...retribution. The passion and the pain that you suffer matches the crime that you have committed but it isn’t the same punishment that you committed on another person. Dante thinks that this is the most fair because only god can be the judge and jury of sin. Retributive justice is the “Eye for an Eye” concept, where the pain that you inflicted is the same punishment that you receive. Dante doesn’t believe in this because Geri Bello murdered his family member but his family members death will remain unavenged. He says, “Made him disdainful; whence he went away, As I imagine, without speaking to me, And thereby made me pity him the more." (Inferno: Canto XXIX: 34-36) This shows...
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...In the Inferno, Dante continuously illustrates the law of retribution or the principle that one’s reparations should be adjusted to the severity of their crimes or actions. Because the Inferno is an allegory where Hell is made up of various concentric circles, Dante depends on symbolic retribution to develop and define his setting, characters, and plot. Each circle of Hell has sinners within them where each sinner is punishing, and their punishment is characteristic of their most severe sin. The spirit of the Roman poet Virgil guides Dante on his decent through Hell where it becomes clear that the deeper they venture, the more daunting their environment becomes. The theme of the law of retribution in Inferno is constantly reinforced with many examples throughout Hell; as Limbo turns to the Treacherous the retribution intensifies. Dante portrays Limbo on the upper edge of hell. Conceptually, this circle is reserved for those who lacked the opportunity to choose between good or evil in terms of having faith in Christ (Dante 4.34-35). These sinners are largely unbaptized, those who lived before the birth of Jesus Christ, and moral pagans (Dante 4.63). In accordance to the law of retribution, the occupants of this circle are not severely punished because their sins are not particularly violent. While they are not suffering for their...
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...individual ideas of what the afterlife will be like. This paper will try to find the differences and the similarities between the hell that is depicted in Dante’s Inferno and in the film What Dreams May Come. The film, What Dreams May Come, is about two people, Chris and Annie, who fall in love and become soul mates. Unfortunately Annie faces many hardships in her life after her two children pass away in a car accident in addition to her husband dying as well. Annie is unable to deal with the pain of her losses and chooses to commit suicide. Because of Annie’s decision to end her life she goes to a special place in hell for those who commit suicide while Chris is in heaven. Once Chris realizes that Annie will never be able to join him in heaven he promises to journey to hell and retrieve Annie and bring her back with him to live in heaven together for eternity. A difference between Dante’s depiction of hell and the film’s view of hell is the concept of where one goes when he or she dies being subjective or objective. In Dante’s Inferno, he creates a hell that is full of creative monsters, and terrifying lands filled with unthinkable punishments for the crimes that were committed while the person was alive. This hell is divided and then subdivided again into smaller more specific realms of hell. In Canto 12-17 Dante describes circle 7 as a specific place in hell for those who have committed crimes of violence. Within this circle there are sub-circles divided up by those who...
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...“Through me you enter into the city of woes, through me you enter into eternal pain, through me you enter the population of loss…. Abandon all hope who enter here.” One of the world’s greatest poets began a legacy that is still influential today. His writings were so powerful that a lot of today’s poets use his work as an idea base. This writer was Dante Alighieri, the man who wrote the famous epic Inferno. Dante began this story in the early 1300s when he was exiled from his own home town, Florence. With this problem he used it to make stories and symbols to help him better introduce this story. Dante uses a variety of different metaphors that have similar sayings apply to religion that make this epic a major head turner. There have been several views on this epic. It has been seen as a religious eye opener with every step taken throughout this extraordinary journey that Dante begins. The symbolism that Dante uses gives a very clear insight on how he felt...
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...In The Inferno it illustrates Dante and Virgil’s journey through Hell, and results in Dante understanding sins. According to the Bible, sinners will be punished for eternity, and those who follows good Christain values will live in eternal happiness, “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life,” (Revelation 21.8) Dante’s journey allows him to see the pain that sinners go through for eternity, and learns about how sins can cause an eternity of pain. In the beginning of the poem, we see that Dante has lost his way of life, Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray From the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. (The Inferno, 16) Dante has lost his way to salvation, and Virgil...
