Dante's Divine Comedy - Good and Evil in The Inferno Essay

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.

The purpose of the pilgrim's journey through hell is to show, first hand, the divine justice of God and how Christian morality dictates how, and to what degree, sinners are punished. Also, the journey shows the significance of God's grace and how it affects not only the living, but the deceased as well. During his trip through hell, the character of Dante witnesses the true perfection of God's justice in that every sinner is punished in the same nature as their sins. For instance, the wrathful are to attack each other for all eternity and the soothsayers are forever to walk around with their heads on backwards. Furthermore, Dante discovers that hell is comprised of nine different circles containing

Dante's use of allegory in the Inferno greatly varies from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" in purpose, symbolism, characters and mentors, and in attitude toward the world. An analysis of each of these elements in both allegories will provide an interesting comparison. Dante uses allegory to relate the sinner's punishment to his sin, while Plato uses allegory to discuss ignorance and knowledge. Dante's Inferno describes the descent through Hell from the upper level of the opportunists to the most evil, the treacherous, on the lowest level. His allegorical poem describes a hierarchy of evil.

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.

Dante’s work Inferno is a vivid walkthrough the depths of hell and invokes much imagery, contemplation and feeling. Dante’s work beautifully constructs a full sensory depiction of hell and the souls he encounters along the journey. In many instances within the work the reader arrives at a crossroads for interpretation and discussion. Canto XI offers one such crux in which Dante asks the question of why there is a separation between the upper levels of hell and the lower levels of hell. By discussing the text, examining its implications and interpretations, conclusions can be drawn about why there is delineation between the upper and lower levels and the rationale behind the separation.

The role of religion, ancestry, and nationality are crucial in forming one’s identity. These items and more come together to create a sense of security for an individual. The narrative epic poem, The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri takes the reader with Dante on his journey through Hell and rediscovery of his identity. Dante’s journey commenced as a result to him falling into temptations whilst falling away from God. This led him to travel through the Dark Wood of Error which symbolizes the worldliness that occurs when one strays from the True Way, or God’s Way. The spirit of the poet Virgil, symbolizing Human Reason, appears and leads Dante away from the Dark Wood of Error and to the Divine Illumination with a journey through Hell. The need

Dante is a poet who wrote an epic poem called The Divine Comedy. This epic poem is about Dante’s journey as he goes through 3 levels, which he calls Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. In the Inferno, he meets Virgil, his guide throughout his voyage. They both pass through the nine circles of Hell, where they witness many different punishments for those who have done awful things in their past. Good versus evil is a major theme that occurred throughout Hell. In the Inferno, there are times where Dante sees good and evil and also represents it himself.

As Virgil leads Dante through the layers of Hell, they come across evildoers who are trapped in the personification of their own sinful personalities. Their tortures are extreme versions of their sins on earth. Dante imparts his own moral standards to the reader by portraying a hierarchy of evil that corresponds with his disapproval of the sin. As the pair of observers descends farther and farther into the pits of Hell, the punishments they see grow less and less bearable. While the evil in the first layers of Hell is simple, sometimes invoking pity in Dante, the lower levels of Hell punish souls for more complex and condemnable sins. It would be interesting to see a system of political justice based upon Dante's values.

Journeys can be taken many ways. Some people take the path less traveled and some people take the easy way out. Dante happens to be on journey that is less traveled, by exploring the depths of Hell in the Inferno. The epic poem’s story is about self-realization and transformation. It sees Dante over coming many things to realize he is a completely different person from the start of the Inferno journey. Dante sees many things that help him gain courage in order to prove to himself and the reader that accepting change and gaining courage can help one to grow as a person and realize their full potential. After seeing people going through certain punishment Dante realizes that he must not seek pity on himself and others in order to fully realize his true potential.

     Infidelity, murder, betrayal, and conspiracy all play an integral part in the story of the relationship between Jason and Medea. Jason is guilty of all four acts and Medea involves herself in three. Yet, perhaps, in the eyes of Dante, Medea might fall further into the realm of Dis than Jason. But, should she? And, is Dante's view of Jason and his sentence in Hell appropriate?

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.

In the beginning of his epic, Inferno, Dante seems to have “abandoned the true path” (1.12). He is lost in a dark forest, which symbolizes not only Dante’s loss of morality, but all of humanity’s sins on Earth. The Dark Wood of Error is a foreshadowing of what the afterlife would be like for Dante without God and without any meaning. Dante appears to be suffering through a mid-life crisis as he flirts with the idea of death, saying, “so bitter–death is hardly more severe” (1.7). Dante has lost his dignity and moral direction following his exile from Florence. Dante must travel through Hell and witness the worst crimes ever committed by humans. By traveling through the depths of Satan’s world, Dante is given an opportunity to reconnect with Christianity. Many people claim that Dante journeys through Hell for revenge, but in fact he is hoping to reset his own moral compass and find God.

The inferno by Dante is a story of faith, religious and moral beliefs with various elements, symbols and themes. Through this journey Dante is guided through hell and back by Virgil a symbolism of his teacher and a comrade philosopher like him. The three elements through out this story that seemed to stand out the most are the perfection of God's justice, evil as a contradiction to God's will, and the style of language.

“The immortalization of man is not done within the confines of society, but from transcending time” “It is only when we transcend time, that we are remembered”. Similarly, Dante goes beyond time and produces an epic for the ages, one that could effectively adapt to any time. He makes this possible through his use of Dante the pilgrim as the Everyman, a being that embodies all of humanity. It may sound crazy that a 700 year old Christian epic written by an Italian exile could still be relevant let alone well-known today, but Dante Alighieri's Inferno proves us all wrong. Since the 14th century, not much has stayed constant; empires have come and gone, wars won and lost, and entire peoples just eliminated, but in spite of this, the root problem

In such discussion I only met with further obfuscation and confusion. Rather this initial difficulty can be overcome with some ease by consulting a letter Dante retrospectively wrote to his patron, Can Grande, where he offers the following guide in reading the whole `Comedy': ."..The subject then of the whole work, taken in the literal sense only, is the state of souls after death pure and simple. If however the work be regarded from the allegorical point of view the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the existence of his freewill he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice" . Dante is stating that the description of spirits which he meets in the other world carries implications about the moral significance of the type of behaviour which they exemplify. This is an important point and if we lose sight of it we lose sight of the poem and of what makes it historically significant. Indeed, I will argue that it is this underlying moral significance which makes the `Comedy' a work of the middle ages but a work for all time. Judging contemporary characters, through lyrical poetry, in consultation with the classics on a question that transcends his own time and place I feel qualifies the comedy as a work of great historical significance. However let us not digress untimely, rather I will now examine the contemporary experience which Dante's