“Abandon all hope ye who enter here” (The Inferno, Cantos III). This line which is inscribed above the gates of Hell, and notably one of the most iconic lines from Dante Alighieri’s, The Inferno, describes what horrors await one inside Hell. Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy, while in exile from his home and birth place, Florence. The Divine Comedy is not only a physical, but spiritual journey which consists of three parts. Part one is The Inferno where Dante journeys through Hell with his guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Part two is called, Purgatory where Dante travels through the place where the souls still have hope to enter heaven. Finally, the last part of the Comedy, is Paradise where Dante gets to see the thrown of God. The Inferno Dante is just like everyone else in regards to knowing absolutely nothing of Hell. It can be said that one reason that Dante wrote The Inferno was for a moral purpose. To point out to the living the error of their ways and to turn them to the path of salvation. Dante creates his own vision of Hell, but nobody knows for sure if Hell is really like he describes. It could be less violent or it could be unimaginably worse. Of course, the threat of Hell can only work if someone believes in the notion of Hell and Heaven and ultimately, if they believe in God. Addressing this issue, Dante awards places in The Inferno for those who do not believe. There is a special area in Hell for those who were born before the practice of Christianity and therefore they couldn’t believe in God. “These were sinless. And still there merits fail, for they lacked Baptism’s grace, which is the door of the true faith you were born to. Their births fell before the age of the Christians mysteries, and so they did not worship God’s Trinity in fullest duty” (The Inferno, Canto IV). His guide, Virgil says that is where he resides. There also is another category of sinners who are punished for their beliefs. “All around are flames and red-hot tombs from which wailings come forth. Virgil explains to the pilgrim that here are buried the souls of the many and various heretics, who burn “The Inferno describes a situation in which the incarcerated have no hope and no possibilities” (Baur). Dante portrays Hell as the condition of the soul after death in which is influenced by the choices made in life. “Constructed as a huge funnel with nine descending circular ledges, Dante 's Hell is a vast and meticulously organized torture chamber in which sinners, carefully and almost pedantically classified according to the nature of their sins, suffer hideous punishment, often depicted with ghoulish attention to detail” (“Dante”). Many of the punishments are very cruel and unusual such as the punishments for suicides. One who has killed his/herself, becomes a tree and is pecked at by harpies. When a branch or twig breaks, it is the equivalent of a human being dismembered. Another group punished is the profligates (those who did not value their earthly goods), “Behind these two the wood was overrun by packs of black bitches ravenous and ready, like hunting dogs just broken from their chains; they sank their fangs in that poor wretch who hid, they ripped him open pieces by pieces, and then ran off with mouthfuls of his wretched limbs” (The Inferno, Canto XIII). There are even more horrifying and painful punishments in The Inferno. This fear of everlasting pain succeeds in acting as a threat to get people to act morally
Dante came a long way in reaching the lower part of Hell in the “Inferno” to not be to be highly satisfied with what he experienced from seeing, hearing, reflecting, and questioning. Throughout the journey we can see that Dante had two sides to him the one in which his felt sympathy for the sinners and felt frightened along the way and the other Dante in which he judgment that the sinners should have a more cruel punishment. Dante encountered many challenges as he progressed to each level.
In most ancient literature some sort of divine justice is used to punish people's acts in life. This is that case with Dante's Inferno, where the Author categorizes hell in 9 circles. Circle 9 being the lowest sins and punishments as the circles decrease. From the time this was written to now in days many things have changed, and things are not seen the same no more. Back then sins like greed and gluttony were ranked as high sins but now people would probably rank those very low with other things like murder way on top. Yet the basic structure set by Dante remains.
The purpose of the pilgrim's journey through hell is to show, first hand, the divine justice of God and how Christian morality dictates how, and to what degree, sinners are punished. Also, the journey shows the significance of God's grace and how it affects not only the living, but the deceased as well. During his trip through hell, the character of Dante witnesses the true perfection of God's justice in that every sinner is punished in the same nature as their sins. For instance, the wrathful are to attack each other for all eternity and the soothsayers are forever to walk around with their heads on backwards. Furthermore, Dante discovers that hell is comprised of nine different circles containing sinners guilty of one type of sin, and that these circles are in order based upon how great an opposition the sin is to Christian morality and the ultimate will of God. We see here how Christianity plays a major role in the structure of hell and the degree to which each sinner is punished. Lastly, we can look at the story and see the importance of the grace of God not only to Dante during his journey, but how it affects the souls in hell and purgatory as well.
Dante Alighieri created The Divine Comedy around the time he was exiled from Florence Italy. The Divine Comedy is made up to three books that’s called inferno, purgatory and paradise. The inferno tells the story about him entering the nine circles with a fellow poet Vigil. During the journey are many Historical, Social and Cultural Context.
In the Inferno we follow the journey of Dante as he wanders off the path of moral truth and into Hell. The Virgin Mary and Santa Lucia ask Beatrice, Dante’s deceased love, to send some help. Thus, Virgil comes to the rescue and essentially guides Dante through Hell and back to the mortal world from which he came. However, things begin to seem kind of odd. When reading the Inferno one may begin to question the way Dante describes Hell and the things that occur within, or even the things we have always believed about Hell. Despite the way it is described and well known in western civilization, Hell is not at all how we expect it to be because of Dante's use of irony throughout this poetic masterpiece.
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 ...
As the great Francois de La Rochefoucauld, “The intellect is always fooled by the heart.” When it comes to doing the morally correct thing, Dante’s Inferno is the text that scares people to do what they are supposed to do. By saying what will happen if a person were to go to hell, this will scare people into doing the right thing. As Tim Keller said, “Sin removes us from that aspect of his power that sustains and supports us. It is to us as water is to a fish-away from it our life slowly ebbs away.” In Dante’s Inferno he uses many tools to scare people into acting as they morally should, three of these critiqued tools include: pain, suffering, and misery.
...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.
In conclusion, we can see that Dante presents the reader with a potentially life-altering chance to participate in his journey through Hell. Not only are we allowed to follow Dante's own soul-searching journey, we ourselves are pressed to examine the state of our own souls in relation to the souls in Inferno. It is not just a story to entertain us; it is a display of human decision and the perpetual impact of those decisions.
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...
“Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.”(Alighieri 18) this statement is viewed while entering through The Gates of Hell. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri is one perspective of Hell that has been written. According to the Cambridge University Library, Hell is set up like a funnel that extends from the surface of the Earth located near Jerusalem; it expands down to the center of the Earth (Cambridge 2006). In this cone-like structure, there are circles that divide sins by the severity of the sin committed. Each circle is on a different ledge or level that separates them from each other (Alighieri 25). Dante and his guide Virgil travel through all the circles of Hell during the Lent season. Through their travels they inspect and comment on the variations
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.
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.