15 Purgatorio 27–33
CHAPTER 15
Purgatorio 27–33
With Canto 26, the purgation of the pilgrim is complete. He has been going through the various stages of Purgatory, from pride to lust. In Canto 27, he crosses a wall of fire, so that he can be cleansed completely of all the stains that may be residual on his soul and thereby approach and enter the Garden of Eden. Canto 27 comes to a close with a passage that contains what are the last words that Virgil will speak. In fact, until Beatrice begins guiding him, the pilgrim will be morally on his own, and there is a very personal moment that stems from this attainment of self-mastery. Virgil says, “The temporal fire and the eternal you have seen”—meaning Hell and Purgatory—“my son, and are come to a part where I of myself I discern no farther onward.”1 This is the limitation of Virgil’s vision. From now on the geometry of their relationship and the arrangement of their journey will be completely reversed.
Virgil continues: “Take henceforth your own pleasure for your guide.”2 What an extraordinary line! This is the poem of desire in the sense that what pushes the pilgrim to proceed and impels him to this journey of discovery and self-discovery is really desire. Desire is the moving force in him, but now the language changes. The first part of the journey is over and pleasure can become the only guide; he can go after what he likes. In a sense, it’s an adumbration of free will. And the relationship between pleasure and happiness will be repeatedly dramatized in Paradiso. Then we get a description of the natural delights near the earthly paradise. It is as if Dante, simply by taking his own pleasure as his guide, has already reached an edenic place. Virgil speaks of a land spontaneously producing vegetation as a metaphor for the pilgrim, who is now capable of spontaneous action and spontaneous decisions. And Virgil is also recapitulating the first part of Dante’s journey, which began in the wilderness and ended in a garden.
But then Dante must choose his own adventure, offered a choice by Virgil: “You may sit or go among them.”3 Is Dante going to make the journey to the Garden of Eden, which is a journey forward, but also a journey back in time? The Garden of Eden is behind all of us and yet lies ahead of us. The past is really the future. Is Dante going to think that the journey is the journey to the complacencies and beauty of the garden, to idleness? Or is he going to turn into an antipastoral poet, that is to say a poet who is always questioning the sense of arrival and moving on to new departures? Paradiso tells us that the latter is a more accurate assessment, but for now Virgil is just telling him the options he has. He can stay where he is, where Virgil will remain, or he can go farther. There’s a peculiar language that resonates behind this moral dilemma placed before the pilgrim. It’s called felix culpa, the idea that the fall of man was actually a happy fall because it allowed human beings to go beyond their previous state. So, Dante may sit and turn into an Adam figure, returning to the beauty and innocence of the garden, or he can surpass even that.
Finally, the teaching of Virgil has been completed, so he leaves Dante to himself: “Free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its pleasure; wherefore I crown and miter you over yourself.”4 This is the moment of the attainment of free will, so that the whole of Purgatorio moves between two poles: the pole of liberty, which was the object of Cato’s quest through the wilderness of the Libyan desert, and now the pole of free will, which allows the pilgrim to view it not just as a point of arrival, but as the necessary precondition for moral life. You can only have an autonomous moral life in the measure in which you think you have free will. Now the pilgrim is his own responsibility. Ultimately, then, this is a kind of secular coronation ceremony. Virgil acts as a kind of lay priest, consecrating the attainment of self-mastery on Dante’s part (Dante the poet, careful to use Virgil as an intermediary figure in this process of transferring power to the pilgrim).
Of course, once he’s under the guidance of Beatrice, especially when it comes to Paradiso, aesthetics takes over. It’s no longer an ethical problem. You may have heard about recent philosophers who think that life or knowledge is arranged according to stages: the aesthetic, the ethical, and then the theological. Dante reverses this order, so that the point that seems to be the most mature is the aesthetic one, which others may view as super-ficial or elementary, the one where perceptions are going to be engaged even before it is possible to get involved and mature in ethical experiences. Once you are in Paradise, you can only enjoy and get to know the world, so all the problems there are intellectual concerns, not moral issues.
