According to Catholic doctrine union with God is the basis of happiness, and separation from God is the greatest punishment for a human being. What enables us to become closer to God is our free will and our reasoning power, when we loose those things we have no hope of achieving happiness. Violence is a very clear demonstration of the loss of these two faculties of the intellect, the way Dante depicts the souls of the seventh circle of Hell accurately portrays this idea.
Rooted in anger violence is controllable by will power, but its particular nature, which goes back to animal instincts, account for the loss of control experienced by an enraged person. This animal origin of violence is most noticeable in the seventh circle of Hell:
"And at the edge, along the shattered chasm,
there lay stretched out the infamy of Crete:
the son conceived in the pretended cow.
When he saw us he bit into his flesh,
gone crazy with the fever of his rage."
(Lines 11-15 in Canto XII of Dante's Inferno)
In this scene the Minotaur, who is half man half bull, upon detecting the presence of the pilgrim and his guide, goes into an uncontrollable frenzy and bites himself. He is further infuriated when Virgil makes a remark about the Duke of Athens, the man who sent the beast to his death. When the Minotaur becomes enraged we can see how separated he is from humans because he lacks the power of intellect to control himself. The beast's rage leads to his loss of control, which allows the pilgrim to slip by, this would not have happened if the Minotaur had not lost control of his faculties. Rage and violence are traditionally traits associated with animals, since animals don't have reasoning power or free will the Minotaur is an ideal character to open introduce us to the circle of violence.
Our second encounter in the seventh circle is with another type of composite creature: centaurs. The centaurs are more controlled than the Minotaur and actually help the pilgrim on his journey but it is still appropriate to call these creatures to mind because they follow through with the theme of disunion with humanity.
When Virgil encounters the Minotaur he keeps calm and finds by taking advantage of his foes weakness (his lack of self-control) he is able to lead the pilgrim around the danger. This ability to keep clear in the face of danger serves to show that even though Virgil isn't in complete union with God he is not completely separated from Him either.
Believers of the Old and New Testaments claim that violence is a sin and can only lead to more brutality and death; poet Tony Barnstone firmly agrees. In his poem “Parable in Praise of Violence” Barnstone lambastes the American obsession with violence-- that it is often triggered by inevitable events which could be handled in different manners. The speaker in “Parable in Praise of Violence” reflects on all parts of his “sinful” culture and comes to the realization that people often use violence as a way to deal with emotions of grief and anger caused by events and concepts they cannot explain.
... passage to suggest the essential role natural evils play in this story: "People who do not believe in God do not, of course, see our living to ourselves as a result of a prehistoric separation from God. But they can be aware – and it is a part of God’s plan of Atonement that they should be aware – that something is pretty wrong and that this wrongness is a consequence of the intrinsic inability of human beings to devise a manner of life that is anything but hideous" (203). Nowhere does experience prove this inability of human beings to escape the hideousness of the world more than in the case of natural disasters. They have existed as long as the human race, and though it may be possible for a person to delude him or herself into believing he or she is living a good life in a seemingly good world, no one can deny the horrible dangers that natural disasters present.
Across different works like Virgil’s Aeneid and Aeschylus’ Eumenides, In these representations of monsters, the initial relationship between gods and monsters is simple: all monsters derived from the gods. However, as soon as distinguishing features set the monsters apart, they prove Clay’s point that monsters are seen as threats who need to be contained and whose powers need to be exploited by the gods. The close reading of both texts reveal the relationship between gods and monsters along with the power structures between
The Murderers Are Among Us, directed by Wolfe Gang Staudte, is the first postwar film. The film takes place in Berlin right after the war. Susan Wallner, a young women who has returned from a concentration camp, goes to her old apartment to find Hans Mertens living there. Hans took up there after returning home from war and finding out his house was destroyed. Hans would not leave, even after Susan returned home. Later on in the film we find out Hans was a former surgeon but can no longer deal with human suffering because of his traumatic experience in war. We find out about this traumatic experience when Ferdinand Bruckner comes into the film. Bruckner, Hans’ former captain, was responsible for killing hundreds
survival, as well as the survival of the wild. He explains that anger occurs when we defend
Human beings are odd creatures, possessing abilities no other living species have. These abilities being Intelligence, Reason, and Free Will. These attributes allow human beings to value and destroy whatever they deem necessary to them. One of the most valuable things to a human being is the communal bond. This bond comes in many shapes and forms and is ultimately a form of love, and is usually a connection we share with others and with God. The communal bond works like a relationship, in which the persons involved are expected to and obey the instructions specified. This bond is a weak love, one that is easily influenced and most likely to be corrupted and shattered. This is due to man’s inability to hate himself and assume responsibility for his actions. Instead man decides to blame his neighbor for his wrongs and this leads to man loathing his community. In his work, The Inferno, Dante Alighieri utilizes the placement of sinners in The Inferno in order to establish the idea of moral depravation being a result of breaking communal bonds.
