In Canto XIV Dante and Virgil meet the souls of those who were – and still are – “violent against God.” First they meet the blasphemers, who lie on a vast ring of burning sand. They lay on their backs facing heaven; it was God they blasphemed while living on earth, and now in death they are made to face the throne of the One they detested. Dante’s meeting with Capeaneus tells us much about the state of the soul which riles against God:
Who is that shade that lies, mighty of limb,
Contorted and contemptuous, scorning the flame,
So that the rain seems not to ripen him?
But he himself, soon as he heard me frame
This question to my guide about him, cried:
“That which in life I was, in death I am”.
XIV, 46ff
It is the last line which gives us the key to understanding the rest. For the souls of the damned, the afterlife is merely a confirmation of the choices they have made in life. What one is in life, God will allow to continue after death. Only, you will then see the true form of that choice. Here we see the blasphemer is still “contorted and contemptuous”. As we look ahead, it is helpful to keep in mind this attitude in Hell, and compare it with the attitude of the repentant souls in Purgatory The flames of God become for each of us either a punishment, a purging, or the fire of love. It depends on how one chooses or rejects those flames.
After those who have been violent against God directly, they come across those who have been violent against those things directly arising from God’s creation: the “violent against nature” and the “violent against art”. Dante, holding to a theology of natural law, places in this section of the Inferno those who have offended against nature through homosexual activity. In his view, they have sinned by reversing the course of nature which God intended in creation. As a parallel, an earlier commentator noted that they are paired closely with the usurers. The one group makes sterile and unfruitful that which God intended to be fruitful (against nature), and the latter group takes something which is sterile (money) and makes it artificially “multiply”. It is this false “artifice” of the usurers which causes them to be in the circle of those who offend against “art” in the very broad sense of the word.
In Canto XVII there is a transition. As if to signal that they are about to enter a new region of Hell, Dante and Virgil must make a bit of difficult crossing of a great barrier which divides the seventh from the eight circles of Hell. To make the matter clearer, they are borne downward over the barrier by the monster Geryon. Geryon is described as having the face of a just man, but a the body of a beast and a scorpion like sting in his tail. Here then we will enter the circles of the more malicious sins – those sins which have a “just face”, but conceal poison underneath.
It is this intentional deception in sin which we will now see. These are the circles of fraud, malice, deceit and treason. These are the kinds of sins which we need all our faculties in order to accomplish. These are not the sins into which one merely falls as if by accident. These are the intentional, 'sought-ought' sins - which we all share in one form or another.
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