Burden of sin

Meaning

II.2.13 asks how ordinary bodily fire could torment a simple soul lacking local extension. The burden of sin is considered as though it could give the soul a kind of composition or weight. That as-if character matters: the phrase is not a straightforward assertion that sins possess measurable physical mass. Within that hypothesis, sin bears the soul downward against its naturally rising lightness and an unspecified as-if composition would make it capable of suffering. These are conditional explanations, not measured properties of sin.

The author allows that God may provide a newly constituted or intensified fire beyond ordinary natural action and qualifies his speculation with a profession of orthodoxy. The passage consequently does not amount to a simple denial of hell. It distinguishes an objection based on familiar physical agency from what divine power may accomplish, while the weight-image tests how bodily language is being applied to an incorporeal subject.