Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Perfection of God’s Justice
Dante creates an imaginative correspondence between a
soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment he or she receives in Hell.
The Sullen choke on mud, the Wrathful attack one another, the Gluttonous
are forced to eat excrement, and so on. This simple idea provides
many of Inferno’s moments of spectacular imagery
and symbolic power, but also serves to illuminate one of Dante’s
major themes: the perfection of God’s justice. The inscription over
the gates of Hell in Canto III explicitly states that God was moved
to create Hell by Justice (III.7).
Hell exists to punish sin, and the suitability of Hell’s specific
punishments testify to the divine perfection that all sin violates.
This notion of the suitability of God’s punishments figures
significantly in Dante’s larger moral messages and structures Dante’s Hell.
To modern readers, the torments Dante and Virgil behold may seem
shockingly harsh: homosexuals must endure an eternity of walking
on hot sand; those who charge interest on loans sit beneath a rain
of fire. However, when we view the poem as a whole, it becomes clear
that the guiding principle of these punishments is one of balance.
Sinners suffer punishment to a degree befitting the gravity of their
sin, in a manner matching that sin’s nature. The design of the poem
serves to reinforce this correspondence: in its plot it progresses
from minor sins to major ones (a matter of degree); and in the geographical
structure it posits, the various regions of Hell correspond to types
of sin (a matter of kind). Because this notion of balance informs
all of God’s chosen punishments, His justice emerges as rigidly
objective, mechanical, and impersonal; there are no extenuating
circumstances in Hell, and punishment becomes a matter of nearly
scientific formula.
Early in Inferno, , Dante builds a great
deal of tension between the objective impersonality of God’s justice
and the character Dante’s human sympathy for the souls that he sees
around him. As the story progresses, however, the character becomes
less and less inclined toward pity, and repeated comments by Virgil
encourage this development. Thus, the text asserts the infinite
wisdom of divine justice: sinners receive punishment in perfect
proportion to their sin; to pity their suffering is to demonstrate
a lack of understanding.
Evil as the Contradiction of God’s Will
In many ways, Dante’s Inferno can be seen as a kind of
imaginative taxonomy of human evil, the various types of which Dante
classifies, isolates, explores, and judges. At times we may question
its organizing principle, wondering why, for example, a sin punished
in the Eighth Circle of Hell, such as accepting a bribe, should
be considered worse than a sin punished in the Sixth Circle of Hell,
such as murder. To understand this organization, one must realize
that Dante’s narration follows strict doctrinal Christian values.
His moral system prioritizes not human happiness or harmony on Earth but
rather God’s will in Heaven. Dante thus considers violence less evil
than fraud: of these two sins, fraud constitutes the greater opposition
to God’s will. God wills that we treat each other with the love he
extends to us as individuals; while violence acts against this love, fraud
constitutes a perversion of it. A fraudulent person affects care and
love while perpetrating sin against it. Yet, while Inferno implies these
moral arguments, it generally engages in little discussion of them. In
the end, it declares that evil is evil simply because it contradicts
God’s will, and God’s will does not need further justification.
Dante’s exploration of evil probes neither the causes of evil, nor
the psychology of evil, nor the earthly consequences of bad behavior.
Inferno is not a philosophical text; its intention is not to think
critically about evil but rather to teach and reinforce the relevant
Christian doctrines.
Storytelling as a Way to Achieve Immortality
Dante places much emphasis in his poem on the notion of
immortality through storytelling, everlasting life through legend
and literary legacy. Several shades ask the character Dante to recall
their names and stories on Earth upon his return. They hope, perhaps,
that the retelling of their stories will allow them to live in people’s
memories. The character Dante does not always oblige; for example,
he ignores the request of the Italian souls in the Ninth Pouch of
the Eighth Circle of Hell that he bring word of them back to certain
men on Earth as warnings. However, the poet Dante seems to have
his own agenda, for his poem takes the recounting of their stories
as a central part of its project. Although the poet repeatedly emphasizes
the perfection of divine justice and the suitability of the sinners’
punishments, by incorporating the sinners’ narratives into his text
he also allows them to live on in some capacity aboveground.
Yet, in retelling the sinners’ stories, the poet Dante
may be acting less in consideration of the sinners’ immortality
than of his own. Indeed, Dante frequently takes opportunities to
advance his own glory. Thus, for example, in Canto XXIV, halfway
through his description of the Thieves’ punishment, Dante declares
outright that he has outdone both Ovid and Lucan in his ability
to write scenes of metamorphosis and transformation (Ovid’s Metamorphoses focuses entirely on transformations; Lucan wrote the Pharsalia, an
account of the Roman political transition and turmoil in the first century b.c.). By claiming to have surpassed two of the classical poets
most renowned for their mythological inventions and vivid imagery,
Dante seeks to secure his own immortality.
