POST 20: Should Socrates be in hell?

Should Socrates be in hell?
In the Divine Comedy every sin has its own circle. In the First Circle, Limbo reserved for Pagans and the unbaptized. Many of the shades in Limbo are not really sinners, but people who were born before Christ, "and if they were before Christianity, in the right manner they adored not God..."(72) and had no opportunity to choose between good and evil. These virtuous pagans live forever in a place of their creation.They lived by wisdom, philosophy and thought, not religion. In the Apology when describing what he thinks death would be like Socrates says,
"I will tell you: what has befallen me appears to be a blessing... for to die is one of two things: for either the dead may be annihilated, and have no sensation of anything whatsoever; or, as it is said, there are a certain change and passage of the soul from one place to another.And if it is a privation of all sensation, as it were a sleep in which the sleeper had no dream, death would be a wonderful gain...and what is said to be true, that all the dead are there, what greater blessings can there be than this...But the greatest pleasure would be to spend my time in questioning and examining the people there as i have done those here, and discovering whom among them is wise, and who fancies himself to be so but is not... both men and women with whom to converse and associate, and to question them with an inconceivable happiness."(343-344) 
The above quote summarizes Socrates vision and idea of hell. In The Divine Comedy, it is the last scenario that is the fate for Socrates, for he is in the First Circle of Hell, with other great minds and heroes from the classical world – the likes of Homer, Horace, Plato ,Ovid, Aristotle, and Lucan. And just as he anticipated, it isn’t a bad afterlife, but it isn’t heaven, either. The residents here are in Limbo: they are not tortured, burned, maimed, or harassed by demons. They are left to share each others company and discuss philosophy and ethics with the other great souls that are there.Socrates does belong in this part of hell. despite not having committed a more heinous sin such as Fraud. His afterlife is not punishment; it is the failure of the imagination to envision the coming of Christ and faith in him. Socrates attained the kind of afterlife that he, as a wise man, envisioned as the perfect one.

So Yes he belongs there!

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 2, 2017 at 10:30 AM

    I agree with your post and it's well put together and great quote.

    ReplyDelete

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