 Who's suffering in the deepest depths of hell? Well, you can't really be sure, but if you want to take Dante Algieri's account of it There are three people down there and this video is going to be on who they are and why they are there In fact, there's there's actually two answers to this Okay, there's a simple answer and then there's a realer answer a more complete answer and we're going to have both of them now Dante of course is most famous for writing the divine comedy the most popular portion of which is called the Inferno where he goes through the depths of hell visiting all all people from classical Antiquity and people of his own time who were suffering for their sins in hell now at the very bottom of hell It's nice and simple here is the vision of what he sees he sees Satan who first off is not only punishing But it is being punished Satan is a three headed Beast monster with giant wings that flap and make the rest of hell extremely cold Hell is actually cold according to Dante, but in Satan's three mouths are three of the worst possible centers One of them is of course Judas Iscariot that of course is an easy answer Judas Of course is the person who betrayed Jesus the other two men in the other two mouths of Satan are Brutus and Cassius the betrayers of Caesar now Why exactly are they in the deepest depths of hell? Well first off if you've ever heard of Brutus and Cassius at least in the English speaking world You're probably familiar with them from Shakespeare's play Which you probably read in high school called Julius Caesar where Brutus and Cassius are sort of dramatized now Of course the Shakespeare's dramatization is not necessarily history in that particular play Brutus is depicted as being sort of an honorable Roman who although his friends with Caesar feels he must betray him because Caesar is undermining the Republic whereas Cassius is just sort of a jealous man many of the other people assassinating Caesar are Depicted as being jealous either way. That's actually Shakespeare's embellishment in actual history We don't actually know their motivations and when Dante who of course right was writing before Shakespeare When Dante depicted both of them he depicted them as being both terrible traitors and they're in the bottom most of hell now The simple reason for why they're there is that Dante considers the absolute worst Sin to be the sin of betraying a benefactor that is not just betraying family Not just betraying friends, but a benefactor someone who has done good to you with no reason For really no reason they have no obligation, but they have done their best to do good to you that is Judas Iscariot has of course betrayed his very savior But Julius Caesar also did incredibly good to Brutus and Cassius for example, he had pardoned Brutus After he sided with an enemy of him Enemy of his and Brutus and Cassius and Caesar should have all gotten along they Caesar had been very benevolent to them Nonetheless, they betrayed him. So that is the simple reason as for why they're in the bottom most reaches of hell There are only three people who have committed the sin at least that Dante depicts in its most extreme form And they are being being eaten by Satan over and over again He's constantly chewing on them and they're being regenerated and eaten that that is their punishment now What is the real reason that these people are in hell? Why does Dante actually depict them there in order to really understand why these people are in hell? You have to understand Dante's I Don't want to say ideology, but his vision of the universe his vision not just of religion, but of politics You know these particular people who betrayed Caesar Have committed a theological sin. They've gone against God's plan in a significant way and here is Dante's actual View of this. Okay, you have to look in another thing that Dante wrote not and Work of fiction, but a work called the monarchy. That's the Latin name of it. It's sometimes translate Literally, I guess you could translate it as on monarchy. It's usually translated on as on empire That might be a little more accurate in his original meaning, but in this book Dante outlines his vision of The entire plan of all of the world that is he specifically argues That there needs to be it is God's plan that there be one Universal government Empire ruling the entire known world and he argues this for multiple reasons for example, he says that The ideal state is one that ensures peace that there's no International war and that is one where the king rules and the king rules over all there's there's no division of who you know Here's a king versus there's a king and they're fighting amongst each other There's one universal rule which is analogous to the rule of heaven where God is the monarch God is the emperor of The entire world Additionally, he argues that when Jesus lived Jesus had to be born during a period of universal Empire and that's because When Jesus was crucified when Jesus was sentenced to death He was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate who of course was working on the behalf he was judging on the behalf of the universal Roman Empire and Dante's point is that in order for Jesus Jesus's Execution which in many respects is illegitimate in the view of Christians, but in order for it to have been Ruled upon it had to be legitimate in the eyes of a universal Empire It couldn't Jesus couldn't be sentenced to death in like rural Wales, you know during this period He had to be sentenced to death in a universal Empire and the coming to be of that universal Empire Was of course part of God's plan now Actually, there's a lot of interesting things we can say about Dante's specific politics here because Dante is speaking at a period where the main political conflict was that between secular authority and church authority now Dante To some things up to write to paint and generalities Dante is a proponent of secular authority That is there were many people at that period who thought the Pope who is the ruler of the church should also be a Ruler of the political realm he should rule sort of like a since he's the vicar of Christ on earth He should also be a political leader as well, and we really should be living in an Empire organized around Religious authority Dante and others disagreed with this in fact Dante was a big fan of the Holy Roman Emperor and the Holy