In Dante’s Inferno, Dante presents many circles of Hell, each with their own sins and with those sins, punishments. These sins go hand in hand with an idol. Idolatry plays a major role in Dante’s Hell as each sin corresponds with an idol and the souls in Hell refused to give up this idol. In Dante’s sense, idolatry is the worship or extreme admiration, love, or reverence for something or someone over God. This love for an object or action draws the soul away from God and they desire Hell rather than Heaven. In Dante’s Inferno, all of the sins have idols associated with them but this paper will focus on three of them: lust, gluttony, and wrath. Lust is one of the seven deadly sin and is the first actual sin in Dante’s Hell. Lust is the destructive force of possessive sexual desire while love is the power of attraction to the beauty of a whole person. Dante meets a character named Francesca who is a soul in Hell who was lustful. She was in an adulterous relationship with Paolo and they are punished together by being blown about by the winds. As sinners in Hell, the lustful have an idol that they cannot give up and that is the pleasure of being loved by another human. As Francesca had the love of her husband, it was not enough so she cheated on him. She attributed this forbidden love to be caused by …show more content…
Gluttony is defined as habitual greed or an excess in eating. The idol for glutinous is earthly materials especially those dealing with food. In the third circle of Hell Dante encounters Ciacco. His name translates to “pig” or “hog.” He was a politician in Florence who was known for his likeness towards food and drink. Even in Hell, Ciacco is still extremely concerned with earthly ideas, especially his city. He prophesies about Florence and expresses his concern saying, “One great desire tortures me: to know / whether they taste Heaven’s sweetness or Hell’s gall.”
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 analyzing this gradient of morality, it is useful first to examine a work from early literature whose strong purity of morality is unwavering; for the purposes of this discussion, Dante’s Inferno provides this model. It is fairly straightforward to discover Dante’s dualistic construction of morality in his winding caverns of Hell; each stern, finite circle of Hell is associated with a clear sin that is both definable and directly punishable. As Dante moves downwards in this moral machination, he notes that
The Inferno is the first section of Dante's three-part poem, The Divine Comedy. Throughout Dante's epic journey into the depths of Inferno he encounters thirty monsters and five hybrid creatures. The most significant of these monsters are of central importance to his journey and to the narrative, as they not only challenge Dante's presence in Inferno, but are custodians of Hell, keeping in order or guarding the "perduta gente". In this essay I am concentrating on these prominent beasts, namely Minos, Cerberus, Plutus and Geryon, establishing why they feature in Dante's eschatological vision and discussing the sources which influenced his inclusion of these particular creatures. These four monsters all fulfil important functions as well as representing important themes in Inferno, establishing them as symbols which reinforce Dante's allegory.
Inferno begins with Dante lost in a dark wood. When he tries to exit, three impassible beasts blocked his path. Dante is rescued when Beatrice sends the spirit of Virgil to lead him to salvation. However, Dante must journey through hell first. Dante and Virgil then journey through the nine circles of hell, with the occasional help of a heavenly messenger sent to aid Dante in his journey. Dante meets many significant people and hears their stories in each circle. The First Circle of Hell or Limbo is resided by virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized pagans. In the Second Circle, Dante and Virgil find people who were overcome by lust. In the Third Circle, they find souls of gluttons that are seen as more than the usual excessive eating and drinking but also drug addiction. In the Fourth Circle, Dante and Virgil see the souls of people who are punished for greed.
Dante Alighieri's The Inferno is a poem written in first person that tells a story of Dante’s journey through the nine circles of Hell after he strays from the rightful path. Each circle of Hell contains sinners who have committed different sins during their lifetime and are punished based on the severity of their sins. When taking into the beliefs and moral teachings of the Catholic Church into consideration, these punishments seem especially unfair and extreme.
