Cantos VI-XII

Justice in Inferno I think is continually portrayed as a matter of precise, almost mechanical, order, as evidenced by, "It comes before him, and confesses all; Minos, great connoisseur of sin, discerns For every spirit its proper place in Hell, And wraps himself in his tail with as many turns as levels down that shade will have to dwell," (Canto V. 7-11) as Minos punishes men based off tail. Not only is God's justice coldly impersonal and utterly without pity, its severity is almost incorrectly matched with the deed. It seems like the degree of evil and torment that Dante encounters escalates as the story progresses, enabling Dante to go into increasingly significant shocks.

"You may be thinking about this ruined terrain guarded by the feral rage that I defied And quelled just now. Know then: that other time I journeyed here, this rock had not yet slid It must have been a little before He came to Dis, if I have reckoned rightly, to take the great spoil of the upper circle with Him--when the deep, fetid valley began to shake Everywhere, so that I thought the universe Felt love" (Canto XII. 31-36). When Virgil tells Dante of "this ruined terrain" and "rock [that] had not yet slid," he alludes to the earthquake that is illustrated in the Bible "All mount Sinai was covered with smoke because the LORD had descended on it in the form of fire. The smoke billowed into the sky like smoke from a furnace and the whole mountain and earth shook with a violent earthquake." This earthquake in my dad's words, "happened after Jesus's crucifixion." When Virgil says, "this rock had not yet slid It must have been a little before He came to Dis" he means that the rocks had not fallen before God first descended to Dis. The Earthquake my dad spoke about, was believed to be the after-effect of God descending into hell to free some biblical characters mentioned earlier in Cantos IV (Noah, Moses, Adam, Abel, Abraham, King David, and Jacob), this is what he means when he refers to God taking "the great spoil of the upper circle with Him." Virgil continues this notion by stating "When the deep, fetid valley began to shake Everywhere, so that I thought the universe Felt love: the force that has brought chaos back many times over, say some philosophers. And at that moment this ancient rock, both here and elsewhere, tumbled to where it now appears." Virgil logically tells Dante that the earthquake that shook, quaked not only hell, but the whole universe (outside hell) as well, implying that Jesus's death affected Heaven, Hell, and Earth.