Education and Salvation

Learning how to attain salvation is the main theme of Dante's epic and subsumes all its other themes. The Divine Comedy is, therefore, a tale of the Pilgrim's education and, by association, the reader's. The reader follows Dante's Pilgrim through Hell in Inferno and learns with him about sin's pervasiveness. The torments of the sinners, who exist forever without hope of redemption or of an end to their suffering, graphically illustrate sin's consequences. As the reader and Pilgrim move through the underworld, the shades they see and speak with provide physical examples of and exemplary lessons on the seven deadly sins. At the end of Inferno, the Pilgrim and reader are better able to recognize sin in its various forms and to avoid committing it. Salvation and further spiritual education are impossible without such knowledge.

In the second section, Purgatory, the Pilgrim and the pilgrim reader...