Canto XXII. After the poets have climbed up to the next terrace, Virgil and Statius converse together. Statius explains that he has spent time on the cornice of avarice, not because of avarice as commonly understood, but because of its opposite: an excessive prodigality. He explains how Virgil’s poetry inspired him to seek out Christian preachers, and how he was therefore converted. After a while the poets come upon souls of the gluttonous, and here the whip of gluttony: which includes an account of Our Lady’s concern for the guests and hosts of the wedding at Cana.

James Thurber’s story of The Bear Who Let it Alone is an account of a drunken bear who becomes a strict teetotaler and temperance lecturer. Neither conditions makes for domestic happiness, so Thurber concludes: 'You might as well fall at on your face than lean over too far backward'. We saw in Canto XVI that vice consists in falling away from virtue, and that this can happen in more than one direction. Statius explains here that, although typically humans depart from proper use of worldy goods by hoarding them for themselves, it is also possible (if less common) to diverge the opposite way, into prodigality. Both sins are purged together.

A Methodist minister I know once preached that, in failing to deal maturely with the fact of our own sinfulness, we typically either become permissive (explaining our sin away) or we become particularly condemnatory of others who fail more spectacularly and/or in different ways from us; ‘at least I’m not as bad as him..’. Perhaps in Lent we should pay attention to our own attitudes. Maybe a corollary of his observation is that we are particularly hot on others’ sins when these diverge from virtue in opposite directions to our own failings.

The poets come upon the tree of the gluttonous.

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Canto XXI. The poets continue on their way, and are overtaken by a soul who identifies himself as the poet Statius. He explains how he has just completed his purgation on the cornice of avarice, and how this release was accompanied by the shaking of the moutain, and exultant cries from all the souls.

In Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius the soul of Gerontius, after enduring the vision of God, says

`Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.’

In short, his purgation is a matter of his own will. It is by the will, says St Thomas, that man is joined to God, and so the will does not merely accept, but desires that purging of the attachments to sin which is the business of Purgatory. Purgatory is a punishment in a Pickwickian sense, St Thomas writes that `the nature of punishment is to be against the will’ (Summa Theologiae 1.2ae.87.7), while the punishment of Purgatory is something the will desires, because its overriding aim is the union with God, which both achieves and requires detachment from sin.

This is why Statius tells Dante and Virgil that it is the soul’s own will which knows when purgation is complete, until that moment it embraces the punishment which is the means to its final end. Our penance is a practice run for this willed and embraced detachment from sin and return to our origin in God, a fitting reflection to begin the last two weeks of Lent, traditionally the beginning of Passiontide.


Dante and Virgil converse with the soul of Statius.

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Canto XX The poets proceed around the mountain, and hear a voice of one of the avaricious calling out the whip of the cornice, examples of virtuous poverty. Dante approaches the speaker, who is Hugh Capet, origin of the Capetian house of Kings of France. He castigates his descendants.

Hugh Capet’s denunciation of the members of his house show that avarice is not only the disordered desire for material goods, but also for power. This is significant, given Dante’s political concerns. It was the Capetian Charles of Valois whose intervention in Florence lead to the downfall of the ‘white’ Guelfs, and with them Dante himself, but more to the point the Capetians were rivals to the Holy Roman Emperor, and promoted the Papal cause with a view to limiting Imperial power. Today I sat in a meeting where important matters were discussed which potentially impact on the lives and families of individual people. Power has to be exercised, and sometimes hard choices must be made. Hugh Capet’s discourse, about the exercise of power on a grand scale, reminds us that the power we exercise at any level is easily misused. The pursuit of power for its own sake can result in damage to others, and ultimately to ourselves.

Dante speaks with Hugh Capet

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Canto XIX Dante has a dream of the siren, who lured sailors to destruction. A woman intervenes, calling to Virgil who unmasks the siren. Virgil wakes Dante, and they proceed to the pass up to the next cornice. Here the avaricious lie, their backs to heaven. Dante speaks with one, the soul of Pope Adrian V.

On the three remaining cornices of Purgatory are purged the sins arising from disordered love-proper. On the lower terraces the sins result from a negative self-love, or from inadequate zeal in love. From now on our concern is with loves of objects, good in themselves, but for which our loves need to be ordered and restrained. As Dorothy Sayers says in her commentary, the objects of these disordered loves are not bad in themselves, so the siren cannot be an image of them. Rather she represents the object of a distorted self-love: the image of ourselves as somehow completed by the wealth or pleasure that we might pursue. It is this that lies at the root of disorder in our loves.

