Corruption In Dante's Inferno

The sale of indulgences was not saving any souls rather yet it was condemning them. The true way to clear away the sin is to as God for forgiveness and repent of the sin committed. Luther objected to the sale of indulgences for many reason. First of all the Pope does not have the power to relive someone from a sin, only God can. Second paying your way out of guilt does not save you in the eyes of God, true repent does. Third many crimes were being committed nonchalant due to buying indulgence. Lastly, the Pope was the making money out of selling indulgence yet not giving back to its people. Rather they

Marin Luther, regardless of his intentions, is one of the most controversial men in all of Christian history. The growth of Martin Luther and essentially the whole Protestant Revolution begins by Luther walking in a storm and getting struck by lightning. At this time, he prays out to the saints in hopes that he will be saved; he promises them that if they save him, he will stop everything a become a monk. Luther is saved and does just that, he quit studying law and took his vows, and he began studying the bible as a monk. While studying the bible, Luther comes across a line in Romans 1:17 stating, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” Luther’s interpretation of this is that no amount of pilgrimages, relics, or good deeds will save someone, what will save that person is his or her faith. At the same time that Luther comes to this conclusion, indulgences are being sold. An indulgence is a ticket to heaven which cleanses a person of all sins. A person pays for this certificate, which typically cost half a year’s earnings, and this will shorten the time in purgatory before going to heaven. The idea of what happened after death terrified some people so this gave those people a false sense of comfort.

In document seven, Martin Luther criticizes the pope and the Church for their use of indulgences. Luther claims that people are falsely being forgiven for their sins with the use of money. He thinks this is teaching the false doctrine of money being more important than ethics. People should be forgiven by God, not by money, and should do so through helping the needy instead of buying the indulgences.

By the 1500’s many issues shows signs of disorder within the Church. The idea of selling indulgences (forgiveness for sin) for clergy benefit began to negatively spread throughout the people, along with opposition to pluralism (holding more than one office). This sparked many attempts to reform the church through individual groups, one of which being the Brotherhood of Common Life. One of their accomplishments was starting schools for the poor, in which educated none other than Martin Luther. By the time he became a priest, many people had already failed to reform the church. When Martin Luther entered Rome, he briefly supported the church before realizing the hidden

Furthermore, The Protestant Reformation saw a major European movement that challenged the religious practices and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. With the rise of religion attracting many individuals, intellectuals began to challenge religious teachings and expose the corruption of the Church. Rather than offering salvation, the Church became corrupt and stingy for control, power, and money, in which German theologian Martin Luther, highlighted. Luther argued that people only achieve salvation by God through faith alone and criticized the use of indulgences, wealth, corruption, and other religious practices within the Catholic Church in his 95 Theses. For example, one of Luther’s theses says, “Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory.” Luther believed papal authorities utilized the people to their own advantage in gaining wealth by fostering beliefs that indulgences relinquished sins. The immorality surrounding the Church made it unfair to people of all social groups who “devoted an enormous amount of their time and income to religious causes and foundations” – only finding themselves fooled into bribery (A History of Western Society 402). Luther’s arguments served a pivotal role in influencing others to fight for their own beliefs and redefine the meaning of religion. The common good of the people and their opinions mattered as Protestant thought grew. In the “big picture” of European

The story of “Dante’s Inferno”, by Dante Alighieri is a dark story which depicts nine circles of Hell. The one circle of Hell that we will be discussing is that of greed which happens to be the fourth circle. In the Fourth Circle of Hell, Dante and Virgil see the souls of people who are punished for greed. They are divided into two groups (The Prodigal and the Miserly), those who hoarded possessions and those who lavishly spent it. They use great weights as a torture mechanism where they are pushing them with their chests. This symbolizes their selfish drive for fortune during their lifetime. As they make their way further down, they come across a swamp filled with naked people with their faces scared by rage. One other form of greed is that of anger, which overcame these terrorized souls. The two groups are guarded by a character called Pluto which also happens to be the God of Wealth from the Underworld. The fourth circle (Greed), is one of the iniquities that most incurs Dante's scornful wrath, thus is of great importance to understanding the text.

Patrick Cooney  3/17/2017  Mockery of the Church  Chaucer and Dante although may have different criticisms, both were not the strongest fans of the Church at the time. Chaucer himself is considered a Christian but he was not the biggest fan of the church knowing that some people in the church are corrupt. Chaucer uses his character's in The Cantenbury Tales to show how some characters are more corrupt than others are. Chaucer was not a fan of the Church to say the least. Dante has a different complaint with the Church though than Chaucer does.

