Purgatorio (The Divine Comedy series Book 2)

by Dante

  As the Anonimo Fiorentino (1400) explains, what is experienced by the five senses is registered in the senso comune and then conserved, without its physical elements, in the imagination, which, in contrast to the senso comune, the recipient of sense impressions only so long as they are present, is able to preserve these impressions. To paraphrase Dante’s ruminative question, he turns to the imaginative faculty within himself to ask, “How do you so remove our attention from outer reality that we do not even notice the most intrusive events? And what informs you if not a sense impression? A light that takes form in Heaven either naturally (i.e., through the natural influence of the stars) or through the will of God.” It seems clear that the visions that follow, like those experienced by the protagonist two cantos earlier (see note to Purg. XV.85–86), are sent to him (and to the penitents on this terrace—but not to Virgil [see note to Purg. XV.130–132]) directly by God. [return to English / Italian]

  19–39. Is the division of the sin of violence in Inferno remembered here, with each of the three exemplary figures guilty of one of the sins of violence portrayed in Inferno: against others (Procne), against oneself (Amata), and against God (Haman)? For this possibility see notes to Inferno VII.109–114 and XII.16–21 (last paragraph), as well as Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 310–11. Wrath is defined, later on in this canto (vv. 121–123), as involving the hardened will in a desire for revenge (vendetta). It is clear that the sort of anger repented on this terrace is not the same sin that we encountered in Inferno VII–VIII, where we saw those who had been overcome by intemperate anger. Here we observe the results of wrathful behavior formed with deliberation.

  It seems clear both that Dante has once again been favored by God-sent ecstatic visions and that Virgil now knows better than to attempt to inject himself into the proceedings: he is utterly silent throughout the scene, although we may imagine that Dante is once again manifesting “drunken” behavior to anyone who observes him (see Purg. XV.121–123). [return to English / Italian]

  19–21. For Dante’s earlier advertence to Ovid’s story of Philomel and Procne, see Purgatorio IX.13–15 and note. There Philomel is dealt with as a sympathetic figure; here Procne, her sister, is made exemplary of the sin of Wrath for murdering her own son, Itys, in order to take vengeance upon Tereus for raping her sister. It may seem odd to today’s readers, but Dante thinks of Procne as the nightingale, Philomel as the swallow (see note to Purg. IX.13–15). [return to English / Italian]

  25. There can be little doubt: the notion of these visions as having “rained down” into the image-receiving faculty of his soul cements the claim made for them. Here is part of Singleton’s comment on this verse: “The phantasy, or imaginativa, is ‘lofty’ because of the experience of a vision coming from such a source. For this adjectival usage, cf. ‘la morta poesì,’ Purg. I.7; ‘la scritta morta,’ Inf. VIII.127; ‘alto ingegno,’ Inf. II.7; and again ‘alta fantasia’ in Par. XXXIII.142.”

  That the poet here uses the very phrase “alta fantasia,” which will mark his final vision of the Trinity three lines from the end of the poem, underlines the importance of this “trial run” for his capacity as visionary protagonist (and eventually God-inspired poet). [return to English / Italian]

  26–30. Once again one must know the story in order to understand the meaning of the vision, which is presented elliptically, a technique Dante employs in all three examples in these lines (19–39). In none of these is the exemplary figure named. This passage is perhaps the most striking in this respect, since the three “supporting players” are all named, while we must supply the name of Haman. Like Procne, Haman is enraged against another (Mordecai, for not bowing down to him, when he had been promoted to being Ahasuerus’s prime minister: see Esther 3:5, where Haman is described as being “full of wrath” [iratus est valde]); like Procne, he tries to take revenge by killing others, deciding to put to death all the Jews in the kingdom of Ahasuerus. At Esther’s urging Ahasuerus rescinds the decree Haman had wrung from him, thus saving God’s people, the Jews in their Persian exile, and has Haman put to death on the gallows (crux in the Vulgate at Esther 5:14, thus accounting for Dante’s crucifisso at verse 26). [return to English / Italian]

