Purgatorio (The Divine Comedy series Book 2)

by Dante

  103–105. For the resonance of Ovid’s tale of Argus (Metam. I.625–721), with his vision that seems limited, for all its seeing, when compared with the total sight of these angels, see Levenstein (Leve.1996.1), pp. 194–95. [return to English / Italian]

  109–114. Pietrobono (1946) points out that in Convivio IV.xxi. 7–8, Dante had already revealed his theory of the relationship among the elements of the individual human soul: the fathering sower, the embryo, and the astral influences of the constellations of the zodiac that shape its human talents. In this passage we hear about God, who breathes in last the vital element, the intellectual, or rational, soul. The passage at Purgatorio XXV.68–75 explains that the generation of the rational soul is performed directly by God; here we learn that not even the saved in the Empyrean nor the angels can understand the love that moves God in the creation of that soul in each of his human creatures. [return to English / Italian]

  115–117. It seems obvious to most readers today that the phrase vita nova refers, if in its Latin form, to Dante’s first prosimetrum, the thirty-one poems collected with prose commentary known as The New Life. And it seemed so to at least one very early commentator, the Ottimo (1333). However, here is the commentary of Benvenuto da Imola to this passage (1380): “This man, i.e., Dante, was such in his new life, i.e., in his boyhood; others, however, refer to his treatise De vita nova, which he composed in his youth. But it is surely ridiculous to do so, seeing that the author was ashamed of it in his maturity.” Benvenuto’s enthusiastic prehumanist reading of the Comedy will only accept an allegorical, theologized Beatrice who bears no resemblance to the mortal girl of the early work.

  One finds, even among recent commentators, a certain desire to avoid committing oneself to what seems completely obvious: the phrase vita nova cannot help but call to mind, in this context, the work that records Beatrice’s lasting impact on Dante, first in his “new life” (when they were both children, a time to which Dante refers in verse 42: “before I had outgrown my childhood”) and then later on, as recorded in the book called “The New Life.” [return to English / Italian]

  118–138. Moore’s essay, “The Reproaches of Beatrice” (Moor.1903.1), pp. 221–52, remains one of the most valuable attempts to deal with this convoluted expression of the single most important explanation Dante offers with regard to what he now conceives to have been his chief errors before he wrote the Commedia. [return to English / Italian]

  118–123. Beatrice offers an epitome of the main narrative of the Vita nuova, according to which for some sixteen years (1274–1290) she attempted to lead Dante to God, despite his natural sinful disposition. Unfortunately, even while she lived, the “rich soil” of his soul grew weeds. [return to English / Italian]

  124–126. Upon Beatrice’s death, and according to Dante’s own report in the Vita nuova (chapters XXXV–XXXIX), he did indeed give himself to at least one other (altrui can be either singular or plural in Dante). His probably most egregious dalliance was with the donna gentile (noble lady) who sympathized with his distress.

  The lady is later allegorized, in Dante’s Convivio, as the Lady Philosophy. (For discussion, see the note to Purg. XXXIII.85–90.) [return to English / Italian]

  134. The sort of dream Beatrice prayed God to send Dante is probably well represented by the dream of the Siren in Purgatorio XIX. 7–32. That accounts for the first part of Beatrice’s formulation, i.e., Dante was given negative dreams about his disastrous love for the wrong lady. What about the second? What God-sent “inspirations” was she granted in order to call him back to loving her even after her death? Scartazzini (1900) offers a simple and compelling hypothesis (apparently silently acceded to by any number of later commentators, who make the same point without even a mention of his name). In Vita nuova XXXIX.1, Dante receives the image of the girlish Beatrice in his phantasy, the image-receiving part of his mind (one may compare the ecstatic visions vouchsafed him for the exemplary figures on the terrace of Wrath [and see the note to Purg. XV.85–114]). As he recounts (VN XXXIX.2–6), this vision of Beatrice had the necessary effect, and he resolved to love her yet again, turning away his affection from the donna gentile. And then, Scartazzini continues, he was allowed the final vision of Beatrice seated in the Empyrean (VN XLII.1). Thus, as seems clear, while Dante slept, God sent him dreams of what was unworthy in his love for the donna gentile; while he was awake, positive images of Beatrice. If this program is correctly perceived, it matches precisely the mode employed to teach penitents on the mountain, positive and negative examples teaching what to follow and what to flee. Unfortunately, even after such encouragement, Dante would fall again. See the note to Purgatorio XXXIII.85–90. [return to English / Italian]

