Justice in Antigone and Dante's Inferno: Secular vs. Divine

Introduction: Two Visions of Justice

The comparison of Antigone and Dante's Inferno is illuminating precisely because the two works are quite different in style, tone, context, and story type. Both address the choices made by humankind and the allegiances that people form — allegiances that shape and ultimately determine their actions. Dante controls the telling in his story, narrating his own journey in the first person. Antigone, by contrast, must endure the interpretations, telling, and retelling of her story and that of her opponent. Despite these differences, both works engage deeply with the nature of justice and the forces — human or divine — that define it.

Antigone: Human Law Versus Divine Law

Antigone is the third of the three Theban plays and is a tragedy attributed to Sophocles, written circa 442 BC. Of the three plays set in the city of Thebes, Antigone was created first but is chronologically the last in the sequence of events. The first part of the play is dominated by the establishment of character and premise; thereafter, the action relentlessly advances toward an outcome the reader assumes or knows in advance — Antigone's death.

Antigone's immediate problem is that she has defied Creon and buried her brother against his explicit orders. The debate that follows pivots around adherence to justice, the king's right to forbid a burial, and Antigone's right to defy Creon's decree given her status in the palace and her ties of kinship. Creon ruled that Polynices should not be buried — a decision symbolic as well as practical, since cities were responsible for burying their own dead citizens. By denying burial, Creon signals that Polynices is no longer to be treated as a full citizen of Thebes.

Sophocles makes the point in Antigone that there is more than one form of law — the laws of men and the laws of the gods — and that only one can be supreme. Sophocles casts his allegiance with the gods, and through the story he attempts to warn Athens away from its hubris and destructive ways. Antigone's rigid stance — even in the face of certain death — is characteristic of the general tenor of Greek life at the time the play was written, when religion and military service were the two dominant forces over everyday existence. A religious or militaristic orientation to life would necessarily have been founded on self-sacrifice and unquestioning obedience to institutional law. Antigone's setting aside of her own interests would have been not only acceptable but perhaps expected for the era. Creon, by contrast, occupies the opposite end of the moral scale, characterized by self-serving attitudes and a constancy that shifts with the winds of advantage.

Conclusion: Civil Duty and Divine Judgment Compared

A thorough exploration of Dante's Inferno and Antigone reveals that Dante examines the issue of divine justice, while Antigone is concerned with religious ritual tied to familial and civil responsibility. Antigone's struggle is simultaneously civil and religious, yet she is driven to action less by fear of some future divine judgment than by outrage that her brother has been so profoundly degraded by an unfeeling king. Dante's struggle, by contrast, is an iterative journey that repeatedly and systematically encounters divinely conceived justice — as Dante himself has imagined and constructed it.