We’re not quite there yet, though. From Canto 28 to Canto 33, which is the end of Purgatorio, we come to a fragmentary area. We have a literary segment that we could call a pastoral oasis. It’s also a representation of what in classical literature is called a locus amoenus. You may recall adumbrations of this phenomenon from Limbo. A lovely spot outside of the world of history where relaxation can take place, Dante also combines it with a biblical hortus, or enclosed garden, as found in the Song of Songs, for instance, or, more obviously, the Garden of Eden. The interesting thing about Dante’s representation of the locus amoenus is that it’s never really outside of history. The general assumption with this trope is that you have the garden and the city, and whenever life becomes unbearable in the city, you can take off for a villa in the garden and find aesthetic relief from the hustle and bustle of the city. Dante instead combines the two worlds. There’s no easy position between them here, in the sense that the Garden of Eden is going to be a very problematical place in the poem, a place where the pilgrim is engaged in a self-confrontation and where he experiences some terrifying moments.
Let’s examine how this representation is carried out, starting at the outset of Canto 28: “Eager now to search within and round about the divine forest green and dense, which tempered the new day to my eyes, without waiting longer I left the bank, taking the level ground very slowly over the soil that everywhere gives forth fragrance. A sweet breeze that had no variation in itself was striking on my brow with the force only of a gentle wind, by which the fluttering boughs all bent freely toward the quarter where the holy mountain casts its first shadow; yet were they not so deflected from their upright state that the little birds among the tops ceased practicing all their arts, but singing they greeted the morning hours with full joy among the leaves, which kept such burden to their rhymes as gathers from branch to branch through the pine forest on Chiassi’s shore when Aeolus lets forth Sirocco.”5 A veritable warehouse of the pastoral tradition is on display here: a fragrance, a running brook, deep shade, birds that seem to rival human beings, introducing songs, a plenitude of the natural order and its innocence. An exception to that unblemished state is present, however, for Dante arrives, and though he has gone through the wall of fire in order to purify himself further, he is not a new Adam. He carries with him the stains of experience and of history, so there is desire that acts in him. An interesting element to this imperfect pastoral scene, one that carries with it the poignancy of autobiography, is that Dante is imagining the Garden of Eden as the pine wood near Ravenna, where he would take morning walks among pine trees on the way to the sea. And that, to him, was the garden: this mixture of the ordinary and the great sublime imagination.
His next few lines in the garden provoke a shock of recognition. He writes, “Now my slow steps had carried me on into the ancient wood so far that I could not see back to where I had entered it, when lo, a stream took from me further progress, which with its little waves was bending leftwards the grass that grew on its bank.”6 These lines are clearly meant to remind us of the very beginning of Inferno. The Garden of Eden is a different version of the wilderness that we saw before and left behind. We’re just seeing it from a different perspective, which means that the supernatural world is just the natural world with a different lens. This reenactment of the drama of Inferno 1 is no shipwreck, though. The mountain has been climbed this time, and a new departure is going to take place. Dante stakes his claim as an antipastoral poet, as he dismisses, refuses, and repudiates all the temptations of gardens, of premature halting and self-enclosure in their luxurious fiction.
But something, or rather someone, does stop Dante in his tracks. Her name is Matelda, a woman who appears on the scene dancing, singing, and gathering flowers. She embodies a true aesthetic fascination for him. In this moment Dante becomes a practitioner of a form of traditional Provençal poetry called the pastourelle. The pastourelle involves a knight who goes to the woods or a meadow and meets a shepherdess, gets off his steed, and woos the young woman. Such a poem usually ends with a pun on the promises of the ecstasies of paradise, so it’s an erotic kind of song. And the other principal Florentine practitioner of this genre was Dante’s good friend Guido Cavalcanti. Dante is using the mode of Cavalcanti but definitively taking his distance from him. There’s nothing of the overtones of erotic violence that Guido Cavalcanti had celebrated in his own version of the pastourelle. This is simply a love scene.
