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.”
God states that we treat each other with the love he gives to us as individuals; while us stating violent acts against love, fraud constituting a corruption and, greed becoming normal thing amongst people defines everything god had envisioned for mankind. Yet, while Inferno implies these moral arguments, it generally states very little about them. Dante discusses with each of the souls in the different circles of hell although it is not truly stated as to why they are specifically in that circle. Only because God justifies there sin belonged there. In the end, it declares that evil is evil, simply because it contradicts God’s will and justification, and since God is God, he thus does not need to be questioned about his morals. Dante’s journey of evil progressed as he winded down the depths of hell pitiless and was driven to make it to purgatory. Inferno is not the normal text that most people would read, then think about how it relates to todays morals; its intention is not to think about the evil discussed but, rather to emphasize the Christian beliefs that Dante followed through his journey.
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
Deceived perspective and impaired logic lure vulnerable individuals to frolic in the meadows of sin; therefore, in order to achieve ultimate freedom, one must first be stripped clean of all earthly and common expectations. Dante contorts Earth from a palace to a prison. Bound in earthly limitations, man “by his own fault” (Dante 307) engenders “grief and toil” (Dante 307) causing the “the winds of earth and sea to rise” (Dante 307). Men adhere to addictive habits ignorant of God’s presence on earth. By contrast, purgatory cuts men’s binds to these traps through punishment, enlightening individuals to their mistake. These conversions prompt “singing” (Dante 109) not moaning—as one would expect during punishment—and as the cleansed souls free themselves of their burdens of sin, their climb “up the sacred stairs”(Dante 133) seems “lighter”(Dante 133) and “easier by far” (Dante 133). Dante uses these paradoxe...
...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’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.
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is taken on a journey through hell. On this journey, Dane sees the many different forms of sin, 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.
It is hard to place St. Augustine within just one of the levels of Dante’s hell for his sins were varied and not great. Today many of his sins are commonplace. For example, most people attempt to better their own lives without regard of others. They attempt to increase their standard of living and gain more worldly possessions. They are neither good nor evil but are just trying to make a living and keep up in today’s fend-for-yourself society. Before Augustine’s conversion, this was his goal. He was continually searching for “honors, money, (and) marriage” (Confessions, 991). This allows Augustine to be placed in the first area of hell, the Vestibule. It is a place for opportunists such as Augustine was before his conversion. It is a place for the “nearly soulless. . . who were neither for God nor Satan, but only for themselves” (Inferno, 1295). Augustine never intentionally hurt anyone, but his actions were led by his instincts to succeed and gain praise. These actions included kissing up to the Emperor, his study of law and the art of persuasion, and the mocking of newcomers to his profession. Since each of these sins also falls within a different realm of Dante’s hell, they will be discussed later in this paper.
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.
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
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.
...ion. Dante cites now-historical and mythological figures to exemplify the sins and to make for the better understanding of sin to even the most inept of readers. This work stands alongside The Bible as one of the greatest religious-literary masterpieces of all time.
... 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.