ace to which the poet consigns his personal
enemies. As Dinsmore says: "Dante had too much greatness in his soul and
too much pride (it may be) to make revenge a personal matter: he had
nothing but contempt for his own enemies and never except in the case of
Boniface VIII ... did he place a single one of them in the Inferno, not
even his judge Cante Gabriella."

Though largely colored by his political theories Dante's Hell is also a
theological conception based on the teaching of the Catholic Church that
Hell exists as a place or state of punishment for the rebel angels and
for man dying impenitent, that is, for man in whom sin has become so
humanized that death finds him not simply in the act or habit of sin but
so transformed that in the striking words of Bossuet, "he is man made
sin." Dante fully accepted that doctrine which had been the constant
tradition and faith of the Church and had been reaffirmed in the second
ecumenical Council of Lyons held when Dante was a boy, nine years of
age.

It is not unlikely with his precocity for knowledge and sentiment at
that age that he was deeply impressed with the history of that council
especially as its legislation also dealt with the Crusades, the union of
Churches, the reform of the Church, the appointment of a king of the
Romans and an emperor--matters of vital importance to him later. He must
have recalled that Council also with special interest, for two of his
ideal personages, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure met their death, one on
his way to the Council, the other while actually attending its sessions.

In any event Dante firmly believed the doctrine of the Hereafter "that
they that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that
have done evil, into everlasting fire." He held that the punishment of
the damned is two-fold. The greater punishment, called the pain of loss,
consists in the loss of the Beatific Vision, a suffering so great that
the genius of St. Augustine can hardly translate it in human language.
"To be separated from God," he says, "is a torment as great as the very
greatness of God." The other pain of the reprobate consists in the
torment of fire so frequently mentioned in Holy Writ. "According to the
greater number of theologians the term fire denotes a material and so a
real fire ... (but) there have never been wanting theologians who
interpret the scriptural term fire metaphorically as denoting an
incorporeal fire and thus far the Churc