13 Purgatorio 18–22
CHAPTER 13
Purgatorio 18–22
Dante has finished one stage in his movement toward self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, and in Canto 18, we’re moving into a different moral realm, toward what Dante and medieval theorists of vices call acedia. Acedia is a Latin term, which in English we can describe as a sort of despondency, indecisiveness, sluggishness, or sloth. In a sense it’s a parody or inversion of contemplation, tied to a sense of loss of the outside world. It describes the condition of the mind that has found itself indifferent to objects of desire, which have lost their consistency, their attractiveness, their luster. It’s the so-called noonday devil, the temptation that the monks experienced in their cloisters when they no longer found the idea of turning their minds toward the divine appealing in that moment. It’s the indifference to anything outside of oneself and indicates an equally intellectual and dreamy state of mind.
Canto 18 is the most intellectual canto in Purgatorio. Dante faces theoretical issues that flow out of the problems that we saw in Canto 17 with an imagination that is somehow vagabond. It breaks out of any particular confines and dislodges us, taking the ground out of our own certainties about the way we see the world. Dante has the same problem in Canto 18, which begins with a question that he asks of Virgil regarding the theory of love proposed in Canto 17: “Master, my sight is so quickened in your light that I discern clearly all that your discourse distinguishes or declares; wherefore, dear and gentle father, I pray that you expound love to me, to which you reduce every good action and its opposite.”1 In other words, what you told me before is not enough. So Virgil explains the very philosophical theory of perceptions. Your perception takes from outward reality an impression and unfolds it within you, so it makes the mind turn to it. Love is simply the unfolding of one such perception.
He goes on to criticize the belief that all love is inherently good. He’s attacking the view of the Epicureans, who believe that every pleasure, without any particular judgment attached to the object of pleasure, is praiseworthy. Instead, according to Dante’s mouthpiece, Virgil, we have to exercise some moral judgment. We have to create distinctions. We have to discriminate between good and bad love, “because perhaps its matter appears always to be good: but not every imprint is good, although the wax be good.”2 I would go so far as to say that when Dante says this through Virgil, he’s really thinking of his friend Guido Cavalcanti and Guido’s Epicurean leanings. Cavalcanti’s Epicurean ethics, the idea that pleasure is the only object worthy of any pursuit, is so hedonistic that Dante has to renounce it.
Dante responds confusedly: “Your discourse and my understanding which has followed it . . . have revealed love to me; but that has made me more full of doubt; for if love is offered to us from without, and if the soul walks with no other foot, it has no merit whether it go straight or crooked.” So now you’re telling me that everything is love and the love that I have depends on my experience of images, but how am I deserving of my fate for choosing well or not choosing well, since at the basis of the imagination, we have perceptions? What I perceive may look good to me and not look good to you, so the issue is displaced from the world of imagination to the world of perception. Virgil will have to explain a Scholastic theory that indeed we do incline to the good, but within us we still have the faculty of choice, “the faculty that counsels and that ought to hold the threshold of assent.”3 He’s talking about free will once again. But then he admits his limitations on this point and says that other issues about free will have to be explained to Dante by Beatrice. We see a distinction between the knowledge of Virgil and that of Beatrice.
Beatrice will never actually discuss this problem, however. And yet, in a sense, Beatrice represents the explanation that Dante is seeking, because Beatrice, for Dante, stands for a visionary form of love, not just a love that can be reduced to a question of mechanics or the physics of perception. Ultimately, then, Canto 18 responds to, enlarges, and at the same time brings us right back to the very predicament that Canto 17 had posed for us. It only seems like Dante is moving forward, when in fact another impasse has been reached.
