![]() In a work so grounded in biblical history, it seems strange to assume that Dante would completely reject it in favor of his own invention. There are, of course, problems with both of these approaches. Pearl argues that Dante is breaking away from the popular notion that the severity of a sin is determined by the damage done to society, suggesting instead that a sin is more or less severe because it is more or less offensive to God, not to man (or rather, that each punishment derives from the offensiveness of the sin itself, rather than the suffering of its victims). In Dante’s poem, punishments must arise from the crime itself, not from the damage it has caused” (paragraph 7). Matthew Pearl, in his article “Dante and the Death Penalty,” argues that, “ contrapasso differs drastically from the biblical principle of ‘an eye for an eye,’ with which it’s sometimes confused. Another camp, however, contends that Dante is attempting to redefine completely the popular image of hell. These scholars firmly believe that Dante wanted only to properly apply the pre-established standard of justice to his interpretation of hell. For example, Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez in their notes on Inferno argue that Dante’s portrayal of divine retribution is clearly derived from “the biblical law of retaliation,” better known as “an eye for an eye” (448). Some of the most interesting of these focus on the relationship between Dante’s unique form of justice and the traditional, biblical sense of justice. As is to be expected with such a complicated concept, many interpretations of this interplay between sin and punishment have been proposed. ![]() In fact, Dante scholar Lino Pertile notes, “the ways in which works in the narrative are as many as the sins, if not as many as the sinners, to which it is applied” (70-73). These punishments, however, are rarely simple or obvious and are usually metaphorically rather than literally related to their respective sins. It is the one “law of nature” that applies to hell, stating that for every sinner’s crime there must be an equal and fitting punishment. Contrapasso is one of the few rules in Dante’s Inferno. ![]()
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