The woman who intervenes can be thought of as an image of virtue, a tendency or disposition to a proper ordering of our capacities. Virtue calls on reason (of which Virgil is the figure throughout Dante's poem), and he unmasks the siren. In short, by properly trained dispositions, we are able to see the reality of our situation. Wealth, for example, will not complete our happiness, which only God can fulfil; and when we exercise reason we see how avaricious pursuit of wealth could undo other goods (justice, for example) which we should pursue. Virtue, however, must be enlivened by Charity, if it is to be effective, so an account of the good life in the purely psychological terms of Dante's dream is not entirely satisfactory.

Dante's dream of the siren

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Canto XVIII. While Dante and Virgil sit in the darkness, Dante questions his guide about love. Virgil explains that we have freedom of choice in responding to our loves, and so can be held accountable for how we order them. The moon rises and, as Dante is drifting into sleep, the poets hear an approaching band of the slothful. These are running around the cornice and crying out examples of zeal and sloth. One, a former Abbot, directs the poets to the pass.

It is a happy coincidence that, in 2009, this Canto falls on the feast of the Annunciation. The first example of zeal in the whip of sloth, which the souls themselves call out, is ‘Mary hastened to the hills’. This is a quotation from Luke’s Gospel describing how, immediately after Gabriel’s visit, Mary set out to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Representations of the Annunciation, such as Fra Angelico’s (see link below), generally show Our Lady interrupted in meditation, prayer or reading. Maybe such leisure was unlikely in the life of a poor Palestinian woman in her time. Nonetheless, the artist captures a capacity for meditative openness to God, which was clearly part of Our Lady’s character in the Gospel. The other side of the coin is the haste with which she then sets out to visit Elizabeth, and to stay with her till the birth of John. The link between these two states of her being --- still and receptive at one moment, active and purposeful the next --- is her ‘Fiat’, ‘let it be’, with which she greets the angel’s news.

The vanishing point in Fra Angelico’s perspective draws our eye through a window to the outside world. Our Lady is called to play her part in a story which will lead her into that world, through the uncertainty of pregnancy, the poverty of the stable, the wonder of the Epiphany, the exile in Egypt, the anxiety of the visit to Jerusalem, and to the foot of the cross.

Sloth takes various forms. There is simple idleness, there is ‘accidie’ or hopelessness which paralyses the will, there is the temptation to withdraw into a quieter and easier life. Perhaps it is also a form of sloth to conceal our lack of engagement with the actual demands of faith and life with a pointless business. Mary took on her vocation in hope and faith, despite the uncertainty it brought her, and persisted to the end. This is the example of zeal which the souls in Dante set before themselves, and offer to us this Lent.


Fra Angelico’s Annunciation

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Dante and Virgil meet the slothful in the Holkham MS.

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Canto XVII. Dante and Virgil leave the cloud around the wrathful. Dante has a vision of the bridle of purgatory, examples of those who gave in to wrath, including Haman whose story is told in the book of Esther. The angel of the cornice wipes a further ‘P’ from Dante’s brow and directs the poets to the pass. On their ascending to the next cornice, night falls, and they can no longer move (see Canto VII). Virgil explains to Dante the principle by which the cornices of purgatory are ordered.

A child might say ‘I love ice-cream’. A man might say ‘I love you’ to his wife. At the baptism of Christ the voice from the cloud said ‘this is my beloved son’. We might hesitate to say that the verb ‘to love’ is used the same way in all three cases. But we would also hesistate before saying the uses are quite unconnected. The sense in which they are the same is what St Thomas Aquinas calls analogy. My will, the faculty by which I seek something perceived as good, is the seat of love, although it is also directed by the mind (which makes the evaluation). So my pursuit of some good is a love. (This must mean something different in God, since my seeing and loving something is a change in me).