With this in mind, we turn to what Dante unavoidably has to do next, namely try to translate all of these issues of love, imagination, and choice from the theoretical into the autobiographical or existential dimension. This is done in an erotic dream that Dante relates at the beginning of Canto 19. Before I turn to that canto, though, let’s look at Dante’s introduction to the dream, which comes at the end of Canto 18: “Then when those shades were so far parted from us that they could no more be seen, a new thought arose within me, from which others many and diverse were born; and I so rambled from one to another that, wandering thus, I closed my eyes, and transmuted my musing into a dream.”4 The line is very interesting because it presents a connection between thinking and dreaming. And at this point Dante favors dreaming over thinking.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Dante is doing this. The Romance of the Rose tells of a dream. Chaucer’s “Book of the Duchess” is the story of a dream. The Vita nuova is full of dreams. Much later there’s Keats’s great poem “Sleep and Poetry.” Poets love sleeping because sleep and dreams introduce the possibility of a knowledge that is not willed. You can have some revelations within yourself, which are not what you would normally have if you were awake, so this is why poets give great privilege to dreams. Still, are the writers of the Middle Ages really conscious of this dimension? Yes. There is a text by an author called Macrobius, who writes on “The Dream of Scipio,” Cicero’s figure in The Republic. It’s an encyclopedia of dreams based on Artemidorus, and it makes distinctions between oracles, fantasies, insomnia, deliriums, and so on. The text was well known, so these writers were very conscious of the sort of power and revelations that can, as the Bible has it, come through dreams.
What is Dante’s specific dream about? It’s definitely grounded in the world of acedia that we discussed earlier. The dream is really a means of highlighting the autobiographical dimension of all the problems we have been discussing in the last several cantos. Dante has to give these theories of love and free will and the imagination a personal shape and to investigate the kind of importance that they may have for him. And so we get this account:
At the hour when the day’s heat, overcome by Earth and at times by Saturn, can no more warm the cold of the moon—when the geomancers see their Fortuna Major rise in the East before dawn by a path which does not long stay dark for it—there came to me in a dream a woman, stammering, with eyes asquint and crooked on her feet, with maimed hands, and of sallow hue. I gazed upon her: and even as the sun revives cold limbs benumbed by night, so my look made ready her tongue, and then in but little time set her full straight, and colored her pallid face even as love requires. When she had her speech thus unloosed, she began to sing so that it would have been hard for me to turn my attention from her. “I am,” she sang, “I am the sweet Siren who leads sailors astray in mid-sea, so full am I of pleasantness to hear. Ulysses, eager to journey on, I turned aside to my song; and whosoever abides with me rarely departs, so wholly do I satisfy him.” Her mouth was not yet shut when a lady, holy and alert, appeared close beside me to put her to confusion. “O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?” she said sternly; and he came on with his eyes fixed only on that honest one. He seized the other and laid her bare in front, rending her garments and showing me her belly: this waked me with the stench that issued therefrom. I turned my eyes, and the good master said, “I have called you at least three times: arise and come, let us find the opening by which you may enter.”5
It’s a dream that happens at dawn, and a dream at dawn was believed to be prophetic. It can be understood as an allegory because it’s about rending a veil, tearing clothes. There is something hidden underneath it all, a truth-value, so it’s not a mere fable. Notably, Dante is evoking the planet Saturn, and when Dante mentions planets, he joins them to the various liberal arts. When he talks about the moon, Dante is also discussing grammar. When he talks about Mars, the planet of war, and he is talking about music as well. Jupiter is associated with justice, and Saturn with astronomy but also contemplation. I think he’s hinting that sloth is the obverse side, the parody, of contemplation, which is just a different type of self-absorption rather than a way of reaching within in order to break out of oneself and reach a space outside of time. Here it’s solely an inward movement. Dante continues with this language of astronomy and divination, divining signs, a different type of rational knowledge, and this is the context in which the dream is set.
The first thing that I have to point out to you about the dream itself is that within it the dreamer is an object. The dream comes to him. Clearly, it is not willed, it’s not something that he decides or wants for himself. One is the object of some apparitions, or signs and images that descend into oneself without one’s own dominion being involved. Dante thus places himself in a condition of passivity, that is, the passivity of sloth. Being awake, and therefore vigilant, and capable of making judgments about what’s happening to him is bracketed for the time being.
