10 Purgatorio 1–2
CHAPTER 10
Purgatorio 1–2
Purgatorio, a word meaning “place of cleansing or purification,” is the middle section of Dante’s poem. It is a place of transition between the world of Hell and all the evil that we have witnessed and the realm of glory that Paradise is going to be. As an idea, the way Dante understands it, Purgatory is part of human geography. There are two hemispheres in medieval geography: the northern hemisphere, which is the one we inhabit, and the southern hemisphere, where we find the island of Purgatory. As discussed in the last chapter, Purgatory came into existence as Lucifer fell, causing the earth to tremble and retreat, thus creating the void that becomes Hades, the abyss, and the island of Purgatory, which emerges on the other side, in the southern hemisphere. At the top of the peak on that island, one finds the Garden of Eden, where God placed Adam and Eve. In sum, Purgatory is a place on the map.
From this point of view, Purgatory is part of human geography, but it has historically been inaccessible to human beings. One hero that we have already met, Ulysses, in Inferno 26, tries to approach an island, and retrospectively we can understand that that was the island of Purgatory, as if it were a place of immortality that Ulysses wanted to reach and could not. That journey of his ended tragically, in shipwreck. This island is not meant to be reached through merely human means.
Structurally, Dante’s Purgatory is divided into three parts. The first part is the so-called ante-Purgatory, the zone for those souls who are waiting to go farther up. They’re not really repenting yet, but simply waiting to be assigned a particular place along the ledges. Then there are the penitents before going through the process of cleansing. And finally, the third group, those who make their way through the various ledges, which begin with pride and end with lust just before the pilgrim gets into the Garden of Eden. The ordering of sins is an exact reversal of the ordering of sins we had in Inferno. Here you begin with a spiritual sin or intellectual sin, the question of pride, and end up with the most physical and material of them all, lust.
Another important characteristic of Purgatory is a moral trait. We are going to enter the realm of the reconstruction of the human, and it makes sense that Dante should place it immediately after Hell. Only by knowing, only by experiencing, as metaphorically as we can through the poetry of Dante, the nature of evil, the horror of it, can we begin to have an appreciation of the good toward which the pilgrim is going to climb. The perception of moral life and political life in Inferno was so satanic, so narrow, so terrible that Dante is going to have quite a challenge to explain the usefulness and the possibility of reconstructing a moral world, then a political world. He came very close to a total rejection of the historical and political world, and now he has to find out if reconstruction is even possible. The way he will do this is, literally, to go back to the natural world. Do not expect Dante to imagine a place where there is some kind of redemptive intervention from the outside that can tell us how we should act. The natural world must be capable of producing within itself at least some seeds of a need for the good. This self-sufficiency is going to be part of both Dante’s strategy and his difficulties in implementing it.
A further trait of Purgatory that was really completely missing in Inferno is a sense of time. Time was the biological clock of the pilgrim, who was the only living creature, the only truly displaced figure, and he is the only displaced figure throughout the first part of Dante’s poem. In Purgatorio he will find instead that all figures are displaced figures. So, it’s a more human world, and the souls here have a sense of time. In fact, the first thing that we come to understand in Purgatory is what time is. In Inferno the present occupies no space, and there is only knowledge of the past and the future. In Purgatorio, we are given an existential sense of time, which is understood as future-oriented, as a projection into some kind of future, and, at the same time, a return to the past. After all, as the pilgrim moves ahead, he discovers that he’s really going backward, to the Garden of Eden, exactly where God placed Adam and Eve in Genesis. This idea of time will truly become a leitmotif throughout Purgatory. The question of the relationship between the past and the future is constant: even the past was the future at some point, right? The future is the only thing that is going to matter, and the way it’s related to the past will become the principal object of Dante’s concerns as he moves through the various ledges of Purgatory.
