sin as involuntary error." To Dante sin is the greatest
evil of the world--not only because it is the source of all other evils,
but because it is at once the denaturing of man--the damned are
characterized as "the woeful people who have lost the good of the
understanding" (Inf., III, 18), and it is also a defiance of God. Sin,
then, is Atheism--a rejection of God, with a conviction that pleasure or
happiness can be attained outside of God, independent of God and in
opposition to God. Apart from the inspired writers of Holy Writ it is
doubtful whether any other writer ever had such an awful sense of sin
and such a vivid vision of sin and its consequences as Dante has given
to the world in a picture which has burned terror into the thought of
man.

To show us that life is a warfare against sin, Dante gives us several
striking pictures of temptation and heavenly deliverance from evil. At
the very beginning of the Divine Comedy, we see his ascent to the
mountain of the Lord barred by Lust, Pride and Avarice represented by a
leopard, a lion, and a wolf. He is victorious over those enemies of his
salvation because Reason (Virgil) and Beatrice (Revelation) come to his
aid. Temptation is also exhibited in Ante-Purgatorio and that is the
more remarkable because both as a theologian and a poet Dante holds that
the present life is the end of man's probation and that as a
consequence, temptation is not to be encountered in the next life. Why
it is put forth in Ante-Purgatorio is explained by the theory that our
poet here nods, that he means, not the actual Purgatory of disembodied
spirits, but moral Purgatory, _i.e._, the present life wherein man,
striving upward, is attacked by temptation to keep him from the end for
which God created him.

Showing temptation in Ante-Purgatorio, the poet gives us a picture of
souls protected by two angels against the serpent. Here is the scene:

"Now was the hour that wakens fond desire
In men at sea, and melts their thoughtful heart
Who in the morn have bid sweet friends farewell,
And pilgrim newly on his road with love
Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far,
That seems to mourn for the expiring day":
A band of souls approach:
"I saw that gentle band silently next
Look up, as if in expectation held,
Pale and in lowly guise; and, from on high,
I saw, forth issuing descend beneath,
Two angels, with two flame-illumined swords,
Broken and mutilated of their po