The article deals with the concept of Purgatory in the «Divine Comedy» as the central locus of Dante's reorientation from pagan to Christian imagery. It is noted that Dante developed ethical material on the seven deadly sins that was common in the Christian theory and practice of his time in the poorly visualized context of Purgatory. It is shown that Dante adopted some key doctrinal points about Purgatory, but used for his description only one general doctrine: corporeal fire, which gave him considerable creative freedom to describe and structure his own image of Purgatory, which, at the same time, was sanctioned by the church dogmas of his time. We conclude that Dante's Purgatory cannot be interpreted within the framework of traditional ethics as Inferno, which is also a serious argument for interpreting this locus of the afterlife in terms of Christian ethics.
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