Dante

by Edmund G. Gardner

3. The “Purgatorio”

Structure and Allegorical Meaning.—Purgatory is a steep mountain of surpassing height, on the only land rising out of the sea in the southern hemisphere. Like Hell, it was formed when Lucifer and his followers were cast out of Heaven. To escape him the earth rushed up to form this mountain, and left void the cavern through which Dante ascended (Inf. xxxiv. 125). It is the exact antipodes of Jerusalem and Mount Calvary, rises beyond atmospheric changes, and is crowned by the Earthly Paradise, scene of man’s fall and symbol of blessedness of this life.

In the literal sense the Purgatorio is the essential Purgatory of separated spirits, expiating and exercising, paying the debt of temporal punishment that remains after the guilt has been forgiven; purging away the material element of sin, after the formal element has been remitted. In the allegorical sense it represents the moral purgatory of repentant sinners in this world; and has for subject man, by penance and good works, becoming free from the tyranny of vice, attaining to moral and intellectual freedom. Thus it becomes a symbol of the whole life of man from conversion to death; man, no longer sunk in ignorance and sin, as in the Inferno; not yet soaring aloft on heights of impassioned contemplation, as in the Paradiso; but struggling against difficulties and temptations, making amends for misuse of Free Will, conforming with the practices of the Church, and obeying the imperial authority, until the time comes to pass to the blessedness of another world.

Dante’s open-air treatment of Purgatory seems peculiar to him. Very wonderful is the transition from the dark night of Hell to the “sweet colour of oriental sapphire,” where the star of Love comforts the pilgrim soul, and the four stars of the Southern Cross, which symbolise the cardinal virtues, make all the sky rejoice in their flame—until Easter Day dawns, and from afar the poet “knew the quivering of the sea” (Purg. i. 117). Throughout this second Cantica the sun is our guide by day, and at night the stars are over our head; we behold the glory of sunrise and of sunset as upon earth, but with added beauty, for it is attended by celestial songs and the softly beating wings of angelic presences. Dante spends part of four days, with three nights, in this portion of his pilgrimage; for Purgatory is the symbol of the life of man, and the life of man has four periods. At the end of each day Dante rests and sleeps; before dawn on each day, except the first, a vision prepares him for the work of the day—the work which cannot begin or proceed save in the light of the sun, for man can advance no step in this spiritual expiation without the light of God’s grace. But the fourth day does not close, like the other three, in night; for it corresponds to that fourth and last stage of man’s life, in which the soul “returns to God, as to that port whence she set out, when she came to enter upon the sea of this life” (Conv. iv. 28).

There are three main divisions of the mountain. From the shore to the gate of St. Peter is Ante-Purgatory, still subject to atmospheric changes. Within the gate is Purgatory proper, with its seven terraces bounded above by a ring of purifying flames. Thence the way leads up to the Earthly Paradise; for by these purgatorial pains the fall of Adam is repaired, and the soul of man regains the state of innocence.

Ante-Purgatory.—In Ante-Purgatory Dante passes Easter Day and the following night. Here the souls of those who died in contumacy of the Church are detained at the foot of the mountain, and may not yet begin the ascent; and the negligent, who deferred their conversion, and who now have to defer their purification, are waiting humbly around the lower slopes. For here purgation has not yet begun; this is the place where time makes amends for time (Purg. xxiii. 84).

Upon the face of Cato, the guardian of the shore and mountain, so shines the light of the four mystical stars, that he seems illumined with the very light of the sun of Divine Grace (Purg. i. 37-39). Cato, “the severest champion of true liberty,” “to kindle the love of liberty in the world, gave proof of how dear he held her by preferring to depart from life a free man, rather than remain alive bereft of liberty” (Mon. ii. 5). He was one of those who “saw and believed that this goal of human life is solely rigid virtue” (Conv. iv. 6). Thus from Lucan’s Pharsalia, Dante has recreated this austere and glorious figure to be the warden of the spiritual kingdom where virtue is made perfect by love and true liberty attained.

