Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Depiction of Hell.

The Inferno is an allegory to Dante’s journey through life towards salvation. In the story, Dante journeys through the different levels of hell and encounters all forms of chaos in each.

Dante’s depiction of hell complements the teachings of the Bible. One of the most oft-discussed themes in the story is the eternal justice of God. The sinner reaps what he sows during his lifetime. His punishment is intended to fit the gravity of his crime.

A vivid example of this principle is shown in the border of the 8th and 9th circles of Hell. A Count sits on his friend whose brains he rips using his teeth. It was the fault of his friend that he starved to death and was forced to eat his children to survive.

Life, as Dante sees it, is a continuous test or struggle between right and wrong. If you commit sin and falls short of heaven, you reap eternal punishment. Dante believes that to be able to go to heaven, one need to experience hell first. Dante may not mean this in a literal way. Figuratively this means that in order to be purified or to receive salvation, a person needs to undergo sufferings first. This is the moral of the story.

Dante’s depiction of Hell is an allegory of life, the role of religion in our lives and the need to choose right over wrong. It does not stop at depicting the fall of man but rather it help shows the way to salvation and happiness. To be able to reach the summit, you need to start at the bottom. That is the essence of Dante’s depiction of Hell.

At some point in our lives, we all face difficulties, problems, temptations. These drive us to the point of desperation and commit sins. At the lowest ebb of our lives, we are often forced to look back and ask ourselves where we have gone wrong.

By going through Dante’s Inferno we realize the need to ponder on our every step and choose the best way before we hit rock bottom. Dante’s journey begins as he got lost in the wood. As he tries to find his way by following the light in the mountain three beasts block his way. Dante is forced to go back to the forest as Virgil appears in his way and brings him to hell so he can enter paradise. Dante agrees and goes through the gate of hell.

The damned souls in Dante’s The Inferno are grouped according to the degree of malice with which they committed sin. The symbolisms help Dante’s “The Inferno” presents his ideas on the startling reality in a creative way:

Charon the Ferryman of the Dead from Canto 3 (lines 81-4, bottom of page 977). “‘Woe to you depraved souls! Bury/here and forever all hope of Paradise:/I come to lead you to the other shore,/into eternal dark, into fire and ice.’” This symbolism refers to the nature of sin itself and not to any specific sins. Sin separates us from other people. Fire and ice are the effects of sin which could cause anger or being ostracized.

About line 127: “most of the souls of the damned in twilight”. “Souls of the damned in twilight” means that though they exist their souls are really empty. Being punished and doing the same thing over and over again.

The lines about the Gluttons – page 988, about lines 35-8: “We made our way across the sodden mess / of souls the rain beat down, and when our steps / fell on a body, they sank through emptiness. / All those illusions of being seemed to lie / drowned in the slush.” These lines pertain to the facts that people who are the “fattest” are the least substantial which means appearances can be deceiving. Substance is found within the person not on the appearance.

Canto 11, page 998: Virgil explains how one sin can be called by many different names according to what caused the sinner to sin. This is in consonance with his view of the main problem with sin. All sins corrupt the will and mind of the sinner and leads to other sins. When Dante says, “Malice is the sin most hated by God” (about line 23), he is referring not just to the souls found in this place, but to any sin at or below this level. In short, malice is the cause for violence and fraud.

Tyrants and Murderers of Canto 12 as Dante depicts them are a washed in a river of boiling blood guarded by the mythical creatures Centaurs. The souls in this place commit murder due to malice, not because of a desire for personal gain. Or, in another way, it can be said that all desire for personal gain is malice toward others.

The Harpies lines 13-15 of Canto 13 are the perfect creatures to guard and torture the suicides in the Wood of Suicides. This is because the Harpies represent the attitude that causes people to commit suicide. The physical traits of the Harpies symbolize his attitude. “Wide wings” symbolize an overpowering sense of sadness. “Clawed feet” suggest danger or a fearful grip. “Huge bellies” suggest laziness or the lack of will to do things.

