Inferno and Odyssey: a War Between the Subtler Shades of Vice and Virtue - Essay Example

 The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and 1321, comprises the three canticas, the first of which is the “inferno” or the Hell. The journey starts from the middle and hence is an ideal media res structure, when Virgil guides the poet, hardened in sin. A Pilgrim’s Progress begins with a Bunyanesque Christian sensibility, but with a greater deliberation not just towards Salvation, but he makes manifest the reality of the sin through the law of retribution. The topographical structure of Dante’s hell is also of major value, since Inferno occupies the cone-shaped abyss formed at the moment of Lucifer’s fall. The damned souls populate the chasm, which Dante classifies under Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and thus becomes an amalgamation of Grecian hellish myth and a testimony to Aquinas’ appropriation of Christian sensibility in Aristotle’s Ethics. Virgil guides Dante through the nine concentric circles of Hell., diving into deeper and graver sins, unrepentant, and culminating into absolute evil, as represented by Satan. The journey begins from the Dark wood, and into the Limbo. It is more of a pagan, unbaptised and a coarse yet virtuous crowd like Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan (Canto IV), who only repent their seperation from god. In Canto V, one of the seven cardinal sins appear, which is sin under lust. Inhabited by the adultress Francesca, who proclaims to justify her irresistible attraction to Paolo, in a way that evokes the ideology of the immoral Thirteenth century Italian love sonnets, that challenged the power of love beyond anything. The third realm is possessed by Cerbereus, amonster from greek mythology, but attributed with montrous humanity by Dante, who guards the gluttons. The journey also evokes the political tensions of contemporary Florence and the complexity of the whole Guelf-Ghibelline conflict and Florentine politics that reached its crest in 1300 (ironically the fictional date chosen by Dante for his Inferno). Hatred for papacy, and the belief that Rome is predestined to be the seat of Empire, disillutions the poet about factionalism (symbolically Florence is shown to be divided by the Arno river of the Hell in Inferno) and party politics and makes him search out a way for Salvation through his poem. The political condition of Florence is mouthed by the sinner Ciacco in Canto VI, in the third realm. IN Canto VII, with the beginning of the fourth circle, Dante sees Pluto stationed, a place damned for the avaricious and the prodigal. In a sysiphean way, the group ofmiserly and the wasteful squanderers push weights against each other and start allover again when it smashes on any of the sides. It is a psychological drama represented by the futility that awaits all materials things that we pursue in life. Entering the land of the sloths, thepoet and Virgil cross Styx with the ferryman, Phlegyas, when tey meet the fury of Filippo Argenti, and denied entry by the fallen angels of the city of Dis, and meeting the hellish monsters and the wrath of the furies are granted entrance due to Heaven’s intervention. Thesixth circle burns with consuming flames to torture the heretics. Here he meets the famous Ghibelline Farinata delgi Uberti, who was seen as a heretic for potensial opposition against the political lrole of the papacy. Excluded from any form of amnesty and pardon he is damned. This part seeks to voice the poets contest with his own fears about sin against the papacy. The violent, like those commited against people and property,theirown self i.e. suicice and that against God, nature and the art i.e. blasphemers, sodomites and the usurers are punished in the seventh circle, and guarded by Minotaur. The eight circle holds the conscious and the ones with knowledge of their evil in ten different ditches. They comprise the seducers, flatterers, sorcerers, hypocrites, corrupt politicians, frauds. In the ditch called Bolga 9 Dante also sees Muhammad. In the nineth realm hecomes across Cain, in the sub-realm called Caina, and at the very centre of Judecca or the lowest rung of the nineth realm lies Satan, Cassius and Brutus in his right and left mouth, and Judas in the centre, while Satan remains impotent and all evil. The journey to the Inferno is guided by a holy fear and is peopled by real and mythical characters and judged with a sense of contemporary urgency that makes Inferno a hellish embarkment for readers and for psychological partaking. It is a political and a religious agenda that has been aestheticised with Dante’s brilliant descriptions provoking real spiritual crisis. The journey is a complex allegory that addresses complex theories that he wants to discuss beyond a certain constriction. The journey addresses by itssheer philosophy of poeticjudgement,the ideology of that age,like the judgementagainst Muhammad, the sower of schism and scandal, is also a mouthpiece of that age, when the first latin translation of the Quoran was just made available. The concept of contrapasso, which is that sin equals the punishment is introduced, so as to give depth and range to the journey. It also addresses personal anger of Dante and his anger against those who exiled him from Florence; and this journey becomes an agent for overcoming this crisis. Can we call this as a form of a personal revenge, so very Pope-ish in it’s impetus? Dante slowly brings about the theological abtractions of evil into the realms of concrete spiritual understanding for common people, and embarks on a journey of realising evil through an illustrative self-analysis. He himself becomes a christ like figure, going through an understanding of spiritual death, sin punishment and reemerging through the Second Coming. What connects Dante’s Inferno to Homer’s Odyssey,isthat we find Odysseus in Dante’s realm of the underworld, in Hell, and in agony, for heis placed in that realm of fradulent advisors andfor his role in the Trojan war. Dante is moved by pity by the sinner’s sorrow, and this finally concludes the necessity of grace in one’s soul. Odyssey, beginning in a medias res, is a sequel to Homer's Iliad and is centered around his journey to Ithaca, after the fall of Troy, and all theadventures that he encounters. One of such an adventure has been immortalized by Tennyson, in his poem “Ulysses”, when he passes into slothful somnambulence in the land of the Lotus eaters. It is a ten year wandering after