But when is this happening for the pilgrim? What is the present moment? The story of the Divine Comedy begins on Holy Thursday, with Dante spending the first night in the dark woods, but the real journey begins on Good Friday, in a clear imitation of Christ’s harrowing of Hell and emergence into the light on Easter Sunday. That’s where we are now, Easter Sunday morning. The Inferno began at dusk, with the idea of the approaching night that represents the unknowability of whatever he was about to confront. Here, instead, we begin with dawn, and therefore Canto 1 of Purgatorio becomes that which in Provençal literature is called an au-bade, from the word aube, alba in Italian, “dawn.” This dawn song is, however, a song that in many ways reverses the grand tradition of the erotic lyrics of Provençal poetry where the dawn becomes the unhappy time for the parting of lovers. It’s restored as a great time when, finally, the pilgrim can proceed and the poet can continue literally mapping the journey.
The second part of the Comedy begins with an image of water, and therefore it carries a motif of cleansing and purification. Dante writes, “To course over better waters the little bark of my genius now hoists her sails, leaving behind her a sea so cruel; and I will sing of that second realm where the human spirit is purged and becomes fit to ascend to Heaven. But here let dead poetry rise again, O holy Muses, since I am yours; and here let Calliope rise up somewhat, accompanying my song with that strain whose stroke the wretched Pies felt so that they despaired of pardon.”1 It’s a brilliant proem to Purgatorio, for a number of reasons. First of all, Dante picks up the metaphor, the epic topos, of the journey with which the poem began, “in the middle of the journey of our life,” as you may recall. But he also mentions sailing, recalling a specific journey, the doomed sea voyage of Ulysses. I also want to draw your attention to the use of a comparative adjective here, the “better waters.” This is Dante’s emphasis on the journey as a comparatively good one. It is not the best of waters; it is not the worst of waters; these are better waters. We are really on the way to better things. It’s a world of degree that Dante introduces, for he truly believes in hierarchy, a hierarchy of values, of states, of powers, of beauty, of intellect. His is never a dual-istic world divided between what’s bad and what’s good. There are many mediations and steps along the route to Paradise, and he has already introduced this notion with a single adjective.
Furthermore, this is not only a pilgrim’s journey, it is also a journey of poetry. Dante specifically mentions “the little bark of my genius,” which is a conventional way of describing the writing of poetry. He wants to highlight a motif that is going to be crucial throughout the rest of the poem, namely that there is no sharp, drastic discontinuity between the journey of the pilgrim and the journey of the poet. The journey of the poet is an extension of the other journey, but it, in itself, is also a journey of knowledge and discovery. Dante makes large claims for poetry, not just a commemoration of the past.
This opening is also the first time that Dante uses the future tense in the text: “I will sing.” We’re brought into a world open to futurity, and the only way of thinking about futurity is a belief in the new. If the future is exactly like today, then you really have no future, since everything would be released into the domain of sameness. Dante uses the future to imply that there is an alternative, a difference, a possibility of doing things in ways that have not been done before. This is going to be a new departure, a new departure for thought, a new departure for the imagination, and a new departure for poetry itself.
He couldn’t say this in Inferno. He couldn’t even say this in the Vita nuova. You remember that when we spoke of that great little autobiographical text at the beginning of the book, I indicated to you that the future tense is never used in it. It was entirely a book of memory, with all the difficulties and the dangers of memory, which can draw us into a world of phantasms. The only time that the future was used in the Vita nuova was in association with death and when Dante has a prophetic dream and hears a sort of oracle speaking to him, telling him that he too will die. Beatrice has just died and then the death of Beatrice brings to his mind the fear and threat of mortality. And the Vita nuova ends with a statement of hope, a hope to work and to write things whereby he can say things about Beatrice that had never been said about any woman. These are the two possibilities of the future that were available in the Vita nuova.
Then Dante offers up a prayer to the Muses, very much in the style of the epic tradition, especially since he invokes the muse of epic poetry, Calliope. The focus on Calliope retrospectively explains the earlier part of the abovementioned citation from the beginning of Purgatorio, “Let dead poetry rise again.” The poem presents itself as Calliope, the mother of Orpheus, so by saying he will let dead poetry rise again from the dead, Dante presents himself as a sort of Orphic poet. An Orphic poet followed the tradition of Orpheus and wanted to conquer death. That’s clearly not for Dante, the belief that poetry can do the trick, that through poetry we immortalize ourselves and conquer death. He is going to understand very soon that that’s not the way he is going to approach poetry.