The creatures of Cantos 13 & 14 -Suicides, Blasphemers, Sodomites, and Usurers-are not people condemned at all in modern society, but Dante finds them loathsome as attested by the place he assigns them.

The most famous people in Cocytus are Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, whose gruesome story makes up Canto 33. Historical accounts inform us that Ugolino was captured and put to death by Ruggieri. The manner with which he perished was so cruel that Dante deemed it best to tell the world the tragic story.

Ugolino was imprisoned for several months with his four young sons. One day, the doors of the tower were nailed shut. And all four of his sons died due to extreme hunger. In hell, Ugolino is eating and gnawing at Ruggeri’s flesh. This punishment is in consonance with “little Anselmo’s” request to his father: “Thou didst clothe us with this wretched flesh, and it would be less painful if you eat of us.” Ugolino cannot abide by his son’s request and eat their flesh. As he sees each child die one by one he was quoted to have said, “Starvation did what grieving could not do.” Ugolino died. In Hell, he was punished by savagely feasting on Ruggieri’s flesh for eternity.

Ugolino when he was alive betrayed his own party to Ruggieri. Hence, the punishment meted to him in hell. In hell, Ugolino was presented as the victim of Ruggieri. He is both the target of divine justice and the instrument of it, when he punishes Ruggieri.

In Canto 34, the souls of those who betrayed their masters at the bottom of hell – Judas, Brutus, Cassius are seen. They are they frozen in twisted postures to represent the sins they committed which is the ultimate sin of malice.

The image of Satan is quite a surprise. He is depicted to have three faces, which symbolizes the distortion of the Holy Trinity. Dante says that Satan looks ugly despite the fact the he was once an angel, beautiful to look at. Satan seems less powerful than the usual ideas woven about him. He is depicted as dumb and roaring, trapped in the ice, punished just like the other sinners.

Dante’s Inferno is a fascinating tale of sin and redemption. It depicts the need to attain deeper spirituality in an abstract way. Hell represents not just a place for sinners but also a state of a sinner’s soul. To be in hell is to be in utter agony and to be in a state far from God. This story shows us the way to heaven or eternal happiness by keeping the faith and doing what is right. It offers us a chance to re-examine our lives and change for the better.

Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried"

There is a thin line between fact and fiction. This is particularly true in Tim O'Brien's THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. Tim O'Brien expertly dealt with words as he described the atrocities of war in this book.

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" goes beyond the usual fare of war fiction. As a matter of fact it goes beyond fiction despite the fact that the author labeled it as "a work of fiction" on the title page. The book is an amalgamation of several genres - a memoir, a novel, and a collection of short stories.

O'Brien's genius lies in the fact that he turns fiction into something real so much so that the demarcation of fiction and fact in this story is hardly noticeable. You can never tell when the fact ended and the imagination begins. The war fiction is not about the usual war story where gory tales of hatcheted bodies and non-stop killings abound. Instead, one finds a certain attachment to the characters as O'Brien skillfully narrates the emotional and psychological impact of war on them.

Tim contemplated on how he was indecisive about being drafted for the war. The character Tim O'Brien reacts to his draft notice by going to the Canadian border and spends six days in a isolated lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he debates on whether he should evade the draft or accept it. In the end, he decided to go to war not so much he believes in it but more so because he does not want to put his family to shame.

O'Brien explores "the things they carried" both figuratively and literally through the intermittent narration of the lives, even death, of the soldiers comprising the Alpha Company. O'Brien masterfully recounts the emotions going through a soldier during unforgettable moments of his life: his feelings when drafted, his guilt when forced to kill an enemy, his shock at seeing friends or fellow soldiers killed in action and the gnawing feeling of homesickness.

The plot is simple but told several times through different character's point of view, making it appear more complex than it seems. Love is one of the motivating factor for Tim's need to tell the story. Tim O'Brien, the character professes his love for a girl when they were little.

