Expert: Brenda Martin - 6/20/2004

Question
How does Dante reflect the church of his day?

Answer
"HOW DOES DANTE REFLECT THE CHURCH OF HIS DAY?"

The meaning given today to the word “hell” is that portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, which meaning is completely foreign to the original definition of the word. The idea of a “hell” of fiery torment, however, dates back long before Dante or Milton.

The Grolier Universal Encyclopedia (1971, Vol. 9, p. 205) under “Hell” says: “Hindus and Buddhists regard hell as a place of spiritual cleansing and final restoration. Islamic tradition considers it as a place of everlasting punishment.” The idea of suffering after death is found among the pagan religious teachings of ancient peoples in Babylon and Egypt. Babylonian and Assyrian beliefs depicted the “nether world . . . as a place full of horrors, . . . presided over by gods and demons of great strength and fierceness.” Although ancient Egyptian religious texts do not teach that the burning of any individual victim would go on forever, they do portray the “Other World” as featuring “pits of fire” for “the damned.”—The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, by Morris Jastrow, Jr., 1898, p. 581; The Book of the Dead, with introduction by E. Wallis Budge, 1960, pp. 135, 144, 149, 151, 153, 161, 200.

Believing that Satan exists does not mean accepting the idea that he has horns, a pointed tail, and a pitchfork and that he roasts people in a fiery hell. The Bible gives no such description of Satan. That is the product of the minds of medieval artists who were influenced by representations of the mythological Greek god Pan and by the Inferno written by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Instead of teaching a fiery hell, the Bible clearly says that “the dead . . . are conscious of nothing at all.”—Eccl. 9:5.

When the persecuted Bible translator, William Tyndale, made his translation of the Greek part of the original Bible, he said, in Matthew 11:23, according to his spelling in the year 1525: “And thou Capernaum, which art lyft up unto heaven, shalt be brought doune to hell.”

When Dr. Martin Luther translated those Christian Greek Scriptures into German in 1522, he used the similarly sounding German word “Hoelle.”

**But when the Roman Catholic Saint Jerome translated the same scriptures from common Greek into Latin, in 383 C.E., he used the word “infernus.” So the Italian poet of the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri, wrote his famous poem entitled Divine Comedy and called the first part of it “Inferno.”

He pictured the “Inferno” as a deep pit with gradually contracting circles on which the condemned human souls suffered after the death of the body. Was Dante correct?

The religious clergymen of Christendom have created an image of what they understand to be “hell” or “inferno” in the minds of their church people. It is a terrible image and not one taught in scripture.

All the best
Brenda