Inferno
Date: The night before Good Friday, 1300
This is the story of a poet who got lost in a dark wood "halfway along his life’s path". He just began
a frightening journey through the three realms of the dead. The poet is Dante Alighieri (1265-1321
AD) and he is about to enter the depths of “Inferno”, the Hell. There, every sin demands a tribute;
therefore, any punishment described in Inferno is intended to represent a "contrapasso", a mirror of
the sin committed in life.
Although this Trilogy poem named "The Divine Comedy" is primarily a religious poem about sin,
virtue, and theology, the poet also discusses several elements of the science of that time.
Within the infernal atmosphere, there is a fellowship of unusual sinners, the inhabitants of Limbo.
These poor souls lived by wisdom and thought but failed in one crucial respect: they did not
acknowledge the existence of God, and therefore, their action was not directed to His purpose.
There Dante meets the prominent philosopher Aristotle who was so respected and well-known at
that time that a single phrase was enough to identify him: “the master of those who know.”
Within the castle of wisdom, another Greek thinker captures Dante’s attention: he is Democritus
(ca. 460-370 BC), announced with these words:
What does that mean? Democritus was a Greek Philosopher, author of the "atomistic philosophy", according to whom the
The universe is an atomic fabric assembled from random chaos and based on well-defined mechanical laws.
Simply put, Democritus believed that all the surrounding reality is made up of atoms that
move unceasingly into the void. The man himself is also a material reality, and so is the soul which
is no different from the body except for the fact that it is composed of subtle, mobile, round and
smooth atoms.
Atoms are therefore the small Lego, the elementary and indivisible particles of matter, and their
continuous movement leads them to gather and separate, giving rise to the birth, transformation, and
death of everything that exists.
The consequence of this theory is that awareness is a "physical" material product of the brain. We
are nothing but a material thing, living in a material world as glorified by Madonna in the 80s.
From this basic assumption will emerge, in the following centuries, the work of scientists of the
likes of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein.
Not all the philosophers, however, agree that the world is a mere material thing. Back to Inferno,
someone else is in the Pantheon of thinkers: let’s meet Plato (427 – 347 B.C). Despite the number
of his writings, today Plato is mostly remembered for the enigmatic tale of a lost island —
Atlantis— which had a considerable impact on last millennium's literature and still.
Much more than that, we should know that Plato is a key figure in science, philosophy, and
mathematics. As opposed to Democritus, Plato believed that the physical world around us is not real
as it is constantly changing and thus you can never say what it really is. On the other side of the fence, there is the world of ideas which is a world of unchanging and absolute truth; the reality
according to Plato.
What is the connection between the world of the ideas and the human mind? Plato thought that
whenever we grasp an idea or perceive something with our senses, we are using our mind to
conceive something in the ideal world. There are plenty of proofs of this perfect world. The
concepts of geometry, such as the circle (a line equidistant from a point), do not exist in the physical
world. In the physical world, circles like wheels, oranges, etc. are not perfectly round. Yet our mind
has the concept of a perfect circle. Since this concept could not rise from the physical world, it must
come from an ideal world. Another proof comes from moral perfection. We can conceive of a
morally perfect person, even though the people we know are not morally perfect. So where does
someone get the idea of moral perfection?
Plato gives us a dramatic account of the difference between the flawed physical world and the real
world in a famous allegory called “the myth of the cave.”
This is the story of a poet who got lost in a dark wood "halfway along his life’s path". He just began
a frightening journey through the three realms of the dead. The poet is Dante Alighieri (1265-1321
AD) and he is about to enter the depths of “Inferno”, the Hell. There, every sin demands a tribute;
therefore, any punishment described in Inferno is intended to represent a "contrapasso", a mirror of
the sin committed in life.
Although this Trilogy poem named "The Divine Comedy" is primarily a religious poem about sin,
virtue, and theology, the poet also discusses several elements of the science of that time.
Within the infernal atmosphere, there is a fellowship of unusual sinners, the inhabitants of Limbo.
These poor souls lived by wisdom and thought but failed in one crucial respect: they did not
acknowledge the existence of God, and therefore, their action was not directed to His purpose.
There Dante meets the prominent philosopher Aristotle who was so respected and well-known at
that time that a single phrase was enough to identify him: “the master of those who know.”
Within the castle of wisdom, another Greek thinker captures Dante’s attention: he is Democritus
(ca. 460-370 BC), announced with these words:
“Democritus, the one who puts the world on chance”.
What does that mean? Democritus was a Greek Philosopher, author of the "atomistic philosophy", according to whom the
The universe is an atomic fabric assembled from random chaos and based on well-defined mechanical laws.
Simply put, Democritus believed that all the surrounding reality is made up of atoms that
move unceasingly into the void. The man himself is also a material reality, and so is the soul which
is no different from the body except for the fact that it is composed of subtle, mobile, round and
smooth atoms.
Atoms are therefore the small Lego, the elementary and indivisible particles of matter, and their
continuous movement leads them to gather and separate, giving rise to the birth, transformation, and
death of everything that exists.
The consequence of this theory is that awareness is a "physical" material product of the brain. We
are nothing but a material thing, living in a material world as glorified by Madonna in the 80s.
From this basic assumption will emerge, in the following centuries, the work of scientists of the
likes of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein.
Not all the philosophers, however, agree that the world is a mere material thing. Back to Inferno,
someone else is in the Pantheon of thinkers: let’s meet Plato (427 – 347 B.C). Despite the number
of his writings, today Plato is mostly remembered for the enigmatic tale of a lost island —
Atlantis— which had a considerable impact on last millennium's literature and still.
Much more than that, we should know that Plato is a key figure in science, philosophy, and
mathematics. As opposed to Democritus, Plato believed that the physical world around us is not real
as it is constantly changing and thus you can never say what it really is. On the other side of the fence, there is the world of ideas which is a world of unchanging and absolute truth; the reality
according to Plato.
What is the connection between the world of the ideas and the human mind? Plato thought that
whenever we grasp an idea or perceive something with our senses, we are using our mind to
conceive something in the ideal world. There are plenty of proofs of this perfect world. The
concepts of geometry, such as the circle (a line equidistant from a point), do not exist in the physical
world. In the physical world, circles like wheels, oranges, etc. are not perfectly round. Yet our mind
has the concept of a perfect circle. Since this concept could not rise from the physical world, it must
come from an ideal world. Another proof comes from moral perfection. We can conceive of a
morally perfect person, even though the people we know are not morally perfect. So where does
someone get the idea of moral perfection?
Plato gives us a dramatic account of the difference between the flawed physical world and the real
world in a famous allegory called “the myth of the cave.”
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