In the end, Tim admitted that his penchant for telling stories and why he needs to do it as he relates his life to the soldiers. He knows it can bring the dead loved ones back to life, as if they are still with us. The soldiers do this to shield them from painful memories of losing a friend or killing a person. Tim, the character, tells stories since he was a child, when he lost the first girl he ever loved to brain tumor. The stories may change -characters, places, and events - but the storyteller keeps the memories alive.

Dinosaur Heresies: A Review

Errors in the scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

One does not need to be addicted to dinosaurs to be able to appreciate from Bakker’s Dinosaur Heresies. Anyone can enjoy this book and gain something from reading it. This book shows why Bakker is one of the top paleontologist of his time and also explained why some of his colleagues are irritated by his theories. The observations he lays on this book will challenge some views held by either his colleagues or the rest of us.

Dinosaur Heresies basically talks about the errors in scientific understanding of dinosaurs. His thesis in The Dinosaur Heresies is that the generally accepted view of dinosaurs is that they are cold blooded, reptilian dullards and an evolutionary dead end. Bakker pointed out that this concept is wrong. As a matter of fact, dinosaurs were one of the most successful groups of land animals in history. The same way that mammals are warmblooded and active today.

To many, this seemed a new, radical idea. But Bakker quickly states that this is not a new idea at all. As a matter of fact, it was the most accepted view from the time the dinosaurs were first discovered until the 1920’s. This correct view however was replaced in the succeeding years particularly around 1920’s to the 1960’s by the foolish view that the dinosaurs were somewhat of a failure. Bakker did not try to explain how this erroneous idea evolved through the years. His focus on this book is primarily centered on the case for his theory of warmblooded dinosaurs rather than discuss the history of dinosaur paleontology.

In the book, Bakker presents his ideas in a clear, methodological method. He first examines the generally accepted theories and concepts to be able to show where its deficiencies are, and to show some evidence against the theory. Bakker does this by not just pointing out the characteristics in the dinosaurs themselves, but also looking at reptiles that are alive today. He compared the dinosaurs to the present-day reptiles and show us where they differe to each other.

After he showed us that the old theories about dinosaurs have serious flaws, he then proceed to show where dinosaurs lived in the past and what they lived on. This is again to show, in great details, the mistakes in the cold blooded theory and the idea that plant eaters like Brontosaurus ate mushy waterplants to be alive. The fact that dinosaurs ate in order to live that proves that if dinosaurs were coldblooded, they would not have needed food as much as warmblooded animals do; Bakker shows that dinosaurs could eat and probably did eat as much as mammals similar to their size do.

He then goes on to explain how the dinosaurs moved and lived. He also examined the relationship between plant eaters and predators. He also pointed out how an arms race erupted a number of times in dinosaur history between armored plant eaters and the very nasty predators. The plant eaters depended heavily on an active, warmblood style of defense instead of the coldblooded “wait it out” defense. In this part of the book Bakker made a controversial claim that there is a possibility that one kind of dinosaurs never died out.

Bakker also looks at the direct evidence for warmbloodedness in dinosaurs by looking at their sex lives, also by their fast rates of growth from hatchling or newborn dinobaby to adult size and the ratio of predators to prey, all of these shows that dinosaurs were indeed warmblooded.

Finally, Bakker puts dinosaurs into their new context, quickly sketching their rise and fall, with the interesting thing being that he does not believe in the idea that the dinosaurs died out due to a meteor impact, an idea that has been largely confirmed since then. He ends the book by argueing that dinosaurs deserve to be taken out of the class Reptilia and there should be a new class created just for them, Dinosauria, with birds as one branch of it, which are the sole surviving dinosaurs.

What The Dinosaur Heresies expounds in the book has now become the new orthodox view of dinosaurs and newer, more up to date books are pushing this view similar to Bakker’s. This book laid the foundation for this revolution in concepts of dinosaur paleontology. Most of the views it holds is still largely correct and it is highly readable and clear. You feel smarter for having read it. And the illustrations, all done by Bakker himself, both proper drawings and sketches showed some incredibly cute looking dinosaurs are very appropriate for the book.