  139–141. Poor Virgil! He has done the Christians sixty-four cantos’ worth of service, guiding their great poet to his redemption and vision, and now the very lady who sought his help does not even mention his name; he is but “colui” (the one who). Where is Virgil now? On his way back to Limbo, we must assume. And thus, we may also assume, to another sad welcome from his fellow poets once he is again (less than a week after he had already returned once [see note to Inf. IV.80–81]) among them in his etterno essilio (eternal exile—Purg. XXI.18). We shall only hear his name twice more (Par. XVII.19 and XXVI.118) and never again from Beatrice, who uses it only once, in her first words, coupling it with Dante’s (verse 55), and then to shame Dante for his affection for Virgil when there are more important feelings he should feel. [return to English / Italian]

  142–145. As Beatrice wept in Virgil’s presence in hell for Dante’s sake (verse 141), so now it is Dante’s turn to weep for the sins that made her intervention necessary. The angels may want to celebrate the eventual triumph of this saved Christian; Beatrice is here to make sure that he observes the ritual of the completion of purgation correctly, even on this trial run. [return to English / Italian]

  PURGATORIO XXXI

  1. Beatrice’s words, perhaps reminiscent of Virgil’s to the cowering, hiding Dante in Inferno XXI.88–90, call his (and our) attention to the fact that he has not yet crossed Lethe, i.e., he still has his sins in mind, as will be hammered home by vv. 11–12. [return to English / Italian]

  2–3. The metaphor of Beatrice’s speech as a “sword” picks up her earlier promise that Dante will weep for “another sword” beside that of Virgil’s departure (Purg. XXX.57). The lengthy speech that she had directed to the angels (Purg. XXX.103–145) was in fact aimed squarely at him, using the angels as her apparent primary auditors in such a way as to publicize his sins and thus shame the protagonist. In this sense, then, the point of her “sword” had seemed aimed at them, while she was wounding Dante (if painfully enough, as we have seen) with only the edge of the blade. Now he finds her sword pointing straight at his heart. [return to English / Italian]

  5–6. Beatrice calls for Dante’s confession with specific reference to the list of charges against him that she had leveled in the last canto (Purg. XXX.124–132). [return to English / Italian]

  10–11. Che pense? (What are you thinking?): Tommaseo was apparently the first to hear the resonance of Virgil’s identical question to Francesca-dazzled Dante in Inferno V.111. Now see Pertile (Pert.1993.3), p. 389.

  It is perhaps not coincidental that Dante’s first two guides, in scenes that are confessional in nature, both prod him to consider the conflicting natures of lust and charity with the same question. [return to English / Italian]

  16–21. Dante’s attempt to discharge the dart of his speech from the crossbow that collapses under the tension of his situation produces a more audible emission of tears and sighs than of true confessions, which he can barely whisper. [return to English / Italian]

  22–24. Perhaps nowhere before or after does the poet make the nature of the love the protagonist should have had for Beatrice clearer than here. His desire for her should have led him to God. [return to English / Italian]

  25–30. Beatrice, given Dante’s muteness, rehashes the charges we had h
eard in the last canto (Purg. XXX.124–132), now substituting a fresh set of metaphors for those we found there (see the note to Purg. XXX.118–138). There we heard that after Beatrice’s death (1) he gave himself to another (or “to others”; the Italian altrui is ambiguous and may be singular or plural); (2) he chose a wrong path, “pursuing false images of good.” Now he is presented first as warrior and then as lover. In the first tercet he is like a soldier (or an army) cut off from his pursuit of his goal by the defensive ditches or chains deployed by an enemy; in the second he is like a courting swain who parades before the house of the woman with whom he is infatuated. In the first case, once he loses his Beatrice he no longer advances toward God; in the second, he moves toward another and improper destination. He was turned by his love for the donna gentile, who, we may remember (VN XXXV.2), was seated at her window and looked pityingly at Dante, who then “parades” before her a pair of sonnets (VN XXXV.15–18; XXXVI.14–15). If, in the Vita nuova, he finally returns to his love for Beatrice and is rewarded with a vision of her in the Empyrean, in Convivio he is writing about the donna gentile again, now as having finally displaced Beatrice in his affections. He had looked for consolation from this lady, he says, but he had instead found gold (Conv. II.xii.5).