the war. The metis or divine intelligence of Ulysses makes him deceptively cunning, and takes him into a world of adventure, with him beinga captive of the beautiful nymph Calypso, for almost seven years. Released by the intervention of Athena, he lands in Scherie, after his raft is destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon, after Odysseus blinded his son. This Scherie is inhabited by the Phaeacians, who help him to build a ship and come to Ithaca, to his son Telemachus and wife Penelope. Interestingly, the journey that Odysseus faces is again rife with moral dilemma, and educative in an allegorical sense. The journey is interspersed with hellish temptations, cosmic relevance and full of surreal complications that challenge the mythical reality of the entire journey and place the loci of significance more on the spiritual nature of their challenges and appearances. Thus it talks of a journey to the hades, or the underworld and the emergencefromit. It is a man’s moral journey (in an amoral, classical, non-christian way) and his fight with the evil forces that lies not outside but inside him. Both thejourneys by Dante and Homer effect this psychological aspect of the problem. The journey thus becomes an objective reality, losing it’s material or concrete dynamic significance, but acquiring a greater symbolic truth. It could have happened within the mental space for all that matters, but the issues that are raised are of greater significance, like the talk between the dilemma of Penelope and the disguised Odysseus on her willingness or unwillingness to accept a suitor. When with the Phaeacians, Odysseus recounts the slothfulsinhe committed in the land of the Lotus Eaters, his battle with Polyphemus the Cyclops, whom he cheated by telling that his name was Nobody, his enchantment with Circe, his temptation by the deadly Sirens, his journey into Hades to consult the prophet Tiresias, and his fight with the sea monster Scylla. The journey combines fate, justice, and heroic pursuit and moral corruption that befalls heroes too. His choices are not always divine, but rather afflicted with mortal weaknesses. In fact Homer shows his hero to be full of human dilemma, but capable of rising to the ocassion when inspired by his heroic traits, like when he enjoys the cheese and plentiful milk in the cave of Polyphemus, and gets trapped with the return of the Cyclops. In their very first journey, Ulysses and his men loot a nearby city, and thinking god to be on their side, they procastinate too long to attract the Ciconians and much of his men were slain in their hands. A similar falling asleep act happens at the land of the Lotus Eaters, but with their encounter with greed in the next voyage attract the Cyclops and Polyphemus, whom he slays by sheer guile. At Aiolia, provided with a bag of air, and mistaken to be a bag of treasure Ulysses and his men are blown back to Aiolia, when his soldiers decided to open it, making Aiolia think they were cursed by Gods and thereby refusing them any further help. After anencounter with Circe, Ulysses talks to the dead and with Tiresias (made famous in Eliot’s Waste Land) for valuable advice on how to conclude his journey. Achilles tells him to enjoy mortality and that being a king on earth is still more alluring to him. The weaknesses that afflict Ulysses oftenis greatly reflected by the fact that he deceives his men to listen to the song of the sirens, when he knew that it may allure them to death. His curiosity too, is a symbollic quest of experience that manhood and humans must deal with as they pass from youth to old age. In his judgement Homer shows less didacticism and more illustration through consequences.In fact he sows a multiple array of consequences that guide the plot not by sheer architecture of the story, but by the fatality of the hero’s character and his choices. There is a remarkable display of free will when Odysseus faces two choices on his way to his home. One is the Symplegades, passed only by Jason, and where all pass or all die. He chose the second where he did not tell his crew of Circe’s prophesy of their sacrifice, lest they cower. When the men were indeed eaten up, the whole army felt mutinous and threatened mutiny near Thrinacia. The subtle aspect of politics and a warriors mentalscape too has beeen delineated well by Homer. The hero and the dynamics between him and his followers are also well decipehered, where Ulysses more than often falls into the trap of beguiling his men into commiting acts that are motivated by ignorance. In Thrinacia, Ulysses was forewarned by Tiresias and Circe to not touch Helios’ sacred cattles. But when his men sacrifice them to eat, Zeus destroy their boat in a thunderbolt and only Ulysses survive. Attracted to immortality and to Calypso, he lives there for sevenyears, attracted to her by the night, symbolically, which means a physical attraction and years for his family at day, which symbolically talks of his moral and spiritual guilt. Both Inferno and Odyssey teach by illustration and delineate their consequences by subsequent actions.In Inferno, the realms of Hell, donot talk so much of the punishment than the nature and the cause that attracted them to such a sphere of disgrace and sin. It is a psychological drama that seeks the minds dilemma with various situatons. If Inferno is a Christian religious journey, thenit is also a politicaltract urging a complete understanding of poltical stances to be taken so as to not commit adultery against the state orthe Empire, which is also the predestined seat of God’s elected son, the king. Odysseus, also delineate the nature of a rulers politics and what makes him efficient in his rule. Ulysses lose hismen out of sheer lack of good judgement andcunning that is often destructive beyond it’s present virtue. If both the journeys are a war between the subtler shades of vice and virtue, then both Dante and Homer have shown the extremeties of Classical and Christian morality in their high ranging grounds of polarities and commonalities. Works Cited Dante, The Inferno, translated by H.F Cary, Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, Cumberland House, Crib Street, Hertfordshire,1998 Homer, The Odyssey, Translated by Samuel Butler, Release Date: April, 1999 [EBook #1727], [Date last updated: 16th February, 2003], Edition: 10, Language: English, Character set encoding: ASCII, PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, Produced by Jim Tinsley jtinsley@pobox.com, Read More