The Theme Of Good And Evil In Dante's Inferno

At the most fundamental level, Dante associates the setting of darkness with sin and sin’s deceiving nature through contrasting the darkness of Hell with the light of Heaven. In the first Canto, Dante sees that his escape from the wilderness is the pursuit of the sun; although Virgil, his guide, offers a better path to achieve his goal, the sun nonetheless represents a lack of sin. Immediately from the start, the darkness represents animalistic sin, such as incontinence or violence. However, Dante’s incorporation of sins against reason with darkness do not become clear until later in his journey. In Hell, darkness, like the degree of sin,

Imagine a place where tyrants stand up to their ears in boiling blood, the gluttonous experience monsoons of human filth, and those who commit sins of the flesh are blown about like pieces of paper in a never-ending wind storm. Welcome to Dante 's Inferno, his perspective on the appropriate punishments for those who are destined to hell for all eternity. Dante attempts to make the punishments fit the crimes, but because it is Dante dealing out the tortures and not God, the punishments will never be perfect because by nature, man is an imperfect creature. Only God is capable of being above reproach and of metering out a just punishment. While Dante 's treatment towards the tyrants is fitting, his views on the

One of the major themes which Dante inferno raises is the nature of the virtues. Like the spirits of hell, the spirits that are encountered by Dante have all sinned. The spirits out there were punished

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is on a journey through hell in which he sees the different versions of sins and what consequences come after the immoralities. The person who commits a sin usually has to suffer in some way that would show revenge for the law of God. Dante threatens the people and tells them that they basically have nothing to look forward to except for having to suffer being separated from the will of God. Since these works were written by Dante, he had the power to judge others and decide how they will be punished for their sins. These visions that he had could very well be all false prophecies and may not be believed by every person. One thing that Dante did was to give enlightenment to sins that people did not know and made people

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.

Dante clearly distinguishes crimes of passion or desire between crimes of violence and punishes them according to their degree. These sinners, the carnal, the gluttonous, the hoarders and wasters, along with the wrathful and sullen fall just below the virtuous pagans in Dante's hell. Somehow, they represent a loss of self-control, of reason gone amiss, as each dives into a personal world of self-indulgence. To Dante, those that surrender to the pleasures of the 'will' deserve an eternity less painful than the individuals who fall into emotional or mental despair.

Dante is described as someone who is trying to find God in his life, even journeying through Hell to do so. However, along the way Dante begins to see things that bring out the worst in him. Dante sees two of his old political rivals, at two separate times with two separate punishments, and he stopped to enjoy their pain and even laugh at them. Obviously this is not something he would do in his normal life, so it is safe to assume that spending time in Hell is taking a toll on his judgement.

   In The Inferno, Dante explores the ideas of Good and Evil. He expands on the possibilities of life and death, and he makes clear that consequences follow actions. Like a small generator moving a small wheel, Dante uses a single character to move through the entire of Hell's eternity. Yet, like a clock, that small wheel is pivotal in turning many, many others. This single character, Dante himself, reveals the most important abstract meaning in himself: A message to man; a warning about mankind's destiny. Through his adventures, Dante is able to reveal many global concepts of good and evil in humanity.

Dante eventually realized that sin is a choice, and in his story creates Hell to have different levels of punishment for each sin. The way Dante divides the punishment of sins is accurate, and he is very successful in the way he chose to deliver his message of what Hell is like.

Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno, translated by John Ciardi, is an epic poem based on Dante and Virgil’s journey through hell. Lucifer was an angel in heaven and God’s right hand man. He wanted to be equal to God and wanted to have as much power and all the respect that God had obtained from all of the other angels. After God found out about how he was trying to gain more power he sent him below the Earth’s surface. This is where hell resides. Dante was inspired to write this book after being exiled from Florence. The Stanford Encyclopedia stated about Dante’s life, “he never returned to Florence, and played no further role in public life, though he remained passionately interested in Italian politics, and became virtually the prophet of world empire in the years leading up to the coronation of Henry VII of Luxemburg as head of the Holy Roman Empire” (1312). One inspiration was because of the political nightmare Florence was facing. Before the fourteenth century the church and state were not separated. Throughout this epic poem Dante shows his major theme of how the state and church should be independent from each other but have equal powers. Another way Dante shows his hatred for the government is by identifying significant political figures at that time period in his journey through hell. Canto five and thirteen show how the sinners impacted Dante, questions that arise from the encounter, and insight to Dante’s main themes of his epic poem.

People view moral failures and sins as just wrong doings, and can easily get away with it, what they don’t realize is that there comes consequences. Dante shows us people suffering for not having bad sins at all. Although moral failures are looked upon differently by each and every person, they all have the same affect on people. Therefore in a way all failures and sins are connected even if it has different affect on your neighbor or some one else out there. Dante gives rankings on the failures and sins, which are the levels of hell.

As Dante explores the Second Circle of Hell, he is horrified by the punishments that the sinners must suffer through. When he hears the story of Francesca and Paolo’s lustful actions, Dante relates deeply to their stuggles because he reflects on his own sins and believes he may be cast to a similar fate in the afterlife. Dante reacts to the story when he says, “I fainted, as if I had met my death. / And then I fell as a dead body falls” (5.142-143). Dante faints from compassion for the two sinners’ pitiful story. Dante struggles to grasp the wrongdoing these people have participated in to be placed in Hell because he continues to search for the noble qualities in everyone. On the one hand, Dante believes God’s punishment for the lustful sinners, relentless winds and storms, is unethical. On the other hand, this belief is naive because it is known that all of God’s punishments are just. The lustful are condemned to an eternity in Hell because they did not care about their actions on Earth, so the raging storm that torments them is not concerned with what is in its path. Dante is not only attempting to discover the possible consequences of his own actions, but also learning to trust in God’s judgement.

Dante Alighieri wrote Dante Devine Comedy which is a poem, “This poem records the travels of the Christian soul from Hell to purgatory and finally to salvation in three books- the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.”(Sayre, H.). We will be talking about the hell portion of the poem. He explained that there is nine levels of hell and each level represents a certain sin. Dante’s goal was to steer Christians away from corruption and bad ways. This was written to give them an idea of what would happen if they did not make it to Heaven and went to hell instead. He made this trip with poet Virgil and Virgil was guiding him through the inferno. We will be discussing each of the nine levels and who is in each level. He believed as the levels descended you got

“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