EL 3560-Literature of Europe
Professor Keizer
December 14th 2015
Sin and Crime in Dante's Inferno
Sin in Dante’s
, Dante walks through hell with a roman poet as a guide. He explains that hell is portrayed as nine circles of suffering and is located within the earth. Different sinners in hell are made to undergo different forms of suffering that represent their crimes of sins while on the earth. There are nine circles of hell two broader divisions; the upper hell and the lower hell (Lyman 1989).
The upper hell is reserved for people whose sins resulted from unbalanced passions, desires and emotions. This is with the exception of vestibule and limbo, which is the waiting area and the first circle respectively. In the …show more content…
As such, the lower hell is reserved for intellectual actual sins and not sins caused by passion. The circles in lower hell are inhabited by the violent, the heretics and various other frauds (Lyman, 1989). The sixth circle is meant for the heretics who are punished in burning tombs. The seventh circle is divided into three rounds which are inhabited by the violent. These violent people include killers in round one who are submerged in blood. The depth of blood is determined by the number of people they killed. In round two, people who committed suicides are punished by having their souls trapped in objects like trees with their bodies impaled nearby (Hewson, …show more content…
Dante is very creative and his designs his punishment to these people are deserving ( Give a description as to why they deserve these punishment). For instance the violent against nature are punished by unnatural rain from the clouds and burning sand which will remind them of their deviance from the laws of nature (Hewson 2009).
The eight circle is divided into ten ditches. In these ditches, pimps and seductresses, flatterers, simonists, barraters, soothsayers, hypocrites, thieves and robbers, evil counselors, sowers of discord and falsifiers are all kept. Punishments in these ditches also vary and includes whipping by demons, a covering in excrement, setting on fire while flipped upside down in holes.
. Further, others heads will be twisted so that they can only see what is behind them. The hypocrites are forced to wear led mantles, with evil counselors true nature concealed in flames. All these wrong doings amount sin and rightfully deserve the type of punishments described by Dante (Lyman