Hell In The Gospel Of John, And St. Thomas Aquinas

The conception of Heaven and Hell is meant to provide a means of justice in the afterlife, C.S. Lewis has a different view than the traditional idea on what that may look like. In “The Great Divorce”, Lewis defends that God is just by writing about a just version of Heaven and Hell. First, I summarize a general image of the traditional Christian idea of Heaven and Hell and explain the issues that come with it. Next, I offer C.S. Lewis’s counter position on Heaven and Hell. Lastly, I assess Lewis’s conception, arguing that it does not escape the justice issue of the traditional image of the afterlife.

Often, we cannot see the good until we have experienced the bad. Dante Alighieri, a poet who makes himself the main character in his Divine Comedy, finds himself lost in a dark wood at the start of The Inferno. Though he sees a safe path out of the wood towards an alluring light, he is forced to take an alternate route through an even darker place. As the ending of the pilgrim Dante’s voyage is bright and hopeful, Alighieri the poet aims to encourage even the most sinful Christians to hope for a successful end. Thus, Dante the pilgrim goes to hell in The Inferno to better understand the nature of sin and its consequences in order to move closer to salvation; his journey an allegory representing that of the repenting Christian soul.

Since ancient civilizations people have been trying to explain what goes on after death. Throughout history, many cultures have had different theories about what happens. Two distinguished ideas of where people go after death are the underworld and Hell. The idea of the underworld came from the Greeks and Romans. A few famous works by the Greeks and Romans that talk about the underworld are The Iliad, The Aeneid, and, The Odyssey. A famous work that discusses Hell is Dante's Inferno. Hell is an accepted part of the Christianity religion and taught all over the world. The two beliefs are very similar but some distinct differences can be seen.

People who don’t accept Christ as their Savior will go to Hell. Revelation 20:15 affirms that fact that if anyone’s name isn’t written in the book of life, they will go to the fiery pit (BibleGateway). Salvation is the complete opposite of death (Kyrtatas). Matthew 13:42 explains what Hell will be like by saying, “and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (BibleGateway).” The apostle Paul said it best when he said that Hell is the separation of the presence of God. Revelation 21:8 describes Hell as a second death and proclaims who the inhabitants of Hell will be. It says, “But cowards, unbelievers, the corrupt, murderers, the immoral, those who practice witchcraft, idol worshipers, and all liars—their fate is in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death

    Hell is said to be the worst place to ever exist, and it is greatly feared about on earth and in the minds of people. “Hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them and swallow them up,” this illustrates personification in giving the flames of hell the live ability to hold and swallow us. It portrays how we will be consumed by our own sins if we do not act on them to better ourselves. If we let our sins pile up they will weigh us down and we will eventually be brought down to hell to pay for our wrong doings.

Robert Herrick, an English poet, once said, “Hell is no other but a soundlesse pit, where no one beame of comfort peeps in it.” Picture any type of Hell with relief, happiness, or even the smallest crack of a smile. There is no place. In fact, one can only think of the complete opposite, whether it is a Hell filled with neglect, pain, disgust, or a never-ending life of horror. This is the place created by Dante Alighieri; The Inferno is exactly the type of Hell where no person would want to be. Even those who acted upon the lightest of sins suffered greatly. While each realm contained a different sinner, the punishment that each were forced to face was cruel, repulsive, and sometimes rather disgusting. Through grieving tears without an

While love is not frequently mentioned in the poem the Inferno, it always has a presence on the back of the reader’s mind. The most surprising appearance of love comes at the gates of hell. This is where Dante learns that this place of punishment has been created from “Primal Love”. Dante displayed hell as being birthed from “the primal love”, or the Holy Spirit. Though those who do not believe the justice of eternal punishment are all less inclined to regard it as a byproduct of God’s love. In this essay I will reveal how hell is the result of God’s loving character, and how it was indeed created from love.

In St. Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Inferno, the central characters in their respective narratives are presented a message from which induces distinct reactions. More importantly, their reactions are reflections of their perspective concerning the Christian outlook

A major theological problem exist as it related to Christ descending into hell to take the keys of death. Although the Apostle’s Creed points out that Jesus descended down into hel, His descent was not about suffering, but about a triumph victory over Satan. In order to ascertain the truth behind the afterlife, the validity of hell has to be established.

