Unforgettable glory through the ages Dante Alighieri receives with his poem "Divine Comedy". It is divided into three parts: the first one is titled "Hell", the second is "Purgatory", the third is "Paradise". In poetic form, Dante tells of an imaginary journey into the afterlife. He is "accompanied" by Vergilius - an ancient poet of Antiquity. Dante introduces the world of the beyond. This is the unknown, secret side of the soul, which seeks to penetrate not only the religious man of the Middle Ages, but also the pagan of Antiquity. The thought of the unknown powers of prophetic destiny, which come as punishment or retribution, has always excited man. He wants to know the future, to perceive beyond the bounds of the wisely acceptable scary or non-terrestrial beautiful picture of his life. Dante Alighieri proves that the ugly and wonderful - like aesthetic attitudes and expectations for the future - depend only on the present and the moral content of human affairs. That is why the truth about man is in the person himself. Both good and evil are in him. It is up to a person to have Heaven or Hell in his soul.
For the first creator of the Italian Renaissance, man has to express himself firmly and categorically in both good and evil. Everyone who is small as a personal position deserves neither Heaven nor Hell. They are deprived of the power of human nature. They can not express themselves neither in sin nor in holiness. That is why Dante assigns them to Hells anteroom. Rather, they are referred to sinlessly impersonal as to unseen saints. For them there is no "future" even in the afterlife. As if such a kind of human manifestation is totally unnecessary, it does not leave a trace in the individual's life of the individual and in the time they live
In the first circle of Dante's "Hell" are the souls of the Gentiles - great poets and philosophers of antiquity. Here are Homer, Horatius, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Democritus and a number of notable historical figures, one of whom is Julius Caesar. Their only sin is that they did not know Christianity. Dante, though a Renaissance thinker, is a believing Christian. And he defines the lightest punishment for the great Gentiles - the first circle of Hell. The sinful passions of love are punished in the second round. Here are the ancient priestesses of love - Semiramis, Cleopatra, the beautiful Elena of the Trojan War. Of course, they are not forgotten Paris, Achilles ,. Their love passions as a force of sinful experiences are metaphorically expressed by Dante through lush, windy winds that carry in the constant whirlwind the souls of those who have sinned without love.
But not only the subjects of love violate the measure of correspondence between passion and the reality of desire. For Dante, the lobsters of life are no less possessed by vicious lusts, and he assigns them the third round of Hell. In the fourth are the witches and the wasting, who torture each other. Epicureans and heretics are punished fairly in the fifth round. Their sufferings are bitter. The pleasure of denying the divine meaning of life is costly. The suicides, turned into dry trunks with loose crowns, occupy the sixth circle of Hell. For every human vice, Dante takes a seat in Hell. Perverse, who have sinned against nature, are placed in the seventh circle, the human cunning is punished in the eighth Circle of Hell, in order to reach the greatest sin, according to Dante, and the traitors. These are moral offenses punishable most heavily in the last ninth round. The Renaissance poet accepts betrayal of the moral decomposition of the soul. This is the darkest abyss of human spiritual Hell. The suffering is great. Count Ugolino, angry with internal anguish, chuckled the head of Bishop Ruggiero. The soul is "writhing", pain "grizzly" consciousness. The betrayal punishes with equal force the souls of both Dante's heroes - real historical figures. They are subjected to inhuman suffering. Their sin can not be redeemed with anything. Both are traitors. They have touched the human in themselves. They have destroyed their humanity. No mercy for their souls. This is the moral retribution of the burdened consciousness. The heaviest punishment for man. The sentence pronounced by him. In the darkest and deepest abyss of Hell is placed Lucifer - the rebellious angel against God. This is a kind of betrayal according to the Christian religion. Lucifer is severely punished.He symbolizes human treason at all. That's why his image is hyperbolic. There are three heads, three mouths. He betrayed the three Divine Principles - Father, Son, and Spirit. Like the traitors Rugieri and Ugolino, Lucifer was the head of three great traitors: Judas, Brutus and Cassius. The universal idea of salvation of man in man protects Dante by triple punishment over the souls of the transgressors of the law of morality and the biblical measure of sin and holiness of thoughts and deeds.
In the cultural history of human civilization, Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" remains the highest model of the poetically suffered truth about the contradictory, dual nature of man. He is free to choose Heaven or Hell of his life, but to have the power to bear the punishment for his unworthy deeds, or by the spiritual humility to accept the gifts of Divine Reason and moral virtue. And that depends only on man. Dante Alighieri warns of the moral crises experienced by previous societies and ages, as he deeply believes in humanity's in the human nature. He is the creator of the Renaissance, and the man for him is the center of the universe.