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Inferno is Dante’s first poem in his The Divine Comedy. The poem starts with Dante traveling in dark where he loses his way. He is trying to get to his beloved Beatrice who is waiting for him. She sends ghost of Virgil to bring Dante to her. In order to get to Heaven, Dante will have to go through heaven, something that almost everyone did in Christian world. At the beginning, they enter the gate of hell. The First Circle of the Hell is for those people who never done anything good or bad in their life, here they run all day long with hornets biting them. In the Second Circle of the Hell, Dante sees that the some souls are stuck in a devastating storm. In the Third Circle of Hell, Dante sees that Gluttonous…
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Dante the Pilgrim visits many different people while on his journey through Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Each one of these tormented souls are punished for their crimes against themselves, society, and God. Most of these personalities bring no surprise as they are robbers, murderers, and blasphemers. However, the amount of Church authority figures in Hell is staggeringly high. The ironic revelation is never fully dissected by Dante but the implications of this writing may cause the public to turn a leery eye towards the Church. Throughout Dante’s Inferno, the sights of “Holy” men rotting in Hell create a rift between the teachings of the church and the common citizens.…
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Dante and Virgil are outside the eighth Circle of Hell, known as Malebolge. The circle has a wall along the outside, and has a circular pit in the center. The ridges create ten separate pits. This is where the people receive their punishment for fraud. This is where Virgil and Dante see souls from one side to another. The demons with great whips cause pain to the souls when they come to the demon’s reach, which then force the souls to the other ridge. There is an Italian that Dante recognize and he speaks to him. The Italian tells Dante that he lived in Bologna, and now is there to sell his sister. The pit is for the Seducers and the Panders, and then Dante saw the Jason of mythology who abandoned Medea. When Virgil and Dante had…
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As they enter through the gates of hell they read the sign on the gate, which reads “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER”. The first place they enter is the Ante-Inferno, which isn’t really part of hell but is still a place of eternal punishment for those who were neither good nor evil. In this part of hell they were continuously strung and bitten by bees and wasps and were consumed by worms. As they exit this part of the Inferno they pass a river called Acheron, which is the border of hell. As they cross the river Dante sees all the damned souls waiting to be punished and sent into hell he then realizes that only the punished and eternally damned souls enter into hell and faints at the thought of entering such a place he might not be able to get out…
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Dante feels hell is a necessary, painful first step in any man's spiritual journey, and the path to the blessed after-life awaits anyone who seeks to find it, and through a screen of perseverance, one will find the face of God. Nonetheless, Dante aspires to heaven in an optimistic process, to find salvation in God, despite the merciless torture chamber he has to travel through. As Dante attempts to find God in his life, those sentenced to punishment in hell hinder him from the true path, as the city of hell in Inferno…
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The very structure of Hell – a series of concentric circles – gives an sense of inescapability, since circles are boundless or have no edges, an individual can only continue tracing their arcs in a futile attempt to find a way out. He describes the entrance to hell like so: “Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood for I had wandered off from the straight path” (1.1). The very imagery portrayed introduces the allegory that Hell is dark, succulent mass astray from the “straight path.” This journey is reciprocated of his exile from Italy. In his journey, he must learn to reject the deceptive promises of the temporal world. These promises are what he deems to be the problems of Italy’s social structure derived from the renaissance era. Promises that justice shall be executed at the expense of the Church, promises that obedience to the Church will ensure one’s reservation in Heaven, promises heeding to allow a state to monopolize the violence within its asserted territory. The use of the allegory explains the means by which he came to cope with his personal calamity of exile and to offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s troubles as well. Thus, the exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the fall of man. Thus, each sinner in the Inferno embodies his sin just as Dante’s…
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One must understand that in abiding by Catholic doctrine and teachings his rankings of Circles represent the Divine Justice that draws the whole story together. Evil, which is the reason behind sin is the ultimate breaking of God’s will because the evil actions are in direct violation of God’s commands. Fraud is seen with such disdain by Dante because it is a direct violation of trust and love, which are seen as two of the purest emotions by Dante. Divine love is seen by Dante as the ultimate power and in many ways shapes his views and understandings of the underworld. Dante views his love that he feels towards Beatrice as the representation of true love because of the pure intentions in which they are founded. Many of the worst sins in Hell are perversions of pure intentions and demonstrate Dante’s views on sins. These views are unquestionably founded in the fact that he was betrayed by his beloved city of Florence when he was exiled. This can help to explain why Dante places Cassius, Brutus, and Judas in the mouths of Satan because of the direct violations of love and trust which were committed by these…
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In the Inferno, the circle of Hell is determined by the sins the person (soul) committed while still alive on earth. For their deeds, they suffer eternally according to Divine Justice. The people one sees in life can already have chosen their eternal fate. Their outward actions may determine which part of Hell they are sent to, if indeed they are fated to go there and if Hell is the way Dante puts it.…