The second scene really gives you a different sense of the tonality of Purgatorio, because now not only do you have the morning and time, you also have light for the first time. These are not the spectacular shades of light, the blue, the reds, the greens, which he will dramatize in Paradiso. There we will see lights emanating from the various planets, the red of Mars, the white of Jupiter, the blue of Saturn; there will be a polychromic palette at work. Here it’s a more human and natural world on display: “Sweet hue of oriental sapphire which was gathering in the serene face of the sky, pure even to the first circle, to my eyes restored delight, as soon as I issued forth from the dead air that had afflicted my eyes and breast. The fair planet that prompts to love”—Venus, the morning star—“was making the whole East smile, veiling the Fishes that were in her train. I turned to the right and gave heed to the other pole, and saw four stars never seen before but by the first people”—Adam and Eve. “The heavens seemed to rejoice in their flames. O northern widowed clime, that are deprived of beholding them!”2 The northern hemisphere is where we are, while Dante is in the southern hemisphere. He is connecting with us, telling us what lights we are deprived of by having lost Paradise.
The other important detail here is one we’ve addressed before. Dante is now turning to the right, although it should be said that even while spiraling down in the world of Hell, he actually was going to the right. He said that he was going to the left, but he was going to the left because he was upside down. Now he is right side up, and the directions of the human world are restored. Dante literally orients himself: the metaphor he uses is of oriental light, and he’s always orienting and reorienting himself according to it. How Dante knows where he is in Purgatorio, and also in Paradiso, is always by looking to the east. From this point of view Dante really retrieves an incredible metaphor that was available among the medieval mystics, thinkers like Boethius and Cassiodorus, who believe that we in the West can only truly think by looking toward the East. The only way in which we can orient ourselves is by trying to capture the source of that light. I mean this in the most metaphorical, and the widest, senses possible, but for now Dante is merely nodding at these implications.
In the midst of all this, it’s incredible how the language has shifted between the first paragraph and the second. There is a contrast between his excitement for the light and his experience of Easter Sunday. Dante understands the Resurrection, and the tonality is elegiac, centered on the idea of what we have lost in the widowed region of the northern hemisphere. But it’s also a provisional privilege for him to see any of this. As a result, Dante introduces the extraordinary poetic tension that abounds in Purgatorio. The pilgrim is caught in the middle, and we shall see the consequences of these currently merely tonal shifts as we progress through the Divine Comedy.
Eventually, Dante concludes his descriptions and meets his first purgatorial soul: “When I had withdrawn my gaze from them”—the stars—“turning a little to the other pole, there whence the Wain had already disappeared, I saw close to me an old man alone, worthy in his looks of so great reverence that no son owes more to his father. His beard was long and streaked with white, like his locks of which a double tress fell on his breast.” This is Dante’s encounter with Cato. Who is Cato? Dante describes him as an old man, and we also know that he’s a Roman. He’s a pagan and a man of laws. The first thing that he asks involves the possibility of rule-breaking on Dante’s part: “Who are you that, against the blind stream, have fled the eternal prison? . . . Who has guided you, or what was a lamp to you issuing forth from the deep night that ever makes the infernal valley black? Are the laws of the abyss thus broken? Or is some new counsel changed in Heaven that though damned you come to my rocks?”3 He is upholding a Roman tradition of the law. In a way this is a man who is a stranger to the world of Purgatory. He certainly doesn’t seem to understand that heaven may have offered some grace, that Dante and his guide may be here because of some providential intervention that is not to be explained, either by the laws of nature or by manmade laws.
