Explain the concept of contrapasso in The Divine Comedy.

The Italian poet, Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321), wrote the epic narrative poem Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy) over a period from about 1308-1320. Divine Comedy is divided into three parts, and describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso).

In a notable departure from literary tradition in the Middle Ages, Dante wrote Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect of Italian, rather than in Latin. Most texts written at this time were exclusively in Latin. However, Dante reasoned that writing the poem in vernacular Italian would make it more accessible to the general public; only highly educated people could read and understand Latin.

In Inferno, the first part of Divine Comedy, Dante is guided through the nine circles of Hell by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. Prior to Divine Comedy, the general belief was that Hell was a place of eternal regret and suffering for being excluded from God's love. In the Christian tradition, Hell is a "furnace of fire," and is known as "the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matt. 13:50; 25:41). Later in the Bible, it is described as a "lake of fire and brimstone" where sinners will be "tormented day and night forever and ever" (Rev. 20:10).

In Inferno, Dante applies the principle of contrapasso. Sinners are punished according to the nature of the sins they committed.

The concept of contrapasso is widely believed to have originated with Dante, but it actually appears first in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

If a man should suffer that which he did, right justice would be done. (Ethics, Book 5, 5)

Aristotle himself disparaged the concept of contrapasso elsewhere in Ethics, but Dante incorporated it into Divine Comedy in what Aristotle considered its primitive form.

An example of contrapasso is the fate that Lucifer himself suffers. Lucifer attempts to rise above all and rule the world in God's place, but he's thrown into the deepest part of Hell. Instead of being able to rule the world, he's condemned to rule over the souls of the damned.

The term "contrapasso" occurs only once in Divine Comedy, in Canto 28. During this passage, an actual person, Bertran de Born, is forced to carry his own severed head for plotting to separate King Henry II of England from his sons.

Original:

Perch' io parti' così giunte persone,
partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!,
dal suo principio ch'è in questo troncone.
Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso.

Translation:

Because I divided persons so united,
Do I now bear my brain, alas!
Divided from is source, which is in this trunk.
So it is observed in me the suffering of retaliation. (Canto 28.142)

What is the meaning of contrapasso in The Divine Comedy?

The word contrapasso literally means “suffer the opposite,” and it was coined by Dante to describe the punishments of the sinners in Hell and, to some extent, the purification of the souls in Purgatory. What these souls suffer mirrors the sins they committed in life. Let's look at some examples of this.

In the Second Circle of Hell, for instance, the souls had allowed their passions to rule them in life, tossing them here and there. Now in Hell, a great wind blows them. They chose not to control their passions in life, and now they have no control over where they are blown and tossed in death.

In the Fifth Circle, there is a nasty marsh in which those who allowed their wrath to control them must now fight with each other forever, while those who in life were slothful and lazy are stuck submerged in the marsh, unable to move. What they chose freely in life, they are now doomed to repeat in death.

In the Seventh Circle, the violent are submerged in a river of blood, boiled forever in the blood they shed. Here is contrapasso at its most vivid. Yet we see it again in the Ninth Circle, where the traitors are frozen in ice. Wanting to be free, they betrayed those to whom they owed respect and obedience, but now they are imprisoned. The love they owed to people in life was frozen by their selfishness. Now they freeze in Hell.