Dante's Inferno chronicles a strange journey through hell, seeming familiar at times but shocking at others. As an American and a Christian, I think that my opinion on this could be crafted from my religion and our society, particularly its media. In my mind Ive depicted hell as this place of immense torment bestowed on all sinners.
My faith has taught me that those who sin go to hell to be punished. Dante's adventure clearly shows that the souls of hell are punished, as I thought. Punishments range from living in filth to painful tortures. Dante expands his idea of hell being made up of circles that descend based on sin. While this idea makes sense, I have never been exposed to that thought. This concept creates constant surprises and extremely interesting imagery. My view of hell was this burning hole where all the souls of sinners kind of dwell together. I basically felt that a sin is a sin. This is probably because it was instilled in me somewhere in my childhood. Now I feel that this circle idea is a better one, possibly more just.
The concept of placing sins in a hierarchy also surprised me as I followed Dante deeper and deeper into the Inferno. The first few circles seemed plausible to me, but the beliefs in the later circles, such as traitors deserving to be higher up than those who are violent to people, caught me by surprise. Killing another human has always been something that I feel is a great sin, but it seemed like traitors belittled it. In life the violent ones are punished harder, so maybe that's why it surprised me. (You may want to be careful here. Even in the US up until the 1900s treason was an offense punishable by death) What also stunned me was the placement of Judas in the same rank as Brutus and Cassius. The latter two betrayed Caesar, who to my knowledge is very insignificant, compared to Christ (who was betrayed by Judas). My religious side cries out that this can not be right. This even made Dante's beliefs of the power of the political party clear, which seemed wrong to me. Dante seemed to place a lot of religious figures in the bowels of hell. This too was startling, yet I sort of agree with it. My religion conveys to me that those who serve God are good people. Although I know that many exist are unjust. It was just unexpected that this issue was brought to the reader's attention.
The idea of Satan was something that this poem clarified. The Bible, movies and television deal with the idea of hell having a ruler, Satan. This is basically Satan. I wasn't surprised that he existed in the last circle. What surprised me was that he lives half frozen. Media portrays hell as this hot fiery place, which remained unsurprisingly true in the middle circles (the raining of fire is an example). When he got to the deepest bowels fire became ice, freezing the worst sinners for eternity. That caught me off-guard, because what I have seen on various movies and TV shows held true to the fiery hell. The most unexpected factor was the idea of Dante going through hell on this tour and having an awakening. Before this I thought that hell was this thing that you heard about to scare you away from sinning. The Inferno makes it into a tour that opens the eyes of Dante. It became an educational tour that awakened his ideas of hell instead of being a fable to keep people from sinning. It seemed odd to me that there could be this actual terrible existence of hell and that someone would want to tour it. Again media affects the idea that it is not someplace to visit. It was interesting to see how my ideas of hell have been developed through my religion and the media. What is more interesting is how my view of hell has changed since reading the Inferno.
At some point in our lives, we all face difficulties, problems, temptations. These drive us to the point of desperation and tempt us to commit sins. At the lowest ebb of our lives, we are often forced to look back and ask ourselves where we have gone wrong. By going through Dantes Inferno we realize the need to ponder on our every step and choose the best way before we hit rock bottom.
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