Why does dante choose to punish the ‘indifferent’

JFK repeated the line over the years as one of his favorite sayings when denouncing inaction at times of moral crisis.

Martin Luther King Jr. Showing up on BlackLivesMatter as early as , its usage proliferated in the two-week period following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, It is within this context—and in this period—that Gov.

Lewis repeated these words in an essay he wrote shortly before his death this July. Please tell us your thoughts.

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Ideas journalism with a head and a heart. This leads to extraordinary richness in the depiction of character. Whereas, in the Inferno , the sinners met by Dante tended to be fixed in the habits of thought which led them to sin, in the Purgatorio Dante faces the challenge of depicting souls who are in a process of change.

It is also a place of prayer. Throughout Purgatory, hymns and psalms are sung, and prayers are said. Its geographical location is also hugely inventive. For Dante, the Garden of Eden is placed at the top of Purgatory. Dante imagines that Eden is at the very antipodes of —the opposite side of the world from--Jerusalem. This is not a casual choice: for in doing so, Dante imagines that the place where mankind incurred guilt from original sin lies on the same axis as the place where salvation from original sin was won by Christ in the Crucifixion.

Original sin and salvation are therefore strongly linked. This link between the Garden of Eden and Purgatory is, as far as scholars have been able to ascertain, without precedent in theology and literature.

Earlier versions of Purgatory had imagined that devils inflicted torments on the souls suffering there. But Dante imagined Purgatory as a place of moral change, as well as uffering. In keeping with this, his Purgatory has angels in the place of devils. Finally, Dante invents an entirely new region of Purgatory. As you will remember, Hell had a region which was invented by Dante, where the indifferent were punished described in Inferno III. This was outside of Hell itself. Count Ugolino proceeds to describe a tragedy in which Ruggieri imprisoned him and his four sons simply because Ruggieri viewed Ugolino as a political enemy.

While imprisoned, Ugolino witnessed his sons die of starvation. Ace your assignments with our guide to Inferno! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Why did Dante write the Inferno?

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