Mid-way through his life and faced with an ignominious end, Dante Alighieri wrote his greatest work, The Divine Comedy. We can understand Dante's motive in writing this epic by reading Cantos I through III of Dante's Inferno. The Divine Comedy was a self-analysis by a man who found himself spiritually lost. Immediately in Canto I we see that Dante "the character" is lost on a spiritual level. He awakens mid-way through his life in a …showed first 75 words of 1381 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1381 total…by the utilization of his intellect and his creativity, we the readers have obtained, for all time a great piece of literature and a roadmap to a methodology of self-discovery. The Divine Comedy continues to describe, in rich detail, the decline that would result from ignoring the seeds of sin; however, in writing the Divine Comedy Dante was able to recognize and stop his own spiritual decline down the hill and away from the light.