Scott Aikin and Jason Aleksander have an interesting, if very odd, paper from a number of years ago, All Philosophers Go to Hell: Dante and the Problem of Infernal Punishment (PDF). The purported topic of the paper is an apparent inconsistency in Dante's depiction of hell. Trying to run this sort of argument with a poetic text is inherently tricky, but certainly Dante as a philosophical poet concerns himself with consistency; all the trickiness in his case is with the mode of depiction. But the oddities of the paper arise precisely from the attempt to translate his depiction into an account of hell. Aikin and Aleksander characterize the account of hell in the following terms:
1. The sins of the damned are a product of free will (though the damned may have “lost the good of the intellect” [3.18]).This is explicitly attributed to Dante, although the justification for this is somewhat unclear. In fact, except for perhaps (3) and (4), it seems clear that Dante would accept none of these as stated. The actual sins of the damned are due to free will (although they can also be punishments for other sins); in Limbo the only relevant sin is original sin, which is not actual sin. The immediate justification given for (2), that it is a requirement for a theodicy of hell based on retributive justice, has nothing to do with Dante at all, who is certainly not giving such a theodicy. (Dante doesn't strictly have a theodicy, but the closest he has is written on the gates of hell themselves, and is, besides, the connection to the overall theme of the Comedy: hell is not said to be founded on retributive justice but on love and mercy. Justice is just one of the forms love takes; by establishing hell, divine love limits how corrupt things can become.) In any case, Dante would almost certainly have made the distinction made by any scholastic, that whether sins are infinite depends on what exactly about them that we are considering. The relevant sense here would be that original sin is participating in human failure to adhere to infinite good and the actual sins of the damned are ways of choosing something that falls short of infinite good, which for Dante means that they are defective and counterfeit loves, love being our participation in the divine love. The reason this is relevant is that heaven is full unitive participation in infinite good, the Beatific Vision; people are in hell in Dante because they have not done what is required for heaven and thus are cut off from full union with the infinite good that is God.
2. The sins of the damned are infinite.
3. The sufferings of the damned in Hell are infinite, in the sense that the damned suffer eternally (or, at least, perduringly) and unchangingly.
4. The sufferings of the damned in Hell are proportionate to their crimes.
5. The punishments of the damned are warranted under a retributive conception of justice.
While (4) is technically correct of Dante's portrayal, it is trivially so -- the Comedy, like almost all depictions of hell, whether Western or Eastern, operates on the principle that the sufferings of the damned are symbolic representations of the sins themselves. The fundamental rule of artistic depiction of hell, as true of Buddhist hells as it is of Christian and Muslim hells, is that vice is the beginning of its own punishment, so that vices are depicted by symbolic punishments. (5), however, seems to be operating on the assumption that the punishments in the Comedy are separate from the crimes punished so that they need justification; in reality they are just the crimes themselves symbolically expressed, and therefore require no such justification. The actual punishments of hell are not really (say) being turned into a bleeding plant or whirling around in a wind of fire; these are just depictions of why people are punished in hell, namely, the sinful actions themselves (in these examples, suicide and lustful actions), or in other words, in what way their life failed to be a life of love and therefore to carry a punishment in itself. Beyond the sins themselves considered as punishments, the actual punishments of hell, which Dante gets from scholastic theologians, are (a) penalty of loss (damnation in the strict sense), which is loss of infinite good, i.e., not being in heaven with full union with God and (b) penalty of sense, which is the experienced foiling of the will, sometimes direct and sometimes by mediating agencies like fire or darkness, that punishes disordered attachment to finite good. That is to say, the punishments of hell are not being with God and not being able to do what one wants, or (perhaps more directly) having to endure positive restriction that one does not want. Penalty of loss is the punishment of all in hell; penalty of sense, a punishment of all except those in Limbo. The poetic depictions are attempting to capture both in relation to the reason why they are given. Aikin and Aleksander recognize that the punishments metaphorically correspond to the sins, but fail to realize the true significance of this, because they keep treating the sins and their punishments as adventitiously related rather than naturally related.
Aikin and Aleksander spend some time trying to make sense of (3); I don't think Dante regards it as requiring much justification. Of course the punishment is perpetual; lots of punishments (exile and life imprisonment without parole, for instance) are perpetual, and only end because we literally die or (in some cases) metaphorically die, i.e., completely repent and reform, neither of which Dante thinks is possible for those who are already dead. Thus the punishment is not merely perpetual, i.e., intrinsically tending to continue; the things that could override its perpetuity are no longer on the table, so it is everlasting. Now, it is true that people today often have difficulty with the idea that the dead can no longer repent, but Dante certainly would not; thus (3) requires no special justification. The treacherous have the punishment of being treacherous people, and what follows naturally from that, for as long as they are treacherous people; the treacherous in hell are punished forever because they are treacherous people forever.
Thus when Aikin and Aleksander characterize the retributive nature of hell by the syllogism, "Those in Hell are sinners, and sin demands punishment. Therefore, Hell is the place for that punishment," this is potentially ambiguous; as characterized by Dante, sin is already the punishment; hell is just the fruition of that.
