Amongst many others are Pope Martin IV. and the poet Bonagiunta of Lucca, whose talk with Dante upon the dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style,” is one of the landmarks for the student of poetry (Purg. xxiv. 49-60). Dante’s famous definition of his own position expresses, in another form, the truth that all great poetry is the “transfigured life” of its author:[35] “I am one who, when Love inspires me, note, and give utterance in that fashion which he dictates within.” It is already anticipated in the prose passage prefixed to the Donne che avete in the Vita Nuova (xix.), and completes the conception of poetry set forth in the De Vulgari Eloquentia.
The Seventh Terrace.—Passing another tree, a shoot from the tree of knowledge, beneath which the purging pangs are renewed, and from whose branches spirit voices proclaim examples of gluttony’s punishment, they are summoned upwards by the glowing and dazzling Angel of Abstinence, fragrant with grass and flowers as the air of May. As they ascend the narrow stairs towards the last terrace, Statius explains the generation of the body and the infusion of the rational soul, which exists, after the body’s death, invested with an aerial body as a shade (Purg. xxv. 31 et seq.). Apparently it is because revelation has some voice in these high matters that the Christian Statius gives Dante this exposition, instead of Virgil, and at the latter’s request; until the seventh terrace is reached, where sensual passion is expiated in the bosom of the great burning. Singing to the God of Supreme Clemency, crying aloud examples of chastity or of lust’s punishment, two bands of souls, divided according to the nature of their sin, pass through the fire in opposite ways (Purg. xxvi.). Here is Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, father of the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, whom Dante gazes upon in rapt admiration, and addresses with impassioned love and worship. But Guinizelli—with that humility which is so characteristically Dante’s own—indicates as miglior fabbro del parlar materno, a “better craftsman of his mother-tongue,” Arnaut Daniel, the cunning Provençal song-smith, who invented the sestina, and whose metrical skill and originality won for him a higher place in the estimation of the poet of the rime pietrose than modern students of the troubadours are usually disposed to concede.
The Purging Fire.—At sunset the Angel of Purity, singing “Blessed are the clean of heart,” bids the poets pass through the flames that lie between them and the last stairway—the purging fire that is the wall between Dante and Beatrice. Dante endures the “burning without measure”; and they reach the ascent, greeted by dazzling light and celestial strains of Venite benedicti Patris mei. The Cherubims with the flaming sword, “turning every way to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. iii. 24), are thus welcoming man’s restoration to the Garden of Eden, as the serpent had endeavoured to impede it in the Valley of the Princes. Now it is a delight to mount; but night comes on, and Dante, watched over by Statius and Virgil, falls asleep on the stairs (Purg. xxvii.).
Leah and Liberty.—Just before dawn, prelude to the new day, he dreams of Leah, a young and lovely lady gathering flowers in a meadow. The theologians took Leah as type of the active life, and Rachel, her sister, of the contemplative; a symbolism to which Richard of St. Victor gave a more mystical colour, by interpreting Leah as “affection inflamed by divine inspiration, composing itself to the norm of justice.” Leah may then represent the affection, thus inflamed and ordered, which is the perfection of the active life. At sunrise the topmost stair of Purgatory is reached, and Virgil, who can himself discern no further, resigns his guidance at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Dante’s judgment has been made free, right, and whole; per ch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio, “wherefore I crown and mitre thee over thyself” (xxvii. 142). It has been supposed that Virgil is here resigning to Dante the crown and mitre of the Emperor; mitratus et coronatus was the expression used for the coronation of an Emperor when the Pope placed upon his head a mitre and a crown, which afterwards were united in the mitred crown, as seen in the great fresco at Santa Maria Novella. Others refer the crown to temporal or imperial authority, and the mitre to spiritual or ecclesiastical; for (Mon. iii. 4) “if man had remained in the state of innocence in which he was made by God, he would have had no need of such directive regimens,” which are “remedial against the infirmity of sin.” Dante, purified from sin, has regained this state of innocence, and has attained that liberty through which “we have our felicity here as men and our felicity elsewhere as Gods” (Mon. i. 12). In any case, Virgil is confirming the freedom which Dante has sought and gained by the passage through Purgatory.