  For this writer’s view of this complex matter see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 159–69. And see, more recently, Picone (Pico.1992.1), pp. 205–12. [return to English / Italian]

  31–33. Here begins Dante’s confession. Mazzoni (Mazz.1965.2), p. 62, rightly observes (as, for instance, Singleton [1973] does not) that the confession will be followed by his contrition and then by his giving satisfaction. These three elements in the rite of confession, in that perhaps puzzling order, occupy the first 102 verses of this canto, with first confession and then contrition, occupying vv. 31–90 (for the traditional order, see the note to Purg. IX.94–102). [return to English / Italian]

  34–36. Finally Dante confesses, summarizing his transgressions as delight in false things set before him after Beatrice was dead. Exactly what these pleasures were is a question that greatly exercises Dante scholars. It does seem clear that they are presented in so vague and encompassing a way as to allow two primary interpretations, that is, both carnal and intellectual divagations from the love he owed God, awakened in him by Beatrice. [return to English / Italian]

  36. Dante’s first words to Beatrice set a pattern that will not be broken until Paradiso XXXI.80: Dante addresses her with the honorific voi. See the note to Purgatorio XIX.131. [return to English / Italian]

  37–39. Beatrice accepts his confession. That word has already been used at verse 6, underlining the precise nature of what is happening here (words for “confession” only occur three times in Purgatorio, where we might expect them to be more common, twice in this canto). [return to English / Italian]

  45. The reference to the Sirens draws us back to Purgatorio XIX.19–33, the dream of the Siren and (as at least a few interpreters agree) Beatrice’s intervention in Dante’s dream to have Virgil show him the ugliness of the object of his infatuation. See the note to Purgatorio XIX.31–33.

  The Ottimo (1333) is one of the very few commentators to think of Boethius’s dismissal of the Sirens (who have so harmed him) in favor of the Muses of Lady Philosophy (Cons. I.i[pr]). [return to English / Italian]

  46. Tommaseo (1837) was apparently the first to explain the strange phrase “to sow tears” by referring to the Bible, Psalm 125:5 (126:5), “those that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” Even so, Dante has made the Psalmist more difficult than he had in fact been: “sowing tears” is not quite the same thing as “sowing in tears” (i.e., planting seed while weeping). [return to English / Italian]

  47–54. Beatrice’s phrasing offers a good example of the cause of the difficulty many have in interpreting her role in this poem. She tells Dante that her buried flesh should have led him elsewhere from where he elected to go (in this context, clearly to other women [cosa mortale, “mortal thing”]). This is not because she was more beautiful in her fleshly being than they, but because she offered him what they did and could not, “il sommo piacer” (the highest beauty). The verbal noun piacer is used only once in the first half of the poem (it describes Paolo’s physical attractiveness at Inf. V.104). When it is found again (at Purg. XVIII.21), it then occurs thirty-four times in the second half, twenty-one of these in Paradiso. It is often used to denote the highest beauty of all, that of God. The word is used three times in this canto (vv. 35, 50, 52), its densest presence in the Comedy. The false beauty of Beatrice’s rivals (verse 35) should have been countered by the highest beauty that he had found in her. The phrase “sommo piacer” was traditionally interpreted as referring to Beatrice as the most beautiful of all mortals. I.e., Dante’s failure was in chasing after women who were not as beautiful as she was. This disastrous interpretation, undermined by the very antithesis present in Beatrice’s formulations, sommo piacer / cosa mortale, which polarizes divine and human beauty, was intelligently dismissed in Mazzoni’s gloss (Mazz.1965.2), pp. 67–72. Mazzoni demonstrates that Dante is relying upon the Victorine tradition that discussed the beauty of God, even as it was manifest in individual human beings, the summa pulchritudo (highest beauty) in the phrase of Hugh of St. Victor (p. 68). (For a study of Dante’s ideas about beauty see John Took [Took.1984.1].) [return to English / Italian]

