Hardly the Last Word

I’m gladder than I was before that I picked up the John Ciardi translation of the Comedy. ?For the first time I have some idea why Cato of Utica, who was a pre-Christian pagan (so he should at least have been in Limbo), a suicide (so he should have been in Hell with the other suicides), and an opponent of Caesar (so he likely should have been at least in the circle of the violent in Hell) ended up as the welcome wagon in Purgatory. ?The chapter notes indicate that, like Virgil, Cato occupies a border post in Dante’s universe–he never actually goes into Purgatory; he’s simply the point beyond which human virtue cannot continue unassisted. ?Because Cato is the picture of Republican virtue, he welcomes those souls to surpass him and spurs them on to ascend by the help of God’s grace.

I’ll admit that I’ve still not wrapped my mind around where Dante stands relative to all the players in the Roman civil wars of the first century BC, but hopefully I have some years of Dante-reading ahead of me to piece some more of that together.

I tend to forget year to year just how long it takes to get to Purgatory proper–Virgil and Dante don’t advance beyond the gate of Purgatory until ten cantos in. ?And the last six cantos take place not in Purgatory proper but in the Earthly Paradise atop the mountain. ?My point here is that, of the three segments of Dante’s journey, Purgatory, at eighteen cantos, is by far the shortest.

This time around I noticed something that should have stricken me about Purgatory for the last six years but didn’t. ?What has been evident since the first time I read Dante is that, on each level of Purgatory, redeemed sinners have their particular vices purged by reins and by whips. ?The reins pull backwards on vices by means of negative exemplars, stories in which the principal characters’ loves were disordered by vice. ?So on the cornice of the proud, Purgatory presents the death of Saul, too proud to endure capture and falling on his sword. ?On the cornice of the wrathful, the redeemed see Haman hanged on his own gallows. ?And so on. ?The whips drive the souls towards virtues by means of positive exemplars. ?So the envious hear of ?the goodwill of Christ’s mother as she requests that her son ?make wine for the wedding at Cana, the slothful hear of Mary’s running to Elizabeth in joyful enthusiasm for proclaiming the coming of the Lord, and so on. ?What I hadn’t noticed before is that Dante places classical Greek and Roman stories side by side with Biblical stories, declaring without saying so directly that, in God’s universe, all learning can be learning-towards-virtue. ?Dante really is a herald of the Renaissance’s educational reforms, and his boldness in putting Ariadne and Medea and Julius Caesar next to the great Biblical narratives I’d always taken for granted. ?Perhaps I should have payed more attention.

As I noted in my last post, my time spent reading Dante every summer marks the time of the year that I let myself believe in Purgatory. ?I’m not sure what that entails, but I do know that it’s true. ?When I’m living in Dante’s poem, it makes perfect sense that souls fresh off the boat from Ostia might still be burdened by disordered loves. ?Virgil explains to Dante that some people’s love becomes twisted, so that a person comes to love rising above and lording power over one’s neighbors (pride), the suffering of one’s neighbor (envy), or the sensation of paying back one’s neighbor for wrongs (wrath). ?One might lack fervor in one’s love for genuine goods, which are all rooted in the Good, Dante’s definition of sloth. ?Or one might come to love possessions (greed), food and drink (gluttony), or sexual intimacy (lust) more than what’s fitting in the divine scheme. ?(As a side note, there are an awful lot of sodomites in Dante’s Purgatory, on their way to Dante’s Heaven. ?They’re on the same cornice as folks immoderately concerned with more conventional sexual pairings. ?Just sayin’.) ?In all of these cases, the souls of the redeemed stay where they stay as long as they’re not willing Heaven. ?When their highest love is directed towards God, as human love ultimately should be, they ascend. ?The prayers of the living help them out, as God listens and blesses the communion that the dead share with those still struggling on earth. ?It’s not something that I’m ever going to teach in Sunday school, but as a vision of how human love, divine love, and the continuity of God’s love beyond the grave (reread John 3:16 really carefully if this is offending you) is compelling. ?I’m not going to deny that.

Dante’s Purgatorio ends with an apocalyptic vision of Plato’s and Paul’s highest virtues in procession, accompanied by allegorical representatives of the books of the Bible, all proclaiming the divine love that redeems humankind. ?As the second division ends and the third begins, Virgil has departed, replaced by Beatrice, Dante’s spiritual love who hands him his butt and makes him feel the horror of his vices before she lets him cross the river Lethe and forget the corruption of his sins. ?The end of Inferno sees Dante nearing madness, snatching a sinner bald-headed out of spite and at a loss for words to describe the true ugliness of the sounds and sights in the center of Hell. ?The end of this one is a place of utter clarity, Dante hearing his name spoken for the first time in the poem and facing, with eyes open, what he’s become before Beatrice leads him to God’s salvation from precisely that.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I think that I’d take Dante or Milton, even with all their weirdness, as my two theological mentors even before Augustine or Aquinas. ?There’s so much richness to their visions of Heaven and Hell that they make the Earth a richer place to the imagination that will take them on.

by ngilmour