  31–33. The “bubble” in Dante’s vision breaks as a bubble does when it rises above the water that contained it, only to give place to another, the final vision of this terrace. [return to English / Italian]

  34–39. Lavinia, anonymous at first but soon to name herself (verse 37), addresses her unnamed mother, Amata, the consort of Latinus, king of Latium, and reproaches her for her suicide. As Bosco/Reggio (1979) point out, Dante, in the spring of 1311, deals with this scene (Aen. XII.595–603) in his second epistle to Henry VII and refers correctly to the context of Amata’s suicide (Epist. VII.24), i.e., she kills herself because she believes that her opposition to her daughter’s marriage to Aeneas has resulted in a failed war and the death of Turnus (whom she wrongly assumes to have been killed when she sees the soldiers of Aeneas approaching the city without opposition). Following expressions of puzzlement with Dante’s treatment of this Virgilian text by Porena (1946), Bosco and Reggio too are puzzled that Dante here develops the situation differently, and suggest that perhaps Dante wants here to make Amata a more sympathetic character. But perhaps he had simpler plans.

  In Aeneid VII.286–405, Virgil presents the results of Juno’s anger at Latinus’s promise of Lavinia in marriage to Aeneas (and not to Turnus, the suitor preferred by Amata, described in verse 345 as a woman on fire, stirred by angers [irae]). Juno’s wrath in turn stirs the Fury Alecto, who comes to earth and puts a venomous snake in Amata’s breast. Poisoned by its venom, Amata goes mad with angry grief and, in the guise of a Bacchante, takes Lavinia to the countryside in the attempt to stop the marriage. All of this insubordination will, of course, eventually fail. It is not clear that Dante is reading the text of Virgil’s twelfth book any differently now than he was when he wrote his second letter to Henry (whether that was written before or after this passage). At whom must Amata be angry, from the point of view of Lavinia? Aeneas, because he will now have Lavinia in marriage. In the epistle, Florence, rejecting her rightful ruler, Henry, is compared to suicidal Amata. There is no reason for such not to be Dante’s understanding here. It is perhaps coincidental that the description of Amata’s suicide is preceded in Virgil by a simile comparing the losing Latians to bees whose hive has been penetrated by the farmer’s emetic smoke; nonetheless, our scene is also preceded by the smoke of anger. Amata, in this respect similar to the two previous exemplary figures, kills someone else in order to harm the person whom she truly hates, Aeneas. That someone else is herself. Hers is the secret of the terrorist, dying to let her enemy know the depths of her envious hatred.

  The “death of yet another” with which the passage ends refers to Turnus in such a way as to indicate that Lavinia understood that her mother had incorrectly assumed that Turnus was already dead, just as she does in Virgil’s poem. [return to English / Italian]

  40–45. The simile is not difficult or surprising. Just as a dreaming sleeper, awakened by a sunbeam, loses his hold on his dream in bits and pieces before it utterly disappears, so was Dante jarred from his visionary sleep by the sudden brightness of the Angel of Mercy. This angelic light outshines even that of the sun, explains Benvenuto (1380), “because an angel gives off light more splendid than any light found in the world.”

  This simile should be remembered in the reading of the final simile of awakening in the poem (Par. XXXIII.58–63). Dante’s fascination with the state between dream and waking is a notable part of his program of investigating the mental state of humans (see note to Inf. XXX.136–141). [return to English / Italian]

  55–60. Perhaps a paraphrase of Virgil’s remarks will be helpful: “This divine spirit does what we wish without our asking, hiding itself in its own radiance (and thus allowing us to see); and it deals with us as we deal with ourselves, for he who sees a need, and yet waits to be asked, unkindly predisp
oses himself toward denying the request.” As Daniello (1568) noted, this is a restatement of a Senecan motto (De beneficiis II.i.3), concerning the grace of giving before one is asked, that Dante had already made his own in Convivio I.viii.16. [return to English / Italian]

  62–63. For the “rule” (apparently more consented to than insisted on) that governs nocturnal stasis on the mountain see Sordello’s explanation (Purg. VII.53–60). [return to English / Italian]

