Lenten Meditations on Purgatorio: Lust

Canto 24 is taken up with the climb of the three poets from the terrace of greed to the terrace of lust, and an extended conversation they have along the way in which Statius explains for Dante's benefit the relationship between the physical body and the soul (according to a mix of theology and Aristotelian biology) and how this accounts for the fact that the bodies of the souls in purgatory cannot die yet can suffer the visible deprivations of hunger. This is a sort of Aristotelian SciFi element to the Divine Comedy which, though doubtless fascinating to its medieval readers, often give the work a reputation for being hard to understand among 20th century readers.

At last, the poets come reach the next terrace, much of which is covered by a wall of fire. They begin to move carefully along the edge of the terrace, with fire to the left and a precipice to their right, and soon realize that there are spirits moving through the fire, and calling out to one another encouragement in the form of examples single and marital of chastity from Christian history and pagan mythology.

From inside the fire, souls call out to Dante asking him who he is that he walks unburned and still in his mortal body, but as he is about to explain he sees another group of souls coming through the fire walking in the opposite direction of those who have stopped to speak to him.

For down the middle of the burning road
Came people with their faces opposite
To these, and they made me stare in suspense.

There I saw all the shades on either side
Hurrying and kissing one another
Without halting, content with this brief greeting:

As ants in black battalions rub their muzzles,
One with another, so as to seek out,
Perhaps, their prospects and their way ahead.

As soon as these break off their friendly welcome,
Before they take the first step to set off,
Each one attempts to outshout all the rest,

The newcomers crying "Sodom and Gomorrah!"
The others, "Pasiphae climbs in the cow
To let the bull come gallop to her lust!"

Then just like cranes that fly away, some
To the Riphean mountains, some toward the sands,
These to escape the frost and those the sun:

One group of people leaves and one comes on,
And they return in tears to their first chants
And to the shout most suitable for them.
(Purg. XXVI, 28-48)

[Note: In Greek mythology, the Cretan queen Pasiphae was taken with a lust for a bull as a result of a spell put on her by the god Poseidon. She had a wooden cow (with necessary openings) made for her so that she could attract the bull's attention, and as a result conceived the Minotaur, half man and half bull.]



Once the other group of souls has moved off, those who had first asked Dante for his story repeat their request, and he explains about how Beatrice's prayers have resulted in the gift of a chance to travel through hell, purgatory and heaven in order that he may return to the road of virtue. Dante then asks the souls the nature of the other group which just passed going in the other direction and they explain the nature of their own sins and those of the other group of souls.

"The people who don’t come with us offended
By that same sin for which Caesar in triumph
Once heard a voice call out against him, ‘Queen!’

"And that is why they run off shouting ‘Sodom!’
Railing against themselves, as you have heard,
And so support the burning with their shame.

"In sinning we were heterosexual:
But since we did not yield to human law,
Following our appetites like beasts,

"To heap opprobrium upon ourselves,
Leaving those shades, we blare the name of her
Who bestialized herself in beast-like planks.
(Purg. XXVI, 76-87)

Dante's point here about the two forms of sexual sin (gay and straight) is interesting: He labels both sodomy and "straight" fornication and adultery as sins against nature, the former for obvious reasons and the latter because they violate the state of faithful natural marriage. Because Dante sees monogamous fidelity as the natural state of the human person, even "straight" sexual sins are deformations of nature's intent.

Sinners gay and straight now share a brief embrace and kiss as they pass each other in the flames, in sign that they now understand the right place of physical affection and do not allow it to be a lure which draws them from the path towards salvation.

The shades speaking to Dante then introduce themselves personally. They prove to be authors of courtly Italian love poetry, which was a great influence on Dante's early style, and the poets take a few moments to express admiration for each others' work before the penitents continue their journey through the flames and Dante (after promising to pray for them) continues along the terrace with his guides.

A little way further and Dante reaches his most difficult point yet on the journey which has taken him from the wasteland of sin, through hell and repentance to this point. They reach the pass up from the terrace of lust, guarded by the angel of chastity.

He stood upon the bank, outside the flames,
And sang aloud, "Blessed are the clean of heart!"
In a voice far more alive than ours.

Then, "You may go no further, holy souls,
Unless the fire sting you: enter it,
And don’t be deaf to what is sung beyond,"

He said to us when we drew near to him;
And when I heard him speak so, I became
Like someone buried in the pit, alive.

I now arched forward over my clasped hands.
Staring at the fire, I clearly pictured
Human bodies I had once seen burned.

My kindly escorts turned in my direction,
And Virgil said to me, "My son, there may
Be suffering here, but there can be no death.
(Purg. XXVII, 7-21)

Despite Virgil's reassurances, Dante is terrified of going through the fire. When Virgil does convince him to go through, it is only with Virgil reminding Dante that it is only by going through the fire that Dante can see Beatrice again.