This particular interactive oral illustrates both the similarities and the differences of the theological Christian hell portrayed in the Bible and the hell displayed in No Exit. Hell is defined in many different ways in both cases. The biblical hell paints a picture of fire, brimstone, ongoing torture, and isolation. On the other hand, a more psychological hell is described in No Exit, a place where hell is other people. A place where there is not physical pain, but everlasting mental anguish. Both hells feature stifling heat, solitary confinement, and a complete absence of rest. However in the Bible, there are clearly defined wages paid for our sins, with the backdrop of this hell consisting of fire, the devil, destruction, darkness, sorrow,

The theme of equilibrium between reason and faith is one of the core messages of Inferno and it is essential in conveying the main idea of the Divine Comedy and of the pilgrim’s journey that the exploitation of intellect and the misuse of will is the cause of sin, and that through faith, those who are morally lost find their salvation in God. In Inferno Dante makes it clear that he greatly values knowledge and reason in a way that is more characteristic to the Renaissance rather than of his own Medieval time. However, throughout this first book, the author reminds the audience of the Christian nature of his poem as he uses the stories of the sinners he encounters to stress the idea that without faith, the intellect is not sufficient to achieve divine salvation and that the misuse of reason can often lead to terrible sins.

American Educator Susan Blow studied Dante’s Inferno with great respect to the implements of ethics and theology. “In the following excerpt, she discusses the Inferno from an ethical and theological point of view, explaining that divine retribution implies man's fundamental ethical responsibility, and that ‘Hell is the Creator's final tribute of respect to the being he made in his own image’ “ (Blow, para 1). Blow clearly understood Dante’s views and states, “His poem is not individual but universal; he utters not his own thought, but the unformulated creed of Christendom. Nay, he reaches beyond Christianity and speaks to the universal conscience of humanity—that inward witness which is always calling upon man to rejoice in his freedom and tremble before the responsibility bound up with it” (Blow, para 2).

As Dante explores the Second Circle of Hell, he is horrified by the punishments that the sinners must suffer through. When he hears the story of Francesca and Paolo’s lustful actions, Dante relates deeply to their stuggles because he reflects on his own sins and believes he may be cast to a similar fate in the afterlife. Dante reacts to the story when he says, “I fainted, as if I had met my death. / And then I fell as a dead body falls” (5.142-143). Dante faints from compassion for the two sinners’ pitiful story. Dante struggles to grasp the wrongdoing these people have participated in to be placed in Hell because he continues to search for the noble qualities in everyone. On the one hand, Dante believes God’s punishment for the lustful sinners, relentless winds and storms, is unethical. On the other hand, this belief is naive because it is known that all of God’s punishments are just. The lustful are condemned to an eternity in Hell because they did not care about their actions on Earth, so the raging storm that torments them is not concerned with what is in its path. Dante is not only attempting to discover the possible consequences of his own actions, but also learning to trust in God’s judgement.

In The Inferno, Dante descends through the nine circles of Hell, encountering increasingly serious sins, most of which are crimes. The levels of Hell can be interpreted as a gradation of crimes, with penalties in proportion to their relative gravity of sin. While crimes are transgressions against human law, Dante’s Christian orthodox ambitions translate the treatment of these seemingly earthly crimes as sins, transgressions against divine law. For the purposes of this paper, the two terms can be used interchangeably because Dante’s perception of crimes on Earth is in parallel to the punishment of those crimes as sins in Hell. For Dante, the most punishable sins are those of betrayal. With a lucid examination of Dante’s political

Religious people always fear that they will not make it to Heaven or the place their God resides. The bible and other religious text give advice on how to avoid the pain of Hell. Dante Alighieri, a famous Italian poet, wrote about the physical description of Hell and the punishments each sinner would receive for their sins. Although The Divine Comedy chronicles Dante's journey from the depths of Hell to the glory of Heaven it contains a deeper meaning. Dante reveals the true meaning of the Inferno through his leading motif, his interactions between the sinners, and the intertwining of other literary works into the Inferno.