Use Of Cultural Bias In Dante's Inferno

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

example of how I believe he would currently organize hell. Dante would have organized his Inferno differently, with different sections and organization, if he had written it in the twenty-first century due to important cultural factors, including globalization, increased occurrences of violence, and a decrease in religious influence.
Dante’s cultural bias is evident throughout his book, and effects his creation of his hell.

The book itself is politically biased due to it being written in Tuscan Italian. Dante used Tuscan to promote an ideology of cultural and political unity throughout Italy. Dante’s use of Tuscan Italian makes him the first canonical classical author to write in a vernacular language. Additionally, The Divine Comedy contains undeniable religious references, symbolism, and bias. The Divine Comedy has three portions, including The Inferno. Additionally, each portion has thirty-three cantos. Three and its multiples are important for religious symbolism due to their reference to the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Dante also references the Pope through the she-wolf blocking Dante the character’s path to heaven. The she-wolf represents greed or avarice and symbolizes the turmoil of the Catholic Church in the fourteenth century. His focus on such a visual portray of his creations in another reference to religious bias and embodies the shift to visual scholasticism that Europe was experiencing. An example of his skill with creating an image through

words:
Nessus had not yet reached the other side
When we made our way into a forest
Not marked by any path.
No green leaves, but those of dusky hue-
Not a straight branch, but knotted and contorted-
No fruit of any kind, but poisonous thorns. (XIII: 1-6)
Finally, religious and cultural bias appear in Dante’s organization of hell. He positions fraud against God as the worst form of sin. Simple fraud and treachery are below inconvenience and violence because fraud requires a denial of the self and an intentional distancing of oneself and the divine. Through the analysis of Dante’s biases, I am able to reconstruct The Inferno in a way that portrays less bias from the thirteen hundreds and has more influences from the twenty-first century.
Similarly to Dante, I would separate hell into four sections. Again, like Dante, my first section would be composed solely of righteous non-believers. This section would contain two circles, a lesser circle for those who never knew of God’s existence, including the Greeks from his Limbo, and a deeper circle for those who were told about God but ignored or denied the opportunity to follow God. Dante explained Limbo when saying, “They did not sin. Though they have merit / that is not enough, for they were unbaptized, / denied the gateway to the faith that you profess” (IV: 34-36). I would create a similar area, because I agree that people who are moral, regardless of their faith and beliefs, do not deserve to live in a destructive section of hell. I would also continue to incorporate the substitution of longingness and hopelessness for a more direct punishment. Because I view this as an idea that is still evident in twenty-first century culture, I would make no change to Limbo except to make it a full section of my version of The Inferno.
From the section of hell onward, I would create an organization distinctly different from Dante’s setup. My second section is for those who caused harm, but only directly upon themselves. In side of my second section, I would place the circles of heresy, lust, gluttony, and avarice and prodigality, with lust being the least punished and avarice and prodigality being the deepest in of those circles in hell. In modern society, self-harm is stilled viewed to be sinful; however, it causes harm to the least number of people because it only directly affects one person. For this reason, I would place self-harm as the second section. The only notable change in order of the circles is the shift from heresy being below avarice and prodigality, and even violence, to being on the top, right before lust. I made this shift because heresy indirectly affects less people than each of the other circles affect. This pattern is continues, with avarice and prodigality indirectly affecting the highest number of people compared to other circles in the second section. I would categorize these shifts as both cultural and religious, most notably because of the shift of heresy, which is a sin against religion but that has lost the majority of its cultural power in modern society.
The third section of hell that I would create is for people who harm those around them.

These people cause direct harm to more people than just themselves, but their influence still has a limit. The circles included in the third section in descending order are anger and sullenness, deceit, and violence. While the people sentenced to the third section can have a significant direct and indirect impact, their power has a limit, and they have a small impact when comparing the people affected to the global population. I would place the anger and sullenness circle with deceit and violence because anger can cause significant emotional damage to a person. Also, I placed the circle of violence below deceit’s circle due to a change in cultural bias from Dante, in which I understand violence to be the most extreme form of harm that one can inflict upon another or

oneself.
The fourth and final section is dedicated to people who have caused mass destruction. The people sentenced to the forth section have had an almost unlimited harmful effect on the world. The only two circles within the fourth section are manipulation and mass amounts of violence. The fourth section is very selective due to the extreme atrocities one must commit to have a global impact. My fourth section is profoundly different to Dante’s due to changes in culture and globalization. When he was writing The Inferno, it would have been almost impossible for one person to have a global impact. However, due to globalization and telecommunication, it has become radically easier to impact nearly the entire world. This shift in power makes my cultural bias drastically different from Dante’s culture bias, leading me to create a vastly different type of hell.
Dante created a version of hell that was strongly influenced by his religion and his time period. By analyzing the factors influenced by time and then eliminating them, I created a modernized version of Dante’s Inferno. I reorganized the circles and formulated new criteria for each of the sections of hell. A hell that recognizes righteous non-believers, those who cause themselves harm, those who cause harm to others, and those who harm everyone is more suited as a modern hell due to the cultural power of religion, violence, and globalization.