Essay on Divine Intellect in Dantes Inferno - 1903 Words

Divine Intellect in Dantes Inferno In Canto XI of Dantes Inferno, Virgil carefully explains the layout of hell to his student, Dante. Toward the end of his speech, Virgil says that Sodom and Cahors are speak[ing] in passionate contempt of God, (XI, 50-51), and divine will thus relegates them to the seventh circle. The sin of the Sodomites is clear for Dante, who poses no question on the matter, sodomy perhaps being an obvious affront to God which the bible directly addresses. However, the sin of Cahors, namely usury, is not clear to Dante. He asks Virgil to unravel the knot in his mind, since there is no obvious reason why a usurer - a money lender essentially - deserves any punishment at all for a crime†¦show more content†¦Thus, Dante is on Virgils level in one sense, and far below him in another, which is true in the grand scheme of the work: Dante is only beginning to understand the workings of the divine order by Canto XI, while Virgil borders on omniscience throughout. Furthermore, Dante has not yet eclipsed Virgil as a poet, since at this point the Inferno is hardly begun, while the Aeneid presents Virgils view of Hades from top to bottom.. In Dantes hell specifically, the reason that usury is a deadly sin is very confusing, which is why Dante calls it a knot. Unlike other sins, usury is not on its face a dreadful immorality. Virgil approaches the issue at first philosophically, making the profoundly esoteric claim that nature follows... the Divine Intellect and the Divine Art. The idea nature is therefore composed of these two abstract elements. The Intellect, coming first, must be at the root of the Art, since intellect must precede production, as in the Platonic doctrine of the essence of a thing preceding the existence of a thing. The Intellect is the potential; the art is the result. In concrete terms, the Intellect must therefore be the primordial stuff from which everything is made, and the Art therefore must be the process of making it into something tangible or usable. From this, then, we can deduceShow MoreRelatedDante s Divine Comedy : An Allegory Representative Of The Christian Soul974 Words   |   4 Pagesbad. Dante Aghileri, a poet who stars in his Divine Comedy as a pilgrim, finds himself lost in a dark wood. Though he sees a safe path to the light and out of the wood, he is forced to take an alternate route through an even darker place. The Divine Comedy is an allegory representative of the Christian soul. 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