Youve Made Your Bed, Now Lie in It
Dante Alighieris Inferno is a story of sin and redemption that shows the way to eternal happiness by keeping faith and doing what is right during time on Earth, and also gives us a chance to re-examine our lives and to change them for the better. Dante believes that to be able to go to heaven, one must experience hell firstand not necessarily in a literal way. He means that in order to be purified or to receive salvation, a person needs to undergo sufferings first, starting at the bottom. In Dante Alighieris Inferno, there is a deep sense of poetic justice, and each punishment fits each crimefairly!
Dantes Hell has a unique design and structure. It is broken up into nine circles, each containing their own prisoners who face different punishments. Each punishment is a reflection of the sins that the prisoners committed while they were alive, so each punishment fits the crime. The circles of Dantes Hell are a symbol of justice, where justice is distributed, throughout, to the sinners. In the Inferno, Dante uses many examples to demonstrate the theme of justice.
Dante starts at the Gate of Hell and will eventually find his way down to circle nine. The circles are organized according to the gravity of the sin involved. The worse the sinner, the farther down into Hell they will fall. God created Hell as a place to put sinners because they do not deserve his love. All of the sinners are then brought to justice by different forms of torment for the sins they had committed on Earth. For every injustice, justice must be served because if there was not, those who sinned would go unpunished and would be raised into Heaven after death to be with God. If the sinners made it to Heaven instead of going to Hell, it would contradict the creation and sole purpose of Hell.
The first level of Hell is not a circle, but more of an entry way or waiting area which holds the Gates of Hell. It is called the Vestibule, and even though it is not a circle, it still holds sinning prisoners and they still face punishments. The prisoners are called the Opportunists who were neither good nor evil during their time on Earth, they just did not choose a sidethey are unclear. The Opportunists will not commit to God. Their fate includes running around mindlessly, trying to grab a blank banner and being eaten by maggots and stung by wasps. All of this happens in the foggy dark so that they cant find direction, much like their indecisiveness toward good or evil. These people wouldnt shed blood or tears for anyone while they were alive on Earth and now they are facing the parallel and shedding both blood and tears for absolutely nothing. In Canto III, The Vestibule, at the gate of Hell, there is a sign that is inscribed, Sacred justice moved my architect; I was raised here by divine omnipotence, Primordial love and ultimate Intellect. (Alighieri III, 4-6). This sign at the gate shows that nothing was get in the way of justice being served in Hell.
This is where the circles of Hell really start. The Carnal is the name of the second circle and it holds a group known as the Lustful. Its prisoners are the lustful, passion driven sinners who thought about love and lust before logic. This circle is where we see the principle of retribution as the sinners are caught in a whirlwind, helpless forever. In their lives on Earth, the Lustful were so driven by their passions that they ignored everything else that mattered and left others helpless. Lines of Canto V read, And this, I learned, was the never ending flight of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty who betrayed reason to their appetite. (Alighieri V, 37-40). Justice being served here in this circle shows that the punishment fits the crimean eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Down to the lowest depths of Hell there is the ninth circleThe Cocytus. The Cocytus holds those that are treacherous to their masters. These traitors had committed the worst sin of all while living on Earth, which is to betray either God, family members, or their country. This circle includes Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ, and Cassius and Brutus who betrayed Julius Caesar. Judas, Cassius and Brutus are all being eaten by the three-headed Satan. Satan is buried beneath icy frozen lake, only to freeze himself more as he flaps his wings with rage. It is their beating that is the source of the icy wind of the Cocytus, the exhalation of all evil (Ciardi, 641). Yes, being the reason for his own immovability is his punishment, because Satan is the farthest down in the depths of Hell and that means that he are the farthest away from God but he had put himself there because he had chosen to betray Jesus. Satan had made his bed and now he had to lie in it, just like all the sinners throughout each circle in Dantes Hell.
Dantes Alighieri created a possible idea on how sins should be scaled against each other and the justice that should go along with that sin. The Inferno is symbolic of justice and the ranking of sins. It depicts the need to attain deeper spirituality in a different way. Hell represents not just a place for sinners but also the state of a sinners soul, and is a place where each punishment fits each crime.
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