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Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet, was born in Florence in 1265. The exact day of his birth and death is unknown. He was born into a noble family with a no fortune. He may have attended the University of Bologna, and around the age of twenty he married Gemma Donati, with her he had several children. He began writing poetry at a very young age. After he was exiled from Florence he wrote the epic poem, Divine Comedy. It is believed that some of the epic poem, of the Inferno was written about the people in his life that wronged him. Dante the poet creates Dante the character in the Inferno. Dante, the character, in the Fourth Bolgia is in an astonishing disbelief by the punishment of the sinners in the Eighth Circle of Hell.…
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In 1265 one of the most influential men in history was born: Dante Alighieri. Dante was born to a family much entangled in the politics of Florence. As Dante grew older, he began to take after his father, and he too got involved in politics. Florence divided into two groups: the black and white guelphs. The two groups fought for years before the black guelphs finally won, and exiled the white guelphs - including Dante Alighieri. After he was exiled, he began to work on his first of three books, Inferno. This book was Dante’s take on hell. Although many people take Dante’s book as fact, Inferno is nowhere near biblically accurate. In Dante’s Inferno he shows extreme personal bias against his enemies, he writes about different sections of hell, and he has many variations of punishment, some worse and some better than others. The bible is very clear about not contradicting God’s word in Luke Chapter 21 verse 15: “For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.” These three major biblical fallacies are the major reasons that Dante’s Inferno can really only be looked at as a fictional story.…
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Dante talks to many souls while he is in hell. None of which repent for their sins. All of the souls in hell are being punished so if any of them do repent it cannot be known if it is genuine or not because they are being tortured, and for repentance to be repentance it has to be for the love of God. Repentance is not a turning to God to gain forgiveness. Repentance is not a turning to God to avoid punishment. Repentance has is asking for forgiveness from God because of the love that one has for God and because they are truly sorry.…
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The Inferno is probably the most realistic section of the Divine Comedy because it comes closer to fitting the people's perception of what Hell is really like then than Purgatory and Paradise do. People's mental image of Hell is an evil, dark, and scary place that is full of fire and that is exactly the way Dante depicts it. People are eager to see, hear, and read about violence, blood, and gore and the Inferno is full of it which helps the reader to pay closer attention to it. In a sense Dante is trying to scare the righteousness into people. Dante himself became scared when he read the inscription above the gate of Hell that read "ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE" because he did not realize that the inscription was only intended for those who had already died. The…
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In Dante’s Inferno we read of the nine circles of Hell and why souls are put there based on Dante’s Christian view of their sins. There are people suffering in the cores of Hell due to lust, adultery, suicide, gluttony, greed, etc. Souls suffer as they grieve their contrapasso punishment for the atrocities they have done while in their bodies on Earth. They have been traitors to the word of God and now they are destined to spend their eternities in Hell where they constantly remember the sins they have caused against the bible, Christ and God. Though there are the souls in Limbo that suffer from never knowing the word of God. These souls in Limbo are those that were Pagans and the unbaptized infants. But now the question is why does Dante place these souls in these certain circles of Hell and how does he decide? Dante lived in a Midlevel time of Christianity and based his view on what his religion taught them. How does Dante’s view of Hell in his time compare to Christianity’s modern view of Hell. I myself being of the same religion, I have come to believe that everyone can be forgiven as long as they truly repent the sins they have committed. It is not if you commit one sin that you are doomed to live your life in Hell, but rather that if you ask for forgiveness and repent the right way you can still make your way to heaven.…
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In Dante's Inferno, Hell is described in vivid detail in the eyes of Dante, the main character and author. Sinners are eternally punished with tortures that fit their sins. This idea of retributive justice and the role of human reason in the form of Virgil are the two main themes in the poem. Canto VIII contains Dis, the capital of Hell and is most representative of these themes.…
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Dante, the pilgrim, experienced Hell and as he reached the bottom of Hell, he experienced something completely different opposed to what readers would have expected. Dante Alighiere’s depiction of Satan once he reaches the bottom of Hell reveals the theme, that in Hell the punishment is always befitting of the sin. As Dante and his tour guide, Virgil, arrive at the last circle, Satan is described to have, “three faces on his head...underneath each came forth two mighty wings...at every mouth he with his teeth was crunching at sinner,” (Canto 34). The illustration of Satan does not satisfy the typical reader; the reader expects to be able to visualize Satan in a more depth illusion, showing how furious he must be after the punishment he has received, of having to be placed in Hell, being frozen; the irony of the Hell described by Dante is that the reader would have expected for Satan to be located where it would be extremely hot, and for there to be uncontrollable fire, not for it to be frozen. At the bottom of the slope, Satan is placed from his mid-breast forth issued from the ice, and as night approaches everything is opposite which is why they must climb down Satan’s leg. Dante was surprised as he reached Satan to see how frozen and powerless he became in circle 9. The ultimate evil is represented in this way by Dante, because Dante wants to show the reader how Satan, and…
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