Dante

1. Introductory

Letter and Allegory.—The Divina Commedia is a vision and an allegory. It is a vision of the world beyond the grave; it is an allegory, based upon that vision, of the life and destiny of man, his need of light and guidance, his duties to the temporal and spiritual powers, to the Empire and the Church. In the literal sense, the subject is the state of souls after death. In the allegorical sense, according to the Epistle to Can Grande, the subject is “man as by freedom of will, meriting and demeriting, he is subject to Justice rewarding or punishing” (Epist. x. 11). There is, therefore, the distinction between the essential Hell, Purgatory, Paradise of separated spirits—the lost and the redeemed—after death; and the moral or spiritual Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, of men still united to their bodies in this life, using their free will for good or for evil; sinning, doing penance, living virtuously. The Inferno represents the state of ignorance and vice; the Purgatorio is the life of converted sinners, obeying Caesar and reconciled to Peter, doing penance and striving God-wards; after the state of felicity has been regained in the Earthly Paradise, the Paradiso represents the ideal life of action and contemplation, closing in an anticipation, here and now, of the Beatific Vision. The whole poem is the mystical epic of the freedom of man’s will in time and in eternity, the soul after conversion passing through the stages of purification and illumination to the attainment of union and fruition.

It must be admitted that the allegorical interpretation of the Commedia has frequently been carried to excess. This has led to a reaction, represented now by Benedetto Croce, who would separate the allegorical and didactic elements from the poetry, in which alone the true value of the work consists. Such a tendency in its turn, if pressed too far, derogates from Dante’s greatness and mars the unity of the poem. In Dante the poet and the practical man—teacher, prophet, politician, philosopher, reformer—are inseparable; more often purely doctrinal themes become so fused in his imagination, so identified with his personality, that the result is lyrical and great poetry.

Title.—Dante unquestionably called his work simply Commedia, which he wrote Comedia and pronounced Comedìa (Inf. xvi. 128, xxi. 2). The epithet divina first appears in the sixteenth-century editions; but it would be almost as pedantic to discard it now as it would be, except when reading the word where it occurs in the poem, to return to the original pronunciation, comedìa.[28]

Metrical Structure.—Each of the three parts, or cantiche, is divided into cantos: the Inferno into thirty-four, the Purgatorio into thirty-three, the Paradiso into thirty-three—thus making up a hundred cantos, the square of the perfect number. Each canto is composed of from one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and sixty lines, forming thirty-eight to fifty-three terzine, a continuous measure of three hendecasyllabic lines, woven together by the rhymes of the middle lines, with an extra line rhyming with the second line of the last terzina to close the canto:

The normal hendecasyllabic line is the endecasillabo piano, in which the rhyme has the accent upon the penultimate syllable (rima piana, trochaic ending). Occasionally, but rarely, we find the endecasillabo sdrucciolo, with the rhyme accentuated on the antepenultimate syllable (rima sdrucciola, dactylic ending), or the endecasillabo tronco, with the accent on the final syllable (rima tronca). Italian prosody regards both these latter forms (which appear to have twelve and ten syllables respectively) as lines of eleven syllables.[29]

The terza rima seems to be derived from the serventese incatenato (“linked serventese”), one of the rather numerous forms of the Italian serventese or sermontese, a species of poem introduced from Provence in the first half of the thirteenth century. The Provençal sirventes was a serviceable composition employed mainly for satirical, political, and ethical purposes, in contrast with the more stately and “tragical” canzone of love. Although the Italians extended its range of subject and developed its metres, no one before Dante had used it for a great poem or had transfigured it into this superb new measure, at once lyrical and epical. In his hand, indeed, “the thing became a trumpet,” sounding from earth to heaven, to call the dead to judgment.

