It is not to be expected that any reader will believe that Dante's Hell
is a photograph of reality. It is a Hell largely fashioned by poetic
visions and political theories, peopled in a great measure by those who
stand in opposition to the poet's theory of government. It is not, as is
sometimes asserted, a place to which the poet consigns his personal
enemies. As Dinsmore says: "Dante had too much greatness in his soul and
too much pride (it may be) to make revenge a personal matter: he had
nothing but contempt for his own enemies and never except in the case of
Boniface VIII ... did he place a single one of them in the Inferno, not
even his judge Cante Gabriella."
Though largely colored by his political theories Dante's Hell is also a
theological conception based on the teaching of the Catholic Church that
Hell exists as a place or state of punishment for the rebel angels and
for man dying impenitent, that is, for man in whom sin has become so
humanized that death finds him not simply in the act or habit of sin but
so transformed that in the striking words of Bossuet, "he is man made
sin." Dante fully accepted that doctrine which had been the constant
tradition and faith of the Church and had been reaffirmed in the second
ecumenical Council of Lyons held when Dante was a boy, nine years of
age.
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