ain for a time at the base of the mountain in Ante-Purgatory. Those in this first group are excommunicants. They had been formally declared by Papal decree to have acted so conspicuously heinously that they had placed themselves outside of the Christian community and so were to be excluded from the sacraments and other expressions of communal life. They could be reconciled to the community only by special procedures performed in addition to confession (usually involving for them some public act of humility), which procedure again required Papal authorization and acknowledgment. Many of these souls in Purgatory achieved this reconciliation and died in the state of grace, but in Dante's system are made to circle the mountain thirty years for every year of previous contumacy; for having kept God waiting, they are made to wait. From this first meeting with a class of souls in Purgatorio, a couple of interesting points emerge. First of all, we see that Virgil is no longer the all-sufficient guide he had been in Inferno. He had already in canto 1 earned a rebuke for trying to handle Cato in the ways that had worked with Infernal souls; here in canto 3 we find him every bit as unsure as Dante about how to proceed up the mountain. The second point suggested to us is the centrality of humility on the mountain. Those souls who had obstinately remained outside of the community of Christians in life spend time in Purgatory in a sheep-like flock, in a new community of former ex-communicants. One of the things to notice throughout Purgatory is the way the communal prayer and suffering we find here contrasts with the isolation of the damned. Sin is a state of separation; grace, of integration. That the keenly perceptive description of sheep's behavior in canto 3.79 ff. is obviously drawn from life should not distract us from the gentle humor of having souls, once so "heroically " obstinate, now appear so timid, or from the gospel echoes of the Good Sh...
