Here Dante explores the relationship–as notoriously challenging in his time and place as in ours–between love and lust, between the ennobling power of attraction toward the beauty of a whole person and the destructive force of possessive sexual desire. The lustful in hell, whose actions often led them and their lovers to death, are “carnal sinners who subordinate reason to desire” (Inf. 5.38-9). From the examples presented, it appears that for Dante the line separating lust from love is crossed when one acts on this misguided desire. Dante, more convincingly than most moralists and theologians, shows that this line is a very fine one indeed, and he acknowledges the potential complicity (his own included) of those who promulgate ideas and images of romantic love through their creative work. Dante’s location of lust –one of the seven capital sins–in the first circle of hell in which an unrepented sin is punished (the second circle overall) is similarly ambiguous: on the one hand, lust’s foremost location–farthest from Satan–marks it as the least serious sin in hell (and in life); on the other hand, Dante’s choice of lust as the first sin presented recalls the common–if crude–association of sex with original sin, that is, with the fall of humankind (Adam and Eve) in the garden of Eden.
 
Bron: danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu