(c) Let us not be surprised that Dante is so lenient in the punishment of carnal sinners. He assigns a lighter punishment to the unchaste than to the unjust. Back of his plan is a sound theological doctrine. Guilt is to be estimated not simply from the gravity of the matter prohibited to conscience and the knowledge that one has of the evil, but more especially from the malice displayed by the will in its voluntary choosing and embracing the evil. Now impurity, it is held, is often a sin of impulse. It springs from concupiscence, a common human inclination, wrong only when there is inordinateness. Then though a man freely consents to the temptation and thereby commits a grievous sin, his will generally is not overcast with perversion or affected with malice. That being so, Dante in assigning punishment for sins against the virtue of purity is moved by the thought that such sins deserve a milder punishment in Hell, because they may be oftener surprises than infidelities.
To make known the nature of the particular sin he depicts Dante shows us the evil in various phases. First of all it is personified in repulsive demons, the guardians of the circles of Hell. At the very entrance, sits, symbolizing the evil conscience, the sinners' judge "Minos horrific and grins. The ill-born spirit comes before him, confesses all and that sin-discerner (Minos) sees what place in Hell is for it, and with his tail makes as many circles round himself as the degrees he will have it descend." (Inf., V, 2.) In the circle of Gluttony, the sin is symbolized by the three-headed monster Cerberus, "who clutches the spirits, flays and piecemeal rends them."
Plutus, the ancient god of riches—"a cursed wolf"—commands the circle of Avarice. Phlegyas, who in fury set fire to Apollo's temple, is head of the circle of Anger. Symbolizing remorse, the three Furies, in the semblance of women girt with green water snakes, with snakes for hair, and the Gorgon Medusa, representing the heart-hardening effect of sensual pleasures, are found on the fire-glowing towers of the City of Dis, Inner Hell. In the seventh circle presides Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, the symbol of bloodthirsty violence and brutal lust.
Fraud is typified by Geryon, having the face of an honest man and the body of a dragon. Further down giants are seen, emblematic of the enormity of crime. At the very lowest point of Hell is Lucifer, "emperor of the Realm of Sorrow." A gigantic monster, he is imprisoned in ice formed from rivers which freeze by the movements of his bat-like wings flapping in vain efforts to raise himself. To him, as to the source of all evil, flow back all the streams of guilt. As he sinned against the Tri-une God, he is represented with three faces, one crimson, another between white and yellow, and the third black. (XXXIV, 55.)
Not only by such terrible monsters, but by the environment of the condemned sinner, does our poet reveal the hideousness of sin. To mention only the three great divisions of Hell, the abodes of incontinence, bestiality and malice, we find in murky gloom the incontinent whose sin had darkened their understanding. In the City of Dis, red with fire, are the violent and the bestial, who in this life had burned either with consuming rage or unnatural passion; in the frozen circle of malice are those whose sins had congealed human sympathy and love into cold, calculating destruction of trust reposed in them.
But it is principally by depicting the intellectual, the moral and the physical sufferings of the damned that Dante would teach us the nature of sin. To depict physical sufferings the poet was under the necessity of creating provisional bodies for his damned. Without such a poetic device the souls of the reprobate before the resurrection of their bodies cannot be conceived to suffer physically, since they lack the senses and organs of pain. So Dante pictures the damned united to forms shadowy yet real, palpable and visible. They sometimes lose the human semblance and assume more sinister shapes, grovelling as hideous serpents, bleeding and wailing from shrubs and trees, or bubbling in a slushing stream.
In such forms the souls are seen in punishment fitting their sin, on the principle that "by what things a man sinneth by the same he is tormented." (Wisdom XI, 17.) The unchaste because they allowed their reason to be subjected to the hot blasts of passion are now driven by "a hellish storm which never rests; whirling and smiting, it vexes them." (Inf., V, 31.) The gluttonous howl like dogs as hail and rain and snow beat down upon them and Cerberus attacks and rends them. The misers and spendthrifts to whom money was king, now are occupied in rolling huge stones in opposite directions. The wrathful, all muddy and naked, assail and tear one another.
The sullen are fixed in slime and gurgle a dismal chant. The materialist and the heretic, whose existence, Dante holds, was only a living death, are confined in blazing tombs. Murderers and tyrants are immersed in boiling blood.
With poetic justice, suicides are represented as stunted trees lacerated by the beaks of foul harpies. The violent lie supine on a plain of dry and dense sand, upon which descend flakes of fire like "snow in the Alps, without a wind." Usurers—should we call them profiteers?—suffer also from a rain of fire and carry about their necks money bags stamped with armorial designs. Thieves, to remind them of their sneaking trade, are repeatedly transformed from men into snakes, hissing and creeping. Hypocrites march in slow procession with faces painted and with leaden cloaks all glittering with gold on the outside. With such realism does Dante declare the nature of sin and its inevitable consequences.