As one increases the distance between himself and the sun, the colder it gets. So for the Inferno to be getting colder as it gets deeper and farther away from the sun makes sense. But, the sun also represents God and as Dante moves away from the sun he is also moving away from God, who is the source of light, truth, and love. It gets colder because he is straying away from the warmth that God fundamentally provides, just as if one moves away from the sun. As Dante travels deeper, he is actually moving further away from God and closer to Satan. Because Lucifer (Satan) is the antithesis of God who is goodness and warmth, this explains why Lucifer is encased in ice. The closer Dante approaches Lucifer, the colder it gets because the deeper Dante is in the Inferno the farther he is away from the sun, synonymously God and the truth. The same way that Dante spirals deeper into the levels of Hell and sin, we get deeper and lost in our own mind of sin. The deeper we are in our mind and desire is parallel to Dante approaching closer to Lucifer. We stray from God, and lose all hope and comfort. We, not only lose our path, but we lose ourselves. We become so invested in our sins that we can no longer clearly see right …show more content…
Here, the leopard represents lust, the lion, pride, and the wolf, avarice. Dante shows how these sins affected him. There is complete loss of hope and comfort. Lust, pride, and avarice consume us and we get lost, the way Dante gets lost midway on his life’s journey. Such desire and sin blinds us that we find ourselves “in dark woods” (1.2) just the way Dante finds himself lost. We will all get lost sometime and somewhere, searching for the truth. Right and wrong will be confused, and at times it’ll feel like a puzzle, but we were torn apart to be rebuilt again, and good needs to be drawn from this bad. Dante “treats the good [he] found [in Hell]” (1.6) and that’s what we need to do. We are meant to learn from these sins that we commit. The admittance of the truth and awareness of the sins that bury us will bring us out of our head and out of that inward focus. We must take the good from the bad, learn from the bad, and repent. What we are most proud of can harm us the most the same way that the sinners in the lower cantos are more boastful because it was by their intellect and choice that they sinned. An example is, gluttony is not exactly by choice as is fraud, and those who commit fraudulence tend to be most prideful (like a