Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. This is Matt Petrucic Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute.

This week we are bringing you the next lecture from Bishop Barron's popular course, Dante's Catholic

Imagination, which is available in its entirety inside the Word on Fire Institute.

We hope you enjoy this deep dive into Dante's Evergreen, always relevant, poetic, moral, and

theological genius.

So now we're ready to look into the second great part of the divine comedy, namely the

purgatorio.

We've seen that Dante and Virgil have hit

absolute rock-bottom in their confrontation with Satan, but then the only way

up is down, so having gone all the way down, they now commence the journey upward.

They come out on the other side of the world, surging up out of that southern sea now is the

great mountain of purgatory. You know Thomas Merton's autobiography called

the seven-story mountain was taken right from here. Merton who loved Dante, I

don't know anyone that reads Dante that doesn't love him. But Merton saw his life as a trappist as a whole life of purgation from the deadly sins. So the seven stories of the mountain of purgatory correspond to the seven deadly sins

that Dante now needs to be purged up. I love as they come out from this terrible

journey through hell and they see the stars that's a constant

motif in the divine comedy the seeing of the stars is always a sign of of life and

hope they also spy the planet Venus and he names it as the planet of love, so Venus

the goddess of love, but it's the interpretive ken out of the whole purgatorio. See suffering resisted out of self-preoccupation

becomes meaningless, but suffering accepted in love becomes redemptive.

So the whole attitude now the poem changes because purgatory,

though it's a place of great suffering,

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