12 Purgatorio 11–17
CHAPTER 12
Purgatorio 11–17
Dante’s problem in Canto 10 of Purgatorio stems from the fact that he is initially a spectator of works of art, which he seems to have no difficulty understanding. He’s witnessing what he calls visible speech, synesthesia, visibile parlare in Italian, but this is God’s art and it has a precise meaning that Dante has no trouble comprehending or enjoying. But then he has to be involved. He has to show at least some compassion to and some self-recognition in the penitent souls who are under these huge weights that they carry. But he cannot do it. He still has to learn what grief is and how to connect to the images that he sees.
In The Confessions, St. Augustine also speaks of the experience of being a spectator. The real pleasure of going to the theater, he claims, is in images of grief. They don’t really touch us. We are not expected to jump on the stage to relieve the characters who were involved in a sad situation. Augustine criticizes the disengaged spectator and the limits of the theater, the limits of that kind of aesthetic experience. I think that Dante is picking up exactly from what Augustine says in this chapter, and he’s showing how unavoidably one has to be involved. In the measure in which we think that we are not touched by somebody else’s grief, we’re really admitting the overpowering quality of that experience.
Dante has learned something, then: he has learned that there is no such a thing as a safe perspective. Dante realizes and admits that he may be no different from Michal in his disclaimer that he does not know and does not see any of these penitents who disfigure the human form. He refuses to acknowledge that they are like him. These admissions are true signs that some of this aesthetic education has sunk in. Cantos 11 and 12 will further this new understanding.
Canto 11 begins with the penitents, who now reverse their perspective. They remain just as close to the ground, but now they are looking up, and they recite the Lord’s Prayer, or rather Dante’s recasting of the canonical prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven, not circumscribed, but through the greater love Thou hast for Thy first works on high, praisèd be Thy name and Thy worth by every creature, as it is meet to render thanks to Thy sweet effluence. May the peace of Thy kingdom come to us, for we cannot reach it of ourselves, if it come not, for all our striving. As Thine angels make sacrifice to Thee of their will, singing Hosanna, so let men make of theirs. Give us this day our daily manna, without which he backward goes through this harsh desert who most labors to advance. And as we forgive everyone the wrong we have suffered, even do Thou in loving-kindness pardon, and regard not our desert.”1 The change that Dante makes is to emphasize that God is not in space, not circumscribed, and therefore He is really everywhere. He is free. The formula he is using is a traditional one in medieval thinking, whereby God is said to be an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God is not in a place; God does not have a perspective. Indirectly there is a critique of the inadequacy of perspective here.
Another change that he’s making is to add a Neoplatonic element to the Lord’s Prayer. He literally places “give us this day our daily manna, without which he backward goes” into the prayer, which turns it into the prayer of the exiles in the desert. These souls are like the Jews in the wilderness, who ask for and receive their manna. This is another metaphorical element that casts Purgatory as a journey through the desert between the bondage of Egypt and Jerusalem.
Additionally, we know that there is a reversal of perspective here, but what kind of a perspective is Dante gaining now? I think I would call it a Franciscan perspective, even from that first line, “Praisèd be Thy name and Thy worthy by every creature.” This line is an echo of the first poem of the Italian poetic tradition, a poem written by St. Francis called the “Canticle of Creatures,” which is an anaphoric sequence of praises: praised be Thy name, praised be the water, and so on. The point of that poem is that it begins with human beings looking up to the highest, and it ends with the idea of humility. Francis tells us that we are not the center of creation, that we are just like everything else valuable in the created world. That’s the thrust of the poem, and the only way in which you can truly understand that creation is to look from the bottom up and not from the top down. This is the perspective that Francis describes and that Dante subsequently adopts.
The rest of the canto is about the connection between art and pride, not surprising considering that the whole of Canto 10 was a reflection on these same premises. Dante illustrates this link by referring to painters and poets who surpass each other. Of Cimabue and Giotto he writes, “O empty glory of human powers! how briefly lasts the green upon the top, if it is not followed by barbarous times! Cimabue thought to hold the field in painting, and now Giotto has the cry, so that the other’s fame is dim.” And then of the poets, Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinizelli: “So has the one Guido taken from the other the glory of our tongue—and he perchance is born that shall chase the one and the other from the nest”—meaning Dante himself.2
The idea of fame, which is what the proud souls may be seeking, is here dismissed as having the inconsistency of the wind, vanishing as quickly as a breath of fresh air. This is Dante’s new moral understanding of pride and humility.
