Divine Comedy
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Wolran Kim
February 2013
I thought Dante’s Divine Comedy on my bookshelf was a kind of praise for God just from the title when I was a child and I soon closed the book because of the horrible depiction of Hell with blazing fires and ensuing brimstones much like comical cartoons. A sin is familiar to humans just like a mother’s womb is, but punishment is the part which I instinctively want to avoid to the bitter end. Dante is willing to show more Hell compared to the Bible focusing on Heaven. Ministers in churches throw themselves into reference to Heaven more in their holy sermons rather than the wrath of God in order to not lose the believers.
The Bible says that the gates of heaven open to all followers as long as they repent and believe in Jesus no matter how serious their sin. On the contrary, Dante shows that all evils that we simply overlooked in our daily lives such as lies, jealousy, greed, hypocrisy, stinginess and even gluttony, would be thoroughly condemned. Our sin is as light as dust in this world, but it will be as heavy as rocks in our next lives. Dante also awakened us spiritually to how superficial and shallow our law system and moral yardsticks are in reality.
Human beings are religious animals. People call on the name of God, even atheists, in emergency situations. We all have an instinctive craving for God and a hunch that our mother’s womb was born from the womb of the Absolute as if our lives started in our mothers’ wombs. The Bible conclusively remarks that all humans are potentially sinners. Who could assume they are completely free from Dante’s nine circles of Inferno (Limbo, Lustful, Gluttonous, Avaricious, River Styx, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery) or seven circles of Purgatorio (proud, envious, wrathful, slothful, covetous, gluttonous, and lustful)? Dante’s next world classifies and digs innate human nature of sin side-by-side with religious leaders who steal the name of God and the reigning political leaders based on divine justice.
Dante is a poet. A poet can become God or a puppy while writing poetry. Then the poet yells at humans from the position of the Creator or in a parody, puts the cunning human in the position of the pure animal. Dante depicts Hell as the observer or pilgrim looking along the back of another Roman poet, Virgil. Skillfully in Christianity, especially the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions, a term of ‘vigil’ is often held when someone is gravely ill or mourning. People who scream in hell, Dante’s selected protagonists, are the people whom Dante wants to condemn for borrowing the name of God. His situation was isolated, politically and socially, as an exile during this creation. He entered outcast faction, the White Guelph government, and sought to recapture the military, but his efforts failed to bear fruit. He also increasingly disenchanted from another outcast, Ghibelline Party.
He tried to guarantee return and proved his worth through his writings. In addition, the fact that his chosen guide was a poet comparable to the poet in Socrates’ Apology by Plato because Socrates could not find any worthy of the venerable sages from the poet in order to prove the words of the Delphic god. Dante, as a poet, challenges to propose a solution of Italy’s difficult situation by accusing insidious wiles of human society and politics. His hope is that church and state should be separated.
Italy at the time brought political and social chaos and disorder caused by the Pope’s desire for secular power and the weakness of the Emperor. These problems of one country encompass all the greed and deceit of the human individual as a little universe. Inferno of Divine Comedy shows us historic distinctiveness and typicality through the Absolute’s hope and punishment toward humans. The author would have felt catharsis and consolation when he condemned the pope and the emperor as being the identity of the exile. A pleasure
of writing poetry is much larger than the feeling of physiological excretion in the bathroom.
The reason that I have the emotion of eating my vomit again when I proofread and embellish my poetry, is because those expressions are similar to the sins of human beings’ hypocrisy and greed.
Dante’s Hell is sophisticated. He had a firm ideology about sin and punishment with the half-life of a 35-year-old. It is exquisitely designed like a computer program, and the sin and matched punishment show his philosophical, religious, theological, and historical erudition intact. One of the simoniacs, Pope Nicholas Ⅲ, denounces two of his successors, Pope Boniface Ⅷ and Pope Clement Ⅴ are placed upside down in the rock (resembling baptismal fonts), with flames burning on the soles of their feet. Simon Magus, who offered gold in exchange for holy power to Saint Peter, is also seen in the Bolgia Three of the Circle Eight.
The simile of baptismal fonts shows the future that we will have to pay for our exact misdeeds; Matthew 7:2 in the Bible says “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” In the Bolgia Eight of the Circle Eight, Ulysses and Diomedes who used their position to advise others to engage in fraud as evil counselors, concealed within fiery travesty of tongues as if it is their glibness of tongue. If Dante’s Inferno is a built fiction, his appointed sinners give sufficient fear and warning as vivid nonfiction.
If Dante’s next world is true, people’s lives will be significantly different. Prisons will be empty and the Bible and prayers will replace alcohol and drugs in their hands. The term ‘Eternity’ is an eternal mystery and also hope to humans who have a life of a hundred years. And this, much more religiously, there always is God because there must be someone who is responsible for the beginning and end of human lives. Otherwise, how is the life of human as light as a skiff in the ocean, foolish and ridiculous? Dante’s journey of the soul toward God in the 14th century continues in our modern days allegorically with the acceptance and denial of evil humans.