It is Virgil, Cato’s fellow Roman, who responds, explaining, “I have shown him all the guilty people, and now I intend to show him those spirits that purge themselves under your charge. How I have brought him would be long to tell you: from on high descends power that aids me to conduct him to see you and to hear you. Now may it please you to approve his coming. He goes seeking freedom, which is so precious, as he knows who renounces life for it.” The reference here is clearly to Cato himself, who historically committed suicide in the civil war because he refused to take sides between Pompey and Caesar, as is told in the great epic by Lucan, the Roman-Spanish poet, who wrote a text called Pharsalia, or Civil War, a text that is very polemical with regard to, among other things, Virgil. Dante’s guide continues to clarify, “You know it, for death for its sake was not bitter to you in Utica”—in North Africa—“where you did leave the raiment which on the great day will be so bright. The eternal edicts are not violated by us, for this one is alive and Minos does not bind me; but I am of the circle”—Limbo—“where are the chaste eyes of your Marcia”—his wife—“who in her look still prays you, O holy breast, that you hold her for your own. For love of her, then, incline yourself to us: let us go on through your seven realms. I will report to her your kindness, if you deign to be mentioned there below.”4 The first phase of their discussion ends here, however, for Cato maintains that his former wife can no longer move him.
This is an amazing beginning to this section of the poem because we are told that Cato is an old man, a pagan, and a suicide. These are the traits that Virgil singles out, obliquely referring to his adventures and clearly contradicting the world of Purgatorio, which is a Christian canticle. It is Easter Sunday, so why have this holy day inaugurated by the presence of a pagan who knew nothing of the Incarnation? It’s the home of a renewed life, so why start it with a suicide? We saw what Dante thought of suicides in Inferno, with a number of suicidal souls inhabiting various regions of Hell, so why begin Purgatorio with an old man, a suicide, and a pagan? Usually, whenever you have representations of the beyond, you have a young man or woman who is welcoming new souls in order to indicate the renewed life, the novelty, the freshness of the scene. You certainly don’t have an old man or a suicide. So why does Dante?
The question of the suicide is probably the easiest to determine because Cato’s suicide is a suicide for freedom, and Purgatory is the domain of freedom. Dante is starting to explain a political and moral state. It’s political because it’s a refusal of the disarray and chaos brought in by the war between Pompey and Caesar, at the time of the civil war, but it is also a moral state because Cato decides to put an end to his life in a sacrificial move, as if to draw attention to the way in which the state had been destroyed by the rivalry between these two great figures. Freedom is the fundamental problem here, and Dante wants us to think of it in pagan intellectual terms from the very beginning of Purgatorio. The middle section of the Comedy ends with the pilgrim regaining his free will, so the whole poem really moves forward this idea of Cato’s search for freedom.
Now there is an obvious relationship between freedom and the future. You cannot conceive of freedom unless you have an idea of beginnings and of the future. Nor can you conceive of novelty unless you have ideas of both the future and freedom. The notion of originality, even poetic originality, is impossible unless it’s tied to a certain idea of freedom, the notion that things can be different. If I am slave to the past, if I am a slave to a political order, if I am slave to my own vices, as internalized as that quest can be, then I really have no freedom. Cato embodies one who refuses to live if that means living under the tyranny of civil war and violence, and thus in the impossibility of a moral life. We can also explain the notion of the old man here. Dante wants to draw our attention to the fact that the search for the future is not an alternative to the past but rather grows out of the past, so that the idea that there may be some sharp distinctions between the two is rejected. The seeds of the future are already contained in the past, in a figure like an old man, like Cato.
The third problem is the question of his being a pagan, and this brings me back to Dante’s project in Purgatorio. He must make a careful distinction, which St. Augustine could not make in the City of God. Augustine distinguishes between the earthly city and the heavenly city, and the heavenly city may live on earth, but it’s really a pilgrim Church approaching beatitude and the encounter with God. The earthly city is corrupt and in many ways not able to assimilate to the world of redemption. This, if you are an Augustinian and have a very supple view of Augustine, may strike you as crude, but I don’t think that it violates the essence of that dual idea. Dante, instead, is talking in opposition to Augustinian dualism. There are in nature—that is within the pagan, secular, historical world—seeds that can become crucial for the making of a new moral life that will be consonant with the Christian redemption that Dante is seeking.