Murder at the Margin is a murder mystery involving various economic concepts. The story takes place in Cinnamon Bay Plantation on the Virgin Island of St. John. It is about Professor Henry Spearman, an economist from Harvard. Spearman organizes an investigation of his own using economic laws to solve the case.
The creature’s embodiment of the non-European, the outcast, the alien and the other stems from the incompleteness of the monster ability to engage in cretin perceptions of the world he was brought in. Unlike the Europeans, the monster was brought to life with no concept of value, or cultural norms. T...
Violence, impulsiveness, anger. These are the three traits that all humans share, and that ultimately lead to their downfall. Throughout history, humans have evolved from animals into civilized humans, yet we still possess the primitive instinct solve problems through violence. William Shakespeare, a playwright, portrays civil humans in animalistic ways, as he uses violence to point out the evil within humans. In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the use of violence highlights the fact that humans are inherently evil, as the characters impulsively use violence to vent anger, exact revenge, and defend honour.
appearance made the creature snap. The confesses that finding himself misunderstood, prompted him to wreak havoc and destruction on him (Shelley 111)
Robert William “Willie” Pickton is currently serving a life sentence for the second degree murder of six British Columbian women. Although convicted for the murders of six victims, physical and forensic evidence for thirty-three women was uncovered at Pickton’s Port Coquitlam pig farm which served as the crime scene for his murders. Numerous other missing women, mostly marginalized prostitutes with chronic drug addiction, from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside area remain unaccounted for. It is not unreasonable to assume that they too, met the same disturbing fate as the other murder victims. Pickton’s modus operandi for the serial murders was the same; he would prowl the drug and poverty ridden Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver looking for potential victims, take the victims back to his Port Coquitlam pig farm, and then sexually abuse, torture, and murder them before mutilating and disposing their bodies. Most disturbingly, the victim’s remains were allegedly fed to the pigs on his farm, which were then slaughtered with the meat given out to associates of Pickton or to visitors of the farm (The Pickton Trial, CBC.ca/news).
Creature comes across the Delacey family; a group of gentle, kind cottagers who live in the woods together. From afar, Creature finds ways to protect this family and help them with their daily labors. His humanity is presented when he decides to refrain from taking food from the cottagers after realizing they need it very desperately themselves, “I had been accustomed, during the night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption; but when I found that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained, and satisfied myself with berries, nuts and roots, which I gathered from a neighboring wood.” (114) Over time, as he watches the Delacey family, he learns from their actions and the way they communicate with one another and also develops a connection to the family and wants to find ways to help them. This is recognized when he gathers wood at night so that the children do not have to spend time during the day doing this chore. By gathering wood, he is helping to ensure the family stays warm, but also allows them time to do other important things like repairs to the cottage and tending the garden. This is a very humane, caring act, hardly an act of a monster. In his observations of the family, Creature also displays emotion which greatly influences the reader's’ perception of him as human-like character, “The
does the killing because when a life is taken by another it is always wrong. By
Dante’s Inferno presents the reader with many questions and thought provoking dialogue to interpret. These crossroads provide points of contemplation and thought. Dante’s graphic depiction of hell and its eternal punishment is filled with imagery and allegorical meanings. Examining one of these cruxes of why there is a rift in the pits of hell, can lead the reader to interpret why Dante used the language he did to relate the Idea of a Just and perfect punishment by God.
Michael Sanders, a Professor at Harvard University, gave a lecture titled “Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? The Moral Side of Murder” to nearly a thousand student’s in attendance. The lecture touched on two contrasting philosophies of morality. The first philosophy of morality discussed in the lecture is called Consequentialism. This is the view that "the consequences of one 's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct.” (Consequentialism) This type of moral thinking became known as utilitarianism and was formulated by Jeremy Bentham who basically argues that the most moral thing to do is to bring the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people possible.