John Milton Lost Paradise in Dante's Inferno- Part 1

Many of us have been taught elaborate, mythic stories about a rebellion in Heaven led by an angel named Satan. or Lucifer, who some of us have been told "was the most beautiful of the angels." This prideful devil, defeated by a host of God's loyal angels, is then kicked out of Heaven. In the stories we are often taught the devil and his angels are thrown down to the earth with a myriad of demons, where he exacts his revenge by leading men to their doom and ruling over them in an eternally burning Hell.

Funny, but I can't seem to find many of these lengthy myths in my Bible. Sure, there ARE three verses about a war in heaven in Revelation 12, and some references to the satan, the devil, and demons. The Book of Revelation has its own issues which are WAY beyond the scope of this article, so suffice to say that we only get a short, four sentence blurb about this battle in scripture. And those four sentences appear in a book of the Bible that some Christian denominations, such as the Eastern Orthodox Churches, don't read as part of their liturgy. These grandiose stories had to come from somewhere, but where?

One source of these myths is the imagination of a 14th-century poet, politician, and philosopher named Dante Alighieri. Dante was the author of an epic poem entitled, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine by Citizenship, Not by Morals. In it Dante is taken on a "tour" of Hell (Inferno). Dante's epic was written after he had been exiled from Florence and sentenced to be burned alive if he were to be caught in his hometown.

This death sentence came about due to his membership in a political group, the Guelphs, which opposed Pope Boniface VIII. Dante and the pope were bitter enemies, and Dante encounters this very same pope in Hell. Inferno is more of a social commentary and condemnation of the leadership of the Roman church than it is a work which lays a framework for any sort of "divine" interpretation of Hell. Bottom line- Dante was a politician, not a theologian.

Dante is accompanied on his trip through Inferno by another epic poet, Virgil, whose poem Aeneid also includes a sojourn through the "underworld" of Roman mythology. The inhabitants of Dante's Inferno include a whole host of characters from Greek and Roman mythology, along with some of Dante's political rivals. There are similar themes throughout Dante's work and that of the Aeneid-one could say that Dante's "hell" shares more than a few of the attributes of the Hades and Tartarus of Greek and Roman mythology. Not exactly what I'd call "biblically sound" interpretations of what Jesus said about "Hell". Given the warning given in 1 Tim 4:7 I'm inclined to be more attentive to what Jesus taught than a couple of boring old poets' epic tales!

One thing I find interesting, from a universalist's point of view, is that Dante not only GOES to Hell, he passes through it. Upon exiting Inferno Dante enters and travels through Purgatory (Purgatorio) as well. Having made it through all the levels of Hell and Purgatory, Dante is then reunited with the love of his life, who guides him through Paradise (Paradiso). Perhaps a closer look at Dante's "heaven" is in order for some future date, but for now we need to take this dogma home and find John Milton's....

-----TO BE CONTINUED-----