Dantes Inferno essays

Dante's Inferno essays It is an accepted fact within many schools of thought that, Dante's Inferno is a groundbreaking work that set a standard for its genre and also demonstrated many new visual and psychological concepts about the after life. Yet, it is also clear that the Inferno is a product of its time and must be judged within the context of it. Within the work there are countless demonstrations of both conformity and departure from the classical Christian moral and ethical view upon sin and punishment but one of the most striking conformities is with regard to the idea of divine right, in the sense that politics were guided and backed by God. "First he must descend through Hell (The Recognition of Sin), then he must ascend through Purgatory (The Renunciation of Sin), and only then may he reach the pinnacle of joy ..." (Dante, Ciardi 3) Dante's Inferno is clearly an example, on a grand scale of the thoughts and standards of his time, as well as a culmination of the classical ideals associated with philosophy, sometimes conforming to Christian ideals but often departing from it. In many ways the work can be seen as one of the first applications of what we like to think of as the renaissance work of reinterpretation of Greco-Roman Philosophy, a genre that in Dante's time, much of which was only recently accepted by the Roman Catholic Church as being anything other than the heathen words of the pagans. Within the front matter of the Ciardi translation of Purgatory, a previous beloved book of the Divine Comedy, there is a clear demonstration of the roots of Dante's quest. Seeing corruption abound within the church, he wondered how any man could even dream to reach salvation: What hope was there that men in general might be persuaded to a just life in this world and salvation in the next when they saw their spiritual leaders behave in such a way' Surely ...