punishment, that would make God unworthy of being a God of law and justice. For shame.