In Canto XXIII of Dante's Inferno, the hypocrites, especially Caiaphas, provide an excellent example of Divine Justice as contrapasso. The hypocrites presented their ideas as pure and good, while in reality, they did not act according to their supposed morality or practice the virtues that they preached. Because in life, the hypocrites said one thing and did another, their heavy garments seem one thing and are, yet another. The ornate priestly robes worn by the hypocrites are beautiful and impressive on the outside, but are in reality leaden instruments of torture. Contrapasso is evident in this circle of Hell, because although outwardly the Hypocrites appear lovely and perfect, underneath their gilded exterior lies only the heaviness of their guilt. After Dante sees the Hypocrites, damned to walk under the weight of their deceptions eternally, he also sees that they are walking over a figure lying naked and supine on the ground. This is the High Priest of the Jews, Caiaphas, who led the Sanhedrin in condemning Jesus. He is now crucified in Hell, sharing in the pain Christ suffe...
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante takes a journey with Virgil through the many levels of Hell in order to experience and see the different punishments that sinners must endure for all eternity. As Dante and Virgil descend into the bowels of Hell, it becomes clear that the suffering increases as they continue to move lower into Hell, the conical recess in the earth created when Lucifer fell from Heaven. Dante values the health of society over self. This becomes evident as the sinners against society experience suffering greater than those suffer which were only responsible for sinning against themselves. Dante uses contrapasso, the Aristotelian theory that states a soul’s form of suffering in Hell contrasts or extends their sins in their life on earth, to ensure that the sinners never forget their crimes against God. Even though some of the punishments the sinners in Hell seem arbitrary, they are fitting because contrapasso forces each sinner to re-live the most horrible aspect of their sin to ensure they never forget their crimes against God.
Descending from the first to the second level of Hell, Dante witnesses the transition to greater agony and greater punishment for the damned. Overwhelmed by the sinner’s harrowing cries and the extensive list of seemingly innocent souls given to him by Virgil, Dante beckons for two lovers to approach him, desperate for some sense of comfort. The souls are known to be the historical figures Francesca de Rimini and her lover Paolo, forever trapped in the circle of lust due to their sinful adultery. Through her words spoken to Dante, Francesca shows how she feels she has been unjustly punished and is deserving of others’ sorrow, and Dante, despite his awareness that she is a sinner, pities her. A close reading of this passage is necessary to better understand Dante’s internal battle with showing compassion where it is not deserved and Francesca’s incessant denial of her sins.
In analyzing this gradient of morality, it is useful first to examine a work from early literature whose strong purity of morality is unwavering; for the purposes of this discussion, Dante’s Inferno provides this model. It is fairly straightforward to discover Dante’s dualistic construction of morality in his winding caverns of Hell; each stern, finite circle of Hell is associated with a clear sin that is both definable and directly punishable. As Dante moves downwards in this moral machination, he notes that
Dante begins his struggle when he becomes lost in the dark forest and then later finds himself in the deep depths of hell with Virgil. “Everyman—that is, any human being—finds himself in the dark state of sin and error after having wandered from the true moral course established by God” (Rudd 10). He encounters a ghostly guy named Virgil who was the amazing Latin/Roman poet that guides him through the nine chambers of hell ba...
In addition, another allegory that Dante describes deal with the Fortune Tellers sent to Hell. Their sin is reversed upon them ...
Fire and brimstone, flames engulfing people, and the endless cries from the souls that are suffering are all things that are commonly associated with hell. It’s not thought of as some place of just punishment, but filled with pain and torment. The question raised is whether or not it is actually full of fire and heat, or is it something different. When we read about hell in Dante’s Inferno, he describes the place not only full of fire, but also of ice, wind, and rain. All of the elements sit on different levels that have been thoughtfully laid out by Dante himself. Carol Forman speaks of how Dante set up his hell, “Hell is structured around Dante’s concept of sin.
...ards monstrous figures and sympathy towards those who seem to be tortured unjustly. In his perverse education, with instruction from Virgil and the shades, Dante learns to replace mercy with brutality, because sympathy in Hell condones sin and denies divine justice. The ancient philosopher Plato, present in the first level of Hell, argues in The Allegory of the Cave that truth is possible via knowledge of the Form of the Good. Similarly, Dante acquires truth through a gradual understanding of contrapasso and the recognition of divine justice in the afterlife. Ultimately, Dante recognizes that the actions of the earthly fresh are important because the soul lives on afterwards to face the ramifications. By expressing his ideas on morality and righteousness, Dante writes a work worth reading, immortalizes his name, and exalts the beliefs of his Christian audience.
