12. The Seven Story Mountain
In this lecture, we begin by discussing the idea of purgatory as it developed over the course of the Christian tradition before Dantes time. Dante himself is the most important figure in the development of our modern imagery for purgatory, as well as the idea of purgatory as a place of spiritual growth that readies the soul for the vision of God in heaven. We discuss the structure of purgatory, a mountain with seven terraced stories in which all of the seven tendencies toward sincalled the seven deadly sinsare successively purged. The reader gets a sense of the kind of place purgatory is, and how it is different from hell, by looking at the guardian of purgatory, Cato of Utica, in Canto 1; Casella, an old friend of Dantes in Canto 2; and Manfred, bastard son of the Emperor Frederick II, in Canto 3.
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