Dante had different thoughts when seeing the good and the evil sinners. As Dante goes through the Inferno, he sees sinners who are tearing up and looking terrible. In circle eight, he witnessed sinners who have committed fraud and rape, yet also saw some who were accidently accused of those crimes and did not deserve to be in Hell. “Here pity, or here piety, must die if the other lives; who’s wickeder than one that’s agonized by God’s high equity?” (Aligheri, Canto 20). He felt pity for some, in which Virgil had to tell him to bear with it and that there is no pity in Hell. Dante was biased about his thoughts of good and evil when determining which sinner was good and which sinner was evil. Sinners are also in Purgatory and are considered good too, since they repented their sins.

Does hell have its own history? For Dante, the structural and thematic history of ‘hell’ in the Inferno begins with the Roman epic tradition and its champion poet, Virgil. By drawing heavily from the characteristics of hell in Book VI of The Aeneid, Dante carries the epic tradition into the medieval world and affirms his indebtedness to Virgil’s poetry. Moreover, Virgil becomes a central character in the Inferno as he guides Dante, the pilgrim, who has no knowledge of hell, through his own historical model. Similarly, the protagonist of The Aeneid, Aeneas, lacks the foresight necessary to make the journey through hell on his own and thus places his trust in the

A long history of corruption caused people to view the Catholic Church as a for-profit organization rather than God’s voice on Earth. By the Renaissance, the Catholic Church had already lost much of its power over secular rulers but still held leverage over the masses. This authority naturally paved the way for corruption. The most outrageous form of corruption practiced by the Church was the sale of indulgences. An indulgence is the remission of temporal punishment still due for a sin that has been sacramentally absolved. One of the ways the Church would generate income was by selling them. The notion started off innocently enough; it stemmed from the idea that punishment for crimes could be converted to payments of money, in essence, a fine (Simon 35). However, it soon spiraled out of control as the Church used indulgences simply to gain money, as when Pope Leo X needed money for the construction of St. Peter’s basilica (Duiker and Spielvogel 429). People began to view salvation as something that could be bought; they could go out and sin on Saturday night, then simply pay for it monetarily Sunday morning. To encourage people to buy more indulgences, the Church even claimed that indulgences could be bought on behalf of those already dead and in purgatory (Sporre 378). This blatant victimization was what spurred Martin Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses,

Many authors have attempted to write a text that will stand the test of time yet few have been successful. Dante Alighieri was the exception. In the early 1300s, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy. It was separated into three parts: The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Hell exists to punish sin. However hell is insinuated that it existed long before mankind was created so God didn't originally create hell for humankind, he created it to punish his angels when they fell from grace. For example a love of wealth and power, drives many souls to commit terrible sins. The second circle of hell contains those sinners who gave into excessive lust, including the memorable Francesca da Rimini. These sinners follow lust and desire, rather than chaste love like that between Dante and Beatrice. Dante also includes Sodomites in his vision of hell, a category including those who engage in homosexual

In The Inferno, Dante descends through the nine circles of Hell, encountering increasingly serious sins, most of which are crimes. The levels of Hell can be interpreted as a gradation of crimes, with penalties in proportion to their relative gravity of sin. While crimes are transgressions against human law, Dante’s Christian orthodox ambitions translate the treatment of these seemingly earthly crimes as sins, transgressions against divine law. For the purposes of this paper, the two terms can be used interchangeably because Dante’s perception of crimes on Earth is in parallel to the punishment of those crimes as sins in Hell. For Dante, the most punishable sins are those of betrayal. With a lucid examination of Dante’s political

The Divine Comedy is much more than an epic poem depicting a man’s interpretation of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Written by Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy frequently alludes to the political turmoil that was prevalent throughout 14th century Italy, specifically, the city of Florence. During this period of Italian history, there was a lack of a stable government and a power struggle between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor. This paper will analyze the political aspects within the Divine Comedy and its connection to religion, focusing specifically on the Inferno.

In Dante's Inferno, Dante places people of all types into one of the nine different circles depending on what they had done in their life and what punishments they deserve. His religion is what said which sins made someone have to spend eternity in Hell and what sins were worse than others. Some of the sins Dante chose to be included in his own version of Hell are wrath, sloth, greed, lust, and gluttony. These sins were seen as some of the worst in the Catholic religion, which influences Dante’s decision to have them in Dante's Inferno. Some of the other sins Dante chose also exemplified his strong Catholic faith. For example, the people who fall in Limbo did not believe in God and in the Catholic religion, this means they were not saved and would therefore end up in Hell (Brantl 208). Dante, just like all catholics, believed that going against God was a sin. In Dante's Inferno, there are punishments for people who go against the catholic religion and the Lord as well as betray them. Dante’s religion also influenced his choices for whom he put in hell and where. According to Dante, no madder how good of a person you are, if you didn't believe in God and Christianity, you were sent to hell. Hawkins says that “…Limbo, the first circle of hell. It is beautiful, refined, civil, and dead. Knowledge may well be perfection, but it is the knowledge of God, the beatific vision, that is the journey’s true end” (107).