Virgil explains that no-one can truly hate themselves (since they cannot will anything other than a good for themselves) nor can they truly hate God (who is their origin). Therefore the lowest of the sins are loves of others’ harm. The proud do so because they see their neighbour’s diminshment as their own advancement. The envious wish ill to their neighbours out of fear of what they might lose themselves. The wrathful desire other’s harm in an irrational emotional response to some hurt they receive themselves. These are the cornices already visited. Dante and Virgil have just reached the cornice where the souls have been inadequately zealous in the pursuit of good loves (the slothfull). On higher terraces are found those whose pursuit of loves has been excessive.

We have already noted that Dante’s strong systematizing of sin, while poetically necessary, and perhaps didactically necessary, needs to be treated with caution (Canto X) since sin is intrinsically disordered. Nonetheless, behind any sin is a love of some good, not wrong in its-self, but wrong when not subordinated to other goods: the worship due to God, the goods of our neighbour and the community, our own true flourishing. Our final goal is a loss of the attachments that disordered loves have created in us. This is only achieved by the love of God himself, Charity. As we discover near the end of Purgatorio, Dante himself held that intimations of that love were possible in the love of another person.

The angel of peace shows Dante and Virgil the pass to the cornice of the slothful.

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Canto XVI. On the cornice of the Wrathful the souls proceed through a dense gritty fog, which mirrors the effect of Wrath whereby the emotion of anger overpowers its reasonable direction. Dante meets the soul of Marco of Lombardy, and asks him a question about free will. Marco answers that, while all people have dispositions (fixed by the stars in Medieval science), they also have reason which should enable them to to make free choices about which dispositions to follow and develop, and which ones to control. Punishment for sin is therefore just. The widespread failure of virtue in Dante’s time can be attributed to bad government. The Emperor does not meet his obligations, and the Church, usurping the Emperor’s place, fails to give the guidance it should (see Canto XIV).

Marco sets out Dante’s account of sin, derived from Aristotle via St Thomas. People have loves, movements of the will towards perceived goods. Their dispositions influence which loves they follow and which ones they shun. Guidance is needed to develop good dispositions. The cornice of the Wrathful is an appropriate place to develop these ideas. Wrath, ira, is not to be confused with anger. Anger is a proper human emotion. It should be directed by our good sense (practical reasonableness). When it is not, we fall into ira.

Now, we can stray from a virtue in various directions, and usually humans stray in one direction more than others (so that, for example, we most commonly divert from virtuous use of food and drink by over-indulgence, rather than by eating insufficient to meet our needs). In the case of anger, however, deviations from virtue in contrasting directions are seen more often. We commonly fall into ira, by ranting, saying things we later regret and so on. But there are also times when we are not angry, although we should be. St Thomas is clear that to fail to be angry when injustice should prompt us to be angry is a failure in living the good life. Anger has its proper place, it should move us to act against whatever injustice causes it. If our emotional capacity for anger has been blunted so that we see injustice, and are passive about it, then we need repentance and detachment from our complacency. The black fog of Dante’s poem is not just an image of irrational violent ira, but also of the darkness we have wrapped ourselves in when we are not moved to proper anger at injustice.

I rather like this image from the Holkham MS. The artist both allows us to see Dante, Virgil and the wrathful but also creates the sense that they are stuck in a gritty smog!

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Canto XV. The poets meet the angel of generosity, the virtue in opposition to envy, and are admitted to the next cornice of Purgatory where the Wrathful are purged. Once again a ‘P’ is erased from Dante’s brow and he finds that the going up the mountain becomes yet easier. He questions Virgil about something said by one of the souls of the envious, and Virgil explains that his, Dante’s, difficulty with the answer will be overcome in due course when he has completed his penance and meets Beatrice. Dante then has a vision, the whip of Wrath, in which he witnesses the gentleness of Our Lady with Jesus when he is discovered in the Temple in Jerusalem, a classical example of meekness towards men, and the example of St Stephen’s meekness at his martyrdom.

Virgil tries to explain to Dante how the envious fail in love. For them the sharing of goods with others is a loss, each has a smaller part. In fact, says Virgil, such sharing should be cause for greater joy, since more people are taking delight in what is being shared. Dante is not convinced, and Virgil says that Beatrice will have to explain. That is to say, a full understanding requires more than reason alone can provide. Human flourishing is not an individual thing. I cannot be happy unless my neighbour is able to flourish. His good should enhance mine, and mine his. Jealousy, and resulting envy, actually harms me. We truly flourish when we flourish together, in reciprocity and mutual concern. Perhaps this reflection of Virgil’s provides a link to the new cornice, that of the Wrathful. We see in the whip of Wrath that for a saint, like Stephen, the good of his enemies is something to be wished for, even as they kill him. That is the real hard stuff in religion, and perhaps this Lent it is a reminder of how far we still have to go.