What is this dream about, though? Well, it’s a dream of two women, two modes of being, two choices. It involves the mythography of Hercules at the crossroads, forced to choose between vice and virtue, but Hercules has an easy time because he’s always going to go right. In mythography, if you go to the right then you are aiming toward virtue, as we have previously discussed. Rather than a simple left-right choice, though, here there are two women, which complicates matters. Fortunately, the language of the poem distinguishes very carefully between them. One is a femmina, a word for which there is materiality and even a kind of animal sense, and when the other woman appears, she’s called a donna—which comes from domina—santa e presta, a holy and alert lady. The choice becomes clearer on these terms.
The first woman crystallizes what we could call an aesthetic of ugliness. We’re always talking about beauty and the idea that beauty brings about a revelation of love and pleasure. As a result, the conventional way of thinking about aesthetics is to imagine beautiful proportionate forms. Here, Dante is providing exactly the opposite, an aesthetic of the ugly, but an ugliness that is not static, that somehow experiences a metamorphosis. In fact, at the outset she is “stammering, with eyes asquint and crooked on her feet,” a veritable anti-Beatrice, but then the dreamer becomes a subject for the first time and changes her. His desires transform her image and invest it with attributes of attractiveness as love prompts.
But we still don’t understand who she is. The temptation that she offers Dante comes in her song. This is primarily a poetic temptation, a certain way of understanding a meretricious form of poetry. Of course, she brings to center stage the myth of Ulysses, which is, as you know by now, a steady source of temptation for Dante. It’s the point of reference: to what extent is my own journey, which I believe to be taking place under the aegis of divine providence, actually a transgression? Is it a way of going beyond boundaries, of breaking down all limits, because after all, that’s what Ulysses did in Canto 26 of Inferno? And Dante knows where he has placed the Ithacan wanderer, but he cannot get Ulysses out of his mind because Ulysses stands for something powerful. What he represents is the idea that there is no knowledge worth having that is not connected to transgressions. The great temptation for Dante is thus to believe that his journey reenacts that of Ulysses, which is exactly what the siren is telling Dante here, that she can make him happy just as she did Ulysses. It’s a lie, of course, because Ulysses never stopped at the island of Capri, in whose grotto the siren is said to reside. He did listen to her song, but he was bound to the mast of the ship, so she never bought him any pleasure. There is a transgression and a binding going on at the same time. The siren is making false promises, claiming to be the end of all Dante desires, urging him to conclude his journey and stay with her.
But then we have another figure that emerges, a woman who is clearly the antagonist of the siren. We don’t know who she is, but we’ll find out very quickly, in Cantos 30 and 31, because the same scene will be reenacted with the arrival of Beatrice. We already have reason to imagine that here too she is Beatrice. Identity aside, what is the difference between these two women? They are two different forms of poetry. Now we understand why Dante has been talking about the imagination all along—because it is what will introduce him to the stakes in claiming to be a poet. He’s been talking about his faculty as a poet, and the cantos that come next constitute the most important segment of the poem in terms of ways of understanding literary history and the place of originality within that particular history. We are going to enter the world of poetry more directly. At any rate, these women speak in two markedly different voices: one sweet, meretricious, and false, the other one very harsh but true. One forecloses Dante’s journey, encouraging him to be like Ulysses and call it quits. The other one claims exactly the opposite: the journey has to continue. The song of the siren seems sweet but also has the stench of death attached to it. The more austere voice instead insists that the true language of sweetness is that of love as an ongoing quest. So, we encounter two forms of love, two forms of poetry, two types of women.
Which of the two is better? Is there an objective criterion by which we can say that Beatrice is actually better than the siren? Yes, and the criterion is going to be very simple: the necessary avoidance of death. The siren stands for death. Underneath the pleasures of her language, she reeks of decomposition. Dante thus recognizes the danger of making the here and now, and the limitations of the here and now, and the limitations of that song in particular, the end of his journey. This is the only way in which you can objectively assert that there is a hierarchy established between these two loves and between these two women.
