A Dante Alighieri Book Report On The Inferno Religion Essay

Dante was born in Florence, Italy in 1265. The linguistic communication spoken at the clip was Italian, but the scholarly linguistic communication was still Latin. Inferno was written in Italian, but to depict certain things, Dante used Latin words. He helped to make portion of the Italian linguistic communication used today because of the words he created and used in Inferno. He was obsessed with a adult female named Beatrice. He was involved in Florentine political relations until a rival political party exiled him in 1302. Inferno was intended as a spiritual text. Although it is chiefly Christian, it does include much of Greco-Roman mythology every bit good as noteworthy Florentine politicians.

Dante himself said that the intent of his Divine Comedy as a whole was to free life human existences from wretchedness and to take them to the province of felicity. The Inferno contributes to that intent in many ways, but possibly most significantly by the manner it embodies the subject that separation from and rejection of the Godhead leads necessarily to unhappiness, and the more intentionally one chooses to harm oneself and others in an effort to acquire happiness by focus oning on the self-importance alternatively of on Godhead love. Furthermore, this ego-centeredness putrefactions and corrupts society every bit good as the person.

The whole construction of Hell embodies this subject. Hell is an tremendous cavity that reaches from the surface of the Earth to its centre, and at each degree the cavity gets narrower and darker. The farther down Dante and Virgil go, the stronger grows the sense of claustrophobia. By this I mean the being trapped in malodor and noise and torture. Those who merely gave manner to crave, gluttony, greed, and anger busy the highest degrees. Then come those who intentionally chose to make force to themselves and others in chase of their terminals.

Finally come those who intentionally misuse what is most distinctively human-the power to believe, to talk, to uncover one ‘s truth to another human being. To be genuinely human is to be guided by the natural bond of love that unites all human existences, and to honour the particular bonds of love created by affinity and shared nationality, or the yet more sacred bonds entered into voluntarily by ask foring person as a invitee or by cursing commitment to person. Those at the lowest degrees have hardened themselves so wholly that they have violated those bonds ; they are barely human.

The manner the souls relate to each other embodies this subject. In the Second Circle, Paolo and Francesca seem to be joined together in wretchedness. After that, no psyche in Hell shows any concern for any other, and so they begin to demo ill will toward each other and so to seek to do each other ‘s agonies worse. In the ice at the underside of the cavity of Hell that so absolutely symbolizes the palsy of all existent life and feeling, we meet Ugolino and Ruggieri, joined by hatred for infinity, as the one gnaws on the other. The consequence of such images is heightened by the contrast between the manner the blasted dainty each other and the manner Virgil and Dante interact, with Virgil ever the sort male parent, Dante the grateful, fond boy.

The manner Dante portrays Satan makes the theme even more obvious. Dante ‘s Satan is ugly and impotent, wholly trapped in the ice created by the flutter of his ain wings, and nil about him could appeal to even the most rebellious stripling. The subject, “ This is non what you truly want, ” could non be more strongly expressed.

Another of import manner Dante chooses to carry through his intent is to incarnate the subject that even a fearful and profoundly blemished human being can confront the horrors of Hell and learn and grow from the experience, merely by desiring to turn and by being willing to accept the aid that is necessary-and that will be forthcoming. He embodies this subject, first by doing himself the “ hero ” of his ain verse form, and so by the manner he portrays himself at this phase in his life-that is, by the manner he portrays Dante the pilgrim.

Dante the pilgrim has good intentions-once he finds himself once more and realizes that he is lost in the Dark Wood. He is horrified and wants to get away. When he sees the Sun on the mountain, he starts traveling toward it right off. But when beasts come against him, alternatively of murdering them as the hero of a classical heroic poem might, he is impotently driven back into the Dark Wood. Merely Virgil can salvage him, and his head virtue is that he is able to appreciate Virgil and willing to follow him.

The first canto ends with Dante following Virgil ; the 2nd canto begins with Dante holding 2nd ideas. He is no classical hero, like Aeneas, the hero of Virgil ‘s Aeneid, who went down into the Underworld and returned. He is no saint, like Paul, who traveled up into Heaven. Cipher would of all time woolgather that he was worthy to travel on an escapade like this, and neither would he. In the same manner, all through the Inferno, once more and once more, Dante is terrified and even ready to travel back, but Virgil ‘s encouragement and assist do it possible for him to “ experience the fright and make it anyhow. ” So Dante the writer brings his readers near to his numeral hero, and encourages us all to see this journey as one that possibly even we could set about.

