A few weeks ago, I mentioned that for my spiritual reading this summer, I’m making my way through Dante Alighieri’s 800 year old epic poem, the Divine Comedy. In the three books of the Divine Comedy, Dante chronicles a pilgrimage he makes through hell, purgatory, and heaven. He describes the horrific sights and sounds of the punishment of the damned in hell. He then makes his way up the mountain of purgatory, where he meets those who still need to be purified of the effects of their sins before entering heaven where amidst glorious celestial light he meets the blessed saints enjoying the beatific vision of the Holy Trinity.
And throughout his journey, Dante often stops to speak to the souls he meets in the afterlife. In hell, Dante meets Popes and political leaders who misused or neglected their responsibilities; heretics who spread their errors and led others away from the Gospel of Christ, he meets those who betrayed their nation and families; and in the very lowest and iciest depths of hell, there is Judas Iscariot who betrayed our Lord.
The conversation Dante has with this lustful pair is interesting because like most of the souls in hell Paolo and Francesca refuse to admit they did anything wrong. They explain how they were simply spending time in a room together, reading a rather lurid romance novel, when their own passions were kindled.
For allowing themselves to be carried away by their passions, Dante describes Paolo and Francesca with all of the other lustful souls as being blown about hell in a sort of whirlwind for all eternity. Their sin was allowing their passions to lead them to sin. They failed to exercise their intellect—and refused to admit that an unmarried couple shouldn’t have been in room together, alone, reading erotic literature—failing to reasonably protect their chastity. We call that the near occasion of sin, don’t we, when we knowingly put ourselves in a situation where, given our fallen human nature, we are likely to fall into sin.
The Catechism explains that our passions—our powerful emotions are an essential part of our human nature—hunger, thirst, desire for physical intimacy—are part of human nature, but it is our responsibility as rational beings that these passions be put under the direction of right reason.
Our passions are like horses, and they need to be directed by the bridle and bit of truth and reason and self-control. And if our passions are allowed to run-away on their own without proper direction, we will not reach the destination God wants for us—and in a very real sense our actions become little different from the animals. To allow our passions to rule is to abdicate our responsibility as human beings.
In our first reading, we hear of the grave evils running rampant in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The book of Genesis describes God Himself taking note of the grave sins taking place in these cities. Like Paolo and Francesco in the inferno, the Sodomites and citizens of Gomorrah were engaging in sins of lust. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah had become so corrupt, Abraham, as we heard in our first reading from Genesis chapter 18 is really struggling to find 50 or 40 or 30 or 20 or even 10 innocent people.
Sodom and Gomorrah are spared for a time, but In the following chapter of Genesis, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed by God with fire and brimstone, which is certainly a foreshadowing of the eternal punishments of the cities inhabitants who allow their passions to become corrupted by sin and fail to repent.
After traversing through hell, Dante eventually makes his way to the mountain of purgatory. And on Mount Purgatory, Dante encounters the holy souls who, repentant of their sins, now undergo purification in order to prepare for heavenly glory.
In purgatory Dante meets souls guilty of the same sorts of sins as those he encountered in hell: sins of gluttony, and lust, and wrath, and avarice and theft. But the big difference between those in purgatory and those in hell, are that the souls in purgatory acknowledged in their earthly life that their sins were offensive to God. And so they repented and began to hand their lives over to God.
The first group of repentant sinners Dante meets in Purgatory are the souls being purified of the sin of Pride—and this is a big group—a very big group. For Dante, and St. Thomas Aquinas, every sin, really can be traced back to pride. For Pride is when we turn away from God, when we claim to know better than God, when we act as if we were the center of the universe. Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their pride and traced their inability and unwillingness to recognize him as the Son of God back to sinful pride.
As part of their Purgatorial purification from pride, Dante describes the souls pushing heavy stones up the inclined mountain, the heaviness of the stones proportional to the measure of their pride while on earth. Additionally, the souls being purified of pride are found praying; they are praying over and over and over again, the prayer we find in our Gospel today, the Lord’s prayer.
The Lord’s prayer is the antidote to pride. For in the Lord’s prayer, we humbly surrender to God’s will, over our own. The sin of Pride weighs us down from living in the freedom of the children of God, so Our Lord teaches us the Lord’s Prayer to combat our earthly pride—to be devoted to doing the will of the Father, and relying on the providence of the Father, as Our Lord himself. The Catechism states praying the our Father should develop in us the desire to become like Christ, to behave like Christ, to be holy like Christ—free from all selfishness like Christ.
A good priest once suggested to me that our holiness as a Christian can be measured by our ability to pray the Our Father from the heart. In Dante’s purgatory, the Our Father is prayed over and over until they really learn to pray it from the heart. Do you pray the Our Father from your heart? Being one of the first prayers we learn, praying it daily, and every week at Mass, it becomes easy just to rattle off the Our Father without praying from our hearts.
The Catechism devotes its last 100 paragraphs explaining the words of the Lord’s Prayer. I recommend reading through those 100 paragraphs over the next week, you won’t regret it. But also, I invite you, each day this week, set aside some time to pray the Our Father from the heart. Pray it slowly, reflectively, pondering each word, each phrase, each petition. Allow the Lord’s Prayer to help you overcome the pride, the willfulness, the arrogance, the disordered passions that keep you from living in the freedom and peace God wants for you.
My God’s Will truly be done on earth as it is in heaven, in our lives, the lives of our families, and nation, and parish, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