Follow the link below to see an illustration of this Canto from a 14th Century Italian Manuscript of the Purgatorio in the Bodeleian Library at Oxford. In future I shall post these links for each Canto

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Canto XIV Dante meets two Italian souls, one from the Guelf party and one from the Ghibelline, who castigate the inhabitants of their former land. The poets then hear the bridle of envy, including the voice of Cain who looked enviously on the Divine favour Abel enjoyed after his sacrifice.

I generally compose this blog in the lunchbreak at work, after reading the mid-day office and the day’s canto. Today I was bogged down in a major job. I turned to Dante for edification and what do I get? Two 13th Century Italian souls grumbling between themselves about the state of the country. At such moments it is tempting to say, as JRR Tolkien once did :‘Dante.....doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don't care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities’.

There is no getting away from politics in Purgatorio. The politics of the time in Dante’s Italy were dominated by the conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Papacy. Broadly speaking the Ghibelline party favoured the Emperor and the Guelfs favoured the Pope. But the situation was complex. Dante, for example, came from a Guelf family, but he was firmly opposed to the Papal cause; that is to say to the arguments for the Pope's functioning as a prince over Papal states. Dante held that the Roman Empire represented an ideal for rule over the human community. The Church did not because its role is to be a sacrament of the human community to come: the Kingdom of God. This, essentially, was the argument of the ‘Spiritual’ Franciscans who wanted the Church to emulate St Francis by embracing poverty as the way of Christ.

While Dante was very much concerned with political issues, and involved with the politics of Florence, which led to his exile from that city, he opposed Italy’s factionalism. Perhaps this is why a Guelf and a Ghibelline join to condemn their homeland. In addition to the two main parties there was another political grouping in Florence, the Popolo, and the Guelfs were divided (as far as most historians can see on entirely obscure grounds) into the ‘Black’ and ‘White’ factions. Dante’s terms of office was during the White Guelf ascendancy.

So what can we say about Dante? He should not be co-opted into contemporary debates on secularism (separating Church and State, restricting the Church to the private sphere). He wanted the Church to perform its true sacramental role, but not to withdraw from public matters. Indeed he thought that temporal Papal power prevented the Church from engaging properly with questions about government and justice. Lent is not a time to withdraw from our concerns about society and politics. If anything they should be heightened, just as visiting Purgatory does not take Dante’s mind off the political turmoil in Italy, but strengthens his outrage.

The root of Envy is holding our own good to matter more than the good of others. This is clean contrary to the “Golden Rule” to do to others as we would be done to. John Finnis, the philosopher of law, in his book on the political philosophy of Aquinas, sees the Golden Rule as the rational heart of the good social life. My basic human goods do not outweigh yours. That is our fundamental equality. Perhaps the cornice of the envious is not such a bad place to grumble about politics after all!

Canto XIII. The poets are now on the second cornice of Purgatory, where the envious are purged. In life their self-love led them to resent the good of others, and to delight in others’ misfortune. They are now no longer able to look enviously on their neighbours, as their eyelids are sealed. The whip of envy is spoken by heavenly voices, which give examples of generous concern for others’ needs, starting with Our Lady’s intercession on behalf of the hosts of the marriage at Cana.

It may be obvious, but the difference between Dante and the souls he meets is that they have died, and he is still alive; obvious, but important. On contemplating a vice such as envy, Dante, and we, should be motivated to try, with the help of God, better to order our loves (see Canto X) in virtuous ways. In short, we must strive for the good life. The holy souls are different. They have failed in a virtue, but now they are not striving for the good life that Dante could, in principle, enjoy on earth. Rather they are purging the attachments that the sin created in them so that they might truly die, and embrace the new life that Christ was the first to enter on his resurrection. In The New Creation, Herbert McCabe OP writes 'what is required at death is that we abandon ourselves totally, that we accept the dissolution of all that self has meant to us'. This, he says, is only possible if we live the Divine life. 'The Christian,' he says 'holds in tension these two ideas: the importance of human achievement and the need to transcend it'.