Now Dante has just come out of the circle of lust. He has cleansed himself, but there is a lingering trace of his history, his body, and his humanity. Thus he goes through the Garden of Eden as a fallen man who is not quite redeemed, certainly not reinstated into the innocence of the prelapsarian garden. As such, it’s no surprise that he finds the fair lady to be so distracting. He explains his perceptions of her and the obstacle she represents through a series of three mythological images. First he says to her, “You make me recall where and what Proserpine was at the time her mother”—Ceres—“lost her, and she the spring.” He thinks of her as Proserpine, or Persephone, the young woman who was picking flowers on the plains of Enna in Sicily when death came and snatched her away. In other words, loving another human being can be a kind of death itself. The second mythological image is more telling: “I do not believe that so great a light shone forth under the lids of Venus, transfixed by her son against all his custom.” It’s the story of Venus wounded by the arrows of Cupid and falling in love with him. It’s more telling because it’s Dante’s way of casting, without going into a full psychoanalytical explanation, the Garden of Eden as a representation of the desire to return to the state of infancy, of the child with the mother. But he understands that this fantasy would lead him nowhere. Finally, the third image is also erotic, but now with distance involved: “The river kept us three paces apart, but Hellespont where Xerxes passed it—ever a curb on all human pride—did not suffer more hatred from Leander for its swelling waters between Sestos and Abydos than that from me because it did not open then.”7 So, an insurmountable barrier exists between Matelda and the pilgrim, which is to say between Dante and his fantasy of what the Garden of Eden could be. And Dante has no choice but to continue.
He goes on to explain the mechanics of the Garden of Eden and then the canto ends with a more accessible fantasy represented by this locus amoenus. Dante writes, “‘They who in olden times sang of the Age of Gold and its happy state perhaps in Parnassus dreamed of this place. Here the root of mankind was innocent; here is always spring, and every fruit; this is the nectar of which each tells.’ I turned then right round to my poets, and saw that with a smile they had heard these last words.”8 From Dante’s point of view, the perplexity that he feels is also the perplexity of Virgil and the perplexity of Statius. They know no more than he does now. The burden of this passage is that Dante is clearly alluding to the bucolic quality of this place, but also suggesting that the ancient poets prefigured the Garden of Eden in their fabulous visions of the Golden Age. He’s establishing a link between their poetic visions and this encounter that he has in the Garden of Eden, which becomes a bucolic fantasy of poets and Parnassus, all of which are projections of Dante’s poetic imagination.
From the distraction of Matelda, however, we move to Canto 30 and the introduction of a far more crucial female figure, Beatrice. Beatrice is linked to the number three, so it makes sense that Canto 30 is where Beatrice arrives. And for those of you who are lovers of the symmetry in the poem, Canto 30 of Paradiso is the canto where Beatrice will disappear. Her residence in the poem lasts for exactly 33 cantos. Her name is three times the good. She’s linked to three (in the form of nine, which is the square of three) in the Vita nuova. It’s a reference to the arcane significance of her presence in the pilgrim’s life.
Canto 30 describes a double drama, though: the arrival of Beatrice but also the disappearance of Virgil, a changing of the guard, as it were. As a result, there are two contrasting moods, one of elegy for the loss of Virgil and the other of sacred terror at the appearance of Beatrice. The canto begins with singing—“Veni, sponsa, de Libano”—that echoes the Song of Songs, a sublime love poem, extending the erotics of previous cantos in anticipation of Beatrice’s presence. Dante continues, “As the blessed at the last Trump will rise ready each from his tomb, singing Hallelujah with re-clad voice, so upon the divine chariot, ad vocem tanti senis, rose up a hundred ministers and messengers of life eternal, who all cried: ‘Benedictus qui venis.’”9 This cry is an allusion to the greetings of Jesus when he comes to Jerusalem. Beatrice is coming into Dante’s story the way that Jesus came into history. Beatrice will come into the soul of the lover wrapped in an aura of Christological language, and she will become grace or the way that one can experience grace in the world through direct love aimed at oneself. And then we get further Latin phrases, including one image taken straight out of The Aeneid, in homage to Virgil, who is about to disappear. The Latin citations demonstrate the interwoven nature of Dante’s interpersonal dramas, revealing both the meaning of Beatrice in the life of the pilgrim and the meaning of the loss of Virgil as a poet and as Dante’s guide.