Sources.—The earlier mediaeval visions of the spirit world, of which the most famous are Irish in origin, bear the same relation, in a much slighter degree, to the spiritual content of the Commedia as the Provençal sirventes does to its metrical form. Even if Dante was acquainted with them (and there are episodes occasionally in the poem which recall the vision of Tundal or Tnuthgal), he was absolutely justified in asserting, in Purgatorio xvi., that God willed that he should see His court “by method wholly out of modern use”:

Such ideas, even in special details, were common property. Dante transformed the mediaeval vision of the world beyond the grave into a supreme work of art, making it the receptacle for all that was noblest in the thought and aspiration of the centuries down to his own day. If a hint or two came from Ibernia fabulosa, as Ariosto calls Ireland, the main suggestion was Roman; and Virgil was his imperial master in very fact, as he was his guide by poetical fiction (Inf. i. 82-87): “O honour and light of the other poets, may the long study avail me, and the great love, that has made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author; thou alone art he from whom I took the fair style that hath gained me honour.”

The influence of Virgil pervades the whole poem, and next to his comes that of Lucan. Ovid was mainly a source of classical mythology (frequently spiritualised in Dante’s hands); the contribution of Horace, Statius, and Juvenal is slighter. And Dante was as familiar with the Bible as with the Aeneid and the Pharsalia; indeed, one of the most salient characteristics of the Commedia is the writer’s adaptation of the message of the Hebrew prophets to his own times in the language and with the consummate art of the Latin poets. In its degree, the influence of Boëthius is as penetrating as that of Virgil; Orosius has contributed as much history as has Livy. The philosophy of the poem is naturally coloured by Aristotle, studied in the Latin translations as interpreted by Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. Augustine and Aquinas (more generally the latter) are the poet’s chief theological sources; his mysticism has derived something from Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventura as well as from Dionysius. But he deals with his matter with independence, as a poet, in the light of his own spiritual experience, his own imaginative interpretation of life and history, his own observation of nature. Though versed in a super-eminent degree with most of the knowledge, sacred and profane, possible to a man of his epoch, and well-read to an almost incredible extent when the circumstances of his life are considered, Dante’s main and direct source of inspiration lay, not in books, but in that wonderful world of the closing Middle Ages that lay open to his gaze, as from a celestial watch-tower of contemplation: “The little space of earth that maketh us so fierce, as I turned me with the eternal Twins, all appeared to me from the hills to the sea” (Par. xxii. 151-153).

Virgil and Beatrice.—The end of the poem, as the Epistle to Can Grande shows, is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity. In the individual, this will be accomplished by opening his eyes to the nature of vice; by inducing him to contrition, confession, satisfaction; by leading him to contemplation of eternal Truth. In the universality, it can only be effected by the restoration of the Empire and the purification of the Church. The dual scheme of the Monarchia reappears in the Commedia, but transferred from the sphere of Church and State to the field of the individual soul. In the allegorical sense, Virgil may be taken to represent Human Philosophy based on Reason; Beatrice to symbolize Divine Philosophy, which includes the sacred science of Theology, and is in possession of Revelation. But, primarily, Virgil and Beatrice (like the other souls in the poem) are living personalities, not allegorical types. Allegory may be forgotten in the tender relation between Dante and Virgil, and, when that “sweetest father” leaves his disciple in the Earthly Paradise to return to his own sad place in Limbo, there is little of it left in Beatrice’s rebuke of her lover’s past disloyalty; none when she is last seen enshrined in glory beneath the Blessed Virgin’s throne.

There is then a universal and a personal meaning to be distinguished, as well as the literal and allegorical significations. The Divina Commedia is the tribute of devotion from one poet to another; it is the sequel to a real love, the glorification of the image of a woman loved in youth; the story of one man’s conversion and spiritual experience. Nor can we doubt that the study of the imperial poet of alma Roma helped Dante to his great political conception of the destiny of the Empire, even as Philosophy first lifted him from the moral aberrations that severed him from the ideal life (Purg. xxiii. 118). But, at the same time, Dante represents all mankind; as Witte remarks, “the poet stands as the type of the whole race of fallen man, called to salvation.”