The Earthly Paradise and Matelda.—The Earthly Paradise represents “blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s natural powers” (Mon. iii. 16). This blessedness is found in the twofold exercise of the mind: the practical, which “consists in ourselves working virtuously, that is, in integrity, with prudence, with temperance, with fortitude, and with justice”; and the speculative, which consists “in considering the works of God and of nature” (Conv. iv. 22). In this Earthly Paradise, the music of whose birds and trees has surely passed into the wonderful six cantos that close the Purgatorio, Dante meets, amidst the flowers on Lethe’s banks, the glorified realisation of the Leah of his dream (Purg. xxviii.). She has been taken as symbolising the glorified active life in the state of recovered Eden, realising in the Church of Christ what Leah had dimly prefigured in the Old Testament; the active Christian life; innocentia bonorum operum, the virtuous use of earthly things, directly ordered to the love of our neighbour; the temporal felicity of the Earthly Paradise. Since the purgatorial process is the freeing of the soul from disordered love, we may follow Richard’s interpretation of Leah, and take her as representing love rightly ordered and inflamed by divine inspiration. Presently she is called Matelda (xxxiii. 119), and it is probable that she is the idealised presentment of a real person. All the earliest commentators, excepting the Ottimo, identify her with the great Countess of Tuscany, in support of which view might be urged the historical work of the Countess in the revival of the study of Roman Law at Bologna—Roman Law being, for Dante, the secular counterpart of the “perfect law of liberty.” Some modern commentators prefer to seek her prototype in one or other of the ladies of Vita Nuova; for instance, in that lady of very sweet speech who had rebuked Dante at the crisis of his “new life.” Others have attempted to identify her with Mechthild of Magdeburg or Mechthild of Hackeborn, two German mystical writers of the latter part of the thirteenth century whose works show occasional analogies with the Commedia. It may be observed that her counterpart, as Rachel to Leah, is not Beatrice, as sometimes supposed, but St. Bernard, in the closing cantos of the Paradiso. Matelda explains her joyous aspect by referring Dante to the Psalm Delectasti (Ps. 92, 91 Vulgate), and her discourse of Eden and its rivers (realising the Golden Age sung by the classical poets) communicates to Virgil and Statius her own celestial joy: “Thou has given me, O Lord, a delight in what Thou hast made: in the works of Thy hands I shall rejoice.” She points out to Dante’s gaze the wondrous pageant, which astonishes Virgil as much as his pupil, the mystical procession that represents the triumphal march of the Church (Purg. xxix.).
The Pageant of the Church.—With brilliant light and ineffable melody, the triumph advances: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. xxi. 2). Headed by seven candlesticks of gold as standards, followed by the twenty-four elders, white-robed and crowned with lilies, singing Mary’s praises; between the four living creatures of Ezekiel and St. John, crowned with green, comes a triumphal chariot, more glorious than the sun, upon two wheels; drawn by a Griffin, half lion and half eagle, whose golden wings stretch up far out of sight, through the seven luminous bands that form the processional canopy. By the right wheel dance three maidens, symbolic of the theological virtues; by the left wheel dance four, who represent the cardinal virtues, following the measure of Prudence, as the others take their step from the song of Charity. The seven candlesticks are the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the twenty-four elders, either the patriarchs and prophets, or the books of the Old Testament; the four living creatures, the four Evangelists, or their four Gospels; the Griffin, Christ Himself in His Human and Divine Natures. Lastly, follow seven more elders, white-robed but crowned with flaming red flowers; a physician, and one with shining sword; four of humble appearance; an old man “sleeping with face alert.” According to Benvenuto da Imola, these represent St. Peter (who had intrusted to him the power of healing souls) and St. Paul, the four great Latin doctors, and St. Bernard. More usually they are regarded as personifying the books of the New Testament—the Acts, St. Paul’s Epistles, the Epistles of St. Peter, James, John, and Jude, the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John. Upon the chariot, amidst a hundred Angels singing and scattering flowers, Beatrice appears, clad in the mystical colours, red, white, green, crowned with the olive of wisdom and of peace over her snow-white veil. And, at the advent of the Wisdom divinely revealed to man, Virgil silently vanishes; he has tasted of the delights of the Earthly Paradise, has witnessed the triumph of the Church from which he is for ever cut off, the Faith he never knew, and has gone back to his mournful dwelling-place (Purg. xxx.).
Beatrice and Dante.—The precise significance of the reproaches which Beatrice pours upon Dante for his mode of life after her death, with the poet’s own bitter shame and intense repentance (xxx., xxxi.), depends upon the view taken of his character and the nature of the wanderings represented in the dark wood. That these aberrations were mainly philosophical and intellectual, as sometimes supposed, appears highly improbable. We would regard Dante’s confession here as one of his most personal utterances, and hold that the cherubically inspired singer of righteousness is deliberately casting aside the allegorical veil which, in the Convivio, he had attempted to throw over the things in the past which still severed him from the ideal life when he wrote: “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion.” It is a personal episode, in which Beatrice is the woman loved and to whose memory the poet has been unfaithful, standing out clearly from the allegorical mystery by which it is surrounded and in which it is set. After Matelda has drawn Dante through Lethe, the four cardinal virtues, which “perfect the intellect and appetite of man according to the capacity of human nature,” lead him to the breast of the mystic Griffin; and, in response to the song of the three theological virtues, which perfect man supernaturally, Beatrice at last unveils her countenance to his gaze: “O splendour of living light eternal.”