So for Dante (and us) human achievement (even human achievement dependent on grace) is important, that is to say we must strive for the good life, the life ordered by the cardinal virtues enlivened by Divine love. At the same time we look, ultimately, to its loss and replacement by something utterly new, the life of Christ. For the souls in purgatory it is this loss and gain that they are struggling, by grace, to complete.

This may seem a bit abstract, but it is an important key to understanding penance, not only in Lent. A penance, McCabe writes, self-denial, is 'the attitude of a man towards his desires with a view to transcending the good life', in short, it is training in the business of dying with Christ. Self-control, on the other hand, 'is the attitude of a good man towards his desires with a view to living well'. In our present life we need both.

Canto XII The poets leave the proud behind them and carry on around the terrace, noticing on the ground engravings of examples of pride from biblical and classical sources. These all contrast with the images of humility by the entrance. In contrast to the Annunciation and Incarnation we see creatures usurping the place of God, for example, Lucifer. In contrast to David’s dance before the Ark we see those who are proud in the face of heaven, for example, Saul. In contrast to Trajan’s humility before the roman widow we see those who are proud in the face of their fellows, for example Holofernes the Assyrian. The poets meet the angel of the terrace who erases one of the ‘P’s from Dante’s forehead and directs them through the pass, an easier climb than any so far on the mountain.

I have often wondered why the terraces of Dante’s purgatory have, as well as the ‘whip’ (the exemplars of virtue), these examples of the vice being purged, the ‘bridle’. Indeed, the proud, stooped down, can only see the bridle during their purgation. Perhaps the bridle is important because it is a reminder that we ourselves are fellow sinners with the notorious scriptural or classical figures. Jonathan Aitken, the former cabinet minister who was imprisoned for perverting the course of justice, was interviewed by Margaret Hebblethwaite after his release. She asked him what he thought his overbearing sin was, and he said pride. She responded that that would not do, it is too easy for the powerful to flatter themselves with the sin of Lucifer, rather than honestly accuse themselves of something more squalid and to the point. Similarly, my weekend newspaper runs an interview in which well-known figures are asked questions including ‘what trait in yourself do you most deplore’, and ‘what trait do you most deplore in others’. It is remarkable how often the failing in self is something rather mild or endearing, while that in others is truly deplorable. The bridle of pride, and indeed those of the sins further up the mountain, are a reminder of the simple reality of our situation, and encourage in us a genuine self-awareness.

Having said that, Aitken had half a point. St Thomas recognized pride as the source of all sin, the abandonment of a true creaturely dependence on God. With pride purged, the souls on Dante’s mountain proceeds more lightly and eagerly. Their reclamation has begun in earnest.

Canto XI. The souls of the proud pray the Lord’s Prayer as they carry their penitential burden. Dante speaks with one patrician soul, who speaks of his previous pride in his ancestry. He now carries burdens as he had disdained to do in life. Dante then meets the painter Oderisi, who expounds on the transience of earthly fame.

The souls of the proud comment on the Lord’s Prayer as they pray it, each clause taking up three lines of the poem. Their exposition focusses on the virtue of humility. In the first two clauses the inherent humility of creaturely status is emphasized. God is ‘in heaven’ not because he is restricted in some spatial sense but because the unchanging ‘first effects’ are dearest to him, and for all creatures it is the hallowing of God’s name in praise that is most appropriate, not puffing up their own. We must pray for the coming of the kingdom, because without this gift our labours can achieve nothing, and we must follow the angelic example of offering our wills entirely to God. We are utterly dependent on God, as the Israelites depended on the miraculous manna in the wilderness. Our dependence on his forgiveness is complete, nothing we do can partly substitute for that gratuitous mercy.

Canto X. The poets climb onto the lowest terrace of Purgatory proper, where the sin of Pride is purged. On arrival they see carvings, strikingly lifelike, of the virtue of humility. One shows Our Lady at the annunciation. In another David dances before the Ark. In a third the Emperor Trajan, in the middle of a procession, attends to the demands of a poor widow. Dante only takes his eyes off these carvings when Virgil draws his attention to a group of proud souls, slowly approaching, bent double beneath heavy rocks.

