Punishment In Dante's Inferno

Although the purpose of the punishments in Dante's Inferno may be unclear, their overall methodology and structure seems straightforward. There are many concentric rings, each with a sin or set of sins associated with them, and a punishment for each sin. When sinners die they are consigned to the place which is designated to appropriately punish the particular kinds of sin that they committed during their lifetime. As Dante descends to lower circles, we see that the punishments get worse and worse, so that more severe punishments are made to correspond to more morally despicable sins. In all cases, it is the sins of a person that place that person at each level of Hell.
Each particular punishment is then chosen to reflect the nature of the
Everyone sins to some extent in different areas. Christian doctrine certainly does not allow for the possibility that people live their lives with no sins whatsoever, or even no sins save one. Thus when Virgil says that the individuals in Limbo "sinned not" (IV.34), on the literal face of it what he is saying cannot possibly be the belief of Dante, the author, as a Christian. That would be to ascribe to the souls in this circle an unbelievable life of perfection. Even if their fault does deny them Paradise, still to say these people never behaved lustfully or gluttonously or were never wrongfully angry defies credulity. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Therefore that cannot be the sense in which we interpret Virgil's words. Even treachery admits of matters of degree. Who has not committed some act that was somewhat disloyal to their family or to someone rightfully in charge of them? Virgil himself tells us that Fraud, the sin of the Eighth and Ninth circles, "gnaws every conscience" (XI.52). It thus must be admitted that the question of placement in Hell is based not on a checklist of sins committed, but rather is based on which sin defines ones essential character. But this hints at something else going on besides the mere act or passion of sin itself. Suicide is not a matter of degree. If the suicides represented in the circle of Lust are such that their lives were not really about
In order to see what general ideas Dante is presenting about Hell, it is necessary to argue from circles in which his purpose is more clear to those that are less clear. At the very end of the Inferno, Dante gives us the last scene of Hell, the lake of sinners frozen in ice, and Satan himself stuck helplessly at the center of the universe. As the last stunning image of Hell, it is plausible that this image represents not only this particular circle of Traitors, but is also an image of what Hell is in general. The Ninth circle is the most vivid picture of something true of all the circles, which is that the sinners are stuck in place, frozen and unable to move because of their sin. All the sinners are stuck wherever they are located in Hell. This is what damnation means. It is not committing sin as such, but being stuck or trapped in sin. In the less severe circles, there is more motion within the confines of their punishment (and thus less damnation or "stuckness"), but all of the damned are stuck in their rut or pattern of behavior that characterized their sin in life. This then shows us that the Inferno is not exactly about sin, but about why individuals remain in sin. Dante does tell us about sin in a more general way--in a different part of the Divine Comedy. In the Purgatorio, Dante uses the model of the seven deadly sins as the root causes of misbehavior to figure out the nature of different sins and how to repent