Dates and Epoch.—Although the vision is poetically placed in the spring of 1300, during the Pope’s jubilee and shortly before Dante’s election to the priorate, the actual date of composition of the poem—as far as concerns the first two parts—is still uncertain and disputed. There are at present two principal theories. According to the one (very strongly held by Parodi), the Inferno was composed shortly before the advent of Henry of Luxemburg, the Purgatorio during his Italian enterprise. According to the other, not only the Paradiso, but the whole poem was written after the death of the Emperor, and must therefore be regarded as the work of the closing years of the poet’s life. On the former hypothesis, the allusion to the death of Clement V., in Inf. xix., must be taken as an indefinite prediction or a later insertion. It is possible to adopt a compromise between the two views. The poem may have been begun some time between 1306 and 1308, and portions of the Inferno and Purgatorio composed before the catastrophe of 1313. After the death of the Emperor, Dante may well have revised and completed these two canticles. Boccaccio tells us—and the statement is confirmed (for the Paradiso) by a sonnet of Giovanni Quirino—that the poet was wont to send his work in instalments to Can Grande before any copies were made for others. There is no evidence of any circulation before 1317, when some lines from Inf. iii. appear among the papers of a notary at Bologna.[30] The first Eclogue shows that, by 1319, the Inferno and Purgatorio had been, so to speak, published, and the Paradiso was in preparation; Boccaccio’s story of the finding of the last thirteen cantos confirms the belief that this final canticle, which crowns the poet’s whole life-work, was only completed shortly before Dante’s death. Dante is in the position of a man who is now relating to the world the vision vouchsafed to him many years before. Hence everything that happened after April 1300 is spoken of as future and by way of prophecy, beginning with Ciacco’s account in Inf. vi. of the famous faction fight of May Day in that year. With two exceptions—Frate Alberigo and Branca d’Oria (Inf. xxxiii.), whose souls went down to Hell before their bodies died—every spirit met with in the ecstatic pilgrimage is represented as having died before April 1300. But Dante anticipates the certain damnation of some who, though living in 1300, were dead when he wrote the poem; Corso Donati, Popes Boniface and Clement, and a few less notorious sinners as Carlino de’ Pazzi. In one instance, that of Venedico Caccianemico (Inf. xviii.), he seems to have supposed a man dead in 1300 who in reality lived a few years later.

Time.—Dante’s conferences with the dead open at sunrise on Good Friday, in his thirty-fifth year. He would impress upon us that his visionary world is no mere dreamland, but a terrible reality, and therefore his indications of time are frequent and precise. For poetical purposes, he seems to represent this Good Friday as an ideal Good Friday, March 25th, which was believed to have been the actual date of the Crucifixion on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Annunciation (cf. Inf. xxi. 112, and the “three months” from Christmas Day in Purg. ii. 98). In reality, it fell upon April 8th in 1300; and, when Dante in his pilgrimage through Hell would mark the time by reference to moon and stars, he perhaps has recourse to the ecclesiastical calendar, in which the Paschal full moon was on Thursday, April 7th (see Dr. Moore’s Time-References in the Divine Comedy):

“And already yesternight the moon was round” (Inf. xx. 127); the night of Maundy Thursday, that he has passed “so piteously” when the poem opens.

2. The “Inferno”

Cantos I. and II.—At break of day on Good Friday, Dante, in his thirty-fifth year, after a night of agonised wanderings, would fain issue from the dark wood into which he has, as it were in slumber, strayed. This tangled forest represents at once his own unworthy life and the corruption of human society; both the “sin of the speaker” (§ 28) and the “state of misery of those living in this life” (§ 15) of the Epistle to Can Grande. He would climb the “mountain of delight” which, for the individual, represents the state of felicity, and, for mankind in general, the goal of civilisation; mystically, it is the mountain of the Lord, to which only the innocent in hands and the clean of heart shall ascend. But he is impeded by a swift and beautiful leopard; terrified by a lion; driven back by a hideous she-wolf. The three beasts are derived from Jeremiah (v. 6), where they stand for the judgments to fall upon the people for their sins; here they symbolise the chief vices that keep man from the felicity for which he is born (Conv. iv. 4): Luxury in its mediaeval sense of Lust, Pride, Avarice or Cupidity in its widest meaning. The comparatively modern interpretation which would see in the beasts the three great Guelf powers that opposed the Empire—the republic of Florence, the royal house of France, the secular power of the Papacy—is now generally discarded.