It's interesting, I think, that this last penance is one suffered at least briefly by every single soul, and which Dante himself (who has not yet actually been subjected to any punishments or penances in his journey through the afterlife) too must suffer from the flames that purge away lust. Lust is, after all, one of the most basic of human sins, and is found admixed in even the most virtuous married relationships. While it was not through sexual sin that Adam and Eve fell, the first sign of their fall was when they realized that they were naked, and became ashamed. As John Paul II pointed out, writing 700 years after Dante, the first result of the fall was that Adam and Eve each realized that they were capable of taking sexual advantage of the other, and as such sought to protect themselves from each others' gaze.

At last, Dante follows Virgil into the fire.

At that he shook his head and said, "What’s this?
You’d have us stay on this side?" Then he smiled,
As one does at a child won by an apple.

Then he stepped in the flames ahead of me,
Requesting Statius, who a long way now
Had walked between us, to approach behind.

Once in the fire, I would have flung myself
Into molten glass to feel cooled off,
The burning heat inside was so intense.

My tender father, trying to comfort me,
Kept talking about Beatrice as we walked,
Saying, "I seem to see her eyes already!"

A singing voice, beyond, was guiding us;
And we, while listening all the time to it,
Came outside at the point which starts to climb.
(Purg. XXVII, 43-57)

Dante finds himself now on the ascending stair from this last terrace of penance. However, sunset and darkness falls on the poets, and they are forced to take their rest on the steps, spending one last night in Purgatory.

Taking one more moment on this last terrace of purgation, in which Dante share (however briefly) in the redemptive suffering, the contrast between the punishments of Purgatorio and Inferno strikes me yet again. Though Dante certainly gives us a powerful image of the heat (wishing he could throw himself into molten glass to cool himself) he spends far more time on his effort to gain the strength of will to enter the fire, and to keep moving through it. No one will push Dante into the fire. While in the Inferno demons, fellow sinners and other keepers constantly force the damned back into their punishments, and capture them if they try to escape, the "punishments" of the Purgatorio are all voluntarily assumed. Dante could, should he have chosen, waited indefinitely on the terrace, refusing to enter the fire.

Climbing a mountain really is the ideal metaphor for Purgatory and for the efforts at spiritual and moral self improvement in life which Purgatory, in Dante' and the reader's earthly lives, represents. It is a difficult task requiring effort and at times suffering, but undertaken because one knows and desires the goal.

No one is going to do anything to these penitents in Purgatory, but they choose to undergo these sufferings because they know that only through the purgation of disordered habits and loves can they reach the promised goal of heaven.

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Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by AllenMandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Lenten Meditations on Purgatorio: Gluttony

As Canto XXII opens, the poets have just ascended from the terrace on which greed and prodigality (both unbalanced loves of material possessions) are purged, and the angel who guards the pass has wiped another P from Dante's forehead. Virgil and the second century Roman poet Statius are deep in conversation. Virgil asks Statius how it is that he came to be a Christian.

And he told him, "You were the first to send me
Toward Parnassus to drink within its caves,
And you the first to light my way to God.

"You were like one who, traveling by night,
Carries the torch behind — no help to him —
But he makes those who follow him the wiser,

"When you announced, ‘The ages are made new:
Justice returns and the first world of man,
And a new progeny comes down from heaven.’

"Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian.
(Purg. XXII, 64-73)

Statius paraphrases, in Dante's Italian, several of the most famous lines from Virgil's 4th Eclogue. The poem talks about the coming of a new golden age, started by a man sent down from heaven:

Now the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung
Has come and gone, and the majestic roll
Of circling centuries begins anew:
Justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign,
With a new breed of men sent down from heaven.
Only do thou, at the boy's birth in whom
The iron shall cease, the golden race arise,
Befriend him, chaste Lucina; 'tis thine own
Apollo reigns.

Written during the Augustan peace, the 4th Eclogue is a "prophecy" to the consul during whose period in office Augustus had been born, and it describes the new Golden Age which will unfold when this child comes to reign over the world. However, since the poem was written shortly before the birth of Christ, and Virgil was revered as the greatest Latin poet throughout the Middle Ages, Virgil's poem was often interpreted by Medieval Christians as being an unknowing prophecy of the coming of Christ. Dante uses that mythology surrounding Virgil to provide an example of how non-Christian art can nonetheless powerfully guide people towards Christian truth -- because Truth itself is one. He imagines Statius, who revered Virgil deeply, to have come across the early Christian community in Rome and immediately seen them to be the coming of the new age into the world which Virgil had foretold. And thus we get this beautiful (though in a sense tragic) image of Virgil bearing a light behind him which for others illuminates the path of truth, but which Virgil himself cannot see. Although the truth of Virgil's poetry helped guide Statius into the Church, Virgil himself is relegated to the Limbo of the virtuous pagans, an afterlife like heaven as these pagans had imagined it (with green grass, white marble buildings, and good company) yet without that greatest happiness of which they had had no knowledge, the beatific vision of the infinite God.

