Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Dante's descent into hell
Dante's inferno circles
Dante's first level of hell
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Dante's descent into hell
In Dante’s Inferno hell is divided into nine “circles” of hell; the higher the number correlates to the grimmer 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. I see flaws with the concept of limbo. If this level includes people that were not baptized, it must include unbaptized infants. Damning infants before they are even able to make their choice of religion is irrational; being put in hell is seen as a punishment, and for those who barely take a few breaths on this earth should not be held to the same standards and be eternally damned.
“Be assured, and doubt not, that not only men who have attained the use of their reason, but also little children who have begun to live in their mothers' womb and have there died, or who, having been just born, have passed away from the world without the sacrament of holy baptism,
The sixth circle of hell is for those who officially deny or doubt the principles of Christianity. I do believe heresy should have a part in hell, however if the heretic had a virtuous and moral life, they should not be in the 6th circle of hell. I would think they should be at circle one, with the unbaptized babies, for if the person or baby lived longer, they could have eventually found their belief in God. For those who did not accept God and did not live a virtuous life, then they should be in a higher level circle. However, if God is omniscience, omnipotent and omnibenevolent why would he punish one so severely for being ignorant and unaware of His
Dante’s Inferno is an unparalleled piece of literature where Dante creates, experiences, and explains hell. He organizes it into four different sections, inconvenience, violence, simple fraud, and treachery. These sections are further divided into ten different circles of hell, which are the Neutrals, Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice and Prodigality, Anger and Sullenness, Heresy, Violence, the Ten Malebolge, and the Frozen Floor of Hell. King Minos passes judgement on each of the people who enter hell, and he then sends them to their designated circle. The organization of Dante’s four sections, his ten circles, and the judgement from King Minos all display forms of cultural bias. This paper will demonstrate possible differences by providing an
...l be like, or even if there will be such a place after this life, but if there is, it is very possible that the threat of eternal punishment can be great encouragement to do what is right and what is morally proper.
When reading Dante’s Inferno, you could see that the worst possible sin for him was betrayal, especially that of a master. He put the people that directly betrayed their masters in the very center of hell. These people were eaten alive by the devil. He had different opinions on what the ultimate sins committed were. When looking at how I would create my own hell, I to would put people in different levels of hell due to the sins they committed on Earth. First of all, I would give souls who weren’t baptized the chance to change that. There are several factors that come into play; maybe their parents didn’t believe in religion, or maybe they died before they got the chance to be baptized. Either way, I would allow souls who haven’t been baptized the opportunity to change. If they chose not to, then they would spend forever in Limbo. It’s difficult to say where I would put each and every sinner; there are several different aspects to take into consideration. The severity of the sin, what it planned out of simply out of rage, etc., but there is a certain category of people I would put in the bottom of hell. Here would reside the souls of all those who hurt children. There is something truly awful about these people. Kids have no way of really knowing just how bad the world is, and the people that hurt them make them grow up much too fast. They take away their innocence. There are even
The geography for each circle of Hell's misery is distinctly arranged to coincide with the sin of the sinners contained within. In Canto V, we are taken to the prison of those souls who were unable to master their own desires. These are those who "betrayed reason to their appetite" (1033), allowing the lust of flesh and carnal things overcome their God-given human reasoning. It is here that we see a dark and deafening Hell, full with the roar of the anguish of the condemned dead. Dante sees a great whirling storm of souls that are forever tossed and battered on their "hellish flight of storm and counterstorm" (1033). It is conveyed to us that each soul's path in the whirling cyclone is all but steady, blown about in a constantly changing torment with no direction or destination...
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
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.
According to Dante, there are many circles in hell. The first circle in Hell is called Limbo. Each of the individuals who die before being baptized and those who live as virtuous pagans are condemned to spend all of eternity in this level. The people being referred to in this level are those who die before accepting Christianity, essentially it’s
The first of the two divisions of Hell is Upper Hell. Upper Hell is the area habitated by those committing sins of incontinence or lack of self-restraint. This lack of self-restraint could be in the form of anything from sex to mood. Before delving into the sins of incontinence, one must first look into the first inconsistency of the Inferno. This inconsistency is found in the Vestibule of Hell. The Vestibule of Hell contains the trimmers and the neutrals. Although almost all other sins mentioned in the Inferno are of an ethical, universal standpoint, the ones mentioned here are sins only from the Christian point of view. These neutrals are the people who either showed no partisanship or did not take sides. Lines 37-39 and 46-50 read:
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.
...judging his fellow man. He could be placed in his own circle of the corrupt politics, for he was banished for choosing the side that lost the political struggle for Florence. He could be placed in his own circle of the false prophets, for he is envisioning the afterlife, without receiving God’s revelation. He could be placed in his own circle of the hypocrites, for placing people in hell, while he himself has committed their 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.
The second stop after the Inferno is Purgatorio for Dante and Virgil. This section was personally the weirdest for me to understand completely out of the whole book which was a very difficult book to understand. Reason being is Purgatorio is not something Christians would normally place between Heaven and Hell or even think about at all when thinking about what happens after you die. It is either straight to Heaven, or straight to Hell depending on what happen and how faithful you were while living upon earth.
Dante organized Hell in cantos 2-10 by going through the 6 Circles of Hell. The six circles of Hell are Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, and Heresy. The first circle of Hell, Limbo, Dante meets non-Christians and unbaptized pagans who are punished with eternity in an inferior form of Heaven. In the second circle of Hell, Dante and Virgil finds people who were overcome by lust. They are punished by being blown violently back and forth by strong winds, preventing them to find peace
This circle of Hell, Limbo, shows how the individuals punished have not “sinned”, but are considered neutral, or they have been undecided throughout life, including forming a relationship with God. Their “neutral” attitude is punished by forcing them to walk in a crowd, following a banner. “And I, who looked again, beheld a banner, which, whirling round, ran on so rapidly, that of all pause it seemed to me indignant”(52-54). Dante also refers to them as being forever lost with no real direction in life. Their punishment, however does not exactly fit the crime. Yes, the people here in Limbo will forever walk towards the banner in hopes of following a leader one day, but they are also being attacked by hornets, wasps, and maggots. “These miscreants, who never were alive, were naked, and were stung exceedingly by gadflies and by hornets that were there. These did their faces irrigate with blood, which, with their tears commingled, at their feet by the disgusting worms was gathered up”(64-69). These souls are being punished because they did not have God in their lives. However, some were born before God, why is it that they must suffer a punishment in which they were not aware of. Same goes for those children who die young that have not been baptized. Given the chance, they would have followed God and could be saved from this eternal