What Is To Come?

Through the book Dante takes us within hell. He experiences the different types of punishments for their respective sins, and what the reader can deduct is that there is not one sin that goes unpunished. This caught my attention since I do not know one person who is free of even the slightest sin. A perfect example that hell holds all type of people is when Dante arrives at the fourth circle of hell “they did not sin; and yet, though they have merits, that's not enough, because they lacked baptism, the portal of the faith that you embrace.” (Inferno Canto IV) When reading this passage I find myself astounded. These are people who did not commit any sin but they still go to hell. Should there not be a place between hell and heaven for them? Who decides what person gets to go to go to heaven and to hell?

These are questions to which I can not find an answer to and the best I can do is give my opinion. Since I was young I have heard and read that God is forgiving. He will forgive even the most atrocious sin, but then why is there even a hell? Maybe Dante believed in a different type of God or almighty power, what I can deduct is that hell is thriving with people and heaven is empty. This reminds me of the piece from Popular Mechanics that we read today in class. The two people are fighting over the baby, which can be seen as the Devil and God fighting over people. God would want them in heaven and the Devil would want them in hell. (Clearly the Devil is stronger than God) The principals are the same but I do not see God forgiving any sin, not the smallest and not the largest.
All of this brings me to one conclusion, and that is that there is no end to hell. Every sin has a punishment and therefore everybody is bound for hell. Dante would have only seen a hundredth of what hell really is, and what it would suggest is that we are all doomed. Dante goes through many changes through the book and we can see how he experiences ultimate fear and how he reacts to it “Then I was more afraid of death than ever; that fear would have been quite enough to kill me, had I not seen how he was held by chains.” (Inferno, Canto XXI) Fear is a synonym of death and a life lived in fear is no life at all. I see Dante’s reaction to these horrendous acts, and what it proves is that he now has a sort of idea to where he is going. It is the most frightening realization off all, to know that however you live your life you will fail. At the end of the book we see that Dante and Virgil reach the stars. This can be seen as a symbol of freedom, that they have traveled through all of hell and made it through. I see it in a different way. As an illumination, he realizes that hell is only beginning, and that he like the rest of us will end up in a respective circle of hell. What is to come we must only wait and see because everything else is a guess.