Before this class, my entire knowledge of Dante’s Inferno came from playing the video game when I was younger. I barely remember the actual story, but what i do remember is Dante fighting demons and making his way through increasingly horrifying parts of Hell. So when I saw The Inferno on our reading list, that was immediately what came to mind. I knew the game was obviously not going to be a completely accurate adaptation of the poem, but I still went into the book expecting Hell to feel like this massive adventure filled with monsters.
There are definitely monsters, but I realized that the actual journey is much more about the people Dante meets and why they are where they are. I also liked how the book depicted hell, It isn’t just a place where every bad person gets thrown together and suffers randomly. There is basically an entire system to it, where different sins have different levels of seriousness and the punishments are connected to what the person did during their life.
I’m not gonna lie some of these punishments were weirdly creative, The people who allowed themselves to be controlled by lust are now literally thrown around by an endless storm, as if they are still being controlled by something outside themselves.The hoarders and wasteful push weights against each other while screaming about why the other side hoarded or wasted their wealth. The suicide punishment stood out to me though, They rejected their own bodies in life, and now they don’t even have human bodies in Hell. They exist as trees and can only speak when their branches are broken and bleed.
I also wasn’t expecting Hell to be so personal to Dante. These aren’t all random fictional sinners. He encounters historical figures, political enemies, people he respects, and eventually even people who influenced him personally. It made me wonder how I would react if I genuinely believed someone I loved or respected deserved punishment according to my moral or religious beliefs.
So far the concept of the inferno has been pretty interesting. The deeper Dante goes, the less I’ve been thinking about what Hell looks like and the more I’ve been thinking about what it means to decide that someone deserves to be there.
Question: Do you think a punishment can ever be perfectly just, or does understanding why someone did something always make judgment more complicated?