Some of the science in it is subject to debate; but the enthusiasm with which the book is written is infectious. Bakker clearly love discussing all things pertaining to dinosaurs. It jumps around cheerfully from subject to subject, talking about subjects pertaining to dinosaurs such as anatomy, physiology, extinction and much more. The prose is easy to read and very interesting, and Bakker’s own beautiful black-and-white illustrations make it all the more understandable which capture his vision of fast, powerful, active dinosaurs.

Bakker knows that challenging generally accepted ideas requires innovative thinking backed by solid evidence. It’s probably the same problem that Darwin faced when introducing evolution through natural selection. The evidence is there, it simply takes a perceptive eye and logical thinking to point it out clearly.

Bakker is able to do just that in this book. He is also good in writing and presenting his ideas and conclusions. Much of the fossil data has an extensive history. He has a very good ability to make field research understood by a wide spectrum of readers. The evidence and conclusions he presented are clear and unambiguous.

The nice thing about The Dinosaur Heresies is that Bakker provides his reasoning for his thoughts on the dinosaurs in a clear, accessible manner especially for those who are not dinosaur buffs. He discusses lizards and their niches and how this might or might not apply to dinosaurs, moas and how their digestive systems may have mirrored that of Brontosaurus. It helps that Bakker is also a decent artist and can illustrate his ideas well.

There is, for example, a clean and informative drawing of a crane, a stegosaur, and an African elephant, showing leverage points and bracing that lead him to the conclusion that if an elephant can stand on it’s rear legs, then a stegosaur most certainly could; much better ligament bracing down it’s spine, and twice the leverage between spine and hip.

Bakker is also smart enough to admit that his theories are not new. Throughout the book he gives credit to papers published in the last century way before his book came out. He is more concerned about getting the idea right rather than credit.

The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture by Rene Pache: A Review

Where does the bible come from? How can a fallible man have penned an infallible bible?

The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture by Rene Pache scrutinizes and presents facts regarding the inerrancy of the scripture. It addresses such baffling question as how can a fallible man produce an infallible Bible? Then it examines the Bible closely with regards to its views on revelation and its inspiration. It delves on the testimony on the Bible given by Christ and the church centuries ago. Pache then sums up theories brought up regarding the Scripture and finally discusses the supernatural qualities which provide evidence to the divine origin of the Scripture and which back up its authority on the word of God.

The first chapter of the book tackles the Revelation from God. It posed some really important, thought-provoking questions to the readers. “Man on earth is placed in a paradoxical situation. Endowed with intelligence and logic, he seems intended to know the reason for his existence and the meaning of it, as well as the origin of the universe and the person of his Creator. Actually, however, he finds himself surrounded by mysteries. Left to his own devices, he is incapable of answering the questions which press in on him so closely.”

Among these questions that baffles mankind is the infallibility of the Bible. Some people accept the idea that the Bible is the inspired Word of God to some extent. To what degree is the Bible an inspiration of God’s Word? Does it extend to every word?

To this question, Pache has an answer. “The doctrine of plenary inspiration holds that the original documents of the Bible were written by men, who, though permitted to exercise of their own personalities and literary talents, yet wrote Linder the control and guidance of the Spirit of God, the result being in every word of the original documents a perfect and errorless recording of the exact message which God desired to give to man.” (The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, p. 173).

Sometimes biblical writers use a specific phrase or quote or even a single word to prove their point that the Bible is completely God inspired. For instance in Galatians 3:16 the apostle Paul cites Genesis 13:15 and 17:8 when God said to Abraham, “Unto your seed (descendant) will I give this land”. Paul’s whole argument is due to the fact that in this particular line, God uses singular descendant rather its plural noun. Rene Pache, in The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture (p. 77), gives an explanation to this idea. He said that “very often the meaning of a whole passage rests entirely on one word, a singular or a plural number, the tense of a verb, the details of a prophecy, the precision of a promise and the silence of the text on a certain point.”

The inspiration and authority of the Bible are one of the important considerations in learning the truths about God, Christ and salvation. That is why knowing the scope of inspiration in every book and every word of the Scripture is of massive. The way to getting to the heart of the matter however is contained in the pages of the document in question itself, the Bible.

