Three Beasts -Madison Flowers
I do not know about you guys, but I am absolutely in love
with this book. I really cannot put it down and I would be lying if I said that
have not read ahead… sorry, not sorry. I am enthralled by Dante’s vision of
Hell and would love to have been able to know what he was thinking, what was
going on in his head, as he wrote this book and why he even decided to write it
in the first place.
I do have a question about one specific section of canto 1. As
Dante is wondering about in the woods, trying to get to the light, three beasts
thwart his attempt to climb up the hill to the light. They were a leopard, a
lion, and a she-wolf. I think we can all come to the conclusion that the
lighted path represents God or salvation (correct me if I am wrong). In the
first few lines of the book, he says “for I had wandered from the straight and
true.” I take this to mean that he wondered from the
way of the Lord and is trying to find his way back. The three beasts are obviously
symbolic of something, but of what I have no clue. I honestly cannot figure it
out. The only conclusion I can form is that they may be three specific
sins that are holding him back from “the straight and true” but what sins are
they? As I was researching this question, I came across an article that brought
up the verse Jeremiah 5:6 and it says,
“Therefore a lion from
the forest shall strike them down;
A wolf from the
desert shall devastate them.
A leopard is watching
their cities;
Everyone who goes out
of them shall be torn to pieces,
Because their
transgressions are many,
Their apostasies are
great.”
This verse is talking about how the people of Jerusalem have
strayed from the path of the Lord (what’s new) and how the Lord had to judge
them for their sins. Based on this information, what do you guys think the
three beasts represent?
I commented on Zelda and Moriah's posts
I couldn't remember the verse where I had read about these three beasts but thank you for researching and sharing it here! The footnote from my ESV Study Bible says the beasts in that verse probably represent different forms of judgement, though I'm not sure that's what Dante intended in his writing. Hmm.maybe they *were* actually consequences of Dante straying from God.
ReplyDeleteThey definitely represent something, just like everything else in this book. Most people in the Middle Ages would have recognized Dante's Biblical reference here. Maybe they knew what the beasts were supposed to represent. I did find someone who said that the wolf represents greed, the lion represents pride, and the leopard represents lust. Another interpretation is that the three beasts foreshadow the three levels of hell, namely incontinence, violence, and fraud. Yet another interpretation says that they represent political powers, namely Rome, France, and Florence. I have no idea which of these (if any) are right. Knowing Medieval writing, it's probably all of them at once.
ReplyDeleteI've read some commentaries on the Jeremiah passage in the past that claim the three beasts could be either sins, or specific oppressive nations/dangers/any number of unfortunate punishments to which Israel was and would continue to be subjected when it strayed from God. There's a part of me that sees this interpretation as slightly more fitting... Dante was on the straight and narrow path, but he left it and found himself in the dark, crooked maze. The sins are what would have caused him to leave the path, but we can be sure that he didn't see savage predators on the side of the road and decided to follow them down (disclaimer: I am aware that sin doesn't look like a killer when it first tempts you, but Dante doesn't offer any symbolism for enticing forms of sin). So if the animals represent sin, they are the reason he left the straight and narrow. But if the beasts represent oppressive nations, punishing powers, then they're the RESULT of leaving the straight path. From what I can tell, this interpretation is what the jury leans towards in the Jeremiah passage. In Dante, I'm inclined to think the same--or, like Eliza said, that they're political forces threatening anyone who lets himself get caught up in the things of the world over Christ.
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