Transcript
I was introduced to The Divine Comedy when I was a senior in high school. At
first, I thought it was just another book that we had to read.
But, after reading the first canto, I couldn’t put the
book down.
Dante is seen as the father of modern Italian, and his works have flourished greatly throughout his lifetime
He was greatly influenced in his
writing by medieval
metaphysics and political events.
Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet and a moral philosopher best known for the epic poem
The Divine Comedy
His work, the divine comedy is divided into sections representing
the three tiers of the Christian afterlife: purgatory, heaven, and
hell.
The entire Divine Comedy : the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradisio, is about the
symbolic voyage through hell, purgatory and into heaven.
This great poem, a work of medieval literature is
generously considered the greatest work of literature
comprised in Italian
a philosophical
Christian vision of
mankind’s eternal fate.
Dante’s Inferno describes Dante’s journey into and
throughout hell, with Virgil as his guide, who Dante ironically looks
up to.
The Divine comedy is the
spiritual voyage through sin, repentance,
penance for sin, and salvation.
DAnte wrote his work in the common
language of Italian at the time. he did this so people who read
his book would know the road that they were on in terms of whether or not they
were going to heaven or hell.
Each section contains 33 cantos plus the introduction which when added up equals
One hundred which stands for
The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.
although critics and commentators normally address the work as a whole, the
first canticle, Inferno, is the main canto that has met with the most avid critical
response.
Dante’s Inferno
has influenced the mind
of the medieval,
the renaissan
ce and even the modern thinker.
Our vision of hell is mainly influenced by Dante than by
any other scripture written.
IN fact, Scripture says quite little about
hell.
Dante’s work has given much
imagination when it comes to hell and what it contains.
Dante was also the first one to use his imagination to devise a hell in which the punishments suited the crime.
Modern writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett,
and James Joyce have all gone back to Dante for imagery as well as countless other artists who have gone to these pages
for inspiration.
The idea of “levels” of hell, and demons that act as some kind of civil servants for torture, comes straight
from Dante. Even Milton felt the influence of Dante, as he populated his
hell with devils and torture devices.
Though, Dante’s work fell into dishonor during the
Enlightenment, only to be discovered later by Blake and the
metaphysical poets.
Today, we can see that even
our understanding of heaven and hell is
owed to this man’s work.
The Divine Comedy by
Dante Alighieri
was crucial to the
development of
literature and
theological thinking.
Even so, Inferno
continues to be a very
relevant piece of religious
literature that should still be used today.
Citations
http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/the-historic-importance-of-inferno-by-dante-alighieri-3-51699
/
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/cgi-bin/web/files/lummus-inferno-
influence.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dante/
http://www.greatdante.net
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