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• Unforgiven sin diminishes sinners, depriving them of their very humanity, whereas Christian virtues enable people to develop into the full stature God intended them to have.
  
  

These principles must not be confused with the sometimes peculiar and eccentric images Dante uses to convey them.

God as Dante envisions him is no petty tyrant or vindictive divinity, as some cursory readers have concluded. Nor is Dante, writing as a political exile, a bitter curmudgeon gleefully assigning his friends to heaven and his enemies to hell.

Instead, the Divine Comedy presents a vision of the love of God evident in his government of the universe and in his grace expressed to humankind. The poem explores the central issues affecting the meaning and purpose of life and culminates in consuming praise for the wisdom of God's ways.

One should not assume, however, that it is a great theological treatise buried within a curiously medieval narrative or an intellectual puzzle to decipher. Dante is doing his utmost to engage our imaginations. The Divine Comedy is first of all an engaging story and should be read as one would read a novel, fully imagining the images and identifying with Dante the character as he gives testimony of how he was led on a complete tour of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

In his famous opening lines, Dante introduces himself as a middle-aged man who was lost in a wilderness, having wandered from the right path:

Ay me! How hard to speak of it—that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! The mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.

(Inferno, I.4-9)

The reader readily understands the allegorical level: Dante has sinned and is filled with distress and deep regrets. Whatever moral waywardness he had lapsed into, he profits from the experiences by coming to understand through them the nature of God. He acquires this knowledge, and shares it with his readers, as we travel with him through the realms of the afterlife.

Dante casts himself as an all-too-human pilgrim. He often seems just as bewildered as his readers by what he sees and learns from his guide Virgil, the image of the wisdom available to the natural man.

Virgil has been sent by the heavenly Beatrice, who allegorically represents the love of God expressed to humankind. The wisdom these two guides impart brings ecstasy to Dante the pilgrim, just as Christian truth thrills the soul and transforms it.

Because Dante at the beginning of the poem is astray in a "rough and stubborn forest," his way up Mount Purgatory—which he sees in the distance—is blocked by a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. These signify respectively the sins of lust, pride, and fraud, acts that prevent people from attaining righteousness.

Only after Virgil has led Dante through the nether regions of hell, sternly impressing upon him the dehumanizing nature of all sins, can Dante understand the necessity of being freed from enslavement to them.

The hell through which Dante travels is a region God intended for Satan and his followers, not for people. Sinners adamant in their sins, however, inevitably and justly experience its myriad horrors.

The figures Dante meets as he funnels to the center of the earth are but the hulls of their former selves. They have, in Dante's famous phrase, "lost the good of intellect" (Inferno, III.18) and become the sins they embraced.

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