=============
Wolran Kim
February 2013
I thought Dante’s Divine Comedy on my bookshelf was a kind of praise for God just from the title when I was a child and I soon closed the book because of the horrible depiction of Hell with blazing fires and ensuing brimstones much like comical cartoons. A sin is familiar to humans just like a mother’s womb is, but punishment is the part which I instinctively want to avoid to the bitter end. Dante is willing to show more Hell compared to the Bible focusing on Heaven. Ministers in churches throw themselves into reference to Heaven more in their holy sermons rather than the wrath of God in order to not lose the believers.
The Bible says that the gates of heaven open to all followers as long as they repent and believe in Jesus no matter how serious their sin. On the contrary, Dante shows that all evils that we simply overlooked in our daily lives such as lies, jealousy, greed, hypocrisy, stinginess and even gluttony, would be thoroughly condemned. Our sin is as light as dust in this world, but it will be as heavy as rocks in our next lives. Dante also awakened us spiritually to how superficial and shallow our law system and moral yardsticks are in reality.
Human beings are religious animals. People call on the name of God, even atheists, in emergency situations. We all have an instinctive craving for God and a hunch that our mother’s womb was born from the womb of the Absolute as if our lives started in our mothers’ wombs. The Bible conclusively remarks that all humans are potentially sinners. Who could assume they are completely free from Dante’s nine circles of Inferno (Limbo, Lustful, Gluttonous, Avaricious, River Styx, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery) or seven circles of Purgatorio (proud, envious, wrathful, slothful, covetous, gluttonous, and lustful)? Dante’s next world classifies and digs innate human nature of sin side-by-side with religious leaders who steal the name of God and the reigning political leaders based on divine justice.
Dante is a poet. A poet can become God or a puppy while writing poetry. Then the poet yells at humans from the position of the Creator or in a parody, puts the cunning human in the position of the pure animal. Dante depicts Hell as the observer or pilgrim looking along the back of another Roman poet, Virgil. Skillfully in Christianity, especially the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions, a term of ‘vigil’ is often held when someone is gravely ill or mourning. People who scream in hell, Dante’s selected protagonists, are the people whom Dante wants to condemn for borrowing the name of God. His situation was isolated, politically and socially, as an exile during this creation. He entered outcast faction, the White Guelph government, and sought to recapture the military, but his efforts failed to bear fruit. He also increasingly disenchanted from another outcast, Ghibelline Party.
He tried to guarantee return and proved his worth through his writings. In addition, the fact that his chosen guide was a poet comparable to the poet in Socrates’ Apology by Plato because Socrates could not find any worthy of the venerable sages from the poet in order to prove the words of the Delphic god. Dante, as a poet, challenges to propose a solution of Italy’s difficult situation by accusing insidious wiles of human society and politics. His hope is that church and state should be separated.
Italy at the time brought political and social chaos and disorder caused by the Pope’s desire for secular power and the weakness of the Emperor. These problems of one country encompass all the greed and deceit of the human individual as a little universe. Inferno of Divine Comedy shows us historic distinctiveness and typicality through the Absolute’s hope and punishment toward humans. The author would have felt catharsis and consolation when he condemned the pope and the emperor as being the identity of the exile. A pleasure
of writing poetry is much larger than the feeling of physiological excretion in the bathroom.
The reason that I have the emotion of eating my vomit again when I proofread and embellish my poetry, is because those expressions are similar to the sins of human beings’ hypocrisy and greed.
Dante’s Hell is sophisticated. He had a firm ideology about sin and punishment with the half-life of a 35-year-old. It is exquisitely designed like a computer program, and the sin and matched punishment show his philosophical, religious, theological, and historical erudition intact. One of the simoniacs, Pope Nicholas Ⅲ, denounces two of his successors, Pope Boniface Ⅷ and Pope Clement Ⅴ are placed upside down in the rock (resembling baptismal fonts), with flames burning on the soles of their feet. Simon Magus, who offered gold in exchange for holy power to Saint Peter, is also seen in the Bolgia Three of the Circle Eight.
The simile of baptismal fonts shows the future that we will have to pay for our exact misdeeds; Matthew 7:2 in the Bible says “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” In the Bolgia Eight of the Circle Eight, Ulysses and Diomedes who used their position to advise others to engage in fraud as evil counselors, concealed within fiery travesty of tongues as if it is their glibness of tongue. If Dante’s Inferno is a built fiction, his appointed sinners give sufficient fear and warning as vivid nonfiction.
If Dante’s next world is true, people’s lives will be significantly different. Prisons will be empty and the Bible and prayers will replace alcohol and drugs in their hands. The term ‘Eternity’ is an eternal mystery and also hope to humans who have a life of a hundred years. And this, much more religiously, there always is God because there must be someone who is responsible for the beginning and end of human lives. Otherwise, how is the life of human as light as a skiff in the ocean, foolish and ridiculous? Dante’s journey of the soul toward God in the 14th century continues in our modern days allegorically with the acceptance and denial of evil humans.