For reasons now unfathomable, as a freshman in high school I read Dante's Inferno. Remembering little to nothing of that first journey through the horrors of Hell, I recently decided it was time to begin the great poem again. This time I wouldn't stop at the frozen center of Hell where Satan, immersed in ice, forever gnaws the great traitors — Judas, Brutus, and Cassius — but continuing on through Purgatory to Heaven. The Divine Comedy is strong medicine about sin, suffering, and salvation.

The Divine Comedy, as you may have guessed, is not a comedy in the sense that Seinfeld or The Simpsons are comedy. It's a comedy in the medieval sense (Dante lived from 1265 to 1321). While a tragedy is a drama with a tragic ending, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending. And the happy ending comes in spite of struggles, pains, and miseries along the way — three things that marked Dante's life.

Born in the prosperous Italian city of Florence, Dante was a great success and the young poet seemed destined to continuing literary, military, and political achievement. Then he publicly opposed Pope Boniface VIII for his expansionistic policies and his role in secular politics. He was accused of fraud and corruption and forced to leave his beloved city along with his family, wealth, and social position, earning himself a death sentence should he return. He lived the rest of this life roaming from court to court, from one patron to the next. In the introduction to Hell Dorothy Sayers writes:

He had lost love and youth and earthly goods and household peace and citizenship and active political usefulness and the dream of a decent world and a reign of justice. He was stripped bare. He looked outwards upon the corruption of the Church and Empire, and he looked inwards into the corruption of the human heart; and what he saw was the vision of Hell. And, having seen it, he set himself down to write the great Comedy of Redemption and of the return of all things by the Way of Self-Knowledge and Purification, to the beatitude of the Presence of God.¹

Like other allegories of redemption — A Pilgrim's Progress for example — it is set as a journey and Hell begins with the lament of a wanderer.

Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. (I.1-3)²

The next morning, he spies the mountain of God in the distance and begins the long trek out of the valley. But as he labors uphill, three beasts bar his way. They are a leopard "nimble and light and fleet," a lion "head high, with ravenous hunger raving," and a wolf:

... gaunt with the famished craving
Lodged ever in her horrible flank,
The ancient cause of many men's enslaving. (I.49-51)

The three beasts represent three categories of sin. The leopard is self-indulgent sin for which the lustful, the gluttonous, hoarders and spendthrifts, and the wrathful suffer in the outer circles of Hell. The lion is violent sins, the second major division of Hell comprising circles for those who committed violence against reason (heretics), against neighbors, against self (suicides), and against God, art, and nature. Finally the wolf is sins of fraud, that is, of willfully deceiving others: seducers, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves, deceivers, and, in the lowest part of Hell, traitors.

These categories are roughly analogous to the three types of sinners we meet in Proverbs: the self-indulgent simpleton, the self-centered fool, and the malicious mocker.

The three beasts back Dante down the valley away from the life of God. Sin is active, not passive. It actively prevents us from going to God, it frustrates our attempts to purify our lives, and drives us to despair. In the dark valley and without hope, Dante meets his guide, Virgil, the chief poet of the Roman Empire.

John Bunyan in writing A Pilgrim's Progress names his characters for the part they play in the allegory. So the pilgrim whose name is Christian meets Evangelist, Mr. Worldlywise, Giant Despair, Hopeful, Faithful, and others. Dante takes a different approach. Virgil could have been named "Reason" or "Mr. All-the-Best-Things-in-the-Classical-World." Instead he is the historic character who, to Dante's readers, represented those things.

The same is true throughout the Comedy. When Dante and Virgil see the souls guilty of violence against neighbor, they don't see "General Merciless" or "Mr. Lovemurder." Instead they see tyrants and killers whose names were as familiar in Dante's day as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are in ours. Having caused rivers of blood to flow, they are immersed in a boiling river of blood forever (the doom perfectly fitting the crime).

Virgil, sent by divine grace, guides Dante through Hell and, by analogy, through his own soul. The way of redemption doesn't lie in a simple hike out of the dark valley to the mountain of God. The way is a descent into the Hell within through an understanding of where our sins inevitably lead: to greater sin and suffering.

The outer circles of Hell, Sayers writes, "are devoted to those who sinned less by deliberate choice of evil than by failure to make resolute choice of the good. Here are sins of self-indulgence, weakness of will, and easy yielding to appetite...."³ These circles illustrate a terrifying fact about sin: sin is progressive.

In their circle of Hell adulterers, having been blown about by winds of passion and appetite in this life, are blown with their partners by an evil wind that never lets them rest. In the next circle are gluttons whose passion and appetite are as strong as those of the lustful, but lack any sense of community. And so the gluttons are oblivious to others as they wallow in filth and are devoured by a relentless appetite in the form of Cerberus, a ravenous three-headed dog.

The next circle holds hoarders and spendthrifts who joust with each other. No longer satisfied with the solitary gorging of the gluttons, they are keenly aware of what others have and fight them for it. Then in the next circle of this progressive journey, the wrathful, plunged in hot mud, attack each other for no reason at all.

In the same way, Judas didn't suddenly betray Jesus. The human soul needs to build up to that. Earlier Judas made a show of care for the poor (hypocrisy), but as keeper of the disciples' money he helped himself (theft) (John 12:6). These were two steps along the way from lesser to greater sins and, finally, to treason. As sinners, we are invariably drawn downward as committing one sin softens us up to commit more.

For Dante, Hell is not, as Dorothy Sayers puts it, "a place of punishment to which anyone is arbitrarily sent: it is the condition to which the soul reduces itself by a stubborn determination to evil, and in which it suffers the torments of its own perversion."⁴

Our experience tells us this is true. When we've acted the hypocrite, saying or doing the "right" thing knowing in our hearts it was wrong, we look wonderful on the outside, but inside we feel the heavy weight of our duplicity. And so the unsaved hypocrites parade around their circle of Hell dressed in splendid robes — lined with a crushing weight of lead.

Or when we betray a friend we learn that treason is an icy cold sin and so Dante places traitors in the deepest pit of Hell frozen in a river of ice.

As a meditation on sin and its consequences, Dante's Hell is a wake-up call. When John Wesley saw a sin-ravaged man on the street, he remarked to a companion, "There but by the grace of God go I." Dante leaves me feeling that way. Lust, gluttony, wrath, hypocrisy, deception, treachery — I'm guilty of every sin from the blustery circle of the lustful to the frigid circle of the treacherous. The architecture of Dante's Hell is the architecture of the human heart. But for the grace of God — his gifts of repentance and faith — the leopard, lion, and wolf will drive us all lower and lower down the pit to suffer the torments we've chosen.

Dante helps me hate and fear sin in a new way just as he helps me love and treasure the Cross in a new way. His meditation is hard reading and strong medicine — medicine that in the feel-good Church of the 21st century, we desperately need to take. For it's only after we journey through the Hell within and "come forth, to look once more upon the stars" (XXIV.139) that we begin to appreciate God's goodness to us in our redemption through Christ.

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NOTES

1. Dorothy L. Sayers, "Introduction," in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Hell, Dorothy L. Sayers, trans. Penguin Books (1949), page 49.
2. The Roman numeral refers to the Canto (chapter) and the Arabic numerals to the lines. Quotations from the Comedy are taken from the Dorothy L. Sayers translation.
3. Sayers, page 101.
4. Sayers, page 68.