In Canto 12, Dante explains the punishments of the prideful, and in doing so he deploys a peculiar rhetorical artifice that merits further consideration. Here the images that Dante sees are on the ground, so he has to look down to view them. They are images of the proud souls who have been punished in this part of Purgatory, souls like Nimrod, Niobe, Saul, Arachne, Sennacherib. And Dante concludes his description of the setting with a final tercet: “I saw Troy in ashes and in caverns: O Ilion, how cast down and vile it showed you—the sculpture which is there discerned!”3 These are all figurations of pride that has been humiliated. And their presentation in the Italian involves a form of visible speech. We are in the presence of a so-called acrostic; if you read the first letters of each tercet from the top down, it spells out V-O-M and then repeats. The letter is V, but in Italian it’s also the U, so that we get the first part of the word uomo, or “man.”
This part of the poem is about the fall of man. To illustrate that point, Dante is using an artifice that you can only understand if you read the text. If you have to hear it, you can’t quite get to it. In other words, he’s using God’s own art as a model for himself. This seems like pride—excessive love of one’s excellence. But what Dante is really telling us is that pride is not a sin in this case. He is, in a sense, redefining the ethical language of the Middle Ages and the ethical language of his own text. He’s saying that in the measure in which you love what is above you, that is not a sin. Pride is a sin only in the measure in which you have contempt for those you think are below you. We have, thanks to the world of art, a reevaluation of moral language, the first and most important textual example of what will be happening throughout Purgatory.
With that in mind, let’s dive into the center of the world of Purgatory. In Canto 15, Dante explores the sin of envy and contrasts it with charity, a virtue he defines with an image of light and reflection. He writes, “Because you still set your mind on earthly things, you gather darkness from true light.” We tend to think in terms of the light that is available to us, but that light does not necessarily produce more light; rather, it can dim our understanding about the way things really are. The metaphor continues: “That infinite and ineffable Good that is there above speeds to love as a ray of light comes to a bright body. So much it gives of itself as it finds of ardor, so that how far soever love extends, the more does the Eternal Goodness increase upon it; and the more souls there are that are enamored there above, the more there are for loving well, and the more love is there, and like a mirror one reflects to the other.”4 This image of the mirror is a Platonic image of the notion in The Celestial Hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius, a mystical theologian whom Dante mentions in Paradiso. Pseudo-Dionysius thinks of all creation as a hall of mirrors, where everything is reflected one in the other in a number of reflections that all produce the light of God in different ways. He thinks of the divine in terms of light that is refracted and reflected throughout all the orders and ranks of creation. This reciprocity is how we arrive at mercy and charity.
This image thus leads us to the generative idea of charity, that is to say the idea that charity produces more charity. It has the power to generate itself and multiply itself. This is the principle of mercy for Dante. The whole of creation is sending back light, without any loss of its original light. This is the metaphysics of Dante’s mirror. The world exists, therefore, on the basis of mercy, and not from the point of view of envy, from which we do not even see the light in the first place. Charity completely allows for a God who creates without envy and with generosity. Dante reveals this system of exchanges, this interconnectivity and reflexivity of all things, and then he moves into the true center of his text.
In Canto 16, Dante meets a famous magnanimous figure, Marco Lombardo, with whom he has a discussion about the issue of human degradation and degeneracy. The scene takes place in the biblical cloud of anger, a world deprived of any light, possessed by a kind of madness. Anger is thus understood as that which violates the clarity and light of reason. Dante is led through the gloom by Virgil, “as a blind man goes behind his guide that he may not stray or knock against what might injure or perhaps kill him.” Within this context, in this background of cloudiness and near invisibility of the world around him (which has been carried over from the sin of envy, a sin, as you know, that is all about being blind), Dante hears a voice and asks of it one question, namely if the “world is indeed as utterly deserted by every virtue as you declare to me, and pregnant and overspread with iniquity, but I beg you to point out to me the cause, so that I may see it and show it to men, for one places it in the heavens and another here below.”5 In other words, is there such a thing as free will? What is the cause of all our deeds? Is it, as the astrologers say, in the planets and therefore a matter of determination by forces that transcend us, over which we have no control? This interpretation results in a severe limitation of the meaning of choice and the possibility of choice, and therefore of merits and demerits. If we have no choices, then we cannot be praised or blamed for what we do. The other option is that what we do originates within us. With this question Dante is revisiting an ancient debate about the relationship between free will and God’s foreknowledge, a debate that Boethius had famously confronted in The Consolation of Philosophy.
