Explain the "immortality ideology" as reflected in medieval literature such as Everyman and Dante's Commedia.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The struggle between good and evil and the ultimate destiny of the soul in the hereafter was the focus of morality plays, which spoke to the questions of life after death. In morality plays, the characters are personifications of abstract qualities and universal conditions. In the play Everyman, for instance, the main character represents all Christian souls, Fellowship stands for friends, Goods for worldly possessions, and so forth. Everyman is essentially a moral allegory that dramatizes the pilgrimage of the Christian soul from earthly existence to Last Judgment. It teaches that life is transient, that worldly pleasures are ultimately valueless, and that sin can be mitigated solely by salvation earned through grace as dispensed by the Church.

Dante's Divine Comedy offered another take on the afterlife. The epic poem describes the spiritual pilgrimage of the Christian soul from sin (Hell), through purification (Purgatory), and ultimately, to salvation (Paradise). The Divine Comedy is the quintessential expression of the medieval mind in that it gives dramatic form to the fundamental precepts of the Christian way of life and death. The structure of the poem reflects the medieval view of the universe as the mirror of God's plan, while the text provides an invaluable picture of the context: the ethical, political, and theological concerns of Dante's time. Dante structured the Divine Comedy according to a strict moral hierarchy. The three parts of the poem correspond to the Aristotelian divisions of the human psyche: reason, will, and love. They also represent the potential moral conditions of the Christian soul: perversity, repentance, and grace. In addition, Dante makes extensive use of numerology, allegories, and symbolism.