The Use Of Religious Numbers In Dante's Inferno

Dante’s Inferno follows the allegorical journey of Dante, who loses sight of the true path, representing good faith, and must travel through hell, among other places, to return to the path by trusting God and avoiding sin. Canto I of the story involves Dante, in the middle of his life where he has both human experience and time to improve, lost in the dark wilderness, threatened by beasts and unable to escape. In fact, darkness pervades in the first thirty-four cantos of the Comedy. It is important to note that Dante considers darkness to be the lack of natural light, as Throughout the Inferno, Dante uses the setting of darkness to represent both sin and sin’s deceiving nature. In doing so, Dante argues that to successfully have faith in God, one must discern the truth from among the darkness which permeates both Hell and humanity.

To merely say that Dante was interested in the world of hell would be an understatement. His needs to explore and write about the nine different realms could best be described as an obsession. It’s an adventure, a tale, a dream (or nightmare) of different historical, biblical, and Greek gods and creatures living their lives in the afterlife of the underground world. Each level has its own form of punishment fitting the crime one has committed.

Now in Circle Nine, Virgil points out the face of Satan to which Dante cowers behind Virgil in numbing fear. "Do not ask, Reader, how my blood ran cold/ and my voice choked up with fear. I cannot write it: / this is a terror that cannot be told."(XXXIV 22-24). In striking fear Dante looks to Virgil to quell his emotions and protect him. Virgil simply goes on to explain who the 3 souls that Satan chews on are, unfathomed. The only way to get out of hell is to climb Lucifer, Virgil puts Dante on his back and begins climbing. "Then, as he bade, I clasped his neck, and he, / watching for a moment when the wings/ were opened wide, reached over dexterously/ and seized the shaggy coat of the king demon;."(XXXIV 70-73). Dante's own blood runs cold at the sight of Satan's 3 horrifying faces. With the presence and reason of his guide he is able to battle his own fear through the last part of their Journey

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.

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante presents the different levels of hell. According to Dante, there are nine levels in hell. It was not considered a good thing to be put in hell. You are sentenced to a hell according to your sin you committed. While he is in hell, Dante explores all the soul 's sin on Earth and the punishment he or she receives while in Hell.

I think Dante’s description of Hell is a wonderful work of literature. Dante uses numerous literary techniques to describe his vision of Hell to the reader. In my opinion, one of the most affective techniques used by Dante is symbolism. It would be a very difficult task to compile a brief list of significant symbols from the Cantos that we read in class. Dante utilized many symbols throughout each canto. Some of the symbols that Dante used in Inferno are well defined and easy to interpret, while other symbols are much more difficult to recognize and understand. For this paper, I will be analyzing multiple symbols from Dante’s Inferno. Some of the symbols came from the Canto’s that were included in class

Coming from the Dante's Divine comedy, one of the three canticles in which is mainly the most famous one and perhaps the one with the most meaning behind it. It perfectly explains so much about the era and time that Dante lived in and perhaps even some of his background can be felt and seen during the whole story itself. From a Florencia decent, especially in the middle age civilization, some of his hate or perhaps just cultural feelings of dislike towards some of the Greek, warriors and even top religious figures can be seen and understand the reason why he placed them in one of the nine parts of hell in his story.

He gives a previously mysterious place a tangible look, geography, and mood. The different parts of Hell that Dante creates are used to accent his message, as well as make Hell more fascinating for the reader. In Inferno, Dante uses physical objects and appearances to convey his opinion about the severity of sins and the people who committed them. Hell itself is sorted into nine circles, with the gates to the City of Dis separating the fifth and sixth circles.

     Dante's Inferno, itself one piece of a literary trilogy, repeatedly deploys the leitmotif of the number three as a metaphor for ambiguity, compromise, and transition. A work in terza rima that details a descent through Nine Circles of Hell, The Inferno encompasses temporal, literary, and political bridges and chasms that link Dante's inspired Centaur work between the autobiographical and the fictive, the mundane and the divine and, from a contemporary viewpoint, the Medieval and the Modern‹Dante's recognition of the Renaissance as our millennium's metamorphic period and of himself as its poetic forerunner (until deposition by Shakespeare).

Literature is an art. It demands the imagination of the reader, and in return the literature will communicate the message at whatever level is desired. It is not uncommon for many literary works to operate on more than various level; there are facts and truths, which are immediately apparent, and in contrast, the symbolism or allegories that may be present upon deeper investigation and exploration. In works regarding religion or spiritual matters, oftentimes it is very common to find symbolism, and this is very true of Dante's 'Divine Comedy,' a work so full of symbolism that there is only time enough to concentrate on the first two cantos of the first book Inferno.

Dante was clearly a very careful poet, as shown through his meticulously placed connections to the Trinity all throughout his work. Through both his writing structure and his descriptions of beings, Dante uses the overall theme of threes, ultimately relating back to the Trinity.

Symbolism can be utilized in diverse manners but remains a prominent aspect of life within most religions throughout the world. Out of ample differential symbolic numbers, Dante showcases the number three throughout the allegorical tale of his journey through hell. Dante bases Inferno upon the Christian idea of hell by using the religiously symbolic number three within his choice of poetic structure, the monsters displayed, and the associations of the number three in the Bible.

Every famous author has something that makes them “special” or “unique.” Some are great at personifying inanimate objects. While others, find strength in their use of metaphors. Through studying Dante Alighieri, there is one particular writing tool he utilizes often. The tool that he uses throughout the entire Divine Comedy is allegory. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as: “a story in which the characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life or for a political or historical situation” (Merriam-Webster, 2013) The ways in which he uses allegory is inherent throughout the entire tale. In his book, The Inferno he describes Dante the Pilgrim’s descent into Hell and the different things he sees. There are a

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