The experience may have influenced Dante's evolution on the great political split of his time. According to one account, two clerics on the altar of St Peter’s raked the money in – using actual rakes – from indulgence-seeking pilgrims. That was a financial boon for the Papacy. There is an irony that Dante helped popularise it, because he had participated in and been somewhat disturbed by the great pilgrimage of Easter 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII declared the first ever 'Holy Year' and many thousands descended on Rome. In contrast with the Inferno’s nine descending circles, Dante’s Purgatorio had seven ascending terraces, corresponding to the deadly sins but populated by those who had not done nothing bad enough in life to be damned. It even put Purgatory on the map, literally. In his powerful imagination, informed by the best science of the time (including an awareness that the world was spherical), Purgatory was in the southern hemisphere, directly beneath Jerusalem on a mountain created by the impact of Lucifer’s fall to earth. The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. Purgatory has long been and still is a popular concept in Ireland, where the idea of being repentant sinners seems to suit us better than being saved Dante's epic poem, begun 34 years later, was an early public relations triumph for the doctrine. It was not until 1274, however, that the Vatican defined it as a place.

And in his vision of the former, he helped invent what was then a new-fangled concept in most of Christendom, if not in Ireland, where Lough Derg had beaten him to it.īelief in an intermediate state of the afterlife, where those too good for Hell but unready for Heaven would expiate their sins, went back to biblical times. But he also visited Purgatory and Heaven. Of the three otherworldly destinations he described in his Divine Comedy, Dante's Inferno is by far the best known.

The divine comedy purgatory