Pride. But it's both more and less complicated than that.

I want to start with my girl Mechthild of Magdeburg. She was a 13th century beguine (like a nun, but probably more active in the world outside her community) and mystical author. Some of her writing is expressed through divine visions that she claimed she received from God, a strategy necessary for women to be able to write theology in the Middle Ages. She recounts lush visions of Christ, of Mary, of the prophets at the end of the world, of conversations with the Trinity--and one very striking vision of hell.

I saw a city

Its name is eternal hate

It was built in the deepest abyss

From all kinds of stones of huge capital sins

Pride was the first stone,

As is manifest in the case of Lucifer

Disobedience, greed, gluttony, lust--

These were the four very heavy stones

Which our father Adam sent here...[other "stones" follow associated with Cain, Judas, and the city of Sodom]

...Lucifer sits bound by his guilt in the deepest abyss. There flows forth unceasingly out of his fiery heart and out of his mouth all the sins, torments, sickness, and shame in whichhell, purgatory, and the earth are so wretchedly entangled. In the bottommost part of hell the fire, gloom, stench, shuddering, and all kinds of intense pain are the greatest. It is there that Christians are placed according to their deeds...

Alas, how ignominiously they are received by Lucifer! He greets them grimly and bitterly...Then, first of all, he grabs the proud one and thrusts him under his tail [for Mechthild, the worst of all possible places] and says, "I have not sunk so deep that I shall not lord it over you"...

She continues on to describe the "punishment fits the crime" fates for people guilty of other sins in her litany of capital "stones"--false sanctity, usury, theft, murder, lust, and so forth:

Those who here gave themselves over to fierce hatred must there serve as a smelling pt, ever hanging before his nose. Those who here so keenly ate and drank to excess must there stand before Lucifer in unending hunger and eat glowing stones.

Writing a century before Mechthild, nun and prophet Hildegard of Bingen also wrote from divine revelation, but she writes that she heard what she calls the Living Light explaining what she saw in her visions to her. She is more systematic, less evocative:

But Lucifer, who because of his pride was cast forth from celestial glory, was so great at the moment of creation that he felt no defect in beauty or strength...He spoke thus within himself about God: "I wish to shine [in this paradise-like place] like God does here!" And all his army assented, saying, "We wish what you wish!" And when, elated with pride, he tried to achieve what he had conceived, the Lord reaching out in fiery blackness cast him down with all his retinue, so they were made burning instead of shining.

So, pride.

But where does that leave Dante? After all, homeboy's version of inferno is so popular that even though, as we saw, visionaries like Mechthild hit all his high points decades and even centuries prior, TV Tropes still uses "Word of Dante" to describe when fanfiction is so entrenched it becomes basically canon.

And to illustrate this, Mechthild is, as always, my go-to author. We're very familiar with the seven deadly sins even today, and you may even know that in Cassian's original formulation there were eight. But let's look at Mechthild's "essential cornerstones" that build the foundation of hell: pride, disobedience, greed, gluttony, lust, anger, duplicity, murder, lying, betrayal, spiritual despair, suicide, sodomy, and false sanctity. These are the capital vices, and sure, you can find more than a few of the Big Big Seven on there. But the list is both different and far more expansive. Furthermore, it includes things like sodomy and murder, which we might group as "actions" that commit the "psychological" sins of lust and wrath rather than being sins in and of themselves.

Not only that, but Mechthild's contrapazzo punishments do not squarely line up with her initial litany of the fundamental sins: pride, sodomy, false sanctity, usury, robbery, theft, unchastity, hypocrisy, avarice, murder, being a hater (no, really), gluttony, sloth, having a hot temper, people who spend money unwisely and drag others down with them. Once again, there is overlap, but it is not exact.

And neither list lines up with any of the other groupings of sin popularized in late medieval didactic literature: the nine alien sins, the six sins against the Holy Spirit, the sins through the five senses, the four sins that cry to heaven. (Twenty-first century clickbait got nothing on the fifteenth.)

Furthermore, turning to pastoral writers, we find something surprising even in discussions of the seven deadly sins proper. Following sixth-century very very important theologian Gregory the Great, late medieval priests preach that pride is the queen or head of the sins, and explain how each of the other sins flows out of it. This is all good and what we are accustomed to today. But if you keep reading into sermons or sermon passages on a sin in particular, the picture changes. Essentially: *literally any of them can be "the worst sin," with a long explanation of why. Greed? You bet. Lust? If you so desire. Gluttony? Sure, why not have 'em all be the worst.

For Dante and his readers, then, there's nothing unorthodox or even remotely odd about placing traitors in the lowest circle of hell. Satan's crime of pride leads to rebellion, forging the link allegorically. And, scholars would suggest, Dante's imagery traces that link from treason against the Lord right back to pride.

As Hildegard relates, Lucifer's crime was willing to be like God--not in resemblance of will, but in independent power. And not just power, but the "rights" that accrue with power and majesty. Hildegard's Lucifer is an inverted God: he assembles an army that says "Our will is to do your will," which is the direct medieval orthodox ideal of Christians towards God.

And Dante's Satan lies frozen at the antiheart of hell. But frozen by his own design: his eternal flapping wings struggling to break free (be independent of God) creating his very punishment; his endless consumption without consuming the three most treacherous traitors likewise a mockery of God's sovereignty, since Satan can never truly consume. Pride, I think Dante would say, is an essential cornerstone of his inferno as well.