setrspecials.blogg.se

It is far less categorized than that of Dante’s, and his work is more concerned with telling the origin story of Satan. In Milton’s hell, Satan is also a fallen angel, who was also once “above the rest, in shape and gesture,” and “matchless but with the almighty.” However, his depiction of hell is rather different. Milton’s Satan is profoundly different from that of Dante. Additionally, the fractured and group nature of Dante’s hell, and his putting Satan in the darkest, deepest corner might signify both the highly stratified medieval society he lived in and his fractured, if beloved Italy. It would make sense then that Satan, like all else, gets a very specific punishment that is literally the opposite of all Dante views as good in a physical sense. Catholicism is a very rule-based form of Christianity, even more so in Dante’s time than now in modern day society. This definition is influenced both by Dante’s Catholic theology and his personal situation. It is a likely combination of the physical and abstract into the metaphor of ice which shows Dante’s personal hell: a state of living.

Also what is interesting are the physics of Dante’s Satan. Dante exclaims upon seeing him “If he was once as handsome as he now is ugly and despite that, raised his brows against his Maker, one can understand how every sorrow has its source in him!” This is an exclamation from a narrator who is sometimes unfeeling and numbed in the face of human suffering. He is described to have three heads, and was said to have once been the most beautiful angel until he was cast down to hell by God.

In Inferno, hell is divided up into nine paralel rings, with satan living in a kingdom of ice at the bottom. Their two hells are deeply reflective not just of their theological differences but also of their personal similarities. As such, their depictions of Satan, king of the Christian underworld, differ in many aspects, but in others are fairly similar. Both were solidly middle class and made their livings by writing, and both lived through times of large turmoil in their countries, witnessing personally what many today might define as a sort of hell. The two men were also similar in many ways. He was a deeply religious Protestant who lived through the English Civil war and the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell over the British Isles, serving as an official in the Republican government. John Milton, who wrote the epic poem Paradise Lost on the other hand, was a Protestant writer from London, England. He would be expelled from his own city due to political interest, and much to his irritation, never return.

He wrote his poem, Inferno, in the high middle ages, at a time when Italy was divided into many city-states. Dante Alighieri was a Catholic writer from Florence, Italy. They were in many ways reflective of the dual nature of western Christianity and the split of the Protestant reformation. The Christian canon contains two influential epic poems which have depicted their authors’ visions of hell and Satan.