At sunrise the white-robed and white-winged Angel of Faith brings the ransomed souls over the ocean from the banks of the Tiber, where the redeemed gather, as the lost do upon the shores of Acheron (Purg. ii.). The In exitu Israel of their psalm signifies mystically, in Dante’s allegory, the passing of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory (Epist. x. 7). His own song of love on the lips of Casella has peculiar fitness at the entrance of the realm of hope and purgation; for, in the eyes of that mystical lady, of whom Love discourses, is the anticipation of Paradise, and yet she is the example of humility—the humility in sign of which Dante has girded himself with a rush. As they turn towards the ascent, the excommunicated draw near, led by Manfred; cut off from the body of the Church by the Pontiff’s curse, they were reunited to its soul by tardy repentance. The episode of Manfred is a counterpart to that of Celestine in the corresponding canto of the Inferno. Dante would clearly show the difference of God’s judgment from that of man. The figure of the canonised pope-hermit, whom the world extolled as a perfect type of Christian renunciation, and who died in the odour of sanctity, is contrasted with that of the worldly king who died excommunicate, and whose name was tainted with suspicion of incest and parricide: “Horrible were my sins, but Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it” (Purg. iii. 121-123).

Through a narrow gap they begin the ascent, which is so hard at the outset, but grows ever lighter as man ascends. Among the negligent through indolence, Belacqua seems as lazy as upon earth (Purg. iv.); but his laziness is now its own punishment. At midday Virgil’s swift rebuke (Purg. v. 10-15) cures his pupil of one fatal obstacle to following philosophy in the search of moral and intellectual liberty—human respect. Among those cut off by violent deaths is Buonconte da Montefeltro, the story of whose fate, Canto v., is in designed contrast with the soul’s tragedy that came from his father’s lips out of the torturing flames of Malebolge (Inf. xxvii.). The lacrimetta of the dying knight—the “little tear” that saved his eternal part from the fiend (Purg. v. 107)—has become one of the priceless pearls in the treasury of the world’s poetry. All these souls ask for remembrance in prayer, that their delay may be shortened, and Virgil’s explanation centers upon the power of love to reach for expiation from beyond the grave (vi. 37-39). In these earlier cantos of the Purgatorio, there are constant traces of the deep impression made upon Dante by the story of Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas, in Books v. and vi. of the Aeneid.

The Valley of the Princes.—They come to the solitary and lion-like soul of Sordello, whose loving greeting to his Mantuan countryman gives occasion to Dante’s superb and famous outburst of Italian patriotism: Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello (Purg. vi. 76 et seq.); which shows a striking correspondence with the great passage where Lucan laments the overthrow of Roman liberty at Pharsalia (Phars. vii. 440 et seq.). The part of Sordello is very similar to that of Musaeus in the Aeneid, Book vi.; he leads Virgil and Dante to the Valley of the Princes, which corresponds to Elysium, the verdant vale where Aeneas met Anchises. Dante probably reconstructed the troubadour’s personality from his own famous poem on the death of Blacatz, a Provençal hero of the thirteenth century, in which he upbraids and derides the kings and princes of Christendom, beginning with Frederick II., and ends with a proud assertion that he will speak the whole truth in spite of the powerful barons whom he may offend. So here, in the Valley of the Princes, where those are detained who neglected some peculiarly lofty mission, or postponed their spiritual welfare to worldly and political care, Sordello, beginning with the Emperor-elect, Rudolph of Hapsburg (Purg. vii. 94), points out the descendants or successors of those whom he had rebuked in the other life. Here, singing together to the Queen of Mercy, the deadliest foes sit side by side, consoling each other; Rudolph of Hapsburg with Ottocar of Bohemia, Charles of Anjou with Peter of Aragon; a motive found previously in the vision of Tundal, where, however, the kings are naturally Irish. On Henry of England Sordello had been more severe when he lived. After sunset, in the light of three brighter stars, that symbolise the three theological virtues, Dante has pleasant talk with Nino Visconti and Currado Malaspina (Purg. viii.). And, as evening closes in, two golden-haired Angels, green-clad and green-winged, the Angels of Hope with the flaming but blunted swords of justice tempered with mercy, defend the noble souls from the assault of an evil serpent. In the literal sense, this episode (which seems a relic from earlier mediaeval visions) may imply that souls in Purgatory have not the intrinsic impossibility of sinning that is possessed by the blessed of Paradise, but are kept absolutely free from any sin by the Divine Providence. In the allegorical sense, the meaning clearly is that the way to moral and intellectual freedom is a hard one, and temptations to fall back in despair are many. The tempter would draw man back from regaining the Earthly Paradise, from which he has once caused his expulsion.