Dante's Journey Through Hell

The definition of sin is the immoral act considered to be a transgression against God or the divine law. The desires that we are faced with, completely go against what God’s will is and what he has in store for us. Everyone struggles with different temptations of their own and how to overcome them. Every single person battles through their own type of sin, in Dante’s case, he is literally walking through hell and all the different layers of sin. People have their own ways to overcome the temptation and sin they are faced with, but no matter how hard we try, your desires and temptation always gets the best of us and we end up sinning. In Colossians 3:5-6 it says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.” By saying this it is implying that sin is very bad and it doesn’t follow the natural law that God intended for us. God created a perfect world for us to live in and sin took it over. In Dante’s Inferno, Dante discussed what each sin is and how they are ranked, how inferno is symbolized, and how the sin affected him.  

Dante arranges hell in nine different layers of sin. As each layer passes, the sin becomes worse. The layers of hell are limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. Each layers punishment is determined on what sin and it reflects on what the person did in their lifetime. The first layer is limbo, where the people who never knew God would go. They are punished by living in an inferior kind of heaven. People who are lustful are punished by winds blowing them so they never get rest. Gluttony is where people have a habitual greed and they are punished in a storm of cold rain. The next layer of hell is greed, they have to roll boulders at one another. The wrathful are punished by being forced to fight one another in the river Styx. Heretics are people who believe opposite of God and they are punished by being confined to tombs of fire. “This is the lowest and the blackest place, / the farthest from the Heaven that turns all things.” (9.28-29). The seventh layer is violence, and it is divided in three groups depending on how they harmed. They were punished by a river of boiling blood and burning rain. Fraud is the next layer and it is divided in to ten sublayers. The last layer of hell is treachery and is divided into four sublayers according to how serious the sin was. As you get further down in hell, and further away from God, the sin gets worse, as you can see.

There are several symbols that stick out in Inferno. “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wilderness, / for I had wandered from the straight and true.” (1.1-3). Dante reveals that he has gone off the path toward God, which is the path of virtue, repentance, and forgiveness. He is to take the much longer, and difficult path to find his way back to God. This path represents Dante’s journey to grow as a person and find his way back to God for forgiveness. The next symbol is the darkness in the wilderness. I believe darkness represents his distance from God, who is the light. Matthew 5:14 states, “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.” This suggests that God is the light and you will be in darkness if you stray from him. As Dante goes through his journey in hell, the light is dim but it gets a little brighter, until the very end when he sees the stars he knows that he made it through hell and was on the right path again. The last symbol that I think is important is Dante’s ascent and descent. Dante has to go through hell before he can get to heaven, so as he descends in hell, he gets further away from God. There are small obstacles that Dante has to get over in hell that are hard for him to do, which shows how difficult it is to get back on the right path once you step off of it.

During Dante’s journey through hell, he starts to feel for the shades in hell. When Dante first got to hell, he felt for them. But the farther down they go he felt more sadness for each of the shades. “I alone remained, Girding myself to bear and battle through / the journey, and pity of my heart - / which memory never straying shall recount.” (2.4-6). He started to understand their punishment that they were going through because of the sins they committed on earth. Once Dante started getting emotional, Virgil was trying to get him out of there as fast as he could. Virgil saw the negative effect that it had on him. “When I looked on our human image there / so gone awry and twisted, that the eyes / shed tears that trickled down the buttocks’ crack. / I leaned upon an outcrop of the bridge / and surely wept; I wept so, that my guide / said, ‘Even now, with all the other fools! / Here pity lives the best when it is dead.’” (20.22-28). Pity is when you feel bad because there is no other option, they are stuck. They have no other chance for salvation. This quote can be used to warn people with what they do and how they should think twice before reacting to their temptations. There is no point in pitying someone who can change their fate.

1 John 1:7-9 states, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Sin is a real thing and there are real consequences for what you do. Dante shows us this when he travels through every layer of hell. Every sin that he shows us has an equal consequence to it. For example, in gluttony, they are forced to consume waste. Even though this is a fictional poetic work, Dante gives us a real depiction of the ramifications of one’s sin and how they will spend their after life.