Dante's Inferno

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You’ve Made Your Bed, Now Lie in It Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is a story of sin and redemption that shows the way to eternal happiness by keeping faith and doing what is right during time on Earth, and also gives us a chance to re-examine our lives and to change them for the better. Dante believes that to be able to go to heaven, one must experience hell first—and not necessarily in a literal way. He means that in order to be purified or to receive salvation, a person needs to undergo sufferings first, starting at the bottom. In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, there is a deep sense of poetic justice, and each punishment fits each crime—fairly! Dante’s Hell has a unique design and structure. It is broken up into nine circles, each containing their own prisoners who face different punishments. Each punishment is a reflection of the sins that the prisoners committed while they were alive, so each punishment fits the crime. The circles of Dante’s Hell are a symbol of justice, where justice is distributed, throughout, to the sinners. In the Inferno, Dante uses many examples to demonstrate the theme of justice. Dante starts at the Gate of Hell and will eventually find his way down to circle nine. The circles are organized according to the gravity of the sin involved. The worse the sinner, the farther down into Hell they will fall. God created Hell as a place to put sinners because they do not deserve his love. All of the sinners are then brought to justice by different forms of torment for the sins they had committed on Earth. For every injustice, justice must be served because if there was not, those who sinned would go unpunished and would be raised into Heaven after death to be with God. If the sinners made it to Heaven instead of going to Hell, it would contradict the creation and sole purpose of Hell. The first level of Hell is not a circle, but more of an entry way
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