ctaylor

"In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost" (The Divine Comedy).  There are three places in The Inferno that touch on the same subject as the one from The Divine Comedy quoted above.  The first is when Virgil is explaining to Dante why some of the souls are tormented outside of the Red City, while the rest are tortured inside.  Virgil asks Dante, "Have you forgotten that your Ethics states the three main dispositions of the soul that lead to those offences Heaven hates- incontinence, malice, and bestiality?" (The Inferno, p. 106).  Virgil reminds Dante of the three offences that will lead a soul to the "dark wood" where they probably will not be saved from, as Dante was.  Dante was saved from the evil that he was caught in by a divine soul that wished the salvation of his soul.  Dante must have committed one of the three offences, because he was in the dark woods.  According to Virgil, every soul in hell has committed one of the offences and the road to hell is the dark woods.  As Dante and Virgil enter the first round of Circle seven, Virgil explains to Dante that he is viewing "all who struck down their fellow men"(The Inferno, p. 112).  In the second round of Circle seven, Virgil instructs Dante to break a branch off a tree.  The tree tells Dante his story, the Virgil tells Dante to ask any questions he has of the tree.  Dante asks Virgil to ask the question he would best learn from, so Virgil asks the tree how spirits become encaged in the tree.  The tree responds shortly that, "when out of the flesh from which it tore itself, the violent spirit comes. . ." (The Inferno, p. 122).  These two quotes tell about what souls did that condemned their souls to their entrance into the dark woods, which in then lead them to their eternal torture in the seventh Circle of hell.  Those who killed other or killed themselves were sentenced to the first and second round of Circle seven.  The third round is Blasphemers, who were violent against God, Sodomites, who were violent against nature (homosexuals), and Usurers, who were violent against art.  These actions made these souls find themselves in the dark wood, and then in hell.  These three rounds of Circle seven are full of souls that were bestial, which is one of the three offences that Heaven hates, and is the darkness that makes a soul lose the straight way.