The sixth circle (rebel angels and heresy, cantos VIII, IX, X, and XI) lies within the walls of the City of Dis, and this break in the geography of Hell also marks the transition from the less grievous sins of weak impulses, such as lust, to the more dreadful sins dominated by willful malice to do harm to others, a deliberate misuse of reason, a gift from God to humans. Notice that Dante, in contrast to prudish religious thinkers, does not consider lust to be a very serious sin. Lust is important enough to send someone under its domination to Hell but is not a sin about which the poet is obsessed. Anything but a puritan or a religious fundamentalist, Dante realizes that betraying a friend is far more serious than giving in to one’s sensual desires, because it breaks one of the essential bonds between men.

Sins of Malice, divided into two subcategories in the seventh circle and the eighth circle, involve either force or violence and fraud. In the seventh circle (violence), this category of sin is broken down into three subcategories, each of which breaks the admonition of Christ to love God, one’s neighbor, and oneself:

• Violence against others, such as murderers or warmongers (canto XII)
• Violence against oneself, such as suicides (canto XIII)
• Violence against God, nature, and art, such as blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers (cantos XIV, XV, XVI, and XVII)

Simple and complex fraud or treachery are punished in the eighth and ninth circles. In the eighth circle of Malebolge, Dante presents ten subcategories of simple fraud, each punished in a different bolgia (which translates as “ditch,” “purse,” or “pouch”).

• First Bolgia: panderers and seducers (canto XVIII)
• Second Bolgia: flatterers (canto XVIII)
• Third Bolgia: simonists (canto XIX)
• Fourth Bolgia: fortune-tellers and soothsayers (canto XX)
• Fifth Bolgia: grafters and barrators (canto XXI and XXII)
• Sixth Bolgia: hypocrites (canto XXIII)
• Seventh Bolgia: thieves (canto XXIV and XXV)
• Eighth Bolgia: evil counselors (canto XXVI and XXVII)
• Ninth Bolgia: sowers of discord (canto XXVIII)
• Tenth Bolgia: falsifiers and alchemists (canto XXIX); evil impersonators, counterfeiters, and false witnesses (canto XXX)

The ninth circle of complex fraud or treachery in a region called Cocytus (canto XXXI) contains four divisions and displays sins that break the most essential human ties—familial, political, and social:

• Caina (treachery against relatives, canto XXXII)
• Antenora (treachery against party, city, or country, canto XXXIII)
• Ptolomea (treachery against guests, canto XXIII)
• Judecca (treachery against lords and benefactors, canto XXXIV)

The relationship between the sins Dante describes in Hell and two of Aristotle’s moral categories—Incontinence and Malice—seems clear enough. Nonetheless, many of Dante’s critics have raised questions over the third category of insane Bestiality. Most refer this third Aristotelian category to all sins of violence, but a few relate the category specifically to complex fraud in the ninth circle.

Dante expects his reader to keep in mind the location of each circle, the sin punished there, the specific description of the punishment, the sinners encountered in that area, and which canto contains this particular material. But sorting out this complicated material with its mass of detail may disorient a first reader of the Inferno. The inevitable question on a Dante examination—to discuss in detail the organization of sin and its punishment in the Inferno—has created hellish nightmares for generations of students. Perhaps Dante’s ingenuity and graphic fantasy failed only to invent an appropriate place in Hell and a suitable punishment for two subcategories of his future readers: teachers who ask this devilish question and students who fail to answer it properly.

The general rule regulating the actual physical punishments in Hell, as opposed to their geographical location or their moral hierarchy from less to more serious, is called contrapasso. Finally defined relatively late in the Inferno (canto XXVIII: 142), contrapasso is a variation on the Old Testament’s lex talionis (law of retaliation of retribution). Longfellow translates contrapasso quite neatly as “counterpoise.” Dante’s Italian term comes from the Latin translation of a Greek word found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and discussed extensively by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on the Aristotelian passage. The original Greek word meant “retaliation,” clearly relating it to the lex talionis of the Old Testament, the proverbial “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Many readers of The Divine Comedy are puzzled by what they find to be a lack of compassion in this first canticle of the work, since nothing seems more foreign to the moral teachings of Christ than the righteous indignation of a progressively less compassionate Pilgrim as he meets sinners and comes to damn them as his understanding of the nature of sin matures. But the reader must never forget that the souls in Hell have died in mortal sin and have had ample opportunity to seek and obtain forgiveness and, in the worst-case scenario, to expiate their evil deeds in Purgatory.

What we may call the “house rules” of Hell are among Dante’s most genial poetic inventions. The afterlife was never so minutely or so creatively described in the Bible or in classical writings as it is in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The Inferno contains any number of special laws that Dante devised for certain groups of sinners. For example, his invention of a vestibule to Hell for the neutral angels and lukewarm humans who never took sides or clear decisions in matters of ethical and political significance while alive has no real precedent. In like manner, his generous salvation of the virtuous pagans, especially classical poets he loved, would probably find few supporters among the theologians. The fanciful idea that certain particularly grievous sinners could have their souls condemned to Hell before their bodies died and that their bodies could be inhabited temporarily by a devil—in effect, being an empty shell on earth while the soul was being tortured in Hell—is a splendid invention hard to match. Medieval man told time by the stars, but in Hell there is no starlight. Yet Virgil manages to tell time in the dark. Damned souls in Dante’s universe have the power to see the distant and near future but not the present. While they may be capable of giving Dante prophecies about his future, they have no idea what is happening in the present. On the Final Judgment Day, time will end and they will lose the consciousness of anything other than their sin and their eternal punishment. God’s goodness prohibits the blessed in Heaven from feeling compassion or pity for the damned, since such a sentiment would diminish their bliss in Paradise. Hence the damned have only one hope in Hell—that Dante the Pilgrim will report favorable things of them in the world of the living. Earthly fame (as opposed to immortality in Paradise) is their one desire. Conversely, true accounts of their sinfulness reported back to the living by Dante the Pilgrim represent their worst fears. But at the Last Judgment, time will dissolve and this hope, too, will be lost. Many physical “laws” of Hell seem strange.