The Allegorical Journey In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy

Dante Alighieri, 14th century Italian poet, wrote The Divine Comedy with many allegorical meanings behind it. He is famous for three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. These books are about how Dante travels to the three stages of the afterlife. He ventures down to Hell and Purgatory with Virgil, and finishes in Heaven with the help of Beatrice. Through all these stages, Dante has to get back on the right path, or the True Way and be one with God. Throughout Dante’s allegorical journey, he has experienced many obstacles and met many different people and their situations. Before Dante gets to journey through the Inferno, he finds himself lost in the darkness of the forest. This represents that mankind will always sin, or go astray from

He encounters the leopard, lion and she-wolf. The leopard represents malice and fraud, the lion represents violence and ambition and the she-wolf represents incontinence and avarice. These three beasts represent the main sins that we all are tempted to commit, because we have strayed so far from the right path. Since we have Free Will, we must not be tempted to sin, because we are stronger than that.. This is when Virgil comes in to confront him and ask him why he is doing all of things. He told Dante that he needed to focus on the True Way and follow him through the journey as far as human reasoning takes him. When he goes down into Hell, he starts to realize that to sin, is a choice and don’t have sympathy for them, because they chose their

Allegories are used throughout many types of work and The Divine Comedy is one of them. They are used in many works, because it enables the writer to convey complex ideas and moral principles while telling an entertaining story. The writer wants to entertain the reader, while they read the story and not just state facts and bore the reader. Every physical element in an allegory corresponds to a larger philosophical or spiritual element. Stories and books are connected and one story can relate to the other and have the same principles and morals that another book did. Authors want to use allegories in their work, because they want to show that not just in this story, this situation is happening, but if real-life or sometime long ago, this has happened,