The Journey through Purgatory

The Seven Deadly Sins: History

Disordered Loves

Dante’s Classification

Setting of the Purgatorio

Outline of the Purgatorio

Outline of the Purgatorio (cont)

Slide 8

The Sin of Pride

Pride

Forms of Pride

He has a Ph.D. from Princeton and wears it effortlessly. The Journals he reads are in languages his colleagues can’t read, and he and they both know it. He is not generous about their attempts at scholarly articles, when he notices them at all, but that is the prerogative of a star.

He enjoys undergraduate teaching and lectures with panache; a few students hate him, but more follow him around, and he seems to enjoy both sorts . . .

It irks him that the college is church-related: he has to go to chapel on ceremonial occasions and put up with a religion department. He is always at his most cutting and disdainful after listening to the chaplain preach.

After hearing a “born-again” student hold forth, he convulsed other skeptics by observing that both births had miscarried . . .

There are a few who have known him for a long time, however, and who remember that he was raised in a Christian family. When he was twelve years old, his father fell ill. He prayed for his father’s healing; his father died.

After that he had nothing more to do with his parents’ god and has dismissed religion as rubbish ever since.

—William S. Stafford

Dante’s Purgation of Pride

Slide 16

Slide 17

The Sin of Envy

Envy

Forms of Envy

Years ago, another pastor’s three children would come to visit my own family on vacations now and then. We enjoyed playing with the other children; they were nice. Their family seemed normal, their parents loving and sane.

As the years passed, however, all three children took inexplicable bad turns—they fell out with their parents, left school, used and sold heroin. In the end, one of them drifted into prostitution; two joined a particularly vicious gang. Three young people and two parents were destroyed, and there was no explaining it . . .

Shortly after the family’s breakup, the children’s aunt died. In her last days she called her sister, the mother of the three. She told her that she had despised her sister’s happiness and had resolved to destroy it by corrupting her children.

Over the years she had invited the three to her city apartment, in a way that seemed entirely normal. There she treated them royally, far better than their underpaid parents could . . .

She introduced them gradually to her bitterness, to lies about their parents, to adult sex, to the pleasure of drugs—all without a hint to the parents. She told this to her sister as a final act of triumph on her deathbed.

That family was destroyed beyond healing. It was not simply that the aunt had wanted a family herself and had tried to steal her sister’s. She saw her sister’s family with an evil eye, and destroyed it in malice.

—William S. Stafford

Dante’s Purgation of Envy

Slide 25

Slide 26