Hell: The Personification Of The Characteristics In Dante's The Divine Comedy

Hell: The Personification of the Characteristics Aristotle Tells us to Avoid

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 paradiso. 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. With that in mind, one can look at Inferno as a handbook on what not to do during a lifetime in order to avoid Hell. In the book, Dante creates

Consequentially, the sins being described in Inferno abide by the rules written for the Catholic religion in The Bible, which is why Inferno has religious significance. This explains why Aristotle and Dante would disagree on a few key points of what it means to be virtuous. Hell may personify the excessive rather than the deficient in Aristotle’s code of ethics because of this religious connection. Aristotle is adamant about not having excess nor deficiency and rather finding a middle ground (mean), whereas Dante abides by the virtues laid out in The Bible. One example of this exists with humility. According to The Bible (and therefore Inferno), humility stands a virtue that is praised, where Aristotle views humility as a deficiency and therefore a vice. Aristotle’s ideas clash with that of The Bible in a few cases producing the main source of differentiation between Dante’s and Aristotle’s views on vice, but ultimately Dante borrows from Aristotle’s ideas showing that this ideological clash does not discount Aristotelian thought. Although some differences among vice and virtue exist in the two texts, the theory that Hell personifies the qualities Aristotle tells us to avoid is still plausible. In most cases, Dante and Aristotle agree on the definition of a vice. For example,

These shared qualities such as the three divisions of sin, and the similar notion of virtue contribute to the idea that Dante borrowed many of his thoughts from Aristotelian thought in order to create both the structure and content of Hell. The punishments those in Hell face, represent what not acting in conformity with the soul does to a person and allows that person to visualize the repercussions for the sins they have committed that contrast a good moral