Enlightenment To Sins In Dante's Inferno

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 The Inferno is his own interpretation of the circles of hell. The people that Dante places in hell tried to validate their offenses and have never seen the injustice of their crime or crimes. They were each placed in a specific circle in Hell, Dante has nine circles in his hell. Each circle holds those accountable for that specific crime. Each circle has its own unique and fitting punishment for the crime committed. There are three different main types of offenses; they are incontinence, violence, and fraud. These offenses are divided into Dante’s nine rings of Hell. Each of these rings has a progressively worse punishment, starting with crimes of passion and

In Dante’s Inferno, there are many important and reoccurring theme’s that are introduced into the story, which is something that both books have in common. In Inferno, the perfection of God’s justice is one of them. What happens to a soul in the mortal world, such as each sin it has committed, is transferred into the punishment received in hell. “Justice moved my high maker, in power divine, Wisdom supreme, love primal. No things were Before me not eternal; Eternal I remain.” It is believed that hell was made by justice, even if there is nothing but suffering inside and that all who enters should “Abandon all hope.” Man must first understand the foundations of sin before he can hope to climb the mountain of salvation, which is being blocked by three beasts in which represent pride, envy, and avarice. Only once he has taken his journey through hell will he be able to pass these beasts. The journey symbolizes man falling into sin before he is able to be forgiven for his sins and saved.

While reading Dante’s Inferno I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the journey of the protagonist and the belief system of the Buddhist religion. Dante believed we must understand sin before we can reject it, and Buddha believed that before we can reject sin, we must suffer also. Examining these two tenets side by side makes the similarities undeniably apparent; they both seem to be purporting the message that there cannot be pain without pleasure, truth without dishonesty or enlightenment with suffering.

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,

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 the story Inferno written by Dante Alighieri, a man, Dante, follows Virgil as he guides Dante through the circles of Hell where Dante “shall hear despairing cries and see those ancient souls in pain as they bewail their second death,” (Canto. I.115-117) ultimately reaching Heaven. This poem was written around the early 1300s. The journey that the character Dante goes through shows a variety of examples of corrupted people that Dante, the author, had encountered over his years in Italy. The author had created his own version of Hell by including details of his own experience during his life.

Knowledge, truth, and virtue are all things desired by Dante, and these concepts are the underlying reasons why he writes the Commedia. In the Heaven of Mars of Paradiso is where Dante meets his great great grandfather, Cacciaguida, who provides him with the immensely valuable information on how to turn his impending exile into a pilgrimage. His journey through the afterlife is for the reason of enlightening all people for the greater good, which in turn “is no small claim to honor” (Par.17.134-35). Dante’s awareness of this honorable regard, along with the hunger for learning that he exemplifies and acts upon parallels to Ulysses’ journey in Inferno to discover more than the human experience offers. The central reason why it parallels so nicely

“The Christian church … conceived of hell as a place where the good were separate from the evil, and the deeds on earth were weighed and judges.”(Bondanella XXXIII) Hell is a place that was created as a punishment for those people who died with mortal sins and did not ask for forgiveness. In this case Dante’s hell in the Inferno is divided into three sections and nine circles. These circles within hell were based off of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Along with the seven deadly sins Dante’s Catholic religion also influenced him in his choices about who to put and where to put people in Hell. According to his beliefs, if you were not a Christian, you automatically went to Hell. (Trotter) As well even though Dante's hell affected all people no matter their religion, the representation of how Hell

Inferno, the first part of Divina Commedia, or the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is the story of a man's journey through Hell and the observance of punishments incurred as a result of the committance of sin. In all cases the severity of the punishment, and the punishment itself, has a direct correlation to the sin committed. The punishments are fitting in that they are symbolic of the actual sin; in other words, "They got what they wanted." (Literature of the Western World, p.1409) According to Dante, Hell has two divisions: Upper Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of incontinence, and Lower Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of malice. The

Many readers argue that Dante’s intentions during his journey into Hell were to gain revenge on his enemies. In each Circle of

In order to convince the people of Italy to behave better, Dante had to send a warning in the Inferno that would stay in people's minds until the end of time. For that reason, his description of the terrible punishments suffered

I think that Dante wrote the Inferno to showcase the evils that many people may be unaware of. In the aspect of sin we do not view all of them as horrible as what Dante describes the punishments to be. In the case of Gluttony many people today just view it as obesity, in Dante’s time it was viewed as a sin. Today’s society is completely opposite with what was acceptable in his time. Today we have grown use to the waste of food or the misers of society as they hold their money close to themselves. I think that he wrote the Inferno because it gave people the idea of what is truly sin for the people of his time and even to extend further to our time, so they can realize what they can change in their life to help better themselves as individuals.

More commonly known as Dante, Inferno, The Divine Comedy: Inferno is a telling of Dante the pilgrim’s journey though the many rings of Hell by Dante Alighieri. At the time of its creation the poem carried a lot of weight by using nearly all of the prominent figures of the time to establish the dos and don’ts of Christianity. For example, when Dante’s journey begins he finds himself in the circle of the lustful where he lays his eyes on many recognizable figures that even those of us today can recognize, those such as; Dido, Helen of Troy, and Achilles. The story very carefully exaggerates the cardinal sin of these people in a way that clearly lines out how it lead to their doom, a brilliant teaching tool for new Christians. However, this

Dante’s Inferno documents the epic journey that Dante and Virgil take into the afterlife, particularly the afterlife that involves the morally corrupt. They take a journey to hell, and see all of the people who have been damned because of the actions they did, or didn’t do, during their lifetimes. A question is posed when the topic of hell is brought up: Does the threat of hell cause people to act more or less moral? When Dante experienced hell firsthand, did it cause him to look differently at his life, and what he should’ve been doing to allow himself to stay away from hell? Most commonly, hell is thought about in the eyes of religion. Most religions believe that if you act a certain way, or perform certain acts, you will be granted access to heaven. However, if you do not do what you are supposed to during your lifetime, you will be condemned to hell. This threat causes many religious people to act more morally than they might naturally, and follow the guidelines that will allow them into a pleasurable afterlife. As stated in Hell, Religion, and Cultural Change, “A common feature of religions is that they provide information about the afterlife... But many religions promote doctrines about the afterlife that are literally the antithesis of bliss. Hell’s objective, in any of its various incarnations, is to minimize consumer utility.” ( Hull) Basically, hell is commonly used as a concept to