The best sign of this incredible tension—time, the meaning of freedom, the value of the pagan world, the insistence on the secular as capable of producing some kind of seed for the future—emerges in the second paragraph, when finally Virgil, to temper the harshness of Cato, asks him to let them through because he knows Cato’s wife. It’s very Italian of him: “I know your wife and I’m going to go back to where she is. I know who you are, so do me a favor because I’ll be doing her a favor.” What he is doing is appealing to Cato’s affective memory, but it’s a solicitation that Cato does not accept because he refuses to be determined by the past. Cato can only make sharp distinctions, and to his mind, Marcia can do nothing for him. Furthermore, in the history of Cato’s life, Marcia had actually left him. She asked for a divorce because she wanted to marry somebody else, and at the death of the other husband Marcia asked Cato to take her back, and he did. Dante recounts this whole story in the Convivio and views it as a sign of the extraordinary generosity of this man. All of that lore plays into this reference to Cato, but from our point of view, it ultimately remains a question of the power of memory and the limits of memory.
After their brief exchange, Cato lists some rules that have to be followed in the process of cleansing: you must wash off the stains of Hell and gird your loins. Dante heeds his instructions, with the aid of Virgil: “When we came there where the dew strives with the sun, for being in a place where, in the breeze, it is little dispersed, my master gently laid both hands outspread on the grass. I therefore, aware of his purpose, reached toward him my tear-stained cheeks, and on them he wholly disclosed that color of mine which Hell had hidden. Then we came on to the desert shore, that never saw any man navigate its waters who afterwards had experience of return.”5 What is Dante referencing, yet again? He makes it very clear that Cato and Ulysses are both pagans, but he insinuates a distinction within the body of pagan culture: Ulysses, on the one hand, with his transgressive search for knowledge, and on the other hand, the experience of Cato.
Now Dante has another task to complete before he can proceed. He must gird his loins. Dante has to gird himself the way a journeyman, whether a biblical journeyman or a Roman one, would whenever he undertook a journey in antiquity, placing a girdle around himself. It’s a moment of containment of self, and that’s the ritual he has to undergo. But something surprising occurs when Virgil chooses a plant with which to cover Dante: “O marvel! that such as plucked the humble plant, even such did it instantly spring up again, there whence he had uprooted it.”6 Interestingly, the emphasis here falls on the power of the natural world to restore itself. There is an immediate emblem of the Resurrection here, but we’re still in the natural world. There is no element of grace: the nature of the plant—in an inversion of what had happened in Inferno 13—is to rise again, to be born again. The power of nature remains an important element of this canto.
And now we come to Canto 2, in which the situation changes somewhat, but it starts with yet another search for orientation. Again Dante orients himself toward the east, the Orient, but now it becomes more clearly Jerusalem. Purgatory was considered to be at the antipodes of Jerusalem, against the feet of the heavenly city. Jerusalem was known as the navel, the center, of the earth and now we are at its outer limits. The holy city becomes an immediate point of reference as Dante ponders movement without acting on the possibility of moving: “The sun had now reached the horizon whose meridian circle covers Jerusalem with its highest point; and night, circling opposite to him, was issuing forth from Ganges with the Scales, which fall from her hand when she exceeds.”7 Aimed toward Jerusalem but unmoving, Dante is attempting to bridge the gap between his expectations and hopes and what is actually happening.
Suddenly, a rapid light appears, and he sees a fast boat carrying the souls of penitents who are reaching the banks of Purgatory. This image is the polar opposite of what we saw with Charon’s boat in Hell, the boat of the sinful souls. And then an angel of God arrives, who “the brighter did he appear, so that close up my eyes could not endure him.”8 Dante looks downward as the ship comes to shore. He hears that the thousand spirits on board are singing a psalm, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto [When Israel came out of Egypt],” Psalm 113. It’s the psalm in which the Jews are remembering their exodus from bondage in Egypt to freedom in Jerusalem. As a result, retrospectively, the reference to Jerusalem gives a kind of unity to the whole canto.
