, 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.

In such forms the souls are seen in punishment fitting their sin, on the
principle that "by what things a man sinneth by the same he is
tormented." (Wisdom XI, 17.) The unchaste because they allowed their
reason to be subjected to the hot blasts of passion are now driven by "a
hellish storm which never rests; whirling and smiting, it vexes them."
(Inf., V, 31.) The gluttonous howl like dogs as hail and rain and snow
beat down upon them and Cerberus attacks and rends them. The misers and
spendthrifts to whom money was king, now are occupied in rolling huge
stones in opposite directions. The wrathful, all muddy and naked, assail
and tear one another.

The sullen are fixed in slime and gurgle a dismal chant. The materialist
and the heretic, whose existence, Dante holds, was only a living death,
are confined in blazing tombs. Murderers and tyrants are immersed in
boiling blood.

With poetic justice, suicides are represented as stunted trees lacerated
by the beaks of foul harpies. The violent lie supine on a plain of dry
and dense sand, upon which descend flakes of fire like "snow in the
Alps, without a wind." Usurers--should we call them profiteers?--suffer
also from a rain of fire and carry about their necks money bags stamped
with armorial designs. Thieves, to remind them of their sneaking trade,
are repeatedly transformed from men into snakes, hissing and creeping.
Hypocrites march in slow procession with faces painted and with leaden
cloaks all glittering with gold on the outside. With such realism does
Dante declare the nature of sin and its inevitable consequences.

Let us now accompany Dante through the Underworld. The scene opens at
dawn in a dark and tangle