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Dante: the divine comedy
Divine comedy by dante canto xxi
Dante: the divine comedy
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The Divine Comedy written by Dante is one of the greatest poems ever written based on the fact that it is an autobiography as well as an allegory. It is considered an autobiography of Dante because he uses his personal experiences as motivation and inspiration. The beginning of first poem in The Divine Comedy, The Inferno, is related to the emotions Dante experienced after being exiled from Florence. He is wandering in the woods when he comes up to the bottom of a hill and starts to climb it before he is stopped by three creatures. This scene relates to how lost and confused Dante felt, along with feeling like he was attacked. By using his personal experiences and emotions, Dante actually wrote what is known as an allegory. Gay Johnson …show more content…
My idea of Hell would not be a permanent destination, but rather a place of rehab where someone’s soul could be changed. From experience, I know that when someone dies, their body is placed in a casket and buried in the ground. It is doubtful that there is a system in which the body is removed from the casket and escorted to Hell. With this in mind, my hell would only consist of the souls of those who have passed on. One of the most common phrases used after someone has died is, “Rest in peace”. I believe everyone deserves the chance to do so. It isn’t fair for people to permanently remain in hell if they have learned from their sins and are willing to change. My version of Hell would be similar to immigration. Just like immigrants, the sinners that were placed in Hell would have the opportunity to be rehabilitated which is similar to the studying of a citizenship test. When they feel like they have repented and are pure, they will be given a test of some sort that would determine if they were worthy of being removed from Hell and taken to Heaven. After all, we are all entitled to peace when we are alive, why shouldn’t we have the same opportunity when we
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.
What is Hell? According to the online Oxford Dictionary, “ A place regarded in various religions as a spiritual realm of evil and suffering, often traditionally depicted as a place of perpetual fire beneath the earth where the wicked are punished after death.” A horrible place to be. Have you ever see someone tortured? I hope not, it is a terrible thing. Imagine this scene: An individual, engulfed in flames. Screaming for help but no one can do anything about it. Skin boiling, shrieks of agony, truly a horrid scene. What crime could someone have done to deserve such a punishment. Let us use an illustration. A good father would punish his child when he has done something wrong. But a cruel father would torture him. Hell from this perspective is illogical.
For centuries humans have been drawing parallels to help explain or understand different concepts. These parallels, or allegories, tell a simple story and their purpose is to use another point of view to help guide individuals into the correct line of thought. “The only stable element in a literary work is its words, which if one knows the language in which it is written, have a meaning. The significance of that meaning is what may be called allegory.”(Bloomfield) As Bloomfield stated, it is only how we interpret the words in an allegory that matters, each person can interpreted it in a slightly different way and allegories are most often personalized by a reader. Dante’s Inferno allegory is present throughout the entire poem. From the dark wood to the depths of Dante’s hell he presents the different crimes committed in life as they could be punished in death.
“Our sense of self, our sense of humor, our ability to think ahead — gone within the first 10 to 20 seconds” (Shaw, 2017). The afterlife has been questioned so much, especially throughout the thoughts of religion. “Theories abound from logical to irrational, yet there is no concrete evidence about the afterlife.” (Shaw, 2017). The idea of their being an afterlife maybe hard to grasp because it is based on having faith. Due to this, hoping there is a heavenly estate after death is not wrong but there is no significant evidence to supports this idea. Therefore, what waits after death maybe neither heaven nor hell due to the varies influential factors that can contribute to the idea of the afterlife.
Hell has been described in many different texts, all explaining how Hell may be organized. There have been many examples in the Bible, myths, folktales, and music through out time. One example in particular is in Dante's, The Inferno, where hell is described as having many layers, which are categorized by individual sins, such as thievery, and are punished for an eternity. In Dante's model, more sin centered, a soul would be sent to a certain layer of hell for one sin that he had committed. However, perhaps a more personalized Hell, sinner-centered, that deals with each sinner individually for each sin committed and its severity, would allow for people to be punished more effectively.
There should not be a way for individuals to be tortured in many endless and continuous scatological depictions of hell. If it is immoral and sub-ethical in the living world to perform such heinous acts upon an individual, the idea of hell should be scant. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be any form of punishment for individuals who committed horrible crimes, quite the contrary, however, no matter how outrageous the crime might be, it does not justify an eternity or a temporary burning, being dipped in boiling oil, mauled, and many more form in hell. For those individuals who see these torturous descriptions of hell as metaphorical, it should also be sub-ethical since one, no one should wish badness upon someone else, and two, there are many recorded evidence of actual living human beings being tortured like the descriptions provided of hell. If these individuals now see those acts as horrifying and shameful to human history, then so should the idea that in hell this is what will happen to an individual. Also, it is just more comforting knowing that no matter what you might end up in hell and be punished in some lean way than to know you will be mauled and butchered in
In The Inferno of Dante, Dante creates a striking correspondence between a soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment it receives in hell for that sin. This simple idea serves to illuminate one of Dante’s recurring themes: the perfection of god’s justice. Bearing the inscription the gates of hell explicitly state that god was moved to create hell by justice. Wisdom was employed to know what punishments would be just, power to create the forms of justice, and love to show that the punishments are conditioned with compassion, however difficult it may be to recognize (and the topic of a totally separate paper). Certainly then, if the motive of hell’s creation was justice, then its purpose was (and still is) to provide justice. But what exactly is this justice that Dante refers to? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the So hell exists to punish those who sin against god, and the suitability of Hell’s specific punishments testify to the divine perfection that all sin violates.