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...Punishment in Dante’s Inferno In Dante’s Inferno, Dante narrates his descent and observation of hell through its various circles. One part of this depiction is his descriptions of the various punishments that each of the different sinners has received. The various punishments that Dante imagines the sinners receiving are broken down into two types. The first type he borrows from various gruesome and cruel forms of torture and the second type is Dante’s creative mind thinking of less physically agonizing types of torture, usually psychological torture. The torturous forms of punishments are either physical pain or mental and psychological suffering. Several punishments that Dante envisions for the various sinners are forms of torture. The first physical punishment from that is his punishment for the heretics. The penalty in the medieval era for heresy was public humiliation or worse, being burned to death for having different beliefs. In Dante’s opinion, to be a heretic was to follow one’s own opinion and not the beliefs of the Christian Church. Dante’s punishment for heretics and those who followed them was that they be sepulchered and to have some tombs “heated more, some less” as in to still have them suffer while buried. Since the archheretics believed that everything died with the body and that there was no soul, Dante not only punishes them with the hot and crowded tombs, but he punishes them with their beliefs and lets them feel what it is like to...
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...Literature Humanities/Essay 1 27 February 2014 Violence in Dante’s Inferno and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Scenes of great violence, as the prompt says, are often written into dynamic narratives of great literary merit. From Dante Alighieri’s Inferno to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the inclusion of violence as a literary technique is used to propel the narrative forward, all while adding action, intrigue, and engaging the reader. Despite it’s validity as a literary technique, the inclusion of violent scenes in literature serve much more than the simple purpose of pushing a plot along a set of structured points. Scenes of violence provoke thought in areas ranging from human nature to the nature of sin, thoughts that often can’t be provoked my images of calm, sublime, or tranquility. Extreme violence, juxtaposed with other scenes, provides insight into the amazing nature of human capability and human nature. In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno there is an abundance of violence that is illustrated in varying ways. Despite the copious inclusion of violence scenes throughout the text, violence does not appear throughout the literary work for its own sake. As one reads on through the Inferno, it provides it’s own clarity. As the levels of Hell increase, the severity of violence does so as well. The violence that appears occurs in different fashions, sometimes mentally, sometimes physically and many times both simultaneously. The scenes violence included in Dante’s Inferno contributes to the theme and darker overtone of the poem...
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... incontinence, violence, fraud, and self-pity lives a colorless soul. This giant monster resides in the center of Hell where the beast is frozen mid-breast in ice. Throughout the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Inferno, Dante is obsessed with the number three. It’s prominent in many of the Cantos and particularly one of the most abrupt “three signs” in the book is Dis with its three heads and a sinner being gnawed on by each one. “Within each mouth - he used it like a grinder – with gnashing teeth he tore to bits a sinner, so that he brought much pain to three at once” (34. 55-57). Brutus, Judas and Cassius, these three men are considered to be the worst sinners of all according to Dante Alighieri. Brutus and Cassius were stuffed feet first in the mouth of the devil, or otherwise referred to as “Lucifer”. They were punished for their sins in the lowest region of the nine circles of Hell, for their assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.E. Brutus and Cassius worked against God and betrayed Caesar who was attempting to build the Roman Empire to be the Pathway to God that was chosen for Rome itself. Brutus and Cassius were on the losing side of a war against Caesar but rather than killing...
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...them by God and they should use to create beauty. Their hope was to of gain fame and grow closer to God. It was this idea, that inspired the Renaissance. Even though humanism was considered a Renaissance idea there were many writers in the late Middle Ages that helped create the basis for future humanist. One of the most important writers was Dante, who wrote The Divine Comedy. Some of the Humanistic concepts that he includes in his Inferno are the revival of the classics, putting an emphasis on the divinity of humans, and the desire to...
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...Gutierrez, Jerome Erick A. Synthesis Paper Inferno 4 and Purgatorio 7 (Comparing and Contrasting) Initially, I wanted to see if there was similarity between the Inferno’s first circle or level and the Pugatorio’s first spur, terrace, or level but I could not really find anything. I then decided to write once again about a topic found in my first paper and I noticed that despite the fact that the Valley of the Rulers isn’t the first ledge, or terrace in Dante’s Purgatorio[1] (unlike Limbo which is the first circle of hell) and that it isn’t also technically IN Purgatory but right before it (a.k.a Ante-Purgatory), it does indeed have some similarity/parallelism (but also big differences) to the first circle of the Inferno (Limbo). The key words I noticed was that Dante the wayfarer asks Virgil who are those “separate from the rest” as they approach Limbo[2] (In the Inferno). Then in the Purgatorio, Sordello leads Dante and Virgil to the Valley of the Rulers who are referred to those (spirits) who are “set apart”[3] Now speaking of Limbo in the Inferno, Virgil, who also happens to be from this place (proved by line 39, Inferno 4), refers to the inhabitants of Limbo as “those who live in longing”[4] (manifested by their constant sighing, and not any outcry of pain due to suffering unlike other Cantos in the Inferno). Logically and factually, these souls long for the Beatific Vision or entry into Paradise, but such event will never happen despite these pagans being virtuous[5]...
