Dante when writing The Divine Comedy: Inferno gives a fictional account of what he thinks that Hell is from his beliefs, the beliefs of Christianity, and the beliefs of the Roman Empire of his time. His concept of sin was greatly influenced by these beliefs. Dante felt man has two ethical journeys in this life: a journey to a secular happiness achievable through following the teachings of the philosophers and the natural virtues (the domain of the Holy Roman Empire and temporal power); and a journey to an eternal beatitude achievable through following the teachings of divine revelation and the theological virtues (the domain of the Church and spiritual power) (Corbett 266). With this belief Dante formed the nine levels of Hell. The nine levels of Dante’s Hell are progressively worse as one descends lower into the levels of Hell. The first five levels of Hell comprise Upper Hell and lesser sins. While the latter four make up Lower Hell and the greater sins. Dante’s first level of Hell is Limbo. In this level of Hell Dante put the souls of the people who were not baptized or were virtuous pagans. These souls are in Hell because they did not accept Christ into their lives, not because they were sinners. The greater number of these souls are the people who lived in the time before Christianity and thus could not accept Christ through baptism. This is the level of is the level of Hell that Virgil resides in because he himself was a pagan. Virgil because of being in this circle of Hell tells the torments of these souls. He says “These wretches have no hope of truly dying, and this blind life they lead is so abject it makes them envy every other fate. The world will not record their having been there; Heaven’s mercy and its justice turn from them” (Alighieri III. 46-50). These souls are accepted by neither Heaven nor Hell and this is their punishment (Alighieri). This level of Hell would be aligned with Dante’s theological virtues. Dante said, through Virgil, that baptism is “the gateway to the faith you follow” (Alighieri IV. 36) without these people being baptized they could not be accepted into Heaven because they did not know Christ. These people also being alive before the birth of Christ could also not worship God properly. In the second level of Hell resides the sinners who have been overcome by the sin of lust. The punishment of this circle of Hell is for the souls of these people to blown around by vicious winds. Dante uses the violent winds constantly blowing to symbolize that lust makes people have no point to life and are thus blown about without end because this is how they lived their lives when they were alive. Dante tells the st