(XXXIV, 55.)
Not only by such terrible monsters, but by the environment of the
condemned sinner, does our poet reveal the hideousness of sin. To
mention only the three great divisions of Hell, the abodes of
incontinence, bestiality and malice, we find in murky gloom the
incontinent whose sin had darkened their understanding. In the City of
Dis, red with fire, are the violent and the bestial, who in this life
had burned either with consuming rage or unnatural passion; in the
frozen circle of malice are those whose sins had congealed human
sympathy and love into cold, calculating destruction of trust reposed in
them.
But it is principally by depicting the intellectual, the moral and the
physical sufferings of the damned that Dante would teach us the nature
of sin. To depict physical sufferings the poet was under the necessity
of creating provisional bodies for his damned. Without such a poetic
device the souls of the reprobate before the resurrection of their
bodies cannot be conceived to suffer physically, since they lack the
senses and organs of pain. So Dante pictures the damned united to forms
shadowy yet real, palpable and visible. They sometimes lose the human
semblance and assume more sinister shapes, grovelling as hideous
serpents, bleeding and wailing from shrubs and trees, or bubbling in a
slushing stream.
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