Shifting Power John Calvin believed in: predestination, that trying to know the secrets of the divine was unlawful, and that men were naturally corrupt. These ideas were a far cry from the ideas of men like Plato and Dante who came before Calvin. Calvin’s ideas reflect the turmoil and the pessimistic nature of his time period and these characteristics are amplified when his work is compared with Dante and Plato’s whose works in turn reflect the ideals and nature of their respective time periods. In his work The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes, “It is not lawful for mortals to intrude on the secrets of God.” For Calvin, God has set down in the scriptures all that we need to know and to try and discover more is arrogant …show more content…
First of all, this seems like it could cause some issues. If people believed that only a certain few were already chosen to go to heaven regardless of what they do here on Earth what are the consequences for their actions, what’s stopping them from just disregarding all scripture seeing as they are most likely not going to experience paradise anyway? Second, Dante’s The Divine Comedy completely contradicts this theory. In The Inferno section of his work Dante has to traverse all the layers of hell. In each layer he sees the souls of those who have sinned and who are being punished according to that sin. Every person that he encounters from the man who ate his children to two lovers who succumbed to the allure of the chivalry tales were in hell because of their actions. They weren’t there because they weren’t one of God’s chosen they, like those in purgatory and heaven, were beneficiaries of Jesus’s sacrifice and all had the same opportunity to make it to heaven. Every person that Dante encountered were in their places because they made a decision except for Virgil and those in the first layer of hell who had lived before Jesus’s