  68–69. The Angel of Mercy draws upon the Beatitude found in Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” yet does so in such a way as to indicate tacitly the distinction between “good” anger (righteous indignation) and the “bad” form of wrath (ira mala) that is fueled by desire for personal revenge. [return to English / Italian]

  70–72. The sun having set, its rays touch only the higher reaches of the mountain. It is after 6 PM and the first stars are visible. [return to English / Italian]

  73. The protagonist’s inner apostrophe of his flagging power of locomotion shows his awareness of the special kind of nocturnal debility afflicting souls on this mountain. As we will see, his physical condition matches that of a man who is slothful. [return to English / Italian]

  79–80. Since, on the terrace of Wrath, Dante’s learning experiences occurred in darkness, and since it is dark as he enters the fourth terrace, he assumes that he may be instructed in virtue by what he will hear. [return to English / Italian]

  82–87. Just as the poem is now entering its second half and this cantica is arriving at its midpoint, so the experience of the repentance of the seven capital vices has come to its central moment with Sloth. From Dante’s question and Virgil’s answer we also understand that there is a gulf separating the vices below, all of which begin in the love of what is wrongful, from the rest, all of which result from insufficient or improper desire to attain the good. The sin purged here is called acedia in Latin and accidia in Italian. (For a lengthy consideration see Wenzel’s book [Wenz.1967.1.]; see also Andrea Ciotti’s entry, which sometimes takes issue with Wenzel, “accidia e accidiosi” in ED I [1970]; for a wider view of acedia see Kuhn [Kuhn.1976.1], with special reference to Dante on pp. 56–59.) In the poem, the word will appear in the next canto, used retrospectively to indicate the sin repented here (Purg. XVIII.132); however, in adjectival form it was present earlier (Inf. VII.123—see note to Inf. VII.118–126). Scartazzini (1900) brings St. Thomas (ST I.lxiii.2) into play as the one who affords a clear understanding of this sin, a kind of spiritual torpor accompanied by (or even causing) physical weariness. [return to English / Italian]

  88–90. This second extended “diagram” is excused, as was the first (Inferno XI), by the need to linger awhile before continuing the journey. Compare verse 84 and Inferno XI.10–15. [return to English / Italian]

  91–139. The rest of the canto is given over, without interruption, to Virgil’s discourse on the nature of love. It misses only by a little being the longest speech we have heard spoken in the poem since Ugolino’s in Inferno XXXIII.4–75, beaten out by Sordello’s recounting of the current denizens of the Valley of the Princes (Purg. VII.87–136) and of course by Marco the Lombard’s discourse on the related failures of Church and empire (Purg. XVI.65–129). [return to English / Italian]

  91–92. The given of Virgil’s whole speech is the universality of love. It proceeds from God in all His creation, and from all things that He has created. In the rational beings (angels and humans), it returns to Him; in the lower animals, to one another and to their habitat; in insentient bodies, to their habitat (e.g., water lilies on ponds) or place of origin (e.g., fire always wanting to reach the sky beneath the moon). See Convivio III.iii.2–5, cited by Singleton (1973). [return to English / Italian]

  93–96. Love is of two kinds, natural or “mental.” Natural love always desires the utmost good, and for rational beings that is God. Thus all humans naturally desire the good. If that were the only love that motivated us, there would be no sin in the world. However, there is another kind of love, one reached by a mental effort, and thus found only in angels and humans. (Since angels have all made their will known, to love God eternally, only humans will be the subjects of Virgil’s discourse.) Human beings, using their free wills, may fall into three kinds of sin: choosing the wrong object for their loves (sins repented on the first three terraces); loving the good deficiently (as do the slothful, whom we are about to encounter); loving the good excessively (the sins repented on the three highest terraces, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust). For discussion of the way in which Dante, unlike Andreas Capellanus and Guido Cavalcanti, is interested in affirming only spiritual love, see Pasquazi (Pasq.1970.1), pp. 227–31. [return to English / Italian]