The fragment from The Aeneid refers to the premature death that Virgil celebrates in a very elegiac way in book 6, when Aeneas goes down into Hades in order to see the whole of history. This is the descent to see his father Anchises, from whom the future of Aeneas and of all mankind is going to stem. At one point Anchises indicates to Aeneas the shade of a young man named Marcellus, who sits off to the side and who died too young, and he says that all throw lilies with open hands, the lily being a funereal symbol like chrysanthemums. This image of premature death is linked to Beatrice, who also died prematurely, and to Virgil, because it’s an anticipation of the loss of the poet-guide. It is as if Virgil’s vision was under the aegis of mortality and finitude because his song is limited to the world of death.
And so Virgil is lost and a new guide found. She arrives in elegant dress that resembles the Italian flag: “Olive-crowned over a white veil a lady appeared to me, clad, under a green mantle, with hue of living flame; and my spirit, which now for so long a time trembling with awe in her presence had not been overcome, without having more knowledge by the eyes, through occult virtue that proceeded from her, felt old love’s great power.”10 This is a rewriting of the early autobiographical work of Dante, the Vita nuova. He’s experiencing the presence of Beatrice through the effects that she has on him: the courtly love, the sweet new style, the trembling, the inability to speak.
In response, Dante turns to Virgil for succor, but Virgil is gone, suddenly vanished: “As soon as on my sight the lofty virtue smote which already had pierced me before I was out of my boyhood, I turned to the left with the confidence of a little child that runs to his mother when he is frightened or in distress, to say to Virgil, ‘Not a drop of blood is left in me that does not tremble: I know the tokens of the ancient flame.’ But Virgil had left us bereft of himself.”11 Dante is scared and seeking guidance, about to say he knows “the token of the ancient flame,” a translation of the words Dido uses when she meets Aeneas in Hades, another image of death and mortality taken from The Aeneid. Dante clearly links Virgil with that kind of metaphor of the limitation of passion. No matter their sentiments and shared experience, Dante is alone now, and Virgil is a part of his past.
Beatrice, sensing Dante’s distress at this turn of events, speaks her first words in the Comedy: “‘Dante, because Virgil leaves you, do not weep yet, for you must weep for another sword!’ Like an admiral who goes to stern and bow to see the men that are serving on the other ships, and to encourage them to do well, so on the left side of the chariot—when I turned at the sound of my name, which of necessity is registered here—I saw the lady, who first appeared to me veiled under the angelic festival, direct her eyes to me beyond the stream. Although the veil that fell from her head, encircled with Minerva’s leaves, did not let her be seen distinctly, royally and ever stern in her mien, she continued, like one who speaks and keeps back the hottest words till the last, ‘Look at me well: indeed I am, indeed I am Beatrice! How did you deign to climb the mountain? Did you not know that here man is happy?’”12 This is the first, and only, time in the poem that Dante’s name is heard. She will never call him Dante again, and he has never been called Dante before. In other words, this is the point where the poem, from the epic that it has been—the epic of desire, the epic of hope, memory, and justice—now becomes an autobiography. With the loss of Virgil, the epic poet, we shift in genre, and the poem is now about the specificity and irreducibility of Dante’s own experience.
Furthermore, Dante emphasizes the necessity of including his name here. What necessity? Why would one go on speaking of oneself? One speaks of oneself because one wants to be exemplary to others. One believes that what one has experienced is crucial for somebody else’s knowledge and experience, or one wants to exempt one’s own name from vituperation. In the philosophical text the Convivio, Dante claims that there are two people who have spoken about themselves in exemplary ways: one is Augustine in The Confessions, and the other is Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy. Dante is alluding to these two autobiographical texts, both of which render talking about oneself a necessity, as he states in this passage.
