Dante and the Inferno

Annotated Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. "The Divine Comedy, Volume I: Inferno, trans. Mark Musa." New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Translator Mark Musa provides a blank verse translation of the first book of the Italian epic, Dante’s Comedia. The first book focuses on Dante’s descent into Hell, after becoming lost and confused a in a dark wood—a metaphor for Dante’s stumble from the path of the straight and narrow that leads to Heaven.

Having fallen by the wayside, Dante is confronted by three beasts, whereupon aid arrives to guide Dante back to the straight and narrow thanks to Beatrice, who is watching over Dante from Heaven. However, it is a very circuitous route, and Dante can only get there by taking a course through Hell, the intention being that he should see what happens to souls who die in the state of mortal sin: they spend eternity suffering in Hell.

To guide Dante on his tour of Hell, which is composed of 9 concentric circles or rings, is the Roman pagan poet Virgil. Virgil lives in the first circle of Hell along with the other virtuous pagans who were not inherently evil or wicked but rather by having no knowledge of Christ were not permitted to obtain Heaven. Their first circle is rather pleasant and the only suffering they experience is their sense of missing something grand above that haunts them and gives them no real rest.

Virgil leads Dante downward into the rings of Hell, each ring being dedicated to a particular group of sinners, and the punishment for each sin is explicitly constructed to be associated with the sin in some way. So, for example, sexual sinners are punished by being buffeted by winds that blow them this way and that, which symbolizes the fact that in their life they were led around by their noses—i.e., by their desires and had no self control.

Once Dante reaches the bottom of Hell, he encounters Satan who has three heads and is munching on the bodies of Brutus, Judas and Cassius—one being the betrayer of Christ and the other two being the betrayers of Caesar. Peterson, Mark A. "Dante and the 3?sphere." American Journal of Physics 47.12 (1979): 1031-1035. This article examines the cosmological shape of Dante’s universe from the standpoint of relativistic physics.

The author posits that Dante uses a 3-sphere universe to create his cosmology, which would mean that Dante—far from being a believer in a flat earth—was actually a believer in a round earth and, in fact, a round universe. The 3-sphere universe is significant for numerous reasons, the author argues, but mainly because it shows symmetrical wholeness and brings a poetic beauty to the field of relativistic physics.

The harmony that exists in Dante’s model is that Satan and God are at polar opposites in the universe—Satan at the bottom end or pit of the universe and God at the top of the universe acting as the force that the entire universe hangs from. All of the universe is suspended by God’s being. The study is helpful for explaining the cosmology that Dante uses to create the universe that houses his.