Another of import subject of the Inferno is that, though human wisdom is indispensable to traveling from a province of wretchedness to one of felicity, human wisdom is ne’er plenty. One must finally trust on Godhead love and grace. Therefore in the 2nd canto we learn that Virgil, the incarnation of the highest human wisdom, has merely come to Dante ‘s assistance because he has been summoned by Beatrice, who was for Dante, even when he was a immature adult male, a disclosure of Godhead love so powerful that he portrayed her as a Christ figure in his early work, La Vita Nuova. It was the Virgin Mary, understood by the Catholic Church as the female parent of God and chosen by God to be the purveyor of godly grace to human existences, who foremost saw Dante ‘s predicament and started the procedure of conveying him aid.

It is the cognition that divine love and grace are at work that enables the fearful Dante to take bosom and travel on into Hell. Virgil on his ain could ne’er hold brought Dante through. He was incapacitated to open the Gatess of the City of Dis. An angel came to their assistance and opened them effortlessly. Virgil told Dante in the really get downing that one time Dante was ready to lift into Heaven, Beatrice will hold to take over.

A speedy sum-up of the narrative I read starts as follows. Dante spends a horrific dark, the Eve of Good Friday 1300, in a wood. The day of the month is important because the chronology of Dante ‘s journey through Hell mirrors Christ ‘s decent into Hell after his crucifixion. In the forenoon, he tries to scale a mountain but is impeded by a king of beasts, a wolf, and a leopard. The spirit of the poet Virgil appears and offers to take him by another way to the top of the mountain. The manner leads foremost through Hell but ends in Paradise. Dante accepts this journey to enlightenment in malice of diffidence and fright.

As they approach the entryway to Hell, Virgil and Dante see a crowd of people travel rapidlying along the Bankss of the river Asheron. Wasps torment them continually. Virgil tells Dante these are the psyches who neither sinned nor adored God, and so are rejected by both Heaven and Hell. They are ferried across the river by Charon and run into the baronial pagan in a palace on the first ring of the upside-down subterranean cone, which is Hell. These psyches are non punished except by exclusion from Paradise. This is Virgil ‘s ageless place.

The 2nd ring is guarded by Minos and is the first ring of four in which psyches are punished for indulgence of natural desires. In the 2nd ring, the psyche of the lubricious are blown about by ceaseless air currents, as in life they were buffeted viscerally by passion. In the 3rd circle, the poets find the gourmands soaked by heavy rain and clawed by the three-head Canis familiaris Cerberus. They encounter a psyche from Dante ‘s metropolis, Florence, who predicts that one of the two warring cabals in that metropolis will suppress the other.

Continuing downwards, the poets fitting Pluto, the Greek God of wealth, at the entryway to the 4th ring, which holds both the squanders of wealth and the greedy. These psyches are condemned to turn over heavy weights back and Forth for infinity. The 4th ring is the prison of the wrathful, those who indulged their choler and the sullen, and those who indulged their sick wit. The wroth battle in the clay of the fen called the Styx and the dark gurgle wholly covered in the clay.

Dante and Virgil are ferried across the 5th circle to the entryway of the walled City of Dis, but a group of fallen angels deny them entry. A courier from heaven arrives and opens the door for them, but non before the Furies threaten to turn Dante into rock with the caput of Medusa. Within the metropolis walls is a field filled with flaring unfastened graves. The psyche of misbelievers, Christians who denied certain philosophies of the Church, are stacked within these graves. Dante converses with the psyche of a political challenger of his household, and is disturbed by his anticipation that Dante will be exiled from his metropolis, but Virgil reassures him that he shall hear the whole of his hereafter when he reached Paradise.

The pilgrims pause at the drop that divides the 6th circle from those below, and Virgil gives an overview of the categories of evildoers held in the three concluding rings below. The first circle is reserved for the violent and divided into three unit of ammunitions: force toward God, towards one ‘s ego, and towards one ‘s neighbour. The 2nd circle nests hypocrisy, flattery, magicians, rip offing, larceny, barratry, and gratifying. The 3rd and last circle of the City of Dis holds treasonists.

