The Inferno recounts Dante’s journey to the afterlife. It was the poet Virgil that ordered by Beatrice – Dante’s lover to take Dante on a tour in Hell and a part of the Earth. Symbolically, the Inferno represents the consequence of human behaviors while the jungle symbolizes life’s path full of uncertainties. In the condensed forms, three beasts are three bad habits of humans: Lust, pride, and Cheating. Beatrice, Dante’s childhood lover, symbolizes the wisdom of the kingdom dominating the wisdom of the lower world. Virgil, the Roman poet whom Dante admires to be the master of his poetry, symbolizes worldly wisdom of philosophy and science. Moreover, these circles concentric, symbolizing the gradual increase of evil and culminating in the heart of the earth, where Satan is imprisoned in prison. Sinners in each circle are punished with punishments appropriate to their sins. Each sinner must suffer eternal pain because of the main sin he has committed. According to Dante, the circles are arranged in order from the first circle, which is the abode of pagans who have not been baptized and have good morality, the main focus of hell is the place for those who committed that terrible sin or those betray God. Inferno is also a realistic picture of Dante’s Italian society because it truly reflects the life of every aspect of Italian people in this period, through the eyes of the poet.
The poem begins with the scene where Dante is lost in a dark forest when he is halfway through his life, metaphorically this means that he has been plunged into human desires.
“ Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
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I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.” (Alighieri 1.1-3)
He was scared and frustrated and didn’t know how to get out of the forest. Beatrice- his beloved is now in the heaven, sent Virgil, the Roman poet, to guide Dante on a journey through hell so can transcend onto heaven. The Gate of Hell opens, Dante witnessed different punishments throughout the nine circles of Hell. Hellish penalties all carry symbols: violent people were battered in the sea of boiling blood, the lenders had to carry heavy pockets of money, sexual people were swirled in the whirlwind, the head of false predictions was bent backward. The souls must repay sins in hell through indescribably painful punishments. But when the sin has been repaid, they have a chance to be human. And while being human, they have the opportunity to be saved, to be better people. With those souls, they still ‘hope’ to ‘live among those who are blessed’. This is a hidden puzzle that will only be solved when connecting the two East-West cultures because the capital of Christians today does not believe that samsara exists. According to Dante’s journey, each circle has different punishments. Thus it can be said that those who are in the Hell floors from one to five share a common characteristic: non-believers, who run after desire, greedy, scrimp and rage. Those sins are nonetheless weak to not overcome the temptation of the interior, between the active and passive. However, heretics, violent people, cheaters, and traitors are no longer merely guilty of temptation, but there is a ‘madness and unethical’ inside their movements. Therefore, they are punished within the gate of Dis. All the sins that Dante met at the Hell are also the sins that human all have. Gluttony is one of them. Gluttony that Dante refers to here is not gluttony in the ordinary sense, but tolerance of desire to cause other sins. It is like an addiction rather than a hobby of strange things. The souls at this level so have to roll in the muddy mud, an image referring to the filth in their thoughts while living in the world.
The ‘cohesion and fullness’ of mud is like a mind of indulgence, pampering to the level of addiction. In addition, we still feel that it doesn’t seem very scary compared to the punishments in hell. Is it not before the gates of hell that the words “Abandon all hope ye who enter here’? To explain this, perhaps people have to return to the Eastern religion a bit. Actually, souls in hell still don’t have a ray of hope? It is to repay all the sins and to be reincarnated as a human being, to have hope again. The time to return their sins seemed hopelessly long. In Eastern Buddhism, there are those who suddenly die before the fate ends and the devilish souls who have no way to return, those who cannot eat, live in vain, need the monks to do the supreme ceremony , help them to have a place to return, that is, to return to the cycle of reincarnation and continue to have ‘a ray of hope’ liberated. It is so! The indifferent Angels before the battle in Heaven faced a tremendous punishment: ‘No hope!’. They ‘desire any fate!’ Because of any fate, even in the tragic hellish punishment, there is still a destiny of liberation.
