The Inferno as Scripture?
Over the years, people have debated where The Inferno stands in Christian religious doctrine. In regards to followers of Christianity taking on The Inferno as a religious text, Saint Thomas Aquinas said “The author of Holy Scripture is God, on whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do) but by things themselves.”The words of men, Aquinas argues, are only abstract representations of representations of things they are trying to describe. Conversely, theWord of God has the peculiarity of also being its own thing. It is the Christian viewpoint that all that is recorded in the Bible is fact. There may be persons or instances in the Bible that were made up for the point of getting across a message in the story, but once they were part of the Bible, they were also the Word of God, which Christians believe is therefore historical fact.
Source: “De Trimilate,” by Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by Robert Hollander 1969
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