It is an accepted fact within many schools of thought that, Dante's
             Inferno is a groundbreaking work that set a standard for its genre and also
             demonstrated many new visual and psychological concepts about the after
             life. Yet, it is also clear that the Inferno is a product of its time and
             must be judged within the context of it. Within the work there are
             countless demonstrations of both conformity and departure from the
             classical Christian moral and ethical view upon sin and punishment but one
             of the most striking conformities is with regard to the idea of divine
             right, in the sense that politics were guided and backed by God.
             "First he must descend through Hell (The Recognition of Sin), then he
             must ascend through Purgatory (The Renunciation of Sin), and only then
             may he reach the pinnacle of joy ..." (Dante, Ciardi 3)
             Dante's Inferno is clearly an example, on a grand scale of the thoughts and
             standards of his time, as well as a culmination of the classical ideals
             associated with philosophy, sometimes conforming to Christian ideals but
             often departing from it. In many ways the work can be seen as one of the
             first applications of what we like to think of as the renaissance work of
             reinterpretation of Greco-Roman Philosophy, a genre that in Dante's time,
             much of which was only recently accepted by the Roman Catholic Church as
             being anything other than the heathen words of the pagans.
             Within the front matter of the Ciardi translation of Purgatory, a
             previous beloved book of the Divine Comedy, there is a clear demonstration
             of the roots of Dante's quest. Seeing corruption abound within the church,
             he wondered how any man could even dream to reach salvation:
             What hope was there that men in general might be persuaded to a just
             life in this world and salvation in the next when they saw their
             spiritual leaders behave in such a way' Surely such a...