The authority of the Bible then stems from the fact that the Bible is an inspired revelation from God. Pache delves on the questions of revelation and inspiration with regard to the Bible. And by doing so, as he manages to address those questions and establish the source of inspiration, then it necessarily addresses the issue of authority also. In short, by proving its inspiration, the question of authority has been settled. How one looks at the issues on revelation and inspiration will determine how he perceive the Bible’s authority.

Since the written revelation contained in the Bible comes from God and has been recorded under the Spirit’s guidance which makes them “the very breath of God,” it naturally follows that what they contain are therefore authoritative. They gain authority by virtue of the fact that they come from the One Authority on the topic. In essence, this would lead us to conclude and give us the necessary assurance that when thumbed the pages of the Bible, we see and read the inspired Word of God.

We need to keep in mind that the authority of Scripture could not possibly be separated from the authority of God. What the Bible affirms, it follows that God affirms too. And what the Bible affirms (or denies), the affirmation (or denial) is clothe with the authority of God. Theologian Rene Pache states this in his book, as he observes that “if God entirely inspired Scripture (as we have seen that He did), then Scripture is vested with His authority.”

Daddy, Poppies in October, and Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s poem is very popular among scholars and general readers.

Plath’s devotion to her craft is apparent in her works. She commands an insightful voice on her works by being steadfast, honest and direct and not being afraid to openly contemplate our deepest anxieties, complexities, joys, and fears.

“Daddy” fuses Sylvia’s thoughts or raw emotions about her husband and her father. The end of “Daddy,” I can’t help but read “They always knew it was you” as Sylvia saying directly, “I always knew it was you” or “I always knew it was true,” in regard to her husband’s infidelity which he always deny.

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” could mean she had either given up on her marriage or more seriously, her life. That she was at her wit’s end. That she can’t go on anymore. The word “through” portrays both resolve and despair.

In Poppies in October, the setting can be interpreted in many ways: a woman tending to a patient, or a woman fighting for her life. There is a strong reference to woman in the poem. Nature, being one of them. A love gift is another. “By a sky, palely and flamily, Igniting its carbon monoxides,”. This part holds the key to the unraveling of the poem.

Carbon monoxide is pollution caused by automobiles. Plath’s mention of carbon monoxide could mean she was referring to the poisons or toxins in either her life or society. That she was in the midst of some form of negativity.

”Lady Lazarus” is about death, and her love-hate relationship with it. The narrator seemed to grow stronger towards the end of the poem. When Plath called Lazarus a crowned “Lady” could mean an association with female power.

Lazarus was a tale from the Bible. He is the man raised by God from the dead. Plath could be referring to a sense of empowerment she felt as she wrote has risen on her own “out of the ash”, from the dead, without help from God or the doctor, like a pheonix with her “red hair”. She coined “eat men like air” to refer to the women’s growing wield of influence as supported by the fact that she named the poem “Lady Lazarus”.

The Holocaust interpretation could be a powerful theme of this poem. Since she was German, this poem could be a tribute to the helplessness and powerless of the Holocaust victims. It is Plath’s attempt to overcome the horror of human trauma.

The most frequent color in her poems is red. Love and heart are often associated with red. Reds of lighter tones often represents feelings of lust, anger and rage. Deeper reds, on the other hand, could mean love, passion and heat.

Emotions such as distress and sadness are important to the Plath’s poem. Most of her poems revolved around these emotions which everybody can relate to. Hence, the popular appeal it holds to both scholars and general readers alike. Plath seemed to extol the virtues of distress. And instead of repelling it as we wont to do, she enjoins to enjoy the fleeting moment when you are in distress.

Sylvia Plath’s abilities as a writer enable her to amalgamate so many elements: intellectual aspect of learning, personal emotional experiences and general human experiences. All these she imbibed in her poetry. To be able to entwine these disparate elements to her poetry is a testament to her abilities as a poet which intrigue and fuel the imagination of scholars and general readers alike.