on out and classify the various modes of moral evil and can comprehend the value of systematic "purification" through self-denial. Virgil, therefore, accompanies Dante on this part of the journey, up to the earthly paradise. Beyond this point, Dante's experience can be comprehended only by understanding the truths of Christianity, and so Virgil returns to hell, victim of what one of my students once referred to as planned obsolescence.Before turning ourselves to a more specific consideration of the "plot" of Inferno, we need to consider one last generalization. Dorothy Sayers says that the Comedy is "the drama of the soul's choice," a point that had been made before, but perhaps not so concisely. The fiction Dante insists upon is that no one has been consigned to a position in the otherworld either through the generosity or through the hostility of God's justice; all the souls Dante meets are where they have chosen to be. Those who have chosen to do the will of God, to discipline and humble themselves and reunite themselves in this life with the Ground of all Being, spend eternity in perpetual celebration in His presence. Those who have made this same choice but need a bit more schooling before actually entering His presence spend some time first on Mt. Purgatory. Those who chose sin, however, spend their eternity confronting an externalization of their peculiar mode of sinfulness. Contrapasso is the awkward-to-translate and hence usually adopted-into-English word for this phenomenon. By an ingenious series of externalized metaphors, Dante reasserts the idea that makes its way into the medieval consciousness via St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and other early Christian thinkers that the true punishment for sin is sin itself. If one accepts as axiomatic that the human spirit can only find ease and comfort in union with God, and if sin separates the soul from God, then God's worst punishment is simply to let sinners continue unchecked to make...