Each sin has its origin in a misdirected love. There is a proper love of self, but it is only proper when it is ordered in relation to other objects of love, other people, God himself. The virtue of humility consists in this proper ordering. Its opposite is the sin of Pride. But this is a false symmetry, sin is a disorder, virtue a proper ordering of our actions. Thus, while there is a fundamental structure to virtue (the four cardinal virtues ordered by their principal one, prudence, and all properly ordered in turn by the theological virtues of which the greatest is love) there is no structure to sin. Nonetheless, it is helpful to the pastor to have an epidemiology of sin, as it were, and so in the history of the Church the idea of seven capital sins emerged. There were not always seven, some lists had eight, distinguishing between sloth (being bone idle) and accidie (being paralysed by a sense of hopelessness). Dante, the poet, builds an intricately structured account of Purgatory, useful to us for reflection, but not to be absolutized.

In Dante’s poem each sin has its ‘whip’, the example of the opposite virtue, held up to the souls in some way. On the first terrace it is the example of the humble, always including an incident from the life of Our Lady, and examples from classical or biblical history. Vice and virtue arise in concrete situations and our response to them, so it is in the particular (such as Mary’s response to Gabriel) that we see humility, not in some abstract definition.

Canto IX. Dante dreams that he has been caught up by an angel, and wakes to discover that he has in fact been carried up the slopes to the gate of Purgatory by St Lucy. The angel who guards the gate allows him passage when he hears that St Lucy has directed the poets to the entrance. Dante must ascend three steps to the gate, and kneels before the angel who marks three ‘P’s on his forehead, each standing for peccatum, sin, and representing the seven capital sins purged on the terraces of the mountain. Dante then passes through the gate.

This canto is rich in symbolism. Perhaps most pressing in Lent are the three steps. The first is of shining white marble, in which Dante can see his own reflection. The second is dark, coarse grained stone, cracked in the form of a cross. The third is blood-red porphyry. The marble, in which the face is clearly seen, represents confession, the first part of the sacrament of penance in which the penitent truthfully acknowledges his guilt. The second, black and broken, represents contrition, a true sorrow for sin. The third, red, represents satisfaction. As Dorothy Sayers points out, satisfaction is made primarily by the sacrifice of Christ, but also by our joining to his our sacrifice in which we seek, by God’s grace, to amend our lives and so offer ourselves to him. As Herbert McCabe puts it, in penance we detach ourselves, perhaps painfully, from the damaging attachments that sin creates.

Canto VIII The poets are introduced by Sordello to other souls among the preoccupied, including some known to Dante who ask his prayers and prophesy his forthcoming personal and political difficulties. Two angels descend to guard the valley at nightfall, and drive away a serpent. As night falls the four stars that Dante saw at dawn pass out of sight, and three take their place.

Dorothy Sayers makes the point that the angelic defeat of the serpent is hardly a serious struggle, it is an almost ritual bout. These souls are not seriously at risk from temptation, but they are susceptible to anxiety, they are not yet in Purgatory proper. The angels are dressed in green, the colour of hope. The souls have cause for hope, but have perhaps yet fully to appropriate it. Progress up the mountain is a work of grace; the same grace by which the theological virtues, faith, hope and love, are infused into the soul. These virtues are represented by the three stars, but as Dorothy Sayers says in another astronomical diversion, neither the three stars of the theological virtues nor the four of the cardinal virtues ever set on Mount Purgatory. Both are needed, but in the night, with the enforced rest and angelic guard, perhaps the dependence on the three is most apparent.

Canto VII. Sordello explains the rule of the mountain to the poets. Progress, any movement, is only possible in the day. After nightfall the soul must stop, since its will can no longer move it. Sordello points the poets to a valley where they can spend the night. In it are souls of late repentant who were preoccupied with their responsibilities, those mentioned are rulers of various European dynasties.

This canto emphasises a point that Dante is sometimes accused of neglecting: the absolute dependence of the souls in Purgatory on Divine grace for their progress. The souls of the preoccupied have a prayer the Salve Regina. Theirs is a better condition than the other late-repentant since their lack was through their diligence. None the less, this canto reminds us the importance of finding the space and time for prayer and the sacraments if the pursuit of the task to hand is not to become the fraught and ultimately frustrated experience that it clearly is for most of these souls. The one exception is Henry III of England, who, it is suggested, sits somewhat apart from the others for failing to balance responsibility with devotion by neglecting his responsibilities in order to pray.

