Dante Inferno; Canto 7

Often, we cannot see the good until we have experienced the bad. Dante Alighieri, a poet who makes himself the main character in his Divine Comedy, finds himself lost in a dark wood at the start of The Inferno. Though he sees a safe path out of the wood towards an alluring light, he is forced to take an alternate route through an even darker place. As the ending of the pilgrim Dante’s voyage is bright and hopeful, Alighieri the poet aims to encourage even the most sinful Christians to hope for a successful end. Thus, Dante the pilgrim goes to hell in The Inferno to better understand the nature of sin and its consequences in order to move closer to salvation; his journey an allegory representing that of the repenting Christian soul.

In Dante’s Inferno, part of The Divine Comedy, Canto V introduces the torments of Hell in the Second Circle. Here Minos tells the damned where they will spend eternity by wrapping his tail around himself. The Second Circle of Hell holds the lustful; those who sinned with the flesh. They are punished in the darkness by an unending tempest, which batters them with winds and rain. Hell is not only a geographical place, but also a representation of the potential for sin and evil within every individual human soul. As Dante travels through Hell, he sees sinners in increasingly more hideous and disgusting situations. For Dante, each situation is an image of the quality of any soul that is determined to sin in

Dante's "Inferno" is full of themes. But the most frequent is that of the weakness of human nature. Dante's descent into hell is initially so that Dante can see how he can better live his life, free of weaknesses that may ultimately be his ticket to hell. Through the first ten cantos, Dante portrays how each level of his hell is a manifestation of human weakness and a loss of hope, which ultimately Dante uses to purge and learn from. Dante, himself, is about to fall into the weaknesses of humans, before there is some divine intervention on the part of his love Beatrice, who is in heaven. He is sent on a journey to hell in order for Dante to see, smell, and hear hell. As we see this experience brings out Dante's weakness' of cowardice,

Dante and Virgil have just left limbo, the first circle of hell, and are now on their way into the second circle of hell, where hell really begins. It is here that Dante first witnesses the punishment brought upon the sinners. They encounter Minos, the beast-judge who blocks the way into the second circle. He examines each soul as they pass through and determines which circle of hell they must go to by winding his tail around himself. Minos warns Dante of passing through but Virgil silences him. Dante encounters a dark place completely sucked of any light and filled with noises more horrible than a tempest and sees the souls being whirled around in a

In Dante’s Inferno, a permeating theme of the work is the idea of contrapasso. Contrapasso is only mentioned once and late in the Inferno in Canto XXVIII of XXXIV by Bertran de Born: “In me you may observe fit punishment / Cosí s’osserva in me lo contrapasso” (XXVIII. 142). Although the literary device of contrapasso is only mentioned once and late in the Inferno, the tool is used in every circle and subdivision in hell. Contrapasso is seen in the punishments of the damned in a physical manifestation, which represents an appropriate mode of retribution in terms of a kind of divine justice. In Dante’s Inferno, contrapasso, while it describes the physical agony of the damned as fit punishment for their habitual sins, represents the damage

Inferno describes Dante’s point of view of Hell when Virgil takes him through a tour of Hell. It has nine circles which are classified by punishment. Sins that each person has committed during their life is what decides to which circle they belong. Dante tries to give us a sense of how Hell looks like to encourage us to make better decisions about our life. Having an understanding of how the afterlife works can encourage us to commit fewer offenses and think better before acting. Contrapasso is “the idea that a sinner’s punishment in the Inferno fits the crimes they’ve committed on Earth”.

The Inferno is a tale of cautionary advice. In each circle, Dante the pilgrim speaks to one of the shades that reside there and the readers learn how and why the damned have become the damned. As Dante learns from the mistakes of the damned, so do the readers. And as Dante feels the impacts of human suffering, so do the readers. Virgil constantly encourages Dante the pilgrim to learn why the shades are in Hell and what were their transgressions while on Earth. This work’s purpose is to educate the reader. The work’s assertions on the nature of human suffering are mostly admonition, with each shade teaching Dante the pilgrim and by extension the reader not to make the same mistakes. Dante views his journey through hell as a learning experience and that is why he made it out alive.