“And they, too, howl like dogs in the freezing storm
turning and turning from it as if they thought
one naked side could keep the other warm.” (Alighieri 6.19-21)
Gluttonous is a term of people who wants to eat a lot good food if it is not delicious, they are going to throw away, using disparaging words even said that trash and not see others represent the selfish and cold of those this. If we can’t control our eating habits, we may also have difficulty controlling other habits, such as things in our thoughts (desire, greed, anger) which could lead to other sins. We must not let our appetite control us, but we must control eating. According to Proverbs Bible, it has given warning to gluttonous: “ Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony” (Proverbs 23:2). We also find a sin of Gluttony in the Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas: ‘Gluttony denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire… leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists.’ (2, 148, ad 1). He also pointed out some sort of gluttony: Praepropere – eat too early. Laute – eating too expensive. Nimis – eat too much. Ardenter – eating too eagerly.
Studiose – eating too picky. Forente – eat wildly.
Life is more and more modern, so our level of eating does not stop at the ‘full’ level but it is also raised to a new level. It is eating, ‘enjoying’, having to eat ‘very rare’, ‘strange’, really ‘complementary’ and not everyone can eat. The insatiable appetite has turned gentle, rural animals like pigs, chickens, ducks, cows, etc., which are no longer attractive enough to the taste of some people who like to ‘enjoy’ the strange things of such time again. They look for larger, wilder animals and especially ‘rare’. It is like that that is worthy of their range and status. And so a snake, tiger, rhino, one horn, … were put into sight. The habit of eating strange things happen a lot in Asia in general, and in my country in particular. For example, snakes put the whole body and soaked the wine. Tigers are cut small for high cooking. Rhinos are killed for their horns … And hundreds, thousands of other wild creatures have been brutally killed by humans to satisfy their ordinary pleasures. Killing wild animals to satisfy the pleasures and desires yourself is kind of selfish. Individual actions are destructive to the whole world and adversely affect thousands of generations later. It is also causing some animals will be in Red List of Threatened Species. According to USA Today, by Jessica Phelan, GlobalPost, it states: “ Humans hunted the tiger population down to just 5,000 to 7,000 individuals worldwide by the late 1990s. That was considered a dangerously low number then. By 2014, it had halved. Some estimates say fewer than 2,500 mature tigers currently remain in the wild. The problem is our passion for every part of them: Tiger skins, bones, teeth, claws, tails and even whiskers find a place on the black market as decorative items or ingredients in traditional Asian remedies. The illegal trade is further fueled by tiger farms in China and Vietnam, where large numbers of the animals are bred for their body parts. As many as three times more tigers exist on such farms than in the wild. Elsewhere, tigers are reared to be killed in “canned” hunts by trophy seekers.”
People indulge themselves by eating, enjoying, and when they are no longer able to meet the demand for good food, it will lead to bad work such as robbery, doing everything to have money for good eating. All of which comes from selfishness, always wanting to be good for oneself without thinking of others. In term of Gluttony, it makes me think about my country, Vietnam- one of the countries with the Communist regime. Citizens have to pay taxes, the government charges many different types of tax such as social insurance tax about 26 %, social insurance tax 4.5%, accident insurance 2%, Union dues 2% VAT 10%…People could not get the tax return, all that money goes to the government, to supply them good food, big house, fancy life. It also causes inflation, the country and citizens are poor but the government is not. The government is eating on the hard-work money by the citizens that I feel not fair for Vietnamese people.
In conclusion, a soul with no hope is the most miserable soul – It is the angels who are indifferent to evil. Through the fate of the fallen angels and these souls, perhaps Virgil, or Dante, or perhaps the God and Angels, adopted Dante to remind him of a lesson the deepest, a lesson that humanity still writes today to understand that the evildoer will, of course, suffer evil, but the one who stands outside is probably not innocent. Selfish people, ignoring evil, indifferent to evil, will be punished, will have to pay the price. And sometimes you’ll have to pay the most precious thing of life yourself – Hope!
Works Cited
- Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Hell. Translated by John Ciardi, Signet Classics
- The Proverbs. Vol. 23, Macmillan, 1919.
- Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. The ‘Summa Theologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas … London: Burns, Oates & Washburne, ltd., 192042. Print.
- Phelan, Jessica. “6 Endangered Animals Poachers Are Hunting into Extinction.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 31 July 2015, www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/07/31/globalpost-6-endangered-animals-poachers-hunting-into-extinction/30932385/.