Canto VI. The poets disengage themselves from the large company of unshriven souls, all of whom beg of Dante that he seek prayers for them from their living friends and family. This leads Dante to ask Virgil to ask why Divine justice should respond to prayer in this matter. Dante and Virgil then meet the soul of Sordello, a Mantuan, which prompts Dante to a long diatribe on the state of Italy.

Virgil’s answer to Dante’s question on prayer provides matter for reflection here. On the face of it the political polemic that takes up most of the Canto does not. I think this mistaken, but will return to Dante’s political views later. Dante’s question to Virgil is ostensibly prompted by a passage in the Aenied where Aeneas visits Hades. A soul of a drowned sailor asks to cross the Styx but is refused, since his body is unburied, and he is told by the Sybil that he cannot hope to change the decrees of the gods by prayer. The question of why our prayer should ever be efficacious does not require this obscure classical prompt, of course.

Virgil offers a provisional answer, Beatrice will fully enlighten Dante later. Figuratively, reason defers to theology. But we learn some theology nonetheless. Prayer is a kind of substitution, an offering of love for another, and so its effectiveness is not a lessening of divine justice, but a satisfaction of it. This answer is enlightening, certainly to me. Prayer is not a matter of offering the Godhead advice on how to run the universe, it is primarily an offering of love to God, that God uses in unexpected ways. That this is possible is a miracle of grace, as Herbert McCabe puts it, our prayer is ultimately not ours but rather ‘our way of sharing in that communication between the Son and the Father’ which is his self-offering on the cross.

Canto V. The poets next meet a group of the unshriven. They died repentant but without the sacrament of confession, not because of indolence, but because of unexpected violent death. Their prayer is the Miserere. Some of them explain their stories to Dante. All are eager that he ask their friends and family to pray for them.

Reconciliation with God, restoration to the community of the Church, depends on grace which gives us the gift of contrition and so a whole-hearted repentance. For these souls such contrition has secured their salvation. The delay in their progress through Purgatory follows from the lack of full reconciliation to the Church by the sacrament. These early cantos all emphasize the importance of the community. The souls are acutely aware of how they can benefit from the prayers of those behind them, for example. The sacrament of reconciliation is of such great importance not because it is the only possible means of repentance and forgiveness, as the stories of these souls show, but because it is the means that fully restores our communion with the Church. Peter Cornwell, formerly an Anglican minister, used an image for sacraments that I find helpful. They are, he said, like pipes that carry the water of God’s grace to where they are needed. Pipes may be work-a-day products of the plumbers trade, but we depend on them. They are God’s ordained means of grace, and so we should make use of them. God might be able miraculously to supply water to those in the desert, but that is no reason for us to be disdainful of the pipes laid on to supply most of us with the grace we need in our day-to-day circumstances.

Canto IV. Dante is so preoccupied with his reflections on the excommunicate that he fails to notice the rapid passage of time. He points out that this is a counter-example to Plato’s claim that different faculties of the mind have different principles or souls; since the powerful exercise of one (Dante’s reflection) inhibits another (his awareness of what is going on around him). St Thomas makes this point in the Summa. The poets climb through a steep and narrow gap onto the next terrace of Ante-Purgatory. Virgil explains to Dante how the passage up the mountain becomes steadily easier. At present it is clearly demanding. Dante is puzzled to see the sun proceeding anti-clockwise through the sky, and Virgil explains why: he is in the southern hemisphere with the sun to the north. The poets meet a group of souls sat still, and, like the excommunicate, with no prayer to repeat. They are the late-repentant, in communion with the Church but having only repented in their last moments, in the case of this group because of their indolence. One of these, known to Dante, explains this to him.

As the slopes of Ante-Purgatory are hard work for Dante, so much of this canto is hard work for those with little interest in astronomy or St Thomas’s philosophy of mind. But the encounter with the indolent late-repentant offers matter for reflection. Salvation is a gift, but it requires our response to ‘work it out in fear and trembling’ in St Paul’s words. This the indolent have failed to do, and so they sit for a period of, what is now enforced, idleness, not even able to pray. The lower slopes of Purgatory bring to mind the carefully balanced affirmations and denials of our faith. We are utterly dependent on God, but by his grace we can truly merit more grace. God’s grace can reach us where-ever we are, but it is our responsibility to take what is offered us through the sacraments and prayer in the ordinary routine of our lives. We can, by grace, build up the disposition of mind to do this. On the other hand, we can build up a contrary disposition to spiritual indolence, which, as is seen on this terrace, it is hard work to slough off.