Canto 31 continues the story of Dante’s failures when Beatrice died, as told first in the Vita nuova, when he sought out someone who could replace Beatrice. Dante indulges in a confession, an Augustinian moment, another part of the autobiographical shift, but his first attempt is a stuttering, speechless one. Beatrice, in an inversion of the roles in Canto 5 of Inferno, asks Dante to resume his temporarily blocked admission, as if it were the same sort of confession of a failing that Francesca offered up in Hell. And Dante does resume: “After drawing a bitter sigh, I barely had the voice to make answer, and my lips shaped it with difficulty. Weeping, I said, ‘The present things, with their false pleasure, turned my steps aside, as soon as your countenance was hidden.’” He finally alludes to his change of heart as soon as Beatrice died, and so Beatrice may proceed with her first act of guidance: “Still, that you may now bear shame for your error, and another time, hearing the Sirens, may be stronger, lay aside the seed of tears and listen: so shall you hear how in opposite direction my buried flesh ought to have moved thee.”13 She is preparing to teach Dante an ethical lesson.
What makes this passage so extraordinary, though, is how it helps us to gloss retrospectively what was a fairly mysterious allegory in Purgatorio. You may remember when Dante met the siren in his dreams and then a lady appeared. The siren was an allegory of a temptation, specifically an erotic temptation. Then an enigmatic woman arrives and manages to send away the siren. She wakes up the pilgrim and allows the journey to continue. Now we know for sure that the mystery woman was none other than Beatrice.
So, she is now glossing the scene of the siren that appeared in Canto 19, but there is more to her words. There is a little phrase that Beatrice uses, “another time,” which suggests that the encounter with the siren is not just an event that happened in the past. It can happen all over again. And since it can still happen in the future, Dante’s conversion, which the poem has been telling us—especially now that it has attained a kind of autobiographical quality—is not over and has to be understood as an ongoing journey. The future is just as fraught with temptations as the past was. Thus, what Dante changes is the Augustinian idea of a conversion that takes place once and for all. In other words, once again, we witness the antipastoral imagination of the poet. Do not believe that you can ever stop on the way, Dante warns the reader. Do not ever believe that there are truths that are going to be unchallenged or untested in time. Dante is irresistibly drawn to the idea that the future is still part of his experience.
And in keeping with that future-oriented outlook, after Cantos 31 and 32, that respectively deal with the pilgrim’s confession and the with the allegory of Church history, we come to Canto 33, the end of Purgatorio, where I really want to focus on one passage in particular, a prophecy that Beatrice makes. Beatrice promises a deliverer who will come. The argument is no longer about Dante himself; now it’s about history. Is there a deliverance for history? Is it possible for the whole human family to return to a place that is, if not in the Garden of Eden as such, then at least among the towers of the true city, as Dante calls it in his political tract the Monarchia? The prophecy refers to a figure that may enter human history, but only at the end of time, so that the whole poem is literally poised at the outer edge of time.
Beatrice speaks as a tough teacher while she delivers her prophecy to Dante:
From fear and from shame I wish that you henceforth divest yourself, so that you may no more speak like one who is dreaming. Know that the vessel which the serpent broke was, and is not: but let him whose fault it is believe that God’s vengeance fears no hindrance. Not for all time shall be without an heir the eagle [probably the eagle of the empire] that left its feathers on the chariot, whereby it became a monster and then a prey: for I see surely, and therefore I tell of it, stars already close at hand, secure from all check and hindrance, that shall bring us a time wherein a Five Hundred, Ten, and Five, sent by God, shall slay the thievish woman, with that giant who sins with her. And perhaps my prophecy, obscure as Themis and Sphinx, persuades you less because, after their fashion, it darkens your mind; but soon the facts shall be the Naiads that will solve this hard enigma, without loss of flocks or of harvest.14
With some criticism of Dante, Beatrice offers up an enigmatic vision of the future. It’s not quite clear, and the lack of clarity only adds, I think, to the fear and the speculations about what this all means.
At its heart is a numerical symbol, which is written five hundred, ten, and five: 515. Medieval numerical symbolism views numbers as containing the essence of the secret of creation. Thinkers like Isidore of Seville claimed that to take the number away from things will result in those things falling apart. Some of the speculations as to the meaning of this specific number are utterly hilarious. There were some who believed that it refers to the year 1315, since 800 was the year of Charlemagne’s declaring the Holy Roman Empire and adding 515 gives you 1315. Therefore, Dante was thinking about an imminent event in his own time. But there’s nothing in the text that would allow us to see this idea as credible.