After this debut, they proceed down into the 7th circle. Passing the Minotaur, they view a river of blood in which work forces, who committed Acts of the Apostless of force towards their fellowmen, are sunk at changing deepnesss harmonizing to their guilt. Centaurs armed with pointers guard them, one of which guides the poets to a Ford in the river.

They cross and find themselves in a mystical wood. Here work forces who committed self-destruction are transformed into trees and tormented by Vixens who tear their foliages. At the border of the wood lies a great field of fiery sand. Blasphemers, sodomists, and loan sharks are punished here by the vesiculation heat. The poets meet a reptilian monster with a human face, called Geryon, guarding the loan sharks and have to sit upon its back down a watery whirl in order to make the 8th circle that holds the fraudulent.

The 8th circle, Malebolge is divided into 10 unit of ammunitions, which are like 10s bastioned trenches of a fortress. The poets pass through the circle along pathwaies that bridge the chasms. In the first chasm, former seducers are lashed while processing. In the 2nd, adulators covered in body waste and enveloped in despicable bluess gasp and beat themselves. The 3rd unit of ammunition holds those who sold religious things. Here Dante meets a former Pope, imprisoned inverted in a rock cylinder with fires creaming the colloidal suspensions of his pess. The 4th unit of ammunition holds prestidigitators who attempted to see the hereafter. They weep and march backwards because their caputs have been twisted around backwards. The 5th chasm holds those who used their public office or authorization to do money. They boil in pitch and are attached by hook exerting devils when they rise above the surface. One of the devils informs Virgil that the following span is in ruins and outfits the pilgrims with an bodyguard of boisterous devils to take them to the following span further along the chasm wall.

Along the manner the devils are distracted by a crafty psyche and stop up contending among themselves while the poets continue. Easily angered the devils pursue the brace who deems it wise to immerse into the 6th chasm instead than expect their bodyguard. There they get an up-close position of the dissemblers sloging along in dull cloaks gilded on the exterior. Climbing out of the chasm they reach the 7th chasm, which holds stealers. The stealers are enveloped in snakes and some morph in between human and reptilian signifier. The 8th chasm holds evil counsellors, including Ulysses, who are separately enveloped in fires. The 9th chasm holds those who volitionally created division among other people. They are mutilated in assorted ways symbolic of their peculiar wickednesss. The ten percent and concluding chasm of the 8th circle holds the falsifiers, who are afflicted by assorted diseases.

The 9th circle of Hell is a good surrounded by giants embedded to the waist in its wall. Nimrod who led the edifice of the tower of Babylon is the first they encounter. The fabulous giant, Ant?us, lifts the two poets and sets them down in the frozen fen at the centre of the well. The circle of the treasonists is divided into three unit of ammunitions: treachery of one ‘s household, treachery of one ‘s state, treachery of cordial reception, and treachery of Godheads or helpers. All are frozen into the fen. They meet assorted ill-famed Italians who Dante treats pitilessly, and eventually they arrive face to face with Satan, who is a monolithic three-faced, winged monster frozen chest deep in the centre of Hell. In each of his three horrid oral cavities he chews an archetypical informer of Church or the Empire. Judas, Brutus, and Cassius hold these topographic points of award in Hell. After a brief but memorable intermission, Virgil takes Dante in his weaponries and mount down Satan ‘s back emerging on the other side of the centre of the Earth, which marks their issue from Hell. It is now the morning of Holy Saturday. To make the surface of the Earth the two poets follow the way of the river Lethe, which at the terminal offers a position of the beauties of Heaven.

Name: _____________________________

SCORE SHEET FOR CRITICAL BOOK REVIEWS

PROFESSOR JEFF MCEWEN

Form and Manner: Points

Syntax ( sentence construction ) aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦.0 1 2 3 4 5

Grammar and Spellingaˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦0 1 2 3 4 5

Paragraph Structureaˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦0 1 2 3 4 5

Overall Form – Logical Flowaˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦.0 1 2 3 4 5

Content:

Thorough Summary of Book Reviewed.aˆ¦..aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦..0 1 2 3 4 5

Set into Historical Context.aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦0 1 2 3 4 5

Critical Analysis of Book – Your Opinions.aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦..0 1 2 3 4 5

Insight/Originality.aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦aˆ¦.0 1 2 3 4 5

Entire POINTS ( 40 upper limit ) ________

Percentage _______

LETTER GRADE ________