This is another
blog about Doctor Who and Dante. I will examine a question that has been
puzzling me from the start of reading The
Divine Comedy.
I have noticed in the Comedy that Dante likes to place certain
individuals who committed similar sins in one category and another in a
different category. For instance, Cato committed suicide, which is a sin Dante
categorizes in Inferno, yet Dante
places Cato in Purgatory. It would make sense for Cato to be in Purgatory, if
he was working off his sin, but he is not working off his sin. Cato is the
guardian of Ante-purgatory and is proclaimed by Dante to be a “saved” soul. How
can Cato be saved if he died a pagan man? This is what confuses me. It seems to
me that Dante does suffer from a God complex in which he feels he has this
privilege to decide who belongs in Hell or Heaven as well as thinking he is
above the evils in humanity.
The God complex can also be
descriptive of The Doctor from Doctor
Who. The Doctor is a Time Lord who is able to travel through time and space
with his TARDIS. Because of this, The Doctor feels that he has the right to
change history as well as save humanity (and extraterrestrial beings) from
destruction. How this relates back to
Dante is through Dante’s punishment of Brutus and Cassius in the Inferno. Dante punishes these men for
changing history and fate when they assassinated Caesar. If Dante punished
Cassius and Brutus for changing history, would he punish The Doctor as well?
That question for me becomes hard to answer because of the way Dante
arbitrarily punishes individuals in his epic. The Doctor, from what I watched,
does encompass the moral virtues while lacking one of the holy virtues, faith. An
example would be when The Doctor constantly puts himself in danger to either
save a planet, a race, or even the entire universe without asking for anything
in return. This does sometimes lead him to develop a God complex such as in the
special, “The Water of Mars” where he purposely changed a fixed point in time
because he wanted to. For individuals that had all the moral virtues and no or
little of the holy virtues, Dante placed them in Limbo, where Virgil resides.
However, given the current state of how Dante places sinners, I am not to
entirely sure if The Doctor would be placed in Limbo. Clearly, The Doctor does
have a God complex that Dante looks down upon, but does that justify a
place in Hell, where Brutus and Cassius reside? I cannot tell because of the
constantly changing criteria Dante seems to have for sinners. God sets out his
laws on what He feels deserves punishment and favor. He does not change them on
a person-by-person basis. Documented stories of thieves in the Bible show that
they all get punished in some way and none are rewarded for their sin. If Dante
really wanted to portray himself as righteous, he should at least stick to the
rules he laid out in his epic.
A final question
that I would like others to answer or think about is: If Dante punished others
for having a God Complex or pride, why doesn’t he punish himself as well?
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