The encounter between Dante, the main character, and Filippo Argenti, a member of the condemned, deals with Dante’s response to Argenti’s place in hell, his disdain for Argenti, and his symbolic rejection of sin by his actions. Dante has no sympathy towards Argenti even though Argenti is condemned to stay in the slimy River of Styx until the Judgment. Dante holds great animosity towards Argenti carried on from conflicts they have had in life to the putrid circles of hell. The hostility Dante demonstrates marks his progression in his journey of purification. With his unprecedented denouncement of a sinner, Dante has proven his journey through hell has not been traveled in vain, but effectively to cleanse his sins from his soul.
Dante reacts with curses upon hearing the calling of Filippo Argenti. As Dante crosses the River of Styx on a boat with his guide, Virgil, Argenti cries out to Dante from the river for Argenti had recognized a live man on the boat. Upon identifying his partner in conversation, Dante changes his tone and curses Argenti. Dante says, “May you [Argenti] weep and wail to all eternity, for I know you, hell-dog, filthy as you are.” Dante explicitly curses Argenti, inducing other sinners also condemned to the River of Styx to attack Argenti. As Argenti wails in response to the attack, Dante sails away and thanks God that “the loathsome spirit” is mangled.
Dante’s actions display a great disdain for Argenti, which had been brought into hell from life on the world above. Dante curses Argenti with rage and strong resentment, obvious evidence that Dante and Argenti do not get along. Dante denounces Argenti and refers to him as a hell-dog. Dante has such immense contempt for Argenti that he refuses to even speak his name. In life, Dante and Argenti had been bitter political enemies, and Dante’s sharp remarks are meant to insult Argenti and his political group. Dante took special measures to make his disdain for Argenti as clear as possible.
By denouncing a sinner, Argenti, for the first time, Dante has shown evidence of purification. Because denouncing a sinner is an acknowledgement of a sin, the sin is expelled. Thus, Dante purifies himself of being wrathful from his own soul by denouncing Argenti. Dante’s journey through the first five circles of hell has hardened Dante’s heart towards sinful men.
Upon entering hell with Virgil, Dante becomes witness to the true perfection of the justice done to sinners after their earthly life is over. This divine justice inflicted by God chooses to punish the souls in hell in a way very similar or representative to how the souls sinned on Earth. For instance, those guilty of the sin of wrath "tear each other limb from limb" (133), a punishment which directly relates to the actions of the sinners. However, there are also punishments that are more symbolic of the actions of the sinners, such as th...
Dante's and Virgil's scorn seems at first glance to echo the sin of intemperate anger which infects the foul waters of the Stygian marsh. Filippo Argenti, the weeping sinner who emerges from the mire, is eternally punished for his anger. However, the pilgrim's denunciation of Filippo is not only permitted, but lauded by Virgil with the praise given Jesus: "Blessed is the womb that bore thee!" (VIII, 43-44) Even the pilgrim's further, seemingly sadistic request to see Filippo attacked by his brethren is granted and accepted as appropriate. This seeming discrepancy in behavior can be reconciled by understanding the underlying motivations of the speakers. The pilgrim and Virgil travel with Divine sanction through Hell. The pilgrim's entire being learns to become entirely subject to the will of God. Virgil's journey is in obedience to the three angelic women who are Dante's patronesses: Our Lady, St. Lucia and Beatrice. However, Filippo Argenti is described by Virgil as "full of arrogance" (VIII, 46) Filippo Argenti's primary concern is Filippo Argenti. The essential element that separates the pilgrim from the sinners in the marsh is his subservience to God. Due to their divergent natures, the treatment of Filippo Argenti by the pilgrim and Virgil reflects the supreme triumph of the righteous over evil and serves as a warning to the reader.
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.
Canto V of Dante's Inferno begins and ends with confession. The frightening image of Minos who «confesses» the damned sinners and then hurls them down to their eternal punishment contrasts with the almost familial image of Francesca and Dante, who confess to one another. In a real sense confession seems to be defective or inadequate in Hell. The huddled masses who declare their sins to Minos do so because they are compelled to declare or make manifest in speech the character of their offenses and although they confess everything (each soul «tutta si confessa», v. 8) it is not an admission of guilt prompted by true contrition or the timely desire to reform their lives. In Hell confession is a formal ritual that is not especially «good» for the soul. This is a confession that serves only as a sign that identifies and seals their eternal fates. The brief and compressed description of Minos and his «offizio» would suggest that this confession of the sinners is largely a formal requirement full of sound and fury signifying only the level of their eternal degradation. Minos is not caught up in the sinners' confessions, and, indeed, Dante's concise description of the entire process of confession and judgment («dicono e odono e poi son giù volte», v. 15) is accomplished with dispatch and aesthetic distancing.1 Unlike Dante the wayfarer who will be moved to pity by Francesca's confession, Minos, the brutish judge, is not captivated by the texts provided by the sinners and seems to represent a fierce but orderly administration of justice. Within the moral architecture of the Commedia Francesca's own words identify and confirm the justice of her punishment, but as the structure a...
