In any event Dante firmly believed the doctrine of the Hereafter "that they that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire." He held that the punishment of the damned is two-fold. The greater punishment, called the pain of loss, consists in the loss of the Beatific Vision, a suffering so great that the genius of St. Augustine can hardly translate it in human language. "To be separated from God," he says, "is a torment as great as the very greatness of God." The other pain of the reprobate consists in the torment of fire so frequently mentioned in Holy Writ. "According to the greater number of theologians the term fire denotes a material and so a real fire ... (but) there have never been wanting theologians who interpret the scriptural term fire metaphorically as denoting an incorporeal fire and thus far the Church has not censured their opinion" (Cath. Encyclo., VIII, 211.)
While the pain of loss and the pain of sense constitute the very essence of the punishment of Hell, theologians teach that there are other sufferings called accidental. The reprobate never experience v.g. the least real pleasure nor are they ever free from the hideous presence of one another. After the Last Judgment the lost souls will also be tormented by union with their bodies, a union bringing about a fresh increase of punishment. On this subject, for our information Dante addresses Virgil his guide through Hell: "Master, will these torments after the great sentence increase or diminish?" Virgil explains that they will become worse because when the soul is united again to the body there will be perfection of being and the resulting sensitiveness will be the more intense.
"Return unto thy science," answers Virgil, "which wills that as a thing more perfect is the more it feels of pleasure and of pain." (Inf., VI, 40.)
Dante also holds that only by way of exception is there any escape from Hell once a soul is condemned. Following a legend commonly believed in the Middle Ages that in answer to the prayers of Pope Gregory the Great, the soul of the Emperor Trajan was delivered from Hell, Dante assumes that God who could not save Trajan against his will, allowed his soul to "come back to its bones" and while thus united to use its will for salvation. So regenerated Trajan is placed by Dante, in the Heaven of Jupiter (Par. XX 40, 7). Referring to this incident the Catholic Encyclopedia says: "In itself it is no rejection of Catholic dogma to suppose that God might at times by way of exception, liberate a soul from Hell. Thus some argued from a false interpretation of I Peter III, 19 seq. that Christ freed several damned souls on the occasion of His descent into Hell. Others were led by untrustworthy stories into the belief that the prayers of Gregory the Great rescued the Emperor Trajan from Hell but now theologians are unanimous in teaching that such exceptions never take place and never have taken place" (VIII, 209.)
As to the location of Hell it is the poet Dante and not Dante the theologian, as we shall see later, who gives definite place and boundaries to Hell. He knows that on this subject the Church has decided nothing, holding to the statement of St. Augustine: "It is my opinion that the nature of hell-fire and the location of Hell are known to no man unless the Holy Ghost made it known to him by a special revelation."
Dante makes his Hell big enough to hold the majority of mankind. He thinks that the elect will be comparatively few—just numerous enough to fill those places in heaven forfeited by the rebel angels who formed according to his conjecture, about a tenth of the angelical host. That their places in Heaven are already nearly filled leaving little room for future generations Dante makes known in the words of Beatrice:
"Behold our City's circuit, oh how vast
Behold our benches now so full that few
Are they who are henceforth lacking here."
(Par. XXX, 130.)
His theory of restrictive salvation, it may be noted, is not in accord with the teaching of the Church which holds that to every man God gives grace sufficient for salvation. That is true even as affecting the heathen and those living in place or in time far removed from the Cross. St. Thomas Aquinas expresses this doctrine of the Church when he writes: "If anyone who is born in a barbaric nation does what lieth in him, God will reveal what is necessary for salvation, either by internal inspiration or by a teacher."
The farcical element is not wanting in the Inferno, a fact proving that our poet, in furnishing the episodes, not superior to his age which demanded especially in the religious plays presented in the public square the sight of the discomfiture of the devil in scenes provoking the audience to laughter. The best example of such farcicality occurs in the eighth circle, fifth bolgia, where officials, traffickers in public offices, or unjust stewards are immersed in boiling pitch. From time to time when the fiends are not alert the reprobate here come to the surface for a breathing or cooling spell, like dolphins on the approach of a storm darting in the air and diving back again or like frogs with their muzzles alone exposed and their bodies covered by the water, resting on the banks of a stream into which they drop at the first approach of danger.