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