What goes around comes around. When sinners reach hell they are forced to experience the counter-suffering of contrapasso. For each sin, Dante gives a specific punishment relating to that sin. Some of these sins include violence towards self, violence towards God, sorcery, and hypocrisy. For the despicable lives they lived on earth, they are doomed to suffer relating consequences for all of eternity.

Dante also relates how sins are punishable by the act that was committed. He does this through an allegory by saying things such as, “Their hands were bound behind by coils of serpents...A great snake shot up and bit him where the neck joins with the shoulder.” The snake in this canto depicts a couple things: The guilt that the thieves lived with from either stealing from the wrong person or hurting someone, always running and being bound by fear of being caught and the punishments that come back to get them. The snakes that bind their wrists and feet represent their emotions. While some certainly didn't care about their actions others were tormented by what they had done, be it from stealing from someone that didn't deserve it or being in the position where it was kill or be killed. The sneaky snake that jumps out and grabs the guy can represent the punishment they escaped catching back up with them.

A contrapasso is considered a “law of nature” that reflects the sin being punished. In Dante’s Inferno, contrapasso is seen several times throughout the poem. Every Circle of Hell is setup to have a fitting punishment. The Fifth Circle is best representative of contrapasso. Circle 5 holds the wrathful souls who spent their living days angry and fighting all.

Dante uses contrapasso to organize how the world he lives in is ordered. Contrapasso is used by Dante to explain and define his beliefs on how the world works and how the afterlife is structured. Dante also uses the concept of contrapasso to help encourage others to lead a life based on the same christian values that he bases his life on. He does this by showing how scary it can be the deeper you go in hell. People feel terror when they see how bad the punishments could be if they don't adopt christian values to their lives.

After passing through the City of Dis, Virgil and Dante enter Nether Hell, where violent and heretical sinners are punished. Dante portrays these sins of corrupt will as more evil and deserving of worse punishment than the weak-willed sins of upper hell. Souls who, during life, were violent against their neighbors boiled in a river of blood. Suicide cases are trapped in the form of trees, unable to scream unless gauged by horrible birds. The violent against God are sprawled face-up on burning sand, eternally confronting the proclaimed enemy. Even within an individual circle, some sinners are punished more than others. Among the violent against God, Capaneus is more severely punished than his peers because of his pride. He continues to be blasphemous, even in death, declaring, "That which in life I was, in death I am." His stubbornness and pride in death causes

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante narrates his descent and observation of hell through the various circles and pouches. One part of this depiction is his descriptions of the various punishments that each of the different sinners has received.  The various punishments that Dante envisions the sinners receiving are broken down into two types. The first type he borrows from various gruesome and cruel forms of torture and the second type, though often less physically agonizing, is Dante’s creative and imaginative punishment for sins. The borrowed torturous forms of punishments create a physical pain for the shades, whereas the creative punishments are used to inflict a mental and psychological suffering. However, it is possible for the creative

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is taken on a journey through hell. On this journey, Dane sees the many different forms of sins, and each with its own unique contrapasso, or counter-suffering. Each of these punishments reflects the sin of a person, usually offering some ironic way of suffering as a sort of revenge for breaking God’s law. As Dante wrote this work and developed the contrapassos, he allows himself to play God, deciding who is in hell and why they are there. He uses this opportunity to strike at his foes, placing them in the bowels of hell, saying that they have nothing to look forward to but the agony of suffering and the separation from God.

At the same time, however, the religious function of Dante’s poem must not be neglected. In the opening lines of The Inferno, Dante embarks on a journey and finds himself “in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost” (Inferno, I, 2-3). Dante’s description of the dark wood indicates the lack of God’s light, and thus informs readers of the life he lived in the condition of sin. These opening lines establish the religious context for the poem, as Dante has deviated from “the straight way”, the way to God. Furthermore, Lee H. Yearley contributes to this religious perspective by