  55–57. Beatrice’s next installment drives the point home, again separating the spiritual from the physical—if readers tend to fail to notice what she has done. The “deceitful” things of this world are distinguished from those of the next in that Beatrice tells Dante that, once she was no longer associated with this world, his affection should have followed her upward. [return to English / Italian]

  58–60. We are given yet another (now the third) version of Dante’s sins after Beatrice’s death (see the note to vv. 25–30). Instead of flying up after dead Beatrice’s spirit, the wings of his affection drooped down to earth in search of a pargoletta (young girl)—the sexual note is struck again—or “other novelty of such brief use,” a phrasing that would again allow the understanding that Dante’s divagation also involved some sort of intellectual experiment that now seems without eventual value. [return to English / Italian]

  62–63. See Proverbs 1:17, “Frustra autem iacitur rete ante oculos pennatorum” (In vain is the net cast forth before the eyes of full-fledged birds). (The citation was first observed by Pietro Alighieri [1340].) Dante, as grown up “bird,” should have been able to avoid capture by his huntress(es). [return to English / Italian]

  64–67. Understandably, Dante is now compared, in simile, not to a mature man, who should have known better, but to a naughty boy. [return to English / Italian]

  68. Continuing the motif introduced in the preceding simile, this verse has had the effect of convincing some readers that the usual portraits and busts of Dante are all incorrect in showing him as clean-shaven. However, all that is probably meant is that he was old enough to know better because he was old enough to shave. In the same vein, some have argued that Beatrice only indicates Dante’s chin (mento, referred to in verse 73). Even so, his chin is “bearded” if he has to shave it. For a brief and cogent review of the argument, see Mazzoni (Mazz.1965.2), pp. 73–74. And for a hypothetical meditation on the iconographic valence of Dante’s beardedness that essentially bypasses the issue that attracts most readers (and which involves an astonishingly large bibliography)—whether Dante meant us to understand that his face was bearded or not—see Shoaf (Shoa.1986.1). [return to English / Italian]

  70–75. The formal “classical” simile is clear in its intent: Dante, for all the reticence of his contrition, is finally won over. Its resonance, however, is subtle and not observed in the commentary tradition. Shoaf (Shoa.1986.1), pp. 176–77, decodes the passage well. He points out that Aeneid IV.196–278 presents Iarbas’s appeal to Jupiter to intervene on his behalf in his suit for widow Dido’s hand, an appeal that results in Mercury’s coming to Aeneas to spur hi
m to his Italian voyage. The simile that gives birth to this one is found, Shoaf continues, at Aeneid IV.441–449, when Aeneas is compared to a deeply rooted oak tree buffeted by north winds when Dido makes her last-ditch appeal to him to stay with her in Carthage. In the end, he remains strong enough in his new resolve to deny her request and set sail. Here, the “new Aeneas,” buffeted by the south wind, gives over his stubborn recalcitrance and accedes to the insistent demand of Beatrice, a new and better Dido, that he express his contrition. Where it was good for Aeneas to resist the entreaties of his woman, it is also good for Dante to yield to Beatrice’s. [return to English / Italian]

  77–78. Since Beatrice’s hundred angels are not referred to directly again, we can only conclude that, after this last act of theirs, they disappear, either into thin air or else to fly back up to the Empyrean, along with the rest of the Church Triumphant (see Purg. XXXII.89–90). While the text guarantees no solution, the second hypothesis seems the better one, if only because we have no reason to exempt them from the general exodus that occurs at that point, even if their arrival is not clearly accounted for (see the notes to Purg. XXX.16–18 and XXXII.89–90). [return to English / Italian]

  81. The phrasing “one person in two natures” makes it difficult to accept the arguments of those who believe the griffin is not a symbol of Christ. [return to English / Italian]