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.