Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 58:230 (Apr 1901)
Article: Dante’s Vision Of Sin
Author: Charles A. Dinsmore

BSac 58:230 (April 1901) p. 378

Dante’s Vision Of Sin

Charles A. Dinsmore

Boston, Mass.

In these days when the consciousness of sin is waning, it is an encouraging sign, that the study of Dante is becoming increasingly popular, and that the circle is rapidly widening of those who are beholding the sovereign realities of life through the clearest eyes that for ten centuries looked into the heart of man. The women of Verona whispered to one another as the lonely exile, grim, swarthy, with hair and beard black and crisp, passed along the street, “See, he has been in hell! “He had been deep in the heart of things, and there had first seen sights of woe, and then visions of unspeakable glory. What he saw he spoke in words of rarest melody, and they survive the centuries because he uttered elemental truths in forms of exquisite beauty.

It is the common opinion of those who know the great Florentine simply through Dora’s illustrations of the Inferno, that Dante was a savage-souled mediaeval poet who gloated over the grotesque, and sought to frighten timid souls into obedience to the church by vivid descriptions of the torments of the damned. Dante was to a degree the child of his time, and undoubtedly believed in a prison-house of everlasting torture; but this was not the inspiration of his poem. He considered himself a prophet sent from God to startle a frivolous world by lifting up before its eyes a commanding vision of actualities. He must show men what sin is, how to escape from it, and what is the supreme beatitude. This burden which God had laid upon his soul found imperishable expression in the “Divine Comedy”: in an Inferno, which is a vision of sin; a Purgatorio, a description of the way of purification; and a Paradiso, a powerful delineation of the raptures of the redeemed.

This poet-prophet left it to theologians to define sin; he would reveal it in its monstrosity and naked hideousness. The scene must be laid in the next world, for it is there iniquity comes to its awful growth. The seed is sown in this life, the harvest ripens in eternal woe: hence he must needs go among the “truly dead” for prophetic as well as artistic purposes. What did this deep-souled, clear-visioned man tell the world that sin is?

In the architecture of the infernal region he sets forth his conception of the different degrees of iniquity. Sitting behind the great tomb of Pope Anastasius, while they were becoming accustomed to the horrible

BSac 58:230 (April 1901) p. 379

excess of stench which was coming up from the deep abyss of the pit, Virgil unfolds to Dante the structural plan of hell. It is constructed so that those who have sinned most heinously are the deepest down, and thus farthest from God; for sin ...