Now, Dante famously puts the noble pagans in Limbo, which is by definition the state in hell where there is no penalty of sense, only penalty of loss. The noble pagans are in hell because heaven cannot be deserved by human acquired virtue; it requires (as we see in the cases of both Ripheus and Trajan) faith, hope, and love, which make us suitable for union with God. The lack of this is the full extent of their penalty, though; the noble pagans still receive the natural reward of their virtue -- they have the reward of having lived a virtuous life, and being honored for it even after their deaths. And this is quite important, because Aikin and Aleksander repeatedly attempt to suggest that there is some sort of injustice in the noble pagans not receiving heaven, despite the fact that they never met the preconditions for it. But I suspect Dante would be simply bewildered by this. Why would you think that pagan magnanimity has as its natural and deserved reward Christian union with God? Dante is in fact being quite generous: a solid Aristotelian himself, he gives Aristotle every reward of pagan virtue that Aristotle himself thinks pagan virtue deserves: the reward of having lived well in a fully human life, the reward of being honored for it by others of similar virtue. What other reward could human virtue have? Why would you think that natural, acquired virtue, demands supernatural reward of divine union? In reality, human magnanimity deserves the reward of the character it forms and the honor of friendship with magnanimous people, which the noble pagans in Limbo have.
Indeed, while some people have made that assumption, it's odd for Aikin and Aleksander to be assuming it in the construction of their argument. If virtue by its nature deserves heaven, which is union with God, this is only explicable if there is union with God to deserve; and thus this assumption has the result of committing the person who assumes it to saying that the existence of virtue implies the existence of God. I'm very certain that this is not what Aikin and Aleksander intend, but it seems to be what they have commited themselves to.
This is, I think, a recurring problem in discussions of the so-called Problem of Hell. The whole point of Dante's limbo of the noble pagans is that if you concede to the noble pagans the fullest, the deepest, happiness and reward for their nobility that most of them hoped for, that is still short of what Christians claim heaven is like. The most complete reception of what ordinary human virtue deserves is just the life of virtue itself in society with others of virtue. But while heaven includes that, heaven is not just that, nor is it even primarily that; it is an infinite glory of an infinite reward. It's sometimes almost amusing that people talk about the 'Problem of Hell'; in Dante's terms, hell is the easy part -- it's just the completion of what you have achieved when you die. The wicked have achieved wickedness, and have the reward of the wicked; the noble have achieved human nobility, and have the reward of human nobility. The real difficulty, if we take seriously how Dante has set things up, is the Problem of Heaven: How can it possibly be just that there are those who receive infinitely beyond what the maximum of virtue could deserve? And it's mediated by what might be called the Problem of Purgatory: How can human beings possibly reach the point of having met the preconditions for heaven? Notably, Aikin and Aleksander don't seem to consider either of these problems, although, in fairness, they are not alone.
The fact that we cannot by purely human virtue deserve heaven, however, means that much of Aikin and Aleksander's argument is misplaced. They put a great deal of emphasis on the claim that you can only deserve punishment if you fully knew what you were doing, and that in this case that means that only the philosophers could deserve hell. But (1) this principle, read this strongly, is not true of any other case of punishment; in human punishments, for instance, ignorance can sometimes partially excuse, but the ignorance itself has to be innocent and whether or not it excuses, and to what degree, depends very much on the wrong that was done. Yes, knowledge of some kind is a requirement for genuinely being guilty of wrongdoing, but the knowledge that is required is just sufficient knowledge to be able to know that it was wrong. If you deliberately refuse to learn what you need to learn, that is not the right kind of ignorance; if you could have recognized that it was wrong but just made no effort to do so, that is not the right kind of ignorance; if other people know it was wrong and you didn't bother to take their advice seriously, that is not the right kind of ignorance. Beyond that, nobody in any other case holds that you have to know everything about the action to be guilty of wrongdoing; voluntary wrongdoing does not presuppose logical omniscience about your actions. Even knowing a very little bit about the wrongness of your action removes the excuse of invincible ignorance. And pretty much all of the sins punished in Dante's hell are things that any thoughtful person could in principle have recognized as wrong. You don't have to be a philosopher to recognize that you shouldn't betray your family or act with excessive violence. Even schism and heresy are just specialized versions of more general sins of contentiousness and willful disregard for truth.
And (2), Aikin and Aleksander seem to assume that all penalties in hell are penalty of sense. But the philosophers in limbo are not subject to the penalty of sense. All they have is penalty of loss, the lack of heaven -- and they don't have heaven because human beings, due to original sin, literally cannot qualify for it by their own virtue. The only reward for which human virtue qualifies is a life of virtue and the honor of virtue. And Dante depicts virtuous pagans as having that. Ironically, what Aikin and Aleksander call the Problem of Hell, is in Dante just the fact that Christianity attributes to sainthood an infinitely higher reward than pagan philosophers like Aristotle (and, indeed, most secular modern philosophers) ever attributed to the virtuous life. Maybe one could argue that Platonists attributed a reward that was somewhat closer but, first, Dante is firmly an Aristotelian, and second, even that was arguably a much more cautious and limited attribution than Christianity insists can be attributed to the Beatific Vision. In other words, the Problem of Hell, at least when we are considering Dante, is really that Christianity has a mind-blowingly audacious conception of heavenly reward.
