This Week on Dante Spiritual Judge The Fates of Agamemnon and Abelard
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante assigns many figures from both history and literature to their respective, and deserving, places in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. To properly assign these figures, Dante looks at the events of the individuals’ lives and, more specifically, analyzes their sins and assigns their position in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory according to his progression of the increasing punishments through ten basic types of sins. ... The concept of Purgatory was another idea regarding the afterlife in Dante’s time and still exists today in the Catholic Church. Purgatory is described as the spiritual location in between Heaven and Hell where saved souls receive punishments for the sins they committed in life which they did not perform adequate penance for purification. ... Again, Dante uses a progression of the severity of sins to assign a Terrace to individual sins. For example, the prideful souls placed in the first Terrace merely contemplate their pride while bearing the weight of enormous rocks hung around their shoulders while the lustful souls in the seventh, and final, Terrace must chant examples of chaste individuals while feeling the pain of a river of fire lashing at their spiritual bodies. This refining fire purifies the individuals of their lust (Dante Purgatorio canto 25). Though Dante did not make specific reference to many of the prominent individuals from literature and history, their punishments or penances can be determined by using Dante’s reasoning in placing souls into their proper Terraces and Circles as seen in his Divine Comedy. Agamemnon and Abelard are examples of figures not used by Dante, but can be assigned to their places in Hell and Purgatory, respectively, using the same rules which Dante used to assign penances to the individuals he did mention in his Divine Comedy. ... Agamemnon’s sins will be analyzed from the examples in Homer’s Iliad and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon while Abelard’s sins will be analyzed from a general history of Abelard’s life stated in The Making of the West as well as content included in Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (Dante Purgatorio, Dante Inferno). In Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon sins a great deal. ... His avariciousness can be seen in the episode in which Agamemnon and Achilles fight over their war prizes.