Canto III Dante and Virgil encounter the souls of the excommunicate, those who died repentent but out of communion with the Church. They must wait to attain Purgatory proper, but have a firm hope of final salvation. The souls tell the poets where they will be able to climb up the mountain, which presents them, where they stand, with a sheer cliff.

The theme of this canto is community. Early on Dante, forgetting that Virgil lacks a material body, notices his own solitary shadow and fears that he has been abandoned. Dante at that moment feels acutely isolated and fearful. The souls that they meet have put themselves out of the community of the Church, the community in which salvation is achieved because salvation is never a purely individual matter. They appear in Dante's description as “sheep without a shepherd” timid and uncertain. They lack a prayer of their own, unlike almost all the other categories of souls which the poets encounter, since prayer, too, is never entirely an individual matter. However, they are not without hope, and the first rekindled sparks of community life can be seen among them. They can also benefit from the prayers of the Church, the community that they are rejoining. This is explained by one of their number, the prince Manfred, who requests that Dante ask for the prayers of his relatives on his behalf. They also offer help to Dante in Virgil in their continuing journey.

Canto II. As in the rest of the poem the passing of time is marked carefully, almost obsessively, with respect to the appearance of the sun, moon and stars. Time is an important theme in this canto. The ship of souls, driven by the wings of its angelic helmsman, passes over the sea so swiftly and lightly that it creates no wake. As soon as the souls have disembarked, again at speed, the boat returns, and, as if to mark the urgency of the action, the sun’s rays appear. Dante meets with the souls, and is recognized by a friend of his, Casella, who starts to sing one of Dante’s own verses. But the curious souls are interrupted by Cato, who urges them to hasten to their purgation, and they run on, in Dante’s image they resemble a flock of birds.

At its best Lent passes with a certain acceleration, the dullness of the first days gives way to a heightened sense of the opportunities that the season offers, which in turn encourages us to mark it with still greater attentiveness. At least, that is how it can be. The Purgatorio matches this pattern. At the start Dante’s limbs are heavy. The passage up the lower slopes of the mountain is hard work , but as each terrace passes, and his own penance progresses, he feels a growing lightness. Grace, as it is said, merits grace. We are reminded of God’s gratuitous gift in the canto. It is why Casella has been admitted early onto the ship (because of the indulgences of the Jubilee year in 1300). But a response is needed, and the newly arrived souls have yet to acquire the sense of urgency of their fellows who Dante meets on the higher slopes. They, like we, have to be reminded that time is a gift, this season is a gift, to be used well.

Canto I. Dante and Virgil emerge from the domain of hell into the dawn of the southern hemisphere. Here they meet Cato of Utica, who represents (as he did to medieval christian writers in general) the virtuous pagan: the paragon of virtue in so far as that is achievable without divine grace. Cato is enlightened by four stars which represent the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and courage. These virtues direct the person who is well-ordered in, respectively, his or her mind, will, appetites and irascible emotions. In christian understanding these virtues can be acquired only incompletely through effort and education. Since human society is ultimately for the sake of the kingdom of God, then, as Herbert McCabe writes “the cardinal virtues need to be perfected and enlivened by the theological virtues, especially charity”. This is why Cato can stand on the lowest terrace of purgatory and direct christian souls towards the first pass, but cannot himself climb it. He instructs Virgil to tidy Dante up: to wash his face and hold his cloak together with a reed (to replace a girdle lost in hell).

This seemingly obscure passage contains much for reflection. In Lent there is a temptation to assume that we are setting out on a programme of self-improvement, giving up chocolate for the sake of our souls as well as our teeth and waist-lines, and that we will achieve some spiritual improvement just as we might achieve a planned loss of weight. At the bottom of Dante’s Mount Purgatory we are reminded that we depend utterly on the gift of divine grace, and that Lenten exercises, by such grace, open us to that, and help us to weaken the attachments to secondary goods which prevent us from fully accepting God’s gifts. What we do in Lent should deepen our sense of dependence on God, and so our humility.