Statius then goes on to describe how he long admired the Christians as they suffered persecution, and at last was baptized, though he kept up an outward show of paganism to avoid sharing in their persecution and for this failing spent many centuries farther down the mountain on the terrace of sloth.

Their conversation ended, they set off along the new terrace they have reached. Soon the poets come upon a tree in the path, with a stream of clear, cool water cascading down upon it from above. A voice from within the tree tells them that they must not eat of the tree or drink of the spring, and then recites a series of examples of fasting or abstinence from the Bible and antiquity.

They are about to move on when they hear a psalm called out from behind them:

And suddenly in tears and song we heard
"Open my lips, O Lord," sung in such tones
That it gave birth to gladness and to grief.

"O gentle father, what is this I hear?"
I wondered; and he: "Shades who journey on,
Perhaps loosening the knot of their bad debt."

Like pilgrims who go wrapped in pious thought
And, overtaking strangers on the road,
Turn toward them but do not stop to talk,

So from behind us, moving faster, coming
And passing by, there gazed at us in wonder
A throng of spirits, silent and devout.

The eyes of each were dark and hollowed-out,
Their faces pale and they so shriveled up
That their skin took its contour from their bones.
(Purg. XXIII, 10-24)

One of these spirits hurrying by slows to speak to Dante, and reveals himself to be Forese Donati -- a long time friend, fellow poet. Dante, who had not recognized him in his emaciated form, greets him joyfully. Forese asks about how Dante comes to be there with his companions, and then tells them about the plight of the souls on this terrace:

"All these people who in weeping sing
Resanctify themselves in thirst and hunger
For having followed appetite too much.

"Craving for food and drink is kindled in us
By the fragrance wafted from the fruit
And from the water splashed on the green leaves;

"And not just once while we walk round this road
Is our ordeal renewed — I say ordeal
And yet I ought to say our consolation,

"For that same will that leads us to the tree
Led Christ in gladness to call out ‘Eli,’
When he delivered us with his own blood."
(Purg. XXIII, 64-75)

It's important to consider the difference between this terrace of purgatory and the circle of gluttony in Inferno, because it tells us something important about Dante's understanding of Purgatory, and how the sufferings of these souls (though often severe) are not mere punishments. In the Inferno, the gluttonous wallow in a muddy swamp with rain beating down on them. The ever-hungry Cerberus runs throughout the circle, biting and snapping at the damned with this three heads. The punishment is the sin exemplified. When we give ourselves up to gluttony we wallow in consumption while at the same time being chased by hunger. We eat or drink compulsively, not because we need to, but because the appetite drives us to dig ourselves in deeper and deeper. Indulgence enfolds us like the swamp, yet even so the appetite remains. We want more because we have given in so completely to the habit of consumption. We hunger because we are eating, and eat because we hunger.

The souls here did not give themselves in completely to appetite -- however much they indulged in gluttony they kept their central desire for God. But they allowed their wills to be weakened through so often giving in and making consumption a little god. Now they are purifying their wills by remaining intent upon their eternal goal despite deprivation. They hurry constantly round the terrace, racing along the path towards God, while foregoing the refreshing water and fruit they see before them. Their bodies as seen in Purgatory do not require rest and sustainance -- they are not being damaged by their hunger and constant hurry -- but what they are suffering is the denial of will.

In Lent, this is a good point to consider. We never seek to hurt ourselves through Lenten sacrifices. The purpose of penance is not to suffer, but rather to accustom ourselves to mastering our appetites and wills. For most healthy adults in modern occupations, giving up food for a day (partially or even completely) will not harm us in any real way. But the difficulty of overcoming that natural desire to eat (and the confidence of seeing that we can do it) helps us to own ourselves more fully and see how we can do what we believe is right or necessary even in difficult circumstances.

Dante compliments Forso Donati on having got so far up Mt. Purgatory in the mere four years since his death, and Forso explains that this is due in great part to the prayers of his wife (still living) and his sister (dead and in heaven.) He then points out several people whom Dante knows or has heard of, including Pope Martin IV, who died after overindulging in eels.

At last, Forso can hold back from his purpose no longer, and runs off to catch up with the other penitents. The poets continue on, and shortly reach another tree where they hear examples of the suffering brought on by gluttony. After an angel has wiped one more P from Dante's forehead, they poets begin their ascent to the next terrace.

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Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by AllenMandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.

