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The Bhagavad gita
What was the justice for dante in divine comedy
The Bhagavad gita
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The Bhagavad-Gita and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno both present the complexity of the human moral code. The Bhagavad-Gita presents the hypocrisy of enforcing punishments for sin, as the same act can either be met with honor or damnation. Inferno provides the reader with a ranking-like insight into Hell and the levels of punishment for different categories of sinners, revealing that the harshest punishments are not necessarily given to the most severe sins. Sin has too transient of a definition too be met with such a brutal punishment; humans simply cannot be expected to perfectly understand the morality of God. The concept of spending eternity in Hell is a cruel and inappropriate form of retribution for sinning because the definition of sin is …show more content…
God creates Hell in order to impose justice on those who sin or go against his will: as the gate states, “JUSTICE IT WAS THAT MOVED MY GREAT CREATOR; / DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME, / AND HIGHEST WISDOM JOINED WITH PRIMAL LOVE,” (III. 4-6). The reader, however, is able to disregard this belief quickly after entering Hell; there is no justice being achieved. Dante further supports the claim that damnation to Hell is an unjust punishment by providing examples of numerous characters who do not deserve to be there. Directly before entering the First Circle of Hell reside the souls who are not even sinners, but just those in a purgatorial state who did not live for good or evil during their lifetimes. Dante observes their torment, seeing the souls “stung and stung again/ by the hornets and the wasps that circled them / and made their faces run with blood in streaks;/ their blood, mixed with their tears, dripped to their feet, / and disgusting maggots collected in the pus,” (III. 65-69). Dante’s vivid description of the gruesome degradation of the people stuck in Hell directly attacks the idea that God created Hell with justice in mind; no justice can be found in brutally punishing those who did nothing to deserve it. Dante then enters the First Circle of Hell, which brings Dante overwhelming grief when he sees his poetic idols stuck in Hell. The sight of these poets is explained by Virgil, who says: Now you should know before we go on farther, / they have not sinned. But their great worth alone / was not enough, for they did not know Baptism, / which is the gateway to the faith you follow, / if they came before the birth of Christ, / they did not worship God the way one should.” (IV.
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.
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.
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 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
This notion of the suitability of God’s punishments figures significantly in the structure of Dante’s Hell. To readers, as well as Dante himself (the character), the torments Dante and Virgil behold seem surprisingly harsh, possibly harsher than is fair, Dante exclaims this with surprise. He doesn’t actually wonder who decided on these tortures. He knows it was god. What he is questioning is how these punishments are just, since they don’t appear to be just from a human’s point of view which views each punishment together with its conjugate sin only superficially. For example, homosexuals must endure an eternity of walking on hot sand, and those who charge interest on loans sit beneath a rain of fire. At first glance, each one seems too terrible for any sin. However, when the poem is viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that the guiding principle of these punishments is one of balance. Sinners suffer punishment to the degree befitting the gravity of their sin, in a manner matching that sin’s nature. The structures of the poem and of hell serve to reinforce this correspondence.
In Dante’s Inferno, hell is divided into nine “circles” of hell; the higher the number, the more likely the sin and the pain you will endure. However, I do not completely agree with Dante’s version of hell, perhaps due to the difference in time periods. In this essay, I will be pointing out my concerns with Dante’s description of hell and how I would recreate hell if I were Dante. The first level of hell in the Inferno is for those unbaptized yet virtuous. Although some did not have a sinful life, if they did not accept Christ, they were sent to Limbo.
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 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.
...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.
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.
“Early in the spring of 1300, "midway along the road of our life," Dante is lost and alone in a dark, foreboding forest. To survive this ordeal, he must visit the three realms of the afterlife, beginning with Hell.” (Smith) Dante’s Inferno, one of the great classical poems that have come out of literature that’s topic is hell. Dante’s Inferno, gives a descriptive look into hell, from the eyes of Dante. Dante goes into detail about every part of hell. The people, what it looks like, sins to go there, the whole shah-bang. Dante splits up hell into nine different parts. In which he sends different types of sinners to each part. Each hell is made up differently, each has different systems that make up that particular systems. For example, circle three, has Cerberus the three headed dog, and another circle is completely frozen over. There are three circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno that are the best in the book: Circle one, circle six, and circle three.
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'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.
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.