There are certain parallels between this scene and the scene of Casella in Canto 2. It’s the reappearance, under different guises, of the same temptation, how the beautiful or aesthetic can gather people around itself. As in the story of Casella, the song collects individuals and drives them to forgetfulness of whatever purposes they are supposed to entertain and carry out. The difference here is that we have entered as deep as we can into Dante’s unconscious mind. This is a moment of amazing self-revelation, whereas the story of Casella had the ring of a public discourse, of poetry as a public act.
Fittingly, we now move into a segment of the poem that has poetry as its central subject matter. Dante begins with the classical tradition, and a critical encounter takes place in the purgatorial realms of avarice and prodigality, the encounter between Statius and Virgil. Statius views himself as a disciple of Virgil, but in many ways he challenges Virgil’s thought. Virgil presents us with Aeneas, a hero who is so divided against himself and yet always manages to find his way around, albeit by following a zigzag, erratic path. Statius counters this tendency in The Thebaid, which makes a conjunction between tragedy and the epic and focuses on the impossible monstrosity of that world, casting it as nightmarish. It’s indubitably the most psychological of these epics—Greek and Latin—because it focuses on the wars that happen in the mind, and this idea of the horror of human fate and human desires.
These are the two worlds that Dante now wants to bring together in this little epyllion, a Greek word meaning a “little epic,” a transcription of two epic texts into one text in a lyrical form. This is a tough task because what he wants to show is the possibility of harmonizing the two of them, demonstrating how they can be seen to talk as friends across time. Statius lived around A.D. 70, and Virgil died in the year 19, but the poetry of Virgil has made them friends. And Statius can be considered a classical version of Dante himself. Dante is the disciple of Virgil, and so was Statius, so Dante tries to bring them together.
But it’s not just a question of making their two different visions agree, which in and of itself would not be all that difficult. For instance, Statius is very skeptical about the empire, while Virgil is not all that skeptical. There is certainly a lot of ambiguity in the way in which Virgil talks about Augustus and the empire in The Aeneid, but he’s basically writing an epic that justifies the ideology of empire. These kind of thematic differences can be reconciled, though. The real difficulty in bringing them together is that Dante has to try to adjust Statius’s vision of monstrosity to some idea of the sacred. How do we understand the sacred in Statius? Is it possible to see in these texts of Statius the seeds of something good? How can we build anything good out of this vision of heroes who fornicate with their own fantasies, who cannot really get out of their minds, who discover their own unchanging submission to a force that transcends them to fate? It’s really absolutely a different worldview from that of Virgil, and Dante will truly have to grapple with the gap between them.
Dante begins Canto 21 with an allusion to the natural thirst for knowledge. It’s very much an entry into the Aristotelian world of the Convivio. Then the figure called Statius appears, and in the same moment the natural world starts mysteriously shaking. There’s an earthquake, we discover, because every time that a soul gets liberated from the purgatorial experience of expiation, this purification and expiation, then the mountain trembles. In this case, it is Statius who can go up to the Garden of Eden: “I, who have lain in this pain five hundred years and more, only now felt free volition for a better threshold. Therefore you felt the earthquake and heard the pious spirits about the mountain give praises to that Lord.”6 His resurrection has taken place.