This psalm is the only text that Dante actually cites in the Divine Comedy. He makes references to the Bible all the time, but the only text of the Bible that Dante cites directly is the Psalms and the Song of Songs. Perhaps this move is meant to acknowledge that the Psalms are poetry and that he responds to that poetry. Furthermore, the Psalms are probably the text that offers the first representation of subjectivity in Western countries. It’s the story of someone who is looking inward and finding out the diseases of the self, the appetites, the passions, and so on. And the pilgrim himself is engaged in that same sort of quest. Finally, the Psalms are basically lyrical recapitulations of the story of Exodus. Dante’s saying that the Divine Comedy is the lyrical representation of the biblical story of Exodus, that his own human history is engaged in the same search for a path from slavery to liberty.
In Canto 1 of Purgatorio we saw a vision of Roman political, moral liberty, but now we have an idea that the whole of history is engaged in this exodus, this journey toward liberty. Thus there are two types of liberties—a Roman one and a Jewish one—to which Dante wants to connect. He understands that there are two traditions based on a quest for liberty that are worth exploring. There is a sense, in both of them, though in different ways, of a beginning that he must try to harmonize, that he must try to explore and probe in depth.
Also, the story of Exodus in many ways embodies and crystallizes the real intellectual issues of Purgatory. What is the story of Exodus about? Leaving behind the house of bondage and taking along the gold of the Egyptians, which represents secular knowledge. That secular knowledge is also part of what we must carry with us in the journey toward freedom. But the Jews also stay in the desert for forty days. They feel that they’re abandoned by Moses, who has come up to receive the tables of the law, and while they’re feeling abandoned, they engage in idolatry. This is the story of Exodus, a story of a people caught between idolatry and revelation and prophetic promises. The idolatry shows itself as a statement or as an experience of nostalgia: that’s what the making of the golden calf is. They are desperate and leaderless, so they engage in an act of desire, a longing for at least the safety, or what they perceive as the safety, of dwelling in Egypt, mindless of the fact that they were in bondage. It is as if the safety of living were preferable to them even if that safety exists in the shadow of tyranny. These are the concerns that Dante will have at heart as he comes into Purgatory.
The whole of Purgatorio becomes a means of looking back and forth between the future and the past, which are warring with each other for control of the mind of the pilgrim. The canto shifts away from grand historical concerns, these reflections on how the pagan world experiences beginnings and new departures, and they are possible only on the basis of an ideology of freedom. The narrative shifts, and it’s all internalized.
The pilgrim moves within himself, and his first statement is that he does not know where he is, which is a way of alluding to his exilic predicament. He literally does not know where to go. His mind and body are split, an inner self-dislocation that persists. And the penitent souls are as lost as he is, so naturally they all ask him for directions. But they’re in the desert. The desert is a place where you don’t know which way to go. Typologically speaking, the desert is the unmapped space between Egypt and Jerusalem. It’s an “in-between.” You have no roots here; you have no paths. There are no carvings or markers left for you, so they ask Dante for directions. Virgil tells them the truth, that the souls are mistaken, for he and Dante are also strangers in Purgatory. That’s what it means to be an exile, and that’s what it means to write this poetry of exile. Purgatorio is a desert. There is even a spirituality of the desert in the text, and certainly a statement of the exilic condition. Dante tells us that we really don’t belong anywhere. We are always displaced and going somewhere else. At the basis of Dante’s own religious longing, there is a sense of displacement, of pilgrimage. There is a sense that our hearts are not where they ought to be.
Virgil continues to explain that they are equally lost, but Dante’s living nature is soon made plain: “‘We came but now, a little while before you, by another road which was so rough and hard that henceforth the climb will seem but play to us.’ The souls, who had perceived from my breathing that I was yet alive, marveling grew pale; and as to a messenger who bears an olive-branch the people crowd to hear the news, and no one shows himself shy of trampling, so did all of these fortunate souls fix their eyes on my face, as though forgetting to go to make themselves fair.”9 As a result, Dante becomes an object of temptation for the penitent souls. They should be going somewhere, they should be going up the mountain, and yet, they stop where they are. They thus reveal another way of thinking about forgetfulness and the sense of having a place to reach.