Inferno, the first part of Divina Commedia, or the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is the story of a man's journey through Hell and the observance of punishments incurred as a result of the committance of sin. In all cases the severity of the punishment, and the punishment itself, has a direct correlation to the sin committed. The punishments are fitting in that they are symbolic of the actual sin; in other words, "They got what they wanted." (Literature of the Western World, p.1409) According to Dante, Hell has two divisions: Upper Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of incontinence, and Lower Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of malice. The divisions of Hell are likewise split into levels corresponding to sin. Each of the levels and the divisions within levels 7,8, and 9 have an analogous historical or mythological figure used to illustrate and exemplify the sin.
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 and Virgil were descending from the circle of gluttony to the circle of lust, when they crossed paths with the mythical monster, Minos; he is a representation of a barrier between Dante and Virgil since Minos was able to identify Dante as living soul. This character is the one who examines sins, places the shades in specific circles based on the extremity of their sins, and nearly obstructed God’s plan for Dante. Minos is at the entrance of the second circle: lust, when he meets Dante he immediately senses that he is a living soul. This mythical monster is the “connoisseur of sin” in Inferno, meaning he is the expert in the classification of each one’s sins (Dante 37.8). He is located right at the entrance of
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.
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is taken on a journey through hell. On this journey, Dane sees the many different forms of sins, and each with its own unique contrapasso, or counter-suffering. Each of these punishments reflects the sin of a person, usually offering some ironic way of suffering as a sort of revenge for breaking God’s law. As Dante wrote this work and developed the contrapassos, he allows himself to play God, deciding who is in hell and why they are there. He uses this opportunity to strike at his foes, placing them in the bowels of hell, saying that they have nothing to look forward to but the agony of suffering and the separation from God.
In Dante’s Inferno, throughout the epic journey of the character Dante into the depth of Hell, he encounters a number of beasts and monsters as he passes along the way, especially through the seven stations of the greatest monsters of Hell. The most significant of these seven major monsters is of central importance to the character Dante’s journey as well as to the narrative, for these monsters not only challenge the presence of the character Dante in Hell, but they are also the important custodians of Hell. Moreover, some of them even have more particular duty to perform, apart from being the Hell guardians.
... of the characters portrayed in his epic poem shine light to the biased nature of his judgment. With Francesca, loving too much was what she was condemned for. Dante completely overlooks the elements of her sin that included those belonging to the ninth circle of hell: the circle of treachery. By kissing the man that was not her husband, Francesca not betrayed her husband but also her marriage. On the other hand, Pope Boniface VIII was predicted to receive condemnation for a severe sin versus a lesser sin while he was still alive. Dante’s damnation of souls in the Inferno may be based on their sins, but the placement of the sinner’s soul once in hell was somewhat skewed by Dante’s opinion of them. Dante’s Inferno does not portray god’s justice purely. It is in Dante’s humanistic feeling of emotion that make this Dante’s hell instead of a purely supernatural version.
When one thinks of God as a synonym of love, it is then easy to understand why Dante chose fraud as the worst of sins; the act of fraud then serves as an antonym of love. The most relevant example of fraud can be found in Lucifer’s betrayal of God. He was Lucifer’s master, and even though Dis was heaven 's most beautiful angel, greed led him to betray his own master. The fact that an angel, a Celestine creature was lured by greed into betraying his omnipresent master, indicates that of all sins, fraud is the most severe of all. Since Lucifer’s betrayal was directly aimed at the creator of every living thing, it then transforms Satan’s disloyalty into a marker that denotes the most precarious side of human nature. In terms of severity, after Lucifer’s actions, Judas Iscariot is the figure best known for betraying a member of the divine trinity, in this case, his master Jesus Christ. Then, the reasoning behind the incorporation of Iscariot into the narrative becomes clear as well as why he was situated as a central figure. By Dante choosing to place Judas directly in Lucifer’s frontal mouth, and having Lucifer chew his skull for eternity, one sees the dire consequences of betraying God. Dante’s decision to include Brutus and Cassius in the narrative is less apparent, yet it can be traced