"My maker was divine power, the supreme wisdom and the primal love" this Dante reads entering the infernal door; words that—a fact almost always unnoticed—put forward a fundamental theodicy question: how could Love create a Dantean Hell? The issue has been hardly problematic for Dante criticism, since the Comedy has been considered—with a wide consensus—the very incarnation of eschatological rigorism or the embodiment of that way of conceiving the afterlife defined by modern theologians as the "strong view of hell." Even more, the poem has been regarded by several thinkers as the literary work most responsible for the spreading of this vision in Western civilization, conveying an exquisitely retributive idea of Divine Justice, or—as someone put it—an "image of God that makes one shudder." Such a judgment is based on an improper philosophical assimilation and blurring of boundaries between the Comedy and the previous popular apocalyptic literature, and on the assumption that the poet was exclusively drawing on those thinkers who can be considered the cultured theorists of the "strong view," like Anselm and Aquinas. To confute this opinion in my dissertation I draw attention to the current of thought—deeply rooted in the ethical and metaphysical elaborations of classical philosophical systems—that defended a different, non-retributive, interpretation of other world afflictions for those excluded from salvation. The kind of damnation the thinkers (from Origen to the Areopagite) of this "weak tradition" envision is basically a do-it-yourself affair in which, as Eriugena says, the self-imposed punishment coincides with sin itself: "poena itaque peccati est peccatum." In my dissertation I argue against the opinion that recognizes at work in Dante's Hell a mere logic of retaliation, materialized in the mechanism of "contrapasso" and, by showing that the metaphoricity of the agonies experienced by the damned goes beyond a simple "analogy" between punishment and respective culpable action but rather expresses their identity, I demonstrate the poet's openness to the instances of the misericordes—the officially marginalized, though prestigious and always-present trend in the tradition of Christianity that conceived a radical global solution to the theodicy question.