Dante Alighieri presents a vivid and awakening view of the depths of Hell in the first book of his Divine Comedy, the Inferno. The reader is allowed to contemplate the state of his own soul as Dante "visits" and views the state of the souls of those eternally assigned to Hell's hallows. While any one of the cantos written in Inferno will offer an excellent description of the suffering and justice of hell, Canto V offers a poignant view of the assignment of punishment based on the committed sin. Through this close reading, we will examine three distinct areas of Dante's hell: the geography and punishment the sinner is restricted to, the character of the sinner, and the "fairness" or justice of the punishment in relation to the sin. Dante's Inferno is an ordered and descriptive journey that allows the reader the chance to see his own shortcomings in the sinners presented in the text.
This notion of the suitability of God’s punishments figures significantly in the structure of Dante’s Hell. To readers, as well as Dante himself (the character), the torments Dante and Virgil behold seem surprisingly harsh, possibly harsher than is fair, Dante exclaims this with surprise. He doesn’t actually wonder who decided on these tortures. He knows it was god. What he is questioning is how these punishments are just, since they don’t appear to be just from a human’s point of view which views each punishment together with its conjugate sin only superficially. For example, homosexuals must endure an eternity of walking on hot sand, and those who charge interest on loans sit beneath a rain of fire. At first glance, each one seems too terrible for any sin. However, when the poem is viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that the guiding principle of these punishments is one of balance. Sinners suffer punishment to the degree befitting the gravity of their sin, in a manner matching that sin’s nature. The structures of the poem and of hell serve to reinforce this correspondence.
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is taken on a journey through hell. On this journey, Dane sees the many different forms of sin, and each with its own unique contrapasso, or counter-suffering. Each of these punishments reflects the sin of a person, usually offering some ironic way of suffering as a sort of revenge for breaking God’s law. As Dante wrote this work and developed the contrapassos, he allows himself to play God, deciding who is in hell and why they are there. He uses this opportunity to strike at his foes, placing them in the bowels of hell, saying that they have nothing to look forward to but the agony of suffering and the separation from God.
Justice is one of the major building block that society is built upon. It gives people a sense of retribution when they have been wronged. In Dante’s Inferno, justice is served in the supernatural realm. Throughout this play, the reader is exposed to the inner working of hell and the nine circles of specialized punishment it is composed of. Justice, in Dante’s Inferno, differs from justice in the mortal world in that it is decided, not by humans, but by God. However, it is not God’s justice that is portrayed in this divine comedy. While this divine comedy depicts justice coming from God, the justice in the Inferno is based on Dante’s personal views of the severity of the sin and the sinner. This paper will examine this issue by looking into the life of Dante and the potential reasons for his rankings of the sin pertaining to specific circles of hell.
“How stern the power of Almighty God who crushes sinners with such righteous blows(Canto XXIV lines 109-110)!” In Dante’s Inferno, Dante Alighieri describes a trip through Hell, visiting the various sinners and circles of Hell. Dante also uses many experiences and beliefs from his real life to enrich his views of Hell and his idea of Divine Punishment. Dante’s perception of Divine Justice includes sinners whom he places in Hell for committing crimes without regret, they are placed lower in Hell according to the severity of their sins. Dante is not always just in his placement of sinners, his personal grudges and archaic Catholic beliefs get in the way of true Divine Justice.
The Divine Comedy is a poetic Italian masterpiece by Dante Alighieri composed of three parts which he called respectively: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso. As this edition’s translator, John Ciardi puts it, originally Dante simply entitled his works as The Comedy, however, in later years, it was renamed The Divine Comedy for the connections that the public saw it had with human behavior and morality (Ciardi, 2003). For the goals and purposes of this review, we will focus specifically on the portion of the book called The Inferno. At a time when religious and secular concerns were at their peak in fourteenth century Italy, a tone of conflict broke out between the church and the government. Beyond the commonalities of corruption
Dante’s work Inferno is a vivid walkthrough of the depths of hell and invokes much imagery, contemplation and feeling. Dante’s work beautifully constructs a full sensory depiction of hell and the souls he encounters along the journey. In many instances within the work, the reader arrives at a crossroads for interpretation and discussion. Canto XI offers one such crux in which Dante asks the question of why there is a separation between the upper levels of hell and the lower levels of hell. By discussing the text, examining its implications and interpretations, conclusions can be drawn about why there is delineation between the upper and lower levels and the rationale behind the separation.
Inferno, the first part of Divina Commedia, or the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is the story of a man's journey through Hell and the observance of punishments incurred as a result of the committance of sin. In all cases the severity of the punishment, and the punishment itself, has a direct correlation to the sin committed. The punishments are fitting in that they are symbolic of the actual sin; in other words, "They got what they wanted." (Literature of the Western World, p.1409) According to Dante, Hell has two divisions: Upper Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of incontinence, and Lower Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of malice. The divisions of Hell are likewise split into levels corresponding to sin. Each of the levels and the divisions within levels 7,8, and 9 have an analogous historical or mythological figure used to illustrate and exemplify the sin.