There are many people in this world that you wish would get a taste of their own medicine. Some people call this karma while others refer to it as just desserts. All the same, the feeling is similar, that some people need to get what they deserve. Within Dante’s The Inferno, there are numerous situations in which the sinner has gotten what he has deserved. Some are rather funny, while others are seemingly a bit cruel. The first half of this essay shall be that of some personal favorites amongst Dante’s allegorical situations within The Inferno. The first of many favorites is the hypocrites in canto twenty three. They have to walk around continuously in a circle and walk over Caiaphas, who decided to crucify Jesus, all the while wearing heavy, leaden friar robes. Dante describes these robes by saying, “The outside is all dazzle, golden and fair;/ the inside, lead, so heavy that Frederick’s capes,/ compared to these, would seem as light as air.” (Dante) These notions represent that though they told everyone one story, their secrets ate at them inside. The robes are golden and beautiful on the outside, representing the outward appearance, but the weight of the robes represent the massive guilt that hung from them in life. This is a favorite because hypocrites should have to deal with that guilt in the next life. They shouldn’t be able to turn on everything that they say and not be punished. This is also a hit to the church, as Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross say, “Dante and the medieval vox populi associate hypocrisy with the clergy.” (Mandelbaum, Oldcorn and Ross). As Dante descends into circle seven, round two, the next allegory emerges to show its interesting head. The intriguing part of this canto is the s... ... middle of paper ... ...ngs right. The only part disagreeable is the Suicides. Suicides are to be scrutinized and judged based on reasoning and logic, because sometimes there is no other way out, especially if the cause was noble. Not all stories are what they seem. Works Cited Ennis, Adolphous Thomas. Introduction to Dante’s Inferno. N.p.: The Gorham Press, 1904. Print. Fowlie, Wallace. A Reading of Dante’s Inferno. N.p.: U of Chicago, 1981. Print. Harris, James C. “The Woods of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides.” Arch Gen Psychiatry. N.p.: American Medical Association, 2003. 229. Print. Mandelbaum, Allen, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross, eds. Lectura Dantis: Inferno. N.p.: U of California, 1998. Print. Vernon, William Warren, Benvenutus, and Gioacchino Rossini. Readings on the Inferno of Dante. Vol. 2. N.p.: Macmillan and Co, 1894. Print. Dante's The Inferno
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.
In circle three of Inferno, Dante conjures a despairing tone by use of vivid imagery and extensive detail to display the harrowing effects of gluttony. This is best exemplified through the weather patterns and general landscape of this circle, the Poets’ encounter with Cerberus, and Dante’s conversation with Ciacco, the Hog. These devices also allow for the conveying of ideas embedded within the text.
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 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.
Individually, the characters of Cato, Sordello, Statius, and Matelda each serve as corrected counterparts to other characters, allowing Dante to learn by comparisons. As a whole, these secondary guides are critical in shaping Dante-author’s vision of Purgatory and the lessons Dante-character is meant to learn. They bridge the gap between classical and Christian wisdom, and further the development of his Christian poet identity, to allow him to progress beyond his poetic models. They exemplify freedom, hope, divine guidance, and love as the key values in Purgatory, defining Dante’s Purgatorial experience and shaping his will to be virtuous enough to enter Paradise, the next step of his journey.
When we are first introduced to Dante the Pilgrim, we perceive in him a Renaissance intellectual, who despite his intelligence and religiosity has lost the “path that does not stray” (I.3). Having thus lost touch with the tenets of orthodox Catholicism, a higher power has chosen for him to undertake an epic journey. (The devout are able to identify this power with the one Judeo-Christian God, while pagans and sinners often attribute the impetus behind the Pilgrim’s voyage to fate.)
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” This maxim applies to the poet Dante Alighieri, writer of The Inferno in the 1300s, because it asserts the need to establish oneself as a contributor to society. Indeed, Dante’s work contributes much to Renaissance Italy as his work is the first of its scope and size to be written in the vernacular. Due to its readability and availability, The Inferno is a nationalistic symbol. With this widespread availability also comes a certain social responsibility; even though Dante’s audience would have been familiar with the religious dogma, he assumes the didactic role of illustrating his own version of Christian justice and emphasizes the need for a personal understanding of divine wisdom and contrapasso, the idea of the perfect punishment for the crime. Dante acts as both author and narrator, completing a physical and spiritual journey into the underworld with Virgil as his guide and mentor. The journey from darkness into light is an allegory full of symbolism, much like that of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which shows a philosopher’s journey towards truth. Therefore, Dante would also agree with the maxim, “Wise men learn by others’ harms; fools scarcely by their own,” because on the road to gaining knowledge and spiritual enlightenment, characters who learn valuable lessons from the misfortunes of others strengthen their own paradigms. Nonetheless, the only true way to gain knowledge is to experience it first hand. Dante’s character finds truth by way of his own personal quest.
He reacts to the inscription by crying out, “Master, I said, these words I see are cruel” (Dante pg.14). By this he shows his fear of the unknown because he does not yet know exactly what he will witness during his descent. One of Dante’s truest displays of fear occurs when he sees the angels. The angels deny the travelers access to the city. Virgil even appears startled and confused by this.
Many arguments have been made that Dante’s Inferno glimmers through here and there in Milton’s Paradise Lost. While at first glance the two poems seem quite drastically different in their portrayal of Hell, but scholars have made arguments that influence from Dante shines through Milton’s work as well as arguments refuting these claims. All of these arguments have their own merit and while there are instances where a Dantean influence can be seen throughout Paradise Lost, Milton’s progression of evil and Satan are quite different from Dante. Dante’s influence on Milton is noted by many scholars and is very apparent in several instances throughout Paradise Lost, however, Milton shows a progression of evil through his own vision of Satan and creates a Hell that is less meticulously constructed than Dante’s and more open to interpretation.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.