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.