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.