Dante's Inferno Summary

here's a quick run-through of Dante's Inferno the first installment of Dante's three-part Divine Comedy in cantos 1 & 2 we find Dante emerging from the dark wood and attempting to escape the wood by climbing a beautiful mountain he's turned back by three beasts a leopard that represents the sins of incontinence or lack of self-control the lion representing violence ends and a wolf representing sins of fraud we can think of this as reminding Dante that he can't achieve salvation on his own or through his own works before he can run back to the wood he meets Virgil who's been sent by by heaven to guide him set of Virgil is his is Dante's hero from classical literature we remember from the Renaissance was we had a resurgence of classical literature he also represents reason in Dante's work in canto 3 chapter 3 Dante and Virgil reach the gate to hell and you see the inscription that troubles Dante this says abandon all hope you who enter here and they come to the Red River a shrine and we meet our first mythological character Charon who ferries them across the river into hell Dante's structure of hell what is a pit with nine levels descending to the bottom at the center of the earth each level was for a different primary sin and the punishment in that level was meant to reflect the sin and the deeper the level the worse the sin in canto 4 we come to the first circle of Hell which was called limbo limbo was the home for the unbaptized and for virtuous pagans again rim calling the importance of classical literature going into the Renaissance here is where we find many the classical poets and writers and the punishment here is passive it's a sad place but the punishment is just simply eternal life without hope of the presence of God here we is where Virgil came from here's where Homer Ovid Horace Plato Euclid the geometrician and others are are found as we move on to this next circle we come across - the mythological character the former king of of Crete who was the judge of the underworld and here Dante has him as the judge of Hell who sends the dead to the appropriate circle according to their primary sin the first the the second circle is the first circle related to lack of self-control or incontinence and it's lust because these people could not control their lust in life think they cannot control themselves in death as well there eternally blown around by stormy winds and here we meet several famous lovers including the Helen of Troy Cleopatra kilise and others again remember that throughout this work Dante is having conversations with people that he meets and which has the gives them an opportunity to make commentary on current times and so forth in the chapters six and seven circles three and four we find first of all the gluttonous they have lived in excess all their lives and then they now lie in disgusting excess say lions sewage are torn by Cerberus the three-headed dog in circle four we have greed which have two types of people both the spin truths who wasted all their resources and the hoarders who did not use their resources widely but held on to them and they roll huge stones against each other for eternity in circle five we come to the River Styx and the marshes around the river we have the wrathful who are fighting in the muddy banks and the sullen who are choking in the mud of legis is called to ferry them across to the gate of the city disks and the beginning of the circles of malicious sense now they have a little trouble getting through the gate of the city and ultimately a angel has to come and and allow them to to enter in circle 6 they come across the heretics and these heretics are sitting in flaming tombs then they move on to circle 7 and it's divided into three rings as they are the sins of violence and you have violence against others those who shed blood so they're now in the river of boiling blood they are being shot by arrows from centaurs here we need Alexander the Great Attila the Hun and others then you have those who committed violence against themself they have been turned into trees and they're being torn by harpies they did not respect themselves in life and so then now they're not respected by others and death and then you have the violent those who committed violence against God and nature violence against God is blasphemy violence against nature and art include the those who show perversion to their own bodies and also interesting the moneylenders those who charged for lending money these are dealing with such things as a rain of fire and burning sand so we move on to circle 8 Circle 8 houses various frauds and are there punished in 10 different ditches or bulges these the first ditch show is how houses seducers or whipped by demons the second has flatterers or are immersed in a Croma excrement third are the simonize errs that's those who use the church for their personal gain and they are placed headfirst in holes which like baptismal fonts with their feet sticking out and on fire the fourth are diviners and magicians and astrologers those who try to tell the future they walk in circles with their heads on backwards they can now only see what's behind them then we have barriers or corrupt politicians who are in a river of boiling tar and torn by demons have hypocrites who walk around clothed in in robes from head to toe they're lined with lead weighing them down thieves are being bitten by serpents and their bodies combust and then regenerate fraudulent counselors are each engulfed in a single continuing flame and so errs of sin scandal and schism those who cause division so they're continually sliced up by a demon with a sword and then healed and then finally the falsifiers these are counterfeiters Liars impersonators etc who are afflicted with terrible diseases before we leave the circle let's look at a few people we run into here some of Dante's contemporaries in the ditch with corrupt churchmen dante comes across pope nicholas the third who was guilty of nepotism during his rule but it's interesting enough and would have even been amusing to those reading at the time since nicholas is unable to see he thinks Dante is Boniface the eighth who's the current Pope thus we see where Dante thinks Boniface is going to end up Boniface recall is to Dante embodied all that was wrong with the church at the time and we run across several other references including some classical references in the end with the seducers we find Jason with the Argonauts Jason seduced Medea to helped them steal the Golden Fleece and then abandoner we find a list Ulysses or odesi as' with the false counselors we're reminded of his deceit in cases like the Trojan horse and leaving Penelope and drawing his crew into into adventure we find Mohammed who's with the sewers of schism next the last four chapters we end up in circle 9 where we find various types of traitors four types of traitors and these traitors are are each of submerge deeper in the ice until the final set are fully submerged had traders to Ken traders to homeland to guests and to their Lords here we find some of Dante's contemporaries considering he felt betrayed himself now in the center of this final section of traitors to their Lords we find Satan trapped in ice with three mouths chewing on the worst sinners according to Dante Judas Brutus and Cassius of course with Brutus and Cassius here that tells us a little bit about how how Dante felt about Julius Caesar now satan's belly is at the center of the earth so the next so next we found Dante and Virgil climbing up Satan's legs to the surface of the earth out of hell and as they emerge from a chasm they see the island of the purgatory which sets us up for the second book purgatory Oh

Channel: Barry Shealy

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Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2016