Lombardo salutes Dante as “Brother,” the typical form of salutation in Purgatorio, before he begins his discourse. We already saw “Our Father” in Canto 11, with this idea of a human family, and therefore a brother is the appropriate form of interlocution and address among the souls and Dante. At any rate, Lombardo explains: “The world is blind, and truly you come from it! You who are living refer every cause up to the heavens alone, as if they of necessity moved all things with them. If it were so, free will would be destroyed in you, and there would be no justice in happiness for good or grief for evil. The heavens initiate your movements: I do not say all of them, but supposing I did say so, a light is given you to know good and evil, and free will, which if it endure fatigue in its first battles with the heavens, afterwards, if it is well nurtured, it conquers completely. You lie subject, in your freedom, to a greater power and to a better nature.”6 The text is fairly clear, but there is a distinction between choice and will that ought to be elucidated somewhat. The difference is that a choice is an intellectual problem, we choose thanks to what we know, while free will implies that the will is never in bondage and it’s possible to attain a moment where we will freely. And yet, so many theologians ask whether free will means that the will can be moved by an act of choice that follows on the prior knowledge. This is not the only seeming paradox here. Lombardo also says that we are free subjects, and you can likely perceive the contradiction in those two terms. Only later will this all make full sense, when Dante shifts the argument to the law (16.93–98), which he says is precisely the metaphor that will make us understand what it means to be free and subject at the same time, where limitations are going to be posited and within those limitations we can be free. That’s the argument he’s trying to make.
The next thing that Dante does is give a sense of creation, positing human freedom in the act of the creation of the soul. He writes, “From His hands, who fondly loves it before it exists, comes forth after the fashion of a child that sports, now weeping, now laughing, the simple little soul, which knows nothing.”7 This alludes to a famous Latin poem by the emperor Hadrian about a little, childish soul that goes wandering around (St. Thomas Aquinas, too, refers to the soul as originally simple, a tabula rasa). Dante reinterprets it not as the soul that is lost in the world, but rather as a soul that is playing. For Dante creation is a playful act, both in the sense of the innocence of the experience and in the sense of being free. When one is at play, one has all the attributes of spontaneity and liberty that go with it. This concept is the basis of what I call the playful theology of Dante: God creates the world in an act, in a moment of freedom, and that freedom becomes the foundation for positing our own human freedom. It’s because we were born free that we can go on believing that there is such a freedom for us, that it was not an act of necessity. Such a need would be the opposite of Dante’s vision of creation as spontaneous and ludic.
Canto 16 proceeds from these theological arguments to extraordinary political and legal arguments. From human freedom Dante moves to political freedom: “Rome, which made the world good, was wont to have two Suns, which made visible both the one road and the other, that of the world and that of God. The one has quenched the other, and the sword is joined to the crook: and the one together with the other must perforce go ill—since, joined, the one does not fear the other.”8 What is he talking about? Rome had two suns? This passage deliberately mistranslates a line in Genesis where it is said that God gave mankind two luminaries, the sun and the moon, but in such a way that we could really see both in the daytime and at night. This image from Genesis was used by the so-called hierocrats, the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages, as the emblem for the Empire and the Church. The sun, having the greater light, the hierocrats would claim, was the light of the Church, and the moon, having a reflected light, was the light of the Empire. They would use this gloss as a way of explaining the superiority of the Church over the Empire—the latter had to take its light and its direction from the former. Dante is purposefully violating that idea of the sun and the moon, instead equating them by saying “the two Suns,” all in order to convey his conviction that the two institutions God provides for the guidance of human beings, the Church and the Empire, are equal. By questioning the legality of systems posited by lawyers at the University of Bologna working for the pope, Dante shines light on the ways in which we may make claims of being free, even when we are also subjects, as discussed in Canto 16 (78 ff.).
