stmhumanities

It seams quite unfair to me that Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil have to eternally exist in the first layer of Hell. Although it isn’t the worst part of Hell, it’s definitely no Elysian Fields. Imagine if you were someone like one of these poets who thought that after they died they would be entering a classical version of the underworld. Imagine how shocked you would be to turn up in some Christian hell where you are punished because you were born at the wrong time in history. All of a sudden, you hear that there isn’t multiple, human like gods, but this one great Emperor. Then his son comes down to pull up all these other people to Paradise because they knew about this one God. It would seem very frustrating that you lived your live morally correct but you are punished solely because your lack of knowledge about this singular God. If God represents justice, then why would Dante have God punish people who sinned without any awareness that they were sinning? Even though they aren’t horribly punished, they still have to dread over the fact that the only thing preventing them from eternally existing in Paradise is the time in which they were born and their lack of exposure to Christianity, rather than some horrible sin they committed. If Dante is right and this is the way the afterlife is actually set up, imagine how crowded the fist layer of Hell would be.