Concluding Allegories of the “Purgatorio.”—The allegory is resumed. In the light of this revelation, now that he is purified and free from sin, Dante beholds a vision of the Church and Empire (Purg. xxxii.). That glorious procession had first presented an ideal of the Church as Divine Providence intended it to be, before it became the vessel that the serpent of simony broke; the Bride that the Divine Spouse ordained for the guidance of the world. Such being the ideal, Dante beholds in a series of allegorical visions its history, in conjunction with the Empire, from the first coming to Rome down to the transference of the papal chair to Avignon. The great procession moves on through the divine forest, the Griffin still drawing the chariot with Beatrice seated upon it; Matelda with Dante and Statius following after the right wheel. Even as the divine origin of the Church has been seen in the triumphal car, so now the divine origin of the Empire is indicated in the desolate and despoiled tree which they reach. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, since the prohibition to eat of that tree was the beginning of law and the duty of obedience, represents Natural Law or Natural Justice, what Dante calls ius; which “in things is nought else than the similitude of the divine will” (Mon. ii. 2). The expression of this natural justice and the means for its effectuation in human society is Law, which Dante identifies with the Empire, and thus the tree becomes the symbol of the Empire and of the obedience due to it. The tree is destitute of flowers and foliage till the Griffin comes to it, who plucks nothing from it: “Thus is preserved the seed of all justice” (Purg. xxxii. 48; cf. our Lord’s words to St. John, Matt. iii. 15). Justice can alone be fulfilled when the Church follows this example of her Divine Founder, and usurps none of the temporal rights of the Empire. After the chariot has been bound to the tree, the previously bare plant breaks out into purple leaves and flowers. The Griffin and his train return to Heaven, leaving Beatrice to guard the chariot of the Church, seated beneath the shadow of the Imperial Tree, upon its root, which is Rome. In a new series of visions Dante beholds the sequel; he sees the conflict of the past, contemplates the corruption of the present, hearkens to the hope of the future. The persecution of the Church by the early Roman Emperors is followed by the inroad of the first heresies; and the donation of Constantine by the rising of the dragon of schism or simony. By more assumption of secular power and dignities, the chariot becomes monstrously transformed, and shamelessly usurped by the harlot, who represents the corrupt ecclesiastical authority enthroned in the place of Revelation, a false and degraded theology based upon the Decretals instead of the true divine science of the Scripture and the Fathers. By her side a giant appears who, after alternate caressing and scourging of the usurper, unbinds the transfigured chariot from the tree, and drags it away through the forest—symbolical of the interference of the royal house of France, ending in the transference of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon.
A Deliverer Announced.—But to the mournful psalm that the maidens around her raise, Deus venerunt gentes, Beatrice answers in words of hope; “a little while,” and the spiritual guide shall rise again from the black tomb of Avignon. And, as they move on, she utters to Dante a further prophecy (Purg. xxxiii.). “The vessel that the serpent broke was and is not,” so completely has corruption and simony degraded the chariot of the Bride of Christ. But vengeance shall fall upon the guilty parties, and the eagle shall not for ever be without an heir; for already a favourable disposition of the stars is at hand, under which a messenger of God shall come, who shall slay the harlot and the giant. It is probably the same event as the coming of the Veltro. Dante is to repeat her words “to those that live the life which is a running to death,” and not to conceal what he has seen of the tree. Apparently (Purg. xxxiii. 58-72) he is to make manifest that the Empire is of divine origin, and to recognise that the precept given by God to our first parents corresponds now with the duty and obedience man owes to the Empire. The law under which Adam lived was the prohibition to eat of the tree; the law under which his descendants, the commonwealth of the human race, live is the Empire. As Parodi puts it, it is not a new sense superimposed upon the first; “it is simply the same single meaning, the historical circumstances alone appearing changed.” The sin of Adam is repeated when the Empire is usurped of its rights or its authority attacked, for God created it holy for the purpose of leading man to temporal felicity—the goal, here and now, of the human race.[36]
Lethe and Eunoë.—At noon they come to where the rivers of Lethe and Eunoë issue from one mystical fountain, the fountain of the grace of God. Here Beatrice refers Dante to Matelda, who leads him and Statius to drink of Eunoë, which quickens dead virtue and restores memory of every good deed in those who have first been bathed in Lethe, which takes away the memory of sin. According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa, iii. 89, 5), works done in charity, although in a sense dead through sin, are brought to life through penance. Through repentance they regain their efficacy of leading him who did them into eternal life. Therefore Dante writes: “I returned from the most holy stream, remade even as young trees renewed with new foliage, pure and disposed to ascend to the stars.”