From this peril Dante is delivered by the spirit of Virgil, who bids him take another way. The power of the wolf will extend until the Veltro or greyhound comes, who will deliver Italy and hunt the wolf back to Hell. The advent of this Deliverer is mysteriously announced (Inf. i. 100-111), and seems to be repeated in other forms at intervals throughout the poem (Purg. xx. 10-15, xxxiii. 37-45; Par. xxvii. 61-63). There can be little doubt that Virgil refers to a future Emperor, who shall re-establish the imperial power and make Roman law obeyed throughout the world, extirpate greed, bring about and preserve universal peace in a restored unity of civilisation. His mission will be the realisation of the ideals of the Monarchia, and will work the salvation of Italy who will be restored to her former leadership among the nations. At the same time, there may possibly be a remoter reference to the second coming of Christ. This double prophecy would have a certain fitness upon the lips of Virgil, who was believed to have sung mystically of the first coming of Christ in the fourth Eclogue (cf. Purg. xxii. 64-73), as well as of the foundation of Rome and her Empire in the Aeneid. It has frequently been supposed that Dante identified the Veltro with some definite person; of the various claimants to this honour Can Grande della Scala is, perhaps, the least improbable. In any case, whatever the nationality of the deliverer, the Empire of Dante’s dream was, in fact as well as name, Roman (cf. Epist. v.).

Human Philosophy can lead man from moral unworthiness and guide him to temporal felicity; there are judgments of God to which human reason can attain. Therefore Virgil will guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory, that he may understand the nature of sin and the need of penance to fill up the void in the moral order; after which a worthier soul will lead him to Paradise and the contemplation of celestial things. Dante’s sense of unworthiness keeps him back, until he learns that Virgil is but the emissary of Beatrice, to whom in turn Lucia (St. Lucy) has been sent to Dante’s aid by a noble Lady in Heaven—evidently the Blessed Virgin Mary, who may not be named in Hell, and who symbolises Divine Mercy, as Lucia does illuminating Grace. Thus encouraged, Dante follows his guide and master upon “the arduous and rugged way.” Aeneas had been vouchsafed his descent to the shades to learn things that were the cause of the foundation of the Empire and the establishment of the Papacy (Inf. ii. 20-27); Dante shall learn things which may prepare men’s hearts for the restoration of the imperial throne, and the cleansing of the papal mantle from the mire of temporal things. St. Paul was caught up into paradise “to bring confirmation to that faith which is the beginning of the way of salvation” (ibid. 29-30); Dante shall follow him to lead men back to the purity of that faith, from which they have wandered.

Ante-Hell.—It is nightfall on Good Friday when Dante reads the terrible inscription on the infernal portal (Inf. iii. 1-9): “Leave all hope, ye that enter.” The sense of the whole inscription is hard to him, but Virgil gently leads him in. In the dark plain of Ante-Hell, disdained alike by Mercy and by Justice, are those “who lived without blame and without praise,” mingled with the Angels who kept neutral between God and Lucifer. Here the pusillanimous, who, taking no side in the struggle between good and evil, would follow no standard on earth, now rush for all eternity after a banner, “which whirling ran so quickly that it seemed to scorn all pause.” Further on towards the centre, flowing round the mouth of Hell itself, is Acheron; where the souls of the lost assemble, and are conveyed across by Charon in his boat. Unconsciously borne across, Dante with Virgil now stands on the verge of the abyss, hearkening to the gathering thunder of endless wailings.

Structure and Moral Topography of Hell.—Hell is a vast pit or funnel piercing down to the centre of the earth, formed when Lucifer and his Angels were hurled down from Heaven. It lies beneath the inhabited world, whose centre is Jerusalem and Mount Calvary; its base towards the surface, and its apex at the centre. It is divided into nine concentric circles, the lower of which are separated by immense precipices—circles which grow more narrow in circumference, more intense and horrible in suffering, until the last is reached where Lucifer is fixed in the ice at the earth’s centre, at the furthest point from God, buried below Jerusalem, where his power was overthrown on the Cross (cf. Inf. xxxiv. 106-126).

“There are two elements in sin,” writes St. Thomas Aquinas: “the conversion to a perishable good, which is the material element in sin; and the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the formal and completing element of sin.” In Dante’s Purgatory the material element is purged away. In