Dante's Purgatorio (Continued)

Purgatory is a place that Catholics believe in that is said to be where good people who aren't worthy of Heaven or Hell go to purge their sins before they go to heaven. However, The Bible never really mentions purgatory, so it does not have enough background for it to exist. Anyway, the basics of purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy are that for whatever sins you committed on earth you will spend a certain amount of time on the level that punishes you for that particular sin. Many of these levels were on a mountain you must climb.

The mountain was designed to purify the psychology of the souls, the first terrace being for the prideful. They would have to run up the mountain, but the mountain gets easier and easier as you go. This holds great significance for real life, because when we start out on earth, we don't know anything, and life is extremely hard. However, as we go through life, we learn more and get better at things we do every day, to the point where the climb is effortless. As we go through life, the burden of those things we put effort into gets lighter as we obtain more knowledge about everything, which was also the way the purging of pride would work.

The work of purging pride in Dante's Purgatorio was not only fitting, but a reference to how we as humans go through life with the things we work at getting easier and easier.