One shade in particular steps forward and attempts to embrace Dante. Three times he tries and three times he fails. This little detail of the failed embraces is a way of acknowledging that the souls have no substantiality that can be grasped, a detail that will resurface a few more times in Purgatorio. The soul asks Dante to stand still, and there is a moment of recognition. It is Casella, a friend from Dante’s youth, a musician who had probably even set Dante’s poetry to music, and a man from Siena who clearly has died. This scene is clearly intended to relieve the hardship of the journey. It offers a moment of indulgence, a meeting with a friend, a little pastoral interlude if you wish, to break up the hardness of the desert and the implications of that metaphor. It is a pause that provides for reflection and crucial aesthetic relief.
Casella asks Dante why he is on his quest. The pilgrim responds, “My Casella, to return here once again where I am I make this journey . . . but how has so much time been taken from you?” Casella explains how he got to Purgatory. Questions answered, Dante makes an important request, which is clearly a reflection on the power and the limits of aesthetics: “If a new law does not take from you memory or practice of the songs of love which used to quiet in me all my longings, may it please you therewith to comfort my soul somewhat, which coming hither with its body is so wearied.”10 So, Casella starts singing a song that is actually a poem that Dante himself wrote, and he sets it to music as he may also have done during his life.
Dante constructs an aesthetic cloister with this song: “‘Love that discourses in my mind,’ he then began so sweetly that the sweetness still within me sounds.”11 Here sweetness is to be understood as an attribute of musical harmony, though, as will be indicated by the canto about the gluttons, it’s also always the language of the palate, of savoring. Dante, Virgil, and all the souls savor the sweetness of the song, enraptured. And yet it remains a poem of Dante’s own. The poet is listening to his own song, with a slight touch of narcissistic temptation. He believes that Casella is playing up to him, giving him a sense of himself, and reassuring him that someone else knows who he is. The danger in this sensation is apparent: they all forget about the ascent.
But then, of course, Cato comes, the ethical voice, the voice of the law, “the venerable old man, crying, ‘What is this, you laggard spirits? What negligence, what stay is this? Haste to the mountain to strip off the slough that lets not God be manifest to you.’”12 So we have a scene of conflict between aesthetics and ethics. How are they working against each other? Dante has forgotten the lesson that he just learned in his encounter with Cato. Therefore Cato intervenes, and his anger is the anger of the teacher, who says, “I just explained to you what the problems are with this behavior.” Virgil had hoped that Cato could be swayed by the memory of the past, but Cato had rejected the power, the affection, and the pleasure of that memory.
In Canto 2 Dante is thus involved in an idolatrous moment. He witnesses something that he has been making, that he has built and composed, and he is so taken in by it that it essentially has the power to distract him from his own ascent. He has forgotten the reasons why he is here in Purgatory in the first place, and so Purgatorio begins with an explicit statement about the importance of new beginnings, new departures. Cato uses the word negligence to describe the particular failing of Dante and the penitent souls in this moment. “Negligence” means “not to choose,” so Cato is reproaching the power of poetry to produce an atmosphere of nonchoice. Obliquely, then, that’s what his ethics is. We are always engaged in an act of choice. He speaks from the perspective of a freedom that literature, the poetic text that Dante evokes, has the power to tame, and somehow, for a moment, to neutralize. A single word thus underscores the extraordinary degree of self-reflection and self-reflexiveness, from all points of view, that Dante puts on prominent display in the second part of his poem.
Purgatory is a place of moral purification, so Dante urges all the souls that had gathered around the song of Casella to move away. The language that he uses is that of dispersion: like doves or pigeons that disperse throughout the plain. In retrospect, what is apparent, I think, in all of these situations is Dante’s insistence on the power and importance of a communal destiny. However, here this communal fate appears as defeated. In the case of Cato, Cato has been defeated by the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, to the point that he had to commit suicide. In the case of Casella’s song, that poem had managed to gather around itself, not only Dante, but all the other souls who had become mindless of what they were supposed to be doing, continuing their climb up the mountain. Cato intervenes and shatters the illusory form of community. What I think that Dante’s after is the following: there may have been defeats here, but these losses contain seeds that will be necessary for his rethinking how to renew and reconstruct his idea of a common historical destiny. There is value even in defeat.