  97–102. The lines essentially repeat what has been established in vv. 91–96, as though Dante sensed the difficulty most readers would be likely to have with this conceptual poetry. [return to English / Italian]

  103–105. The argument pauses for its first affirmation: whether we sin or use our (free) wills well, the results observed come from our ways of loving—and our merit or demerit accords with the nature of our loves. [return to English / Italian]

  106–111. The first consequence of this doctrine is to remove two possible motivations from consideration: hatred of self or hatred of God, both of which are declared to be impossible. Singleton points out that sinners like Capaneus (Inf. XIV) and Vanni Fucci (Inf. XXV) indeed do demonstrate a hatred for God, a feeling possible only in hell, but not in this life on earth. The sins of suicide and blasphemy, however, surely seem to contradict this theoretical notion. [return to English / Italian]

  112–124. Hatred of self or of God having been discarded as motivations for immoral human conduct, hatred of our neighbor remains, expressed in (1) prideful desire that his success be reversed so that we may be his superior, (2) in envious desire that his success be thwarted, (3) in wrathful desire to take revenge for the harm he has inflicted on us. We realize—although we are told it in case we might not—that these are the sins of Pride, Envy, and Wrath that we have just finished visiting. [return to English / Italian]

  124–125. The actual midpoint of the poem lies between these two verses, numbers 7116 and 7117 of the poem’s 14,233. For discussion of the debate surrounding the fact that the line lengths of the seven central cantos of the Comedy form an apparently deliberate pattern, see the Princeton Dante Project, commentary to Purgatorio XVII.133–139. [return to English / Italian]

  125–126. These two verses refer to all of the other four sins as a group united in at least seeking the good (as was not the case for the first three), but imperfectly. [return to English / Italian]

  127–132. Virgil now defines Sloth, the first of these two better kinds of sin, as “laggard love.” Thus, by failing to respond to God’s offered love more energetically, the slothful are more rebellious to Him than are the avaricious, gluttonous, and lustful, who are pursuing a secondary good rather than avoiding the primary one. In Dante’s day, Sloth was a sin particularly identified with the clergy, with reference not so much to their physical laziness as to their spiritually laggard lives. See Kuhn (Kuhn.1976.1), pp. 39–64. [return to English / Italian]

  133–139. This secondary good has been referred to earlier at verse 98 and will occupy Cantos XX through XXVII, broken into three categories: money, food, and sex. [return to English / Italian]

  PURGATORIO XVIII

  1. This canto continues the flow of the last with no demarcation in the text itself of a terminus or of a new beginning. As Bosco points out in his introductory remarks to the two cantos, they form a unit developed on a chiastic pattern:

  Further, these two cantos form a larger unit with Purgatorio XVI, which is similarly divided into two large blocks of material: 1–63 (narrative) and 64–145 (Marco’s instruction). In this way the numerical center of the Commedia, cantos 49–51, is made more noticeable. (For the midpoint with respect to the number of lines in the poem see the note to Purg. XVII.118–119.)

  Ricci (Ricc.197
0.1), p. 252, suggests that Dante spreads Virgil’s full canto’s worth (145 verses) of speechifying over two cantos so as not to strain the reader’s patience. [return to English / Italian]

  2–3. Virgil’s “Scholastic” credentials seem strong. See Tarozzi’s appreciation (Taro.1901.1), p. 7: Virgil “here represents the idealized figure of the medieval docent.” A close analysis of his discourse in the preceding canto, such as may be found, in English, in Singleton’s commentary, reveals a line of argument that is closely based on Thomistic texts. In keeping with such discourse and for the first time since Inferno XVI.48, Virgil is saluted by his pupil as “professor” (dottore). For the other terms used to describe Virgil’s role as guide in the poem, see note to Inferno II.140.

  In fact, Virgil has rarely been referred to or addressed by Dante with such fervent admiration as here and shortly later in this canto, when he will be “padre verace” (true father—7), “Maestro” (Master—10), and then “father” again (13). See note to vv. 17–18. [return to English / Italian]