Hell As A Propaedeutic

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

    Hell is said to be the worst place to ever exist, and it is greatly feared about on earth and in the minds of people. “Hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them and swallow them up,” this illustrates personification in giving the flames of hell the live ability to hold and swallow us. It portrays how we will be consumed by our own sins if we do not act on them to better ourselves. If we let our sins pile up they will weigh us down and we will eventually be brought down to hell to pay for our wrong doings.

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 Inferno explores the nature of human suffering through a precautionary light. As Dante and Virgil move through the Inferno, Dante sees what has become of people who overindulged in things such as, lust, gluttony, violence, and bribery. Few of the punishments described in the Inferno have a direct correlation to the sin that the souls committed while they were living. Rather, they are a representation of what happens when we commit those crimes against ourselves and others. We create hells for not only ourselves, but those who we have sinned against. These hells are almost impossible to come back from as most of these sins cannot be taken back or undone. Some of the punishments that were clear representations were the punishments of

Robert Herrick, an English poet, once said, “Hell is no other but a soundlesse pit, where no one beame of comfort peeps in it.” Picture any type of Hell with relief, happiness, or even the smallest crack of a smile. There is no place. In fact, one can only think of the complete opposite, whether it is a Hell filled with neglect, pain, disgust, or a never-ending life of horror. This is the place created by Dante Alighieri; The Inferno is exactly the type of Hell where no person would want to be. Even those who acted upon the lightest of sins suffered greatly. While each realm contained a different sinner, the punishment that each were forced to face was cruel, repulsive, and sometimes rather disgusting. Through grieving tears without an

While love is not frequently mentioned in the poem the Inferno, it always has a presence on the back of the reader’s mind. The most surprising appearance of love comes at the gates of hell. This is where Dante learns that this place of punishment has been created from “Primal Love”. Dante displayed hell as being birthed from “the primal love”, or the Holy Spirit. Though those who do not believe the justice of eternal punishment are all less inclined to regard it as a byproduct of God’s love. In this essay I will reveal how hell is the result of God’s loving character, and how it was indeed created from love.

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

He decides to play the role of “god” by punishing his victims for their sins and giving them an opportunity for a second chance only that they have to undergo a lot of pain. Through a series of life threatening tests, the victims have to either kill others in order to save themselves or inflict pain on their bodies to save their family as well as themselves. Similar to the Buddhist depiction of hell, this film gives the characters an opportunity to atone their sins by doing what is perceived to be right. This paper will compare the modern depiction of hell ass seen in the film with the ancient apocalypse seen in the Buddhist depiction of hell (Buddhist Study and Practice Group,

In the play No Exit, by Jean Sartre, the author attempts to describe his visualization of what Hell is, a subject that many have brood over, but none really know. Sartre was under the impression that Hell had nothing to do with the fire and brimstone, as many people before him believed. He instead voiced his thoughts through the characters of No Exit. “Obviously there aren’t any physical torments…and yet we’re in hell. And no one else will come here. We’ll stay in this room together, the three of us, forever and ever…in short there’s someone far away here each of us shall act as the torturer of the two others.” The three main characters in this play, Inez, Garcin, and Estelle create the hell they were banished to, but not by using the “racks and red-hot pincers” of the past, but by hurting each other in a disturbed form of a “love triangle”, where the love really doesn’t exist.

Religious people always fear that they will not make it to Heaven or the place their God resides. The bible and other religious text give advice on how to avoid the pain of Hell. Dante Alighieri, a famous Italian poet, wrote about the physical description of Hell and the punishments each sinner would receive for their sins. Although The Divine Comedy chronicles Dante's journey from the depths of Hell to the glory of Heaven it contains a deeper meaning. Dante reveals the true meaning of the Inferno through his leading motif, his interactions between the sinners, and the intertwining of other literary works into the Inferno.

Who would write about a journey going to hell and coming out alive without a single scratch, scar, or mark? Not me, because I’d be departing long before entering the first ring. But, a dubious gentlemen by the name Dante Alighieri narrates his “adventure in hell” with his idol Virgil, in the poem Inferno. In Dante’s Inferno, Alighieri reveals his unique interpretation of hell. This so called final destination, if one is unable to live a righteous lifestyle.

The Inferno captures the way a majority of people depict Hell: miserable. During his expedition, Dante described the third circle of Hell as being “filled with cold, unending, heavy, and accursed rain; its measure and its kind are never changed” (Alighieri 1307, 51). Trudging through cold rain that seeps through clothes and shows no signs of stopping are enough to damper anyone’s day. Already in the third circle of Hell, one can only be curious as to what is going on above or below. According to the Tewa Creation Story, the world before it was created was not the happiest place to be either. “The world under the lake was like this one, but it was dark,” sums up how the Tewa felt the world was: a dark, unknown place where supernaturals, humans,

When you think of Hell, what do you see, perhaps a burning pit full of criminals and crazed souls? Or maybe you’re like Dante and have a well organized system of levels in correspondence with each person’s sins. In Dante Alighieri’s epic The Inferno, Dante and his real life hero, Virgil, go on an adventure through a rather elaborate version of Hell. In this version of Hell numerous thoughts and ideals are brought to the attention of the readers. Through Dante’s use of both imaginative and artistic concepts one can receive a great visual impression of how Dante truly views Hell, and by analyzing his religious and philosophical concepts the reader can connect with the work to better understand how rewarding this work was for the time period.

Dante’s Divine Comedy illustrates one mans quest for the knowledge of how to avoid the repercussions of his actions while alive so that he may seek salvation in the afterlife. The Divine Comedy establishes a set of morals that one must live by in their life in order for them to reach ‘paradiso’. These morals are precedented in Dante’s Inferno where each level of Hell has people facing atonement for their respective sins during their life. As Dante gets deeper into Hell the sins that are being atoned for get progressively worse (as does their punishment). With that in mind, one can look at the Inferno as a handbook on what not to do during a lifetime in order to avoid Hell. In doing so, Dante creates a moral lifestyle that must be followed in order to have both a successful life, and after life. The moral system Dante creates is comparable to that of which Aristotle creates in Nicomachean Ethics. Dante uses Hell as a negative reinforcement for the living to understand that their actions will lead to repercussions in the after life creating a moral code that one must abide by in their life in order to reach Paradiso— the highest good— which is similar to the code Aristotle creates in Nicomachean Ethics by describing the ultimate function of man. Through this, Dante dictates that in order to reach ‘paradiso’ one must behave rationally in accordance with God’s will making Hell a personification of the characteristics Aristotle advises people to avoid in Nicomachean