Statius’s next task is to describe himself. He evokes the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem when the good emperor Titus, with God’s help, enacted divine justice for the crimes of Judas. Statius was a pagan at this time, but he became a born-again Christian. He was drawn to Rome by the pull of desire, and there he wrote of Thebes and began a second text about Achilles that he failed to finish. Finally, he explains the process that produced his poetry: “The sparks which warmed me from the divine flame whereby more than a thousand have been kindled were the seeds of my poetic fire: I mean the Aeneid, which in poetry was both mother and nurse to me—without it I had achieved little of worth; and to have lived yonder when Virgil lived I would consent to one sun more than I owe to my coming forth from exile.”7
There are two metaphors for poetry here. One is that of sparks, so that poetry is invested with the power to light a fire in its readers, and the second one is that of nourishing the inner hunger, of mother and nurse. The latter constitutes a great acknowledgment of a master, without his knowledge that it is Virgil to whom he is speaking. And then Dante reveals Virgil’s identity to Statius, and the two of them try to embrace, though Virgil quickly calls a halt to the futile gesture: “‘Brother do not so, for you are a shade and a shade you see.’ And he, rising, ‘Now you may comprehend the measure of the love that burns in me for you, when I forget our emptiness and treat shades as solid things.”8 This is a mistake that has been made before, a mistake meant to convey the claims or illusions of poets to believe that there is a solidity to them, and not just to their poetry. But there is no solidity to them. Rather, there is a kind of emptiness and a distance between the poets and their works. Perhaps for this reason, works of art are going to be the focal point of Canto 22.
The two poets start to converse, and Virgil asks Statius to explain why this moral blight existed in him, this sin of avarice: “Wherefore, from the hour when Juvenal descended among us in the Limbo of Hell and made your affection known to me, my good will toward you has been such as never yet did bind to an unseen person, so that these stairs will now seem short to me. But tell me—and as a friend pardon me if too great confidence slackens my rein, and talk with me now as with a friend—how could avarice find place in your breast, amid wisdom so great as that wherewith you were filled by your zeal?”9 This is a passage of some importance. First of all, we get the claim of friendship between Virgil and Statius. Friendship is an ethical virtue in Aristotle’s Ethics and also for Cicero, who writes a treatise called On Friendship, which Dante mentions at the beginning of the Convivio, his philosophical text, in the belief that friendship is really the other term for philosophy. The friend and the philosopher are interchangeable because there is a love of truth in both cases. Still, there is some exaggeration on the part of Virgil because friendship implies some degree of equality. It’s often said that tyrants and slaves are not capable of love or friendship with each other because one is the inversion of the other, and the slave is, by definition, inferior to the tyrant. So, here there’s a rhetorical exaggeration of Statius and Virgil’s relationship because Statius sees himself as a disciple and therefore views Virgil as superior from a poetic point of view, while from a theological point of view Statius is superior to Virgil. Statius is going on to Paradise, and Virgil is going to go back to Limbo. In other words, there is perhaps a push in the direction of wishful thinking on the part of Virgil when he calls them friends.
I must also add that Dante may be aware that friendship was never really thought of as a Christian virtue. It’s a classical and pagan virtue, and it confuses Christian ethics with the idea that a friend is always part of one’s soul. It’s a truly earthbound concept and experience, so by and large it was held that friendship could distract the mind from an ascent to higher and superior ends, paradisiac ecstasies and pleasures. Dante has to know that there were efforts to Christianize this idea.
Nonetheless, it brings the conversation between the two souls back to the earth, and they talk as if they were truly two friends meeting in the forum, in the agora, chatting about their moral failings or their own poetic crafts and visions. But the question remains: how could you be so avaricious, when you are quite enlightened in so many other ways? Statius responds that he’s not avaricious and spends a great deal of time talking about the fact that he is actually prodigal. You may remember from Canto 7 of Inferno that prodigality was a violation of the economy of goods by devaluing them, not holding onto them, while avarice means overvaluing the goods and trying to amass larger quantities of them.
Statius defends this classification of his sin at length before explaining his moral conversion, which is the first thing he mentions about just what poetry can do: “Know that avarice was too far parted from me, and this want of measure thousands of courses of the moon have punished; and were it not that I set right my care, when I gave heed to the lines where you exclaim, angered as it were against human nature, ‘To what do you not drive the appetite of mortals, O accursèd hunger of gold?’ at the rolling I should feel the grievous jousts.”10 What Statius is saying here is that he read a passage in book 3 of The Aeneid, the story of Polydorus, who had been killed because they wanted to rob him of his gold, and as a result of this reading he was converted. This account exemplifies how we actually read, for we dismember the integrity of the text. We take out of a book, or a passage of a book, that which we find relevant to us. In this case, he takes some lines from The Aeneid and alters their meaning. The original text of Virgil’s is the opposite of Statius’s interpretation of it. The word sacred is used, which can mean either “sacred” or “cursed,” as the English translator uses here. It’s a most ambiguous term semantically speaking because it can describe both the holy and the profane. It joins them together, so that there’s no longer a clear-cut distinction between them. So, the poetic text of Virgil has a moral power over and against Virgil’s own intentions. We can understand now, retrospectively, why Dante has to distinguish between poets and their works. We can read the works regardless of the intentions of the authors and we can select or take out of those texts whatever we think that they are saying to us.
