Dante Each Time Less Human

The Inferno as described by Dante is a place where everything is done with divine and perfect justice. The term of poetic justice can be used all throughout Dante’s trip through the Inferno. There are many kinds of sinners and many kinds of punishments. The sinners are people that have acted wrong against God and Dante has levels of punishments done to each sin. As we can see as he goes from the top of the Inferno to the bottom there are levels of punishments according to the sin. The first level of the Inferno is the limbo. In the limbo there were the people that did not act wrongly against God but where not baptized because they were born before Christianity appeared. “For these defects, and for no other evil, we now are lost and punished just with this: we have no hope and yet we live in longing.”(Inferno Canto IV, 40-42) The defects that Virgil is referring to are not defects that were determined by them they are not sins. A defect and a sin are things that are total opposites. A sin is something that you are told not to do and you do it by your own. In the other hand a defect is something that you are born with and you don’t determine or choose to do it. I think what Dante is trying to stress here with this part of the Inferno is that baptism and doing the rituals God tells us to do is as important as the difference between going to the Inferno or Heaven.

The last place in the Inferno is reserved for the traitors to benefactors. My conclusion from this level of the Inferno is that Dante could not simply tolerate people that were traitors. If I were to do a scale on which attributes of a person I disliked the most certainly traitors would be on the top of my list. A traitor is a person that you choose to confine your secrets with or be your friend, and all of a sudden he is on your enemy’s team and has given all the information and your secrets to them. A traitor is kind of a spy but much worse because he appears to be your friend and you trust him believing he is your friend and then he betrays you. This same thing happened to Jesus when Judas Iscariot betrayed him and that is why Judas is on the deepest level of the Inferno. “That soul up there who has to suffer the most, my master said: Judas Iscariot- his head inside, he jerks his legs without.”(Inferno Canto XXXIV, 61-63) Jesus was a benefactor so when Judas betrayed him he entered the last and deepest place in the Inferno. Dante’s trip ends after that when they reach again the path that leads to world but if Dante’s inferno were to continue much more things would happen. After that I would say that there would be much more suffering by the hands of Lucifer and his demons that are the ones in charge to torture sinners. Dante changed a lot during his trip to the Inferno so he would each time have to bear more sufferings of sinners. At the start of the Inferno Dante felt pity towards the sinners being tortured but as he traveled deeper he started to feel less pity towards them. Since each time he would go down a level the punishments grew worse each time he would grow more pitiless towards the dead. Dante would still change if the Inferno were going to continue and I think each time he would grow less aware that those souls that are there were once like him but committed terrible sins.