Alighieri places Filippo Argenti in Circle Five, the Styx, among the wrathful souls; here is the first time that readers see Dante express such strong emotions of hate towards a sinner. These feelings displayed through his use of dialogue, juxtaposition, imagery, diction, and tone. Alighieri’s hatred is justified, as it is revealed that Argenti has been a longtime enemy who had played perhaps the most decisive role in Alighieri’s banishment from Florence. Dante encounters Argenti trying to board the skiff on which the poets were crossing the Styx, and upon recognition ...
Traveling through Hell, Dante’s pity and fear starts to challenge and overcome him, resulting in him blacking out. Within the storming Second Circle, home of the lustful, the pity Dante feels for the shade Francesca had him “Swooning as in death, [as he] fell like a dying body,”( V. 127 ). Growing as an individual as his vile journey continues, Dante’s fainting out of pity or fear concludes, which shows a small transformation of him
Dante passes through the gate of Hell, which reads, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here (Dante 42)." At the end of his journey, Dante comes to realize what that means. As Dante descends through each level of Hell, he sees how every sinful act is punished accordingly. He passes by the Opportunists, who were neither for good or bad. Because they chose neither, they are placed in neither Hell nor Heaven. The Carnal are eternally whirled around, just as in life, the souls were led by their emotions. These punishments are everlasting. This is the meaning of the inscription, " Abandon all hope ye who enter here (Dante 42)." Dante goes though the Inferno and learns what eternal torture is. The souls he meets in torment will never receive ...
...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.
Moreover, Dante, the narrator of the Inferno, has succeeded in not only telling the frightening story of the Inferno, but also pointing out the importance of the relationship between human’s sins and God’s retribution, using the monsters as the symbols for each kind of sin and its punishment throughout the progress of the story, which teaches his readers to be well aware of their sins through the literature – a part of humanities; the disciplines that teach a man to be a human.
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.
Dante’s The Divine Comedy illustrates one man’s quest for the knowledge of how to avoid the repercussions of his actions in life so that he may seek salvation in the afterlife. The Divine Comedy establishes a set of moral principles that one must live by in order to reach paradise. Dante presents these principles in Inferno, where each level of Hell has people suffering for the sins they committed during their life. As Dante gets deeper into Hell, the degrees of sin get progressively worse, as do the severity of punishment.
Seeing as this work was written by Dante, and the journey is taken by Dante, he has a unique opportunity to judge his fellow man and decide how they will be punished. He also gets to place his enemies in hell, forever besmirching their names for generations to remember. Perhaps unknowing to Dante, that is worse than any of the punishments that he placed his enemies in. The reality of The Inferno is unlikely and therefore these punishments are nothing but a fictiona...
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.
Dante's "Inferno" is full of themes. But the most frequent is that of the weakness of human nature. Dante's descent into hell is initially so that Dante can see how he can better live his life, free of weaknesses that may ultimately be his ticket to hell. Through the first ten cantos, Dante portrays how each level of his hell is a manifestation of human weakness and a loss of hope, which ultimately Dante uses to purge and learn from. Dante, himself, is about to fall into the weaknesses of humans, before there is some divine intervention on the part of his love Beatrice, who is in heaven. He is sent on a journey to hell in order for Dante to see, smell, and hear hell. As we see this experience brings out Dante's weakness' of cowardice, wrath and unworthiness. He is lead by Virgil, who is a representation of intellect. Through Dante's experiences he will purge his sins.
... Moreover, such belief in human reason signifies Dante's hope towards a bright society and the pursuit of God’s love as the other part of self-reflection. In conclusion, a great deal of tension and contrast between “dark” and “light” in The Inferno helps us to explore Dante’s self portrait—he fears dangerous desires and sinful darkness, but shows much courage and hope towards life since he nevertheless follows his guide Virgil to dive into horrible Hell. As shown in Canto I, such emotional reaction to dark and light symbols lays a great foundation for developing Dante’s broad and universal traits as his journey progresses.