Finding Morality and Unity with God in Dantes Inferno Essay -- Alighi

Finding Morality and Unity with God in Dantes Inferno Throughout the fast-paced lives of people, we are constantly fashioning choices that shape who we are, as well as the world around us however, star often debates the manner in which one should come to correct good decisions, and achieve a virtuous existence. Dante has an uncanny ability to represent with such precision, the trials of the everymans soul to achieve chasteity and call up unity with God, while backing forth the beauty, humor, and horror of human purport. Dante immediately links his own personal experience to that of all of humanity, as he proclaims, Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood, / for I had wandered off from the orderly fashion (I.1-3). The dark wood is the sinful life on earth, and the straight path is that of the virtuous life that leads to God. Dantes everyman, pilgrim character represents all of humanity, and endures much adversity and temptation through squa lid conditions in a nightmarish survey of pit, in his search to find the souls true path in life. While he stands in peril, Dante wishes that each individual would put themselves in the same position as the aforementioned, as all of mankind knows some form of sin, and also wanders lost in a dark wood. Before achieving righteous redemption, an individual must take a hard look at evil both in the world and in himself. Only by confronting interior evil can people achieve self-knowledge, which is the first step toward redemption.Dante feels hell is a necessary, painful first step in any mans spiritual journey, and the path to the blessed after-life awaits anyone who seeks to find it, and through a screen of perseverance, one will find the face of God. Nonetheless, Dante aspires to heaven in an optimistic process, to find salvation in God, despite the merciless torture chamber he has to travel through. As Dante attempts to find God in his life, those sentenced to punishment in hell h inder him from the true path, as the city of hell in Inferno represents the negative consequences of sinful actions and desires. Though the punishments invariably fit the crimes of the sinners and retributive justice reigns, the overt emphasis of fear and pity that Dante imbues on the transgressors illustrates his human tendency to feel sympathy towards one who is suffering. For example, when Dante approaches the gat... ...a vice. The virtue of courage, then, lies at the mean between the excessive innate of rashness, and the deficient extreme of cowardice. Reason often calls for us to take sides on moral issues, however, Dante illustrates the extremity of moral demands that Christianity makes on human beings, who are perpetually fallible. He reflects that the world beyond the present one, is, like reality, rational and orderly, and the poem allows us to view this certain, orderly world.Dante makes himself everyman, and the journey that God decreed through hell is one mans persona l transcendent journey from deep intellectual moral confusion to a sound and steadfast faith and hope, in which Dante renews his faith. Dante awakens our hope, and warns against moral complacency by peeling away the dangerous illusions of adequacy, leading one upward, toward the eternal heart of reality. Dante compels the reader to share his growing abhorrence of sin and his compact to uphold Gods will. The poems purpose is to re-awaken Dante, and, by extension, the reader, to the reality of sin and the accompanying need for confession and repentance, to return to the straight path that leads to eternal salvation.