And with that, we turn to Canto 17, which is numerically the center of the Divine Comedy. The canto begins with an apostrophe to the reader’s memory: “Recall, reader, if ever in the mountains a mist has caught you, through which you could not see except as moles do through the skin”—the difficulty of seeing is highlighted again—“how, when the moist dense vapors begin to dissipate, the sphere of the sun enters feebly through them, and your fancy will quickly come to see how, at first, I saw the sun again, which was now at its setting. So, matching mine to the trusty steps of my master, I came forth from such a fog to the rays which were already dead on the low shores.”9 It’s a twilight landscape. There are a number of reversals, along with the contrast between the blind mole that burrows underneath the earth and the alpine scenery that also makes vision impossible. Dante is simultaneously evoking the highest heights and the lowest possible point of sight. The sun is setting, and the night is approaching. It is as if the solidity of the world around him is vanishing before his eyes. At the same time, he’s appealing to the memory and the imagination of the reader. When the world outside seems to be failing us, Dante suggests that we have an inner light, this possibility of recollecting or imagining the world as it disappears. Even in the darkness, even rendered blind, we can see with the light within us.
He’s also preparing a remarkable second apostrophe, this one to the imagination. We are approaching the center of this poetic universe, and Dante wants to remind us that this is a work of the imagination. He says, “O imagination, that do sometimes so snatch us from outward things that we give no heed, though a thousand trumpets sound around us, who moves you if the sense affords you naught?”10 It’s the same question he had been asking earlier: where do our choices come from? Why do we do what we do? Is it because a power from the outside moves us, or is there something within us that does it? Here, though, this question is asked in slightly different terms, in terms of the imagination, which is a power that removes us from the outside world. It’s not just, as Aristotle posited, that the imagination translates sensory experiences into images for the benefit of our rational judgment, acting as the middle ground between the work of perception and the work of reason. This is a standard triadic pattern that Dante could certainly have found in Aquinas, who, in turn, found it in Aristotle. But Dante is talking about a different conception of the imagination, one that needs nothing of the world of perception. It’s a faculty that is completely free from our external reality, a power that we have within us to imagine worlds that don’t even exist. As Dante is approaching the center of his world, we are shown the power of the imagination as a visionary faculty. It encompasses the real world and yet is almost prophetic, for it eschews contact with that reality. These combatting ideas of the imagination will both play a role in Canto 17.
But first Dante spends some time describing the laws of Purgatory. How is this realm constructed and run? Unsurprisingly, it is built, as Singleton made clear, upon a fabric of love and an architecture of love. At the very center of the Divine Comedy, lines 91, 92, and 93 of Canto 17 of Purgatorio, Virgil says, “Neither Creator nor creature, my son, was ever without love, either natural or of the mind. . . . The natural is always without error; but the other may err either through an evil object, or through too much or too little vigor.”11 He’s distinguishing here between two types of love but emphasizing that the instinctual impulse of love is never prone to sinfulness. It’s a natural impulse, a natural desire. What is sinful instead is a love where choice is involved. Whenever we make a choice, we may either not love the right object or we may love it too much or too little, as previously mentioned. This triadic division in terms of love defines Purgatory’s topography. Everything here is a problem of love, but then there are varieties that organize the realm’s subdivisions.
The question thus becomes how to understand this love of choice. What is it, really? Does it depend on my particular perception of the world? If so, and that perception makes me see whatever I encounter as beautiful and desirable, where is my fault? Once again, Dante repeats the same problems of will and fate that were raised in Canto 15. This time Dante will explain the conundrum in terms of love, and yet we are going to be brought back to the world of perception, for our perception of what we love becomes crucial to our responsibilities for it. Love is problematic. Dante’s theory of love is a rational one, one that brings us to knowledge and organization, and yet love is one of those experiences exactly like the imagination, the powers of which always seem to be transgressing whatever rational limitations we want to impose on it.
At the center of the poem, then, Dante seems to be oscillating between two ideas. On the one hand, there is the notion of a real world in which we have responsibilities for love and for everything that we do, and on the other hand, there’s our imagination, which is completely disengaged from the world of reality and cannot be constrained by it. Suspended between these two possibilities, how can Dante bring them together? If the world of the imagination is free and disengaged from reality, how am I going to be held accountable for what I do to the world around me?
One resolution is that the imagination does not exclude rationality; it simply surpasses it. Dante claims that the imagination cannot be held in check, but his poem is designed with a precise principle of order in mind. Thematically, it’s about order, too: ordering the appetites, ordering the will. And yet, the text is complex, and some elements are left out of the fabric that Dante is weaving. In spite of his careful construction, there are still loose ends. Fortunately, Dante’s poem is only nourished by these contradictions, its beauty enhanced as it moves back and forth between love and the imagination, the fossae at the poem’s core.