From there, Virgil questions Statius’s poetic and spiritual growth. Dante purposefully refers to Virgil here as the author of a pastoral poem, The Eclogues, in which rivalries are always placated. Pastoral poems are always about rivalry, a rivalry between two shepherds, but there’s never any tragic outcome. There’s some uneasiness and anxiety running through the debate between the poets, but it’s not a serious rivalry. That’s really the difference that Dante is highlighting. At any rate, Virgil the pastoral poet says, “It does not appear, from that which Clio touches with you there, without which good works suffice not, had yet made you faithful. If that is so, then what sun or what candles dispelled your darkness, so that thereafter you set your sails to follow the fisherman?”11 What he’s really asking about, in a general way, is the relationship between poetry and faith. How did Statius find faith after his conversion? Can poetry reveal and lead us on to the world of faith or not?
Statius responds, “You it was who first sent me toward Parnassus”—the mountain of poetry, suggesting that the poetic apprenticeship is the preamble to the experience of faith—“to drink in its caves”—a metaphor that picks up the natural thirst of the previous canto—“and you who first did light me on to God. You were like one who goes by night and carries the light behind him and profits not himself, but makes those wise who follow him, when you said, ‘The ages are renewed; Justice returns and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from heaven.’”12 Virgil is a prophetic voice, using language that benefits those who follow him though he himself remains in the dark. The cited passage is from the famous fourth eclogue of Virgil, where Virgil is celebrating the birth of a child, Pollio, and also talking about the rejuvenation of the world. Pollio’s birth is an emblem for this Pythagorean vision that he has, a vision whereby the world goes through 360,000 years of the Golden Age, the Silver Age, and so on, and then degrades itself and goes right back to where it started. Interestingly, this also crystallizes Virgil’s concern with birth, his belief that being born has within itself the potential to renew the world.
Then Statius talks about how the world outside only buttressed the message of faith that he had found in the fourth eclogue. The fourth eclogue is thus seen as a messianic eclogue and a mechanism for the transition from poetry to faith. As Statius proclaims to Virgil, “Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian.”13 This crucial line requires some close reading. First of all, it contains an anaphora, which gives continuity to the movement of the line from poetry to faith: “through you . . . through you,” “per te . . . per te.” Nonetheless, if you read this line carefully, you see that there is also a caesura, a break in the middle. The line has a mobility that seems to promise the transition from poetry to faith, but at the same time technically, it forces you to stop as if they were two discontinuous experiences. You cannot quite go directly from the world of poetry to the world of faith, but you can still go from one world of poetry to the other. That ambiguity of poetry and its power is exactly what Dante aims to replicate here.
Ultimately, the differences between the two poets are largely overridden by the links between their poetry, but an insurmountable divide remains. Statius deals with the tragedy of birth, while Virgil treats it optimistically, talking about the history-making quality of a birth. At the same time, Virgil’s stance indicates a desire to establish a sense of what the sacred is, while Statius has come to know the sacred by taking advice from Virgil that Virgil was unable to apply to himself. In a way, then, their poetry is imbued with the ambiguous sense of the word sacred that we discussed earlier, containing both the profane and the holy within it. It’s a hybrid art, a hybridity that allows Dante to assimilate Statius’s contradictory vision to his own understanding of history and the sacred. In sum, Dante writes powerful, ambiguous poetry precisely to demonstrate poetry’s powerful ambiguity.