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.