Dante the Poet is harsh with Dante the Pilgrim, and, along with Virgil, consistently criticizes Dante the Pilgrim’s sympathy for those in Hell. Dante the Pilgrim’s lack of agency is exacerbated by the need for literal divine intervention by Beatrice, who tasks Virgil with the responsibility of bringing Dante the Pilgrim through Hell, and later Purgatory, before she and St. By starting Dante the Pilgrim’s journey here, Dante the Poet is aligning Dante the Pilgrim not with Heaven and Paradise, but with the hopelessness of Hell. The Inferno begins with Dante the Pilgrim straying from the path of God: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray/from the straight road and woke to find myself/alone in a dark wood.” (Dante, The Inferno, trans. I argue that Limbo is fundamentally different from the other levels of Hell, and through Dante the Poet’s description of the afterlife, we can extrapolate that despite concluding that he will go to Paradise, Dante the Poet’s description of Dante the Pilgrim’s experiences advocates for Limbo.
My argument is that despite this surface-level reading, what Dante actually shows us is that the sameness of becoming one with God in heaven is boring, and that the best place to land oneself in the afterlife is in Limbo. Dante’s Divine Comedy – part treatise on death, life and religion, part self-insert fanfiction – ostensibly argues that, of the different paths through life, the most important is the straight path toward God and toward Paradise.
0 kommentar(er)
