" "Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere
mind," says James Russell Lowell, "would have been the modern theory
which deals with sin as involuntary error." To Dante sin is the greatest
evil of the world--not only because it is the source of all other evils,
but because it is at once the denaturing of man--the damned are
characterized as "the woeful people who have lost the good of the
understanding" (Inf., III, 18), and it is also a defiance of God. Sin,
then, is Atheism--a rejection of God, with a conviction that pleasure or
happiness can be attained outside of God, independent of God and in
opposition to God. Apart from the inspired writers of Holy Writ it is
doubtful whether any other writer ever had such an awful sense of sin
and such a vivid vision of sin and its consequences as Dante has given
to the world in a picture which has burned terror into the thought of
man.
To show us that life is a warfare against sin, Dante gives us several
striking pictures of temptation and heavenly deliverance from evil. At
the very beginning of the Divine Comedy, we see his ascent to the
mountain of the Lord barred by Lust, Pride and Avarice represented by a
leopard, a lion, and a wolf. He is victorious over those enemies of his
salvation because Reason (Virgil) and Beatrice (Revelation) come to his
aid.
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