. The third step, satisfaction, is blood red, for it is a controlled, symbolic act of punishment, an attempt at making spiritual restitution for what has been lost and at imposing a moral self-discipline to compensate for previous self-indulgence. The underlying emotion required for the whole sacrament is humility; sin, which comes from pride, can only be undone by humility. Penance, however, which absolves sinners from guilt and so saves them from damnation, does not necessarily free them from the influence of the seven deadly sins; hence the need for Dante's Purgatory as a follow up to the three steps. The term, deadly sin, though of long standing, is actually a misnomer: no one still guilty of sin could be saved. Rather these should be called the seven capital vices or the seven roots of sinfulness. Even after the forgiveness of specific sins, one's predisposition to sin remains. Envy is not a sin, for it is an abstraction, not a specific act requiring consent of the will. Out of envy one might steal another's property or slander another's reputation; these would be sinful acts, possibly severe enough to warrant damnation if unconfessed. The deadly sins, therefore, are yet another construct of medieval psychology, this one designed to explain the presence within the individual of certain universal instincts toward evil. As instincts they are not sinful and so are insufficient to keep souls from hell, but as imperfections derived from Adam's fall, they need to be purged if one is to regain Adam's prelapsarian innocence. If Inferno had dealt with the effects of sin, Purgatorio deals with their causes. At each of the seven terraces the souls systematically overcome one of the vices, either by practicing the opposite virtue or by symbolically suffering from the harmful effects of the vice. At each cornice, we find an appropriate prayer in addition to one of the eight beatitudes from Christ's Sermon on the Mount (nowhere more appropriate ...
