The Unfulfilled Love: Dante's Inferno

Dante Inferno is a story about the journey through hell to of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet, to rescue Beatrice, his beloved, guided by the Roman poet, Virgil. The journey of Dante and Virgil briefly and concisely represented the Christian belief of the afterlife through the nine circles of hell, the sinners and their relatively punishments. Each circle of the Inferno specifically painted the picture of the sinners’ punishments according to the acts they did when they were alive. Nine different circles described nine different sins that people committed; however, the second circle, which was also called Lust, was the one I found most related to the system theory. The sin that people in the second circle committed was characterized by their stimulations of the flesh in life. The visualization of the afterlife in Christian belief and the love between man and woman represented the symbolic subsystem. The deaths and the wars that the sinners sacrificed for were the price they had to pay for their lust represented the trading subsystem. Lastly, their power of causing wars to satisfy their sexual desire represented the social hierarchy subsystem.

As Dante and Virgil left the first circle and entered the second circle of hell, Minos appeared to be the guardian of this circle. “Minos horribly, and snarls; Examines the transgression at the entrance” . This second level was the truth beginning of the torments of the Inferno which was also the place where the evil-born spirits truthfully confessed their sins in order to be placed in a proper level. After the sinner confessed their sins, Minos would assign them to a specific circle based on a certain number of times that he wrapped his tail around himself. In the second circle,...

... middle of paper ...

...se of their social hierarchies in society at that time. Consequently, the decisions of trading to satisfy their own lustful desires had significant impacts on the society such as Semiramis, who changed the law to erase the blame that she had, was King Ninus’s wife . Helen of Troy was the wife of Menalaus whose brother was Spartan King, and Paris was a princess of Troy. Taking away Helen from Menalaus had brought the war to the two greatest kingdoms at the time. The war could not have happened if Paris had not been the princess of Troy.

As a reader, I sometimes found it difficult to understand the reason behind the way Dante arranged the order of sin in different level of the Inferno. However, the entire journey through the inferno of Dante and Virgil helped me better understand the interactions between the subsystems which created the society at that time.