than on this Mount). In addition, each cornice provides in some ingeniously apt way examples of the harm that springs from its particular vice (called the rein or bridle of the vice) and of the good that comes from its corresponding virtue (called the whip). The terms come from horsemanship and stand as reminders of our need for guidance if we are the stay on the right path and continue to act in purposive ways. Dante is not unique in combining the three steps of confession and the seven deadly sins. The two structural devices combine in such other famous 14th century works as Piers Plowman, Confessio Amantis, "The Parson's Tale" (with which Chaucer "knits up all the feast" in the Canterbury Tales) and in the widely known 15th century play, Everyman. The aftermath of the Fourth Lateran Council found parish priests by and large ill-equipped to guide parishioners in spiritual preparation for the sacrament of Penance. Large numbers of books, penitential in content, hortatory in tone, circulated in the subsequent years both in Latin and in the several vernaculars, that would aid both confessor and penitent in adequately "groping" a conscience before confession. By far the most popular such organizing principles were the ten commandments and the seven deadly sins. Virtually all Christians in Dante's day, therefore, were familiar with this systematization of vices, and both he and other writers adopted it easily and naturally as a structural device. Finally, before we examine Dante's specific climb up the mountain, let us try to reconstruct a typical climb for "everysoul," as Dante apparently would have conceived of it. At death, the saved soul would go to the River Tiber (for salvation comes only through the Church of Rome) and, sometimes after an indeterminate delay, board a boat, which is then guided by an angel steersman across the ocean to the shore of Purgatory. Assuming that the soul has no reason to delay at the foot of the mountain, ...
