In lecture we discussed the lovers Paolo and Franchesca who were doomed to eternity together in the 2nd circle of hell. Paolo and Franchesca’s eternal life together in Hell appears to fulfill the lovers’ wishes, but in fact it is a punishment. This punishment is known as contrapasso, literally meaning “counter-suffering.”
In Dante’s Inferno, Dante depicts hell as a place of sin unmasked, where people eternally suffer through continued, eternal acts of the same sinning they committed on Earth and failed to repent while they lived. Sin, in Dante’s society, refers to a human perversion of God’s given gifts. The most basic category of sin described in Inferno is incontinence – a lack of self control. In Canto V, those who were incontinent with sexual desire are punished. Incontinence is a vitriolic sin as it rejects God’s gift to humanity of reason, a gift not given to other creatures on Earth. We are humans, not pigs, yet sinners of incontinence treat themselves as pigs, subjecting reason to desire. In relation to Francesca and Paula, Francesca did not recognize her own humanity, and succumbed to the temptation of
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Honor’s supremacy over other crimes in Viking culture is very similar to sin’s primacy over crime in medieval Christianity. Christianity holds sin, an offense against God, as the most serious of crimes. Sin separates a man from God, removes his communion with God, and threatens those that sin with eternal damnation. Man’s possibility of eternal damnation makes intercession of vital importance. Intercession, the act of intervening on behalf of another, was a practice done by church Bishops with the hopes of realigning criminals’ relationship with God. Intercession led to more just outcomes, as it introduced a rehabilitative form of punishment, by leading criminals towards God instead of using force as retribution, common in secular