One of the biggest and most common fears of human beings, since the beginning of time, is what will happen to them after they die. Many religions lecture the concept that people who are “bad” (need a better word for bad) during their lifetime will be sent to a place, called hell, after they die. Within the mainstream of Christian beliefs, there are many different ideas and ways of comprehending what hell is. Some think of hell as a place of fire, brimstone and torture in addition to separation of God, forever, in ways that represent ultimate justice for their sins. But what bears/conducts you to this place? That’s something Tim and his family are going to find out. Their own personal hell, “war is hell” William T. Sherman
Dante describes Hell as a city in his epic poem Inferno. On the surface, Hell appears to be considered a city of danger over safety, however ultimately the purpose of Hell weighs more towards the refuge end of the scale. In the beginning of Dante’s Inferno the structure of Hell is described and resembles that of a typical city with a wall and a gated entrance. Inscribed on the gate it reads: “Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way to the eternal pain, through me the way that runs among the lost. Before me nothing but eternal things were made, and I endure eternally. Abandon every hope, who enter here” (Canto III, Page 68, Line 1-9). This section of the gate implies eternal suffering and great pain to those who are condemned by God to reside there, however the last line is most intriguing. The implication of the phrase “abandon every hope, who enter here” suggests that when a soul enters Hell, there are never to be released and when judgment day comes, they will be left behind and their punishments become
There are multiple views on death and the afterlife and each view is different depending on the religion or belief that someone practices. Some religions believe in a heaven but not a hell, some believe in both and others do not believe in either. The religions that are practiced today were created by our ancient ancestors who had the ability to think beyond themselves. Practicing a religion and having an idea of death and an afterlife back in ancient times laid a foundation on how religion is seen and practiced today. Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Hindu’s created the concept of death and life after death through what they believed and practiced in ancient times.
As researchers and the catholic studies have found, there might not even be a Hell. The Pope has just recently came up with the idea of, “There is no hell, Hell was never taught in catholic places, nor is there any real evidence that even says it is there. If a soul is condemned then it just disappears, it does not suffer, it does not go through stages or chambers to fight for forgiveness, it just plain out
Dante’s work Inferno is a vivid walkthrough 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.
One phrase summarizes the horror of hell. “ God isn’t there.” What if God weren’t here on earth? What if he never came to set us free? If you think that people are cruel now, imagine what it would be like without the presence of God. You think we are brutal to each other now, imagine the world without the Holy Spirit. You think there is loneliness and despair and guilt now, imagine life without the touch of Jesus. No forgiveness. No hope. No acts of kindness. No words of love or encouragement. No more food given in his name. No more songs sung to his praise. No more deeds done in his honor. If God took away his angels, his grace, his promise of eternity, and his servants, what would the world be like?
Conflict can be found in many stories and it is one of the key pieces to making a story. Without a central conflict in a story the story will seem generic or boring. Writers like to put a conflict in the story to add life to their work and keep the reader interested in what they are reading. It is a way to keep the reader wondering what happens next. In the Divine Comedy, Dante’s Inferno, the main character in the story, Dante, encounters all five types of the different conflicts on his journey through Hell. Some of these conflicts include: person against self, people against people, and Dante against Society.
One way in which death can be viewed comes across the Catholic religion. The Catholic believers look life after death in a prospective of three different worlds, such as Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise according to the deeds committed during life. If a person during his or her lifetime committed any sins, this person’s next world will be the Hell. The traditional view in which people refer to hell can be found in the book written by Dante Alighieri, “La Divina Commedia”. The book states that the formation of Hell was given by the crash of Lucifer (the angel that wanted to be better than God) from the sky onto the earth. Crashing on the Earth in Jerusalem, his head formed an upside down cone inside the Earth. This is where is located the Hell. In the Hell, people pay for their sins with different penitences (12-13). For instance, a person that committed homicide will freeze in a lake frozen by the breath of Satan (XXXIV canto). If a person during his or her life commits any sins but asks for forgiveness, then he or she will go to the Purgatory. The purgatory is represented by an island with a mountain (23). One source states that “Purgatory is very similar to Hell; the main difference is that one will eventually be released from torture. The souls that go in the Purgatory are tortured with fire. These souls remain in purgatory until they become sufficiently purified to enter heaven”(2). For example, if a soul in the purgatory asks for forgiveness and pays the punition with some tests, the soul will be released and moved immediately to Heaven (2).