Dante: Six Sermons

by Philip H. Wicksteed

In these three lower circles is expiated the perverse love that, in pride, in envy, or in passion, seeks another's ill.

Round the fourth or central ledge hurry in ceaseless flight the laggards whose feeble love of God, though not perverse, was yet inadequate.

Then on the succeeding circles are punished those whose sin was excessive and ill-regulated love of earthly things.

There in the fifth round the avaricious and the prodigal, who bent their thoughts alike to the gross things of earth and lost all power of good, lie with their faces in the dust and their backs turned to heaven, pinioned and helpless.

In the sixth circle the gluttonous in lean and ghastly hunger gaze from hollow eyes 'like rings without the gems,' upon the fruit they may not taste.[67]

And lastly, in the seventh circle the sin of inchastity is purged, in flames as fierce as its own reckless passion.

Through all of these circles to which its life on earth has rendered it liable, the soul must pass, in pain but not in misery; at perfect peace with God, loving the pain that makes it fit to rise into His presence, longing for that more perfect union, but not desiring it as yet because still knowing itself unworthy.

At last the moment comes when this shrinking from God's presence, this clinging to the pain of Purgatory, has its end. The desire to rise up surprises the repentant soul, and that desire is itself the proof that the punishment is over, that the soul is ripe for Heaven. Then, as it ascends, the whole mountain shakes from base to summit with the mighty cry of 'Gloria in excelsis!' raised by every soul in Purgatory as the ransomed and emancipated spirit seeks its home.[68]

Through all these circles Dante is led by Virgil, and here as in Hell he meets and converses with spirits of the departed. He displays the same unrivalled power and the same relentless use of it, the same passionate indignation, the same yearning pity, which take the soul captive in the earlier poem. In the description of Corso Donati's charger dragging his mangled body towards the gorge of Hell in ever fiercer flight; in the indignant protest against the factious spirit of Italy and the passionate appeal to the Empire; in the description of the impotent rage of the fiend who is cheated by 'one wretched tear' of the soul of Buonconte; in the scathing denunciations of the cities of the Arno;[69] in these and in many another passage the poet of the Purgatory shows that he is still the poet of the Hell; but it is rather to the richness of the new thoughts and feelings than to the unabated vigour and passion of the old ones, that we naturally direct our attention in speaking of the Purgatory. And these we have by no means exhausted.

When Dante first entered the gate of Purgatory he heard 'voices mingled with sweet strains' chanting the Te Deum, and they raised in his heart such images as when we hear voices singing to the organ and 'partly catch and partly miss the words.'[70] And this sweet music, only to find its fullest and distinctest utterance in the Paradise, pervades almost the whole of the Purgatory, filling it with a reposeful longing that prepares for the fruition it does not give.