Dante, Boethius, and Christian Faith in the Inferno

Introduction: Three Writers, Three Visions of Christianity

Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy — of which the Inferno is the first of three books — called Boethius, an early Christian, "The blessed soul who exposes the deceptive world to anyone who gives ear to him." But Boethius was not an unconflicted Christian, and it seems, neither was Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy at least partly as a kind of historical-political payback. For example, in Canto VI of the Inferno, Ciacco mentions Pope Boniface VIII, the reigning Pope of his time, "whose intervention in the affairs of the city was, in Dante's view, a main cause of its miseries" (Sinclair, p. 95).

St. John, on the other hand, was an unconflicted Christian who believed wholly in Jesus as the Son of God and entertained no other ideas. Although he likely wrote — and therefore thought — in Greek, his devotion to Jesus, as one of Jesus' disciples, was absolute. According to "John: Introduction":

The Gospel according to John is quite different in character from the three synoptic gospels. It is highly literary and symbolic. It does not follow the same order or reproduce the same stories as the synoptic gospels. To a much greater degree, it is the product of a developed theological reflection and grows out of a different circle and tradition. It was probably written in the 90s of the first century.

Boethius, on the other hand, seemed — based on his writings — to vary between Christian faith and a Greek belief system that included Philosophy, clearly a Greek conception and ideal, personified in the form of a woman.

This essay examines Dante's Christian beliefs within, and possible other motivations for writing, the Inferno, and suggests that these were perhaps less purely Christian than the apparent overall subject of the Divine Comedy — and the Inferno in particular — might suggest. In that same sense, a comparison may be made between Dante and Boethius, who both wrote of Christians and Greeks within the same texts and shared an allegiance to both, spiritually and philosophically. St. John, although he probably wrote both his Gospels and his Acts in Greek, had an allegiance only to Jesus and was therefore a more serious, committed Christian than either Boethius or Dante, even though all three wrote about Christianity.

Boethius: Greek Philosophy and Christian Faith Intertwined

Like Dante in the Inferno, Boethius seemed conflicted about his Christian beliefs. Writing while imprisoned, he describes the following in The Consolation of Philosophy:

. . . when I turned my eyes towards her and fixed my gaze upon her, I recognised my nurse, Philosophy, in whose chambers I had spent my life from earliest manhood. And I asked her, "Wherefore have you, mistress of all virtues, come down from heaven above to visit my lonely place of banishment? Is it that you, as well as I, may be harried, the victim of false charges?" "Should I," said she, "desert you, my nursling?"

Boethius is a Christian, but his Christianity clearly co-exists with Greek — that is, non-Christian — ideals, and he identifies these ideals in particular as giving him comfort during his last days on earth: a reflective time filled with disappointment and sadness. It is then that Philosophy comes to Boethius, in the form of a woman, to comfort him in prison. Furthermore, Boethius' heroes and inspirations, much like Dante's later, seem not to be Christians but instead Greeks:

In ancient days before the time of my child, Plato, have we not as well as nowadays fought many a mighty battle against the recklessness of folly? And though Plato did survive, did not his master, Socrates, win his victory of an unjust death, with me present at his side? When after him the followers of Epicurus, and in turn the Stoics, and then others did all try their utmost to seize his legacy, they dragged me, for all my cries and struggles, as though to share me as plunder; they tore my robe which I had woven with mine own hands, and snatched away the fragments thereof: and when they thought I had altogether yielded myself to them, they departed.

For Boethius, the concept of God also seems perhaps a composite of Greek (logic-based) and Christian (faith-based) thinking. As the personification of Philosophy states — and as Boethius implicitly agrees:

. . . there cannot be two highest goods which are different. For where two good things are different, the one cannot be the other; wherefore neither can be the perfect good, while each is lacking to the other. And that which is not perfect cannot be the highest, plainly. Therefore if two things are highest good, they cannot be different. Further, we have proved to ourselves that both happiness and God are each the highest good. Therefore the highest Deity must be identical with the highest happiness.

Dante's Dual Allegiance: Greek Ideals and Christian Allegory

Dante Alighieri's medieval masterpiece The Divine Comedy is similarly varied in its expressions of admiration for Greek ideals alongside a serious engagement with Christian belief. Dante clearly admires pre-Christian figures, as does Boethius. He even chooses the pre-Christian, never-baptized Roman poet Virgil to be his spiritual guide through Hell and Purgatory, rather than a Christian guide — since Virgil, having never been baptized, must stop before entering Paradise and cannot guide Dante all the way through.

The Divine Comedy consists of three separate works: the Inferno (Hell), the Purgatorio (Purgatory), and the Paradiso (Heaven). The combined works are meant to represent a spiritual Christian journey — metaphorically and allegorically — through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, so that Dante the poet and sojourner might learn, from this midlife experience following his apparent loss of faith, what he needs to feel, experience, and believe in order to become a better Christian and thereby ascend to Paradise when the time comes. Like Boethius, Dante has also been persecuted and ostracized: Boethius writes from prison, while Dante writes from political exile.

Like the writings of Boethius — and even the Gospels of St. John, stylistically speaking, though not spiritually — the observations, experiences, and feelings Dante expresses within the Inferno are far from purely Christian at all times. Dante's vision of the underworld, for example, resembles that of Virgil, and before Virgil, that of Orpheus, neither of whom were Christian, having both been born far too early to be baptized.

The Inferno is filled with pagan references and imagery as well, none of which gives Dante pause or deters him from his supposedly Christian journey. Virgil is a pre-Christian Roman pagan who may accompany Dante through Hell and Purgatory but not up into Heaven. This is in itself ironic: as Dante's personal and spiritual guide through the darkest regions of the afterlife, Virgil assists him more than anyone else he meets in learning the requirements of Paradise — a place Virgil himself can never enter.