It is sin; our actions distract or keep people away from gaining salvation and ultimately Heaven. Dante demonstrates this when he places upon each sinner the punishment, fitting their sin, keeping them in Hell.
There are many examples of the symbolic punishments used by Dante. In Canto III, the angels that did not pick a side when Lucifer revolted are rejected by God, but not accepted by Hell. Because of their indecision, they have no place. In Canto VI, the gluttons, who surrender to desire in life, howl like dogs, unable to use reason. They are also covered in slime, portraying the excessive gluttony they lived in. In the swampy waters of Styx, is the home of the sullen and the wrathful, where they remain trapped in the water and violently attacking one another. In the twenty third canto, Dante describes the land of those who took their own life:.
The moment that the violent soul departs.
The body it has torn itself away from.
Minos sends it down to the seventh hole; .
It drops to the wood, not in a place allotted, .
But anywhere that fortune tosses it.
There, like a grain of spelt, it germinates (XXIII.93-99).
Suicides (those who have committed violence against themselves), by rejecting the gift of human life, renounce their right to the human body. For such souls, "there's no place to which it is allotted, but wherever fortune has flung [it]," because suicides make the presumption of changing God's plan for them by taking their own lives, thus sacrifice their rightful place in God's plan. Entrapped in the forms of trees, rooted forever in a single spot, the suicides basically endure a living death, in which they are helpless against their attackers, the Harpies. On the arrival of Judgment Day, they will not be allowed to reunite with their human bodies, but must watch as they hang just out of reach. In the fifth canto, Dante explains the land of the lustful:.
I came to a place where no light shone at all,.