Lenten Meditations on the Divine Comedy: Our Story So Far

It's Lent, and so on DarwinCatholic it's time to return to Dante's great Christian spiritual epic, the Divine Comedy. Over the last two years we've worked through the Inferno and the first twenty-one cantos of the Purgatorio. This year we'll cover at least the remaining 12 cantos of the Purgatorio, and hopefully a good chunk of the Paradiso as well. But first a little review, as a help for readers old and new, and also to get myself back in the Dantean groove.

Too many people recall the Divine Comedy, if they recall it at all, as that weird, dark, violent medieval poem that they had to wade through in college, written by that dour Italian guy who put all his enemies in hell. This image is hardly helped by the fact that while many people are assigned to read at least parts of Inferno, few read Purgatorio and fewer still read Paradiso. And yet this really is too bad, because it is only through reading all the way through Dante's great work that his purpose comes fully into view.


A Catholic to the core, Dante's story which ranges from the torments in the deepest, frozen pits of hell (for Dante's hell has indeed frozen over) to the beatific vision, is at core a story of conversion and the cleansing of sins. The first lines of the Inferno read:

Halfway through the journey we are living
I found myself deep in a darkened forest,
For I had lost all trace of the straight path.
(Inf. I, 1-3)

At middle age, the in the jubilee year of 1300, Dante finds himself off the path towards Christ, and lost in a wood of sin and attachment to sin. He tries to struggle back to the path unaided, but is overcome by the figures of the vices he is attached to. And from thence he is rescued by Virgil, the great Roman poet, released from Limbo by command of a lady in heaven to guide Dante through hell, up the mountain of purgatory, and at last to heaven. Virgil must lead Dante through the first two thirds of his journey, because Dante has lost his faith so thoroughly that it is through the humanism of art and natural virtue, as symbolized by the great pagan poet in whose work many in the Middle Ages saw prophetic echoes of the messiah to come, that he must rediscover the nature of sin and, rejecting it, develop virtue.

Thus, as the poets descend through hell Dante comes to understand the nature of sin. In upper levels of hell, where the sins of indecision (see: The Lost) and mis-placed love (see: Swept Away by Sin) are punished, Dante often finds himself sympathizing with the damned and questioning how God could be so hard as to punish them thus. But as they travel deeper and Dante's vision becomes clearly, he comes to see the repulsiveness of sin. Yet along the way humanity is never lost. Dante has a tearful conversation with one of his old teachers among the burning sands of the sodomites. And in the frozen lake at the center of hell we read the equal parts pitiable and shocking story of betrayal and hate feeding upon itself.

At last the poets and the reader as well are battered and sobered by all the horrors they have seen. They reach the very deepest part of hell, where Satan himself, giant in size and chewing on the souls of Judas, Brutus and Cassius -- history's three greatest traitors. To leave hell the poets climb down Satan's shaggy fur, through a channel in the ice, until they pass the center of the globe and reach a winding stair that leads them up to the other side of the world where Mt. Purgatory stands.

While Inferno is increasingly dark and terrible, Purgatorio seems saturated with sunlight as it opens. A ship of souls approaches the shore, driven by an angel whose flapping wings send the vessel skimming over the water. As the souls disembark, they are soon running at full speed down the beach, eager to make progress towards the salvation they are not certain of.

The poets follow them, and as they do so meet groups of souls who are purging themselves of those vices which keep them from God. First among these are the late repentant and those so enwrapped in earthly power and glory that they paid little attention to God until their deaths. Traveling up the mountain, the poets meet those purging pride, envy, wrath, sloth, and greed.

And there, with Dante's upward journey, I will be resuming. The path through purgatory spiral ever upward until Dante reaches the earthly paradise which serves as a launching pad towards heaven, where images of sin and its purgation are replaced with example of virtue, drawing ever closer to the beatific vision, in whose presence Dante's artistic powers at last fail him:

As the geometer who sets himself
To square the circle and who cannot find,
For all his thought, the principle he needs,

Just so was I on seeing this new vision
I wanted to see how our image fuses
Into the circle and finds its place in it,

Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —
Except that then my mind was struck by lightning
Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
(Para. XXXIII, 133-145)

I do this first of all because I enjoy doing it. I look forward to it each year, though somehow when the discipline of Lent falls away, my ability to keep up the Dante posts falls away as well.

And I hope in the process to share some of the text and images and lessons of one of the greatest literary works of Catholic culture. The Commedia is beautiful both as an artistic and humanistic work, but also as a work of devotion and a guide to the spiritual path, from that gloomy wood halfway through life's journey to the eternal vision of God, which we are called to tread.

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Thanks to:

The translation and notes of James Finn Cotter

The translation, original text, and notes provided by AllenMandelbaum

And most especially the translation and extensive commentary by Dorothy Sayers, which Penguin keeps appearing to drop, but never quite has.