Another ridiculous interpretation revolves around a rearrangement of the roman numerals DXV, 515, to spell DUX, or “Duce” in Italian, a common nickname for Mussolini. Yes, some have actually said Dante was making a prophecy of the eventual rise of Mussolini. Absurd.
So, what does it mean? For the best solution, I turn to two historians, who found an explanation in medieval illustrations of the Roman Catholic mass. There’s a moment in the mass where there’s a so-called antiphonal prayer, the idea that Christ is coming sacramentally; it says, “it is truly right and just.” In Latin the phrase is “vere dignum et justum est,” and the letter V at the beginning of the phrase is brought into contact with an X, in the form of a cross that joins the human (also V, or U, uomo) and the divine (D for Dio). Thus the enigma of Beatrice evokes the apocalyptic end of time, the eschatological time when Christ will return to the earth. First he came as a human being signaled by the number five, but he will come a second time in the splendor of his divinity, and the humanity and divinity are joined by the X of the cross. This interpretation, by R. E. Kaske and G. R. Sarolli, is a great discovery, but it too is not without its problems.
If Dante believes in some kind of imminent end of time and this is to be understood as an apocalyptic symbol of an imminent end of time, Dante would be what is called a Joachist. In Paradiso we’ll encounter a man by the name of Joachim of Flora who had a theory of history in a kind of tripartite structure. The idea is that history is patterned on the Trinity, so there is an age of the father, which roughly goes from creation to the time of the biblical patriarchs. Then there is the age of the son, which goes from the time of the Incarnation to roughly 1260, Joachim’s time. Finally, there’s the age of the spirit, which goes from 1260 to a time when, thanks to the fraternal orders, all structures and institutions will disappear, and mankind will experience a time of brotherhood and chastity. There will be no marriages, no state, nothing. If Dante were a Joachist, though, that would create a number of problems because what I have just been describing was viewed as a most heretical vision of history. Why was it heretical? With this idea of an age of the father, an age of the son, and an age of the spirit, Joachim of Flora was in effect undoing the unity of the Trinity. He was dividing the Trinity into three distinct parts, and no less a great theologian of Dante’s own time than Bonaventure—whom Dante will encounter very soon in Paradise, and with whom he will discuss this very Joachim of Flora—declares Joachim of Flora heretical. So if this very powerful explanation that Dante’s really alluding to the second coming when Christ will return to earth to restore the Messianic advent is accurate, is Dante therefore a heretical, apocalyptic writer?
I am doubtful because there’s no poet I know who cares more about institutions and believes that they are history. Of course he attacks them insomuch as he thinks that they need to be revitalized, refreshed, and improved. But you cannot go on attacking these institutions without believing in their vital importance in history. He talks about the empire, the Church, the law, the family, all institutions that preserve their enduring importance.
But if he’s not an apocalyptic writer, what is he? I think that this allusion is indeed to the second coming, but that Dante has removed all of the Joachist paraphernalia that generally accompanied such a prophecy. His version doesn’t refer to the “now” of history; it refers instead to a time that nobody can really fathom, nothing imminent or within the scope of linear history. These logical complications are a necessary addition to an excellent explanation of the prophetic image, which would otherwise be too neat and simple.
It is with this prophecy of the end of times that Purgatorio climaxes. After it, Dante has to be ritually immersed in two rivers—the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and the river Eunoè, the river of good memories—a ritual that ought to remind you of the ritual actions at the beginning of Canto 1, when Dante washed his face and had to gird his loins with the reed that was growing spontaneously on the shore of the sea. As Dante explains, the two rivers, Lethe and Eunoe, flow out of the same source, and like two friends who are fond of each other, they depart from each other only very lazily. The two continue to be intertwined, so that there’s no erasure that is not at the same time a memory. Each—memory and forgetfulness—contains the other.
Finally, the whole of Purgatorio ends with a line that obviously recalls the end of Inferno: “I came forth from the most holy waves, renovated even as new trees renewed with new foliage, pure and ready to rise to the stars.”15 Dante is once again ready for the journey to continue. Now, he is at the top of Mount Purgatory, and he will soon fly on, like lightning, to the moon. There he commences the planetary, cosmological epic that is Paradiso.