Dante's Inferno State Your Case

¶ … Dante's Inferno State your case for choosing one particular work. 2. Provide evidence from the text to support your claims. 3. If necessary, cite other sources to support your claims. 4. Show that the work you advocate is a better choice than one or two others. You can be quite efficient about all this. I expect the completed papers to be 500-750 words long. Dante's Inferno is one of the most important and representative works of the universal literature.

It is a reference work for its time and for the following literary concepts to follow centuries later. There are however certain elements which make this part of the Devine Comedy to be a crucial piece of literature for the contemporary world. These relate to the actual subject, to the logical connections Dante Alighieri makes between symbols, religion, feelings, and reason, as well as to the actual literary masterpiece created by the author. The choice for this particular work is motivated especially from the point-of-view of the message it sends.

In this sense, the message sent across can be viewed as contemporary largely due to the fact that it discusses sin, redemption, and punishment. According to the religious creed of the time, which was largely catholic, the sin was punishable and involved the notion of hell and purgatory. However, Dante makes a clear distinction between the two and establishes a particular delimitation, thus giving more meaning to both terms.

Even more, Dante deals with these two issues separately in the Devine Comedy, thus giving them each a certain meaning in terms of religion and medieval philosophy. The journey of Dante starts in the week before Easter, which is considered by the Roman church to be the most important holiday of the religious creed. This is largely due to the fact that the Resurrection is in fact the actual proof of the existence of Jesus and of the biblical creed.

The Resurrection implies the miracle of salvation and of rebirth, which is an important point to make in Dante's writing. The fact that the events from the Inferno take place before Easter point out a religious connection and symbolism for what is to come in the writing. Another important element in Dante's Inferno is related to the message the actual journey bears. Thus, the text points out to a journey through the forest, which in fact indicates a dark, tumultuous travel, full of unforeseen events.

The actual beginning of the text suggests a crisis and a moment of recollection, and thus the journey is needed: "Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost." Moreover, the journey can be considered a fantasy, as Dante himself points out that he fails to remember parts of his travel: "Made myself ready to sustain the war / Both of the way and likewise of the woe, / Which memory that errs not shall retrace." In this sense, the entire journey is in fact a great struggle, one which every man must experience to get in touch with his conscience because this trip is made by the spirit.

The use of the pronoun "our" points out to the collective nature of the journey, as it suggests that the journey he is to embark on is one which everyone should take. For our society, the text of Dante is quite relevant because it shows a world, even if simply an imaginary one, which may exist at the level of the subconscious. It is a journey of rediscovery of the true important values such as romance, feelings, faith.

The text is in this sense highly educational because it draws the attention, through literary language, to aspects which are often disregarded in everyday life nowadays. In a general manner, Dante's Inferno, as is the trilogy the Devine Comedy may also represent the interior feelings of a tormented soul, trapped in its sinful thoughts and actions. A symbol in this sense can be considered the continuous circles of the Inferno which represent the decaying levels of humanity.

The upper levels may still present some innocence as the sins are not evil but rather innocent because the people trapped in the Limbo lost the divine contact with God; for the lower levels however, which include fraud and treachery, the sins are unpardonable. Thus, while the Church can bring back faith, fraud and treachery as understood by Dante cannot be forgotten. Indeed, parts of Dante's journey are today dissolute. Aspects such as magic or defiance of the religion are not as common today as were in the medieval time.

However, Dante's exquisite masterpiece offers also, through this point-of-view, a mirror of the way in which the church was perceived and the belief that witchcraft along with occult means of defying faith were the gravest sins. This perspective only points out the importance of religion and faith, a perspective which would be useful in today's world as well. The approach Dante took for his work is not uncommon however. The period of his writing was deeply religious.

It must be pointed out that the 1300s represented one of the most religious periods in the history of human kind largely due to the influence the Catholic Church had in Europe in particular. Following this troubled period, the conquests would eventually determine the actual power and precision of the Roman Catholic Church. Therefore, from this point-of-view, the defending of the Church and of the Holly beliefs seems natural for Dante. It is rather difficult to compare Dante's work with others.

There are some particular elements such as true love or emotions which are then left unfulfilled that are.