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...The Law of Retribution in Inferno describes the relationship between the sins a person commits and its consequences in the after-life. The law states that sinners would suffer a punishment to a degree matching the sin’s nature. So, if someone committed a very horrible sin, then his or her punishment would be very brutal. The phrase, “an eye of an eye,” can be used to describe the law. An example of this phrase is if a person causes the death of another person’s child, then that person’s child would also be put to death. In inferno, there are many unique examples that demonstrate the Law of Retribution. Dante first approached a ditch and saw the Panderers and the Seducers running constantly from one side to the other in cant XVIII. Panderers are also known as pimps and Seducers are people who used others for their own purpose. They moved woman as merchandise from one buyer to the next. In retribution for the sin, demons whipped them and they ran from one demon’s whips to another’s. Dante meets one sinner from Bologna and admits to Dante that he sold his own sister to a noble. In the next ditch, there were the Flatterers. They were immersed in filth and sewage, like what happened in real life with their false flattery towards other people....
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...Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, is the first story of a three part epic which depicts Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and ultimately, Heaven. Inferno describes Dante and Virgil’s expedition through the layers of Hell as they encounter numerous demons and monsters along the way. Although Dante and Virgil encounter as many as thirty demons along their travels, I will only be addressing the demons who serve as the role of guardians. These demons are crucial to the narrative because they act as a barriers who jeopardize Dante’s travels. Dante and Virgil’s reactions and descriptions of the guardians display a change in the severity of the demons that they encounter. The first demon who Dante encounters is a ferryman named Charon. Charon rows the boat across the river Acheron that leads to the first circle of...
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...Dante constructs Virgil to be a guide, that symbolizes Human reasoning. With the birth of Humanistic beliefs, humans no longer had to rely on God. Dante’s humanistic beliefs depicts in Inferno. In this Hell, Dante uses the character Virgil as a symbol of Human reason. With Virgil, Dante can show how Human reasoning can outsmart Christian sins. As Dante, the pilgrim works his way through the nine circles of hell, Dante encounters a multitude of sinners who attempt to trick or harm Dante. The sinners try to trick Dante the pilgrim through the means of the sin he or she is guilty of. However, because of Dante’s reliance on Virgil, he can outsmart the sinners and move on further into Hell. Dante’s Virgil leads Dante the pilgrim through his spiritual...
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...Lin English 11 Ms. Wan Sep 28 2014 Francesca da Rimini in The Divine Comedy In order to better understand Francesca’s role in The Divine Comedy, it is necessary to first understand her backstory and how Dante is able to identify her. In many ways those who are personally identified by Dante in the Inferno are there for specific reasons. Each fallen character plays the role of shedding light on a specific human emotion or vice that acts as a pitfall. Francesca’s pitfall was lust, and thus she is condemned to be blown around for all eternity in the gusts of the second circle of the Inferno. This symbolizes how the passions in life blew the condemned whichever way they went, no matter the cost to those who they hurt. In her vivid interpretation, Francesca remains inexpiate to her infamous acts and even absolves herself from responsibility of sin of lust in a stern and regretless tone. Francesca is not repentant for her action while alive on Earth which is interesting side note. The love that she speaks of effects Dante so much because in a sense regretless tone about her adultery. She regards her trespass with Paolo as “past happiness” and this memory crave in her soul. It is meaningful because it is “no greater pain than to remember”(121). Her words elaborates all the details that how the others transgressed. She arouses Dante’s empathy by convincing him that she is the victim of the affair. The book she read, Paolo and Lancelot become the target...
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...The human body has always interested me. The way that it dramatically changes throughout life and events that we are not able to control. Dante endures a similar fascination with the human body and its changes a parts on his journey through hell through the Inferno. Even reading this a second time, I was able to make even more personal connections with the book than I previously had. I have had many experiences where my view of the human body was being ruined by uncontrollable forces. Much like me, Dante’s fascination with the body often leads to disgust of even pain when it is ruined. Not long ago while I was still in my boarding school, my grandmother that I called Nana had a heart attack. She is fine now, but it worried our entire family...
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