The Ladder of Virtue
The seven terraces of Dante’s Mount Purgatory as one ascending scale: each capital vice purged and its contrary virtue gained, from pride and humility up to Eden.
In Dante’s Purgatorio the mountain rises in seven terraces. On each, souls are cleansed of one capital vice by practising its contrary virtue: pride and humility at the bottom, then envy and generosity, wrath and meekness, sloth and zeal, avarice and liberality, gluttony and temperance, and lust and chastity at the top, below the Earthly Paradise.
How to read the ladder
Read it from the bottom up, the way Dante climbs. Each rung is a terrace, numbered on the bar. The vice purged there stands on the left and the virtue practised there on the right, and the colour climbs from red at the root to violet at the top.
The gate and its three steps
Below the first terrace is the gate of Purgatory, reached by three steps (Purgatorio IX): white marble, a dark and cracked stone, and red porphyry. The commentators read them as the three parts of penance: confession, contrition and satisfaction.
Why pride is at the root
In canto XVII Virgil explains the order. The lowest three terraces cleanse love turned the wrong way, toward another’s harm: pride, envy and wrath. The middle one cleanses love too slow: sloth. The top three cleanse love of good things held too much: avarice, gluttony and lust. Pride, the most serious, is furthest from Eden.
Related
Common questions
Are these the seven deadly sins?
Yes. They are the seven capital vices of the Christian tradition, which Gregory the Great listed and Dante arranged on his mountain from the most serious at the bottom to the least at the top.
Where do the virtues come from?
On each terrace Dante sets examples of the opposite virtue before the souls: humility against pride, generosity against envy, meekness against wrath, zeal against sloth, liberality against avarice, temperance against gluttony and chastity against lust.
Why is this on an astrology site?
Because the Almanac keeps the older wisdom beside the sky, and Dante’s cosmos is one of its great maps: after Purgatory his Paradiso climbs through the planetary heavens. The Faith and Discernment pages say more.