Roman Empire Which you know people make fun of it because they say oh it's not really Roman It's not really any blah blah blah because it was centered on like Germany and stuff like that But Dante and others viewed the Holy Roman Empire as the legitimate heir of Rome and their view was that Secular authority is something different. We have to have someone who is care, you know caring for man's different material needs Making sure that there is peace and that is something different from his spiritual needs now Dante of course argues this isn't like modern Sort of secularism versus religious authority This isn't quite exactly the same because Dante's view is you know the material world exists for spiritual ends The reason we want universal peace a universal Empire is so people can have the best the optimal environment to reach Salvation okay, that is the goal of secular rule, but Dante's view is that it's a different thing It can't be the same thing as papal authority It has to be something different so in the political environment at Dante's day Dante what took the side he was Aligned with factions that took the side of the Holy Roman Emperor in most political disputes While others took the side of the Pope and the papal states and in fact Dante had been exiled in his life You know before the writing of the Divine Comedy by these The pro-papal faction of course in his Inferno he writes about many of his political enemies suffering You know as sort of a you know just to own them or whatever But anyway, this should be a little clearer why Brutus and Cassius are depicted in hell They're in hell because Dante's view is that God's plan not just for politics But also for salvation is that there needs to be a universal Roman Emperor that is part of the plan So Brutus and Cassius, although they're betraying people they're betraying their their friend and benefactor Caesar They're actually doing something they might not even realize but they they're doing something much more evil That is they're standing in the way of God's plan God's plan is that the Roman people will rule over a universal Empire and this this was actually sort of that you know, there's a view nowadays that All right, I guess we have this view of Christian, you know Christendom of Christianity as if Christianity, you know God didn't have any other plans outside of the Jews and you know the Messiah was born to the Jews and you know Everyone else was just sort of languishing and you know, there was no plan for them That is not the view that people in the medieval ages and the Renaissance and early Christians had because Dante as others He thinks for example the Romans have a unique covenant with God that they Eventually have to come to rule the world and the Greeks have a unique covenant with God and that they're given particular Philosophical approaches that prepare them for the you know the arrival of Christian theology all this kind of stuff so Dante's view is That Brutus and Cassius are fundamentally doing something theologically evil. They are standing in the way of inevitable Ability they were living at the cusp of the Roman Empire Empire a time where there was fine God's plan was finally coming to fruition there was going to be one man Julia Caesar who ruled the entire world and that was it and They stood in the way and they said no we don't want that we don't want any of that We're gonna for our own reasons maybe because we're jealous Maybe because we believe in you know the Republic or something like that But for our own reasons we are going to stand in the way of inevitability and of course God's plan in both case in the case of Judas Iscariot Betraying Jesus obviously that was sort of played into the plan of being crucified But additionally Brutus and Cassius play into the plan as well because although they killed Julia Caesar What happens the emperor the Empire starts in fact their assassination? Serves as a pretext for a civil war where eventually Octavian Augustus becomes the the original first Emperor so all these people although they stood in the way They utterly failed and that's Dante's view and when you look at Dante's inferno with this Viewpoint the idea that it is building to some kind of culmination of the Roman Empire a lot of other things make sense For example, if you read in school the Iliad and the Odyssey You know of course the hero of the Odyssey is this guy Odysseus the guy who made the Trojan horse Okay, but if you read Dante's inferno you find that this hero is reduced to actually he's pretty deep in hell You know some of the heroes they're in limbo. They're in the place in hell where there's no suffering as Dante depicts them But Odysseus is actually very he's a schemer so he's depicted as being very deep in there despite the fact that he's a hero He's a hero in the eyes of the Greeks. Now if you're a very superficial Literary analyst you'll be like well, that's just because Dante was like, you know, he was ethnocentric and he didn't like Greeks when that is not the answer It's not the answer because Dante's vision. It's not that he doesn't like Greeks, but in Greek history Greeks constantly stand against the Roman Empire and of course the Trojan war, you know Romans you know since the time of You know Aenea or well not really since Aeneas, but since the Aeneid was written by Virgil There was the idea that Romans come from Troy So these Greeks who are fighting against Trojans in the Trojan war are depicted as sort of bad guys including Odysseus Odysseus of course comes up with the idea of the Trojan horse and So all of these Greeks are sort of thought of as villains even though in Greek literature Of course, they're you know, they're the heroes So it's not just oh, well, they're a different culture than me or something like that It's that in Dante's view all of these people are fighting against the fact that Romans will become the preeminent ruling class of the world. That is their that's their issue Okay, so and in each case the Greeks fail to extinguish the Trojans Aeneas runs away from Troy He founds wrong. He doesn't found Rome, but he his ancestors or his descendants for that found Rome So anyway that that is the point that is why Brutus and Cassius are Along with Judas Iscariot in the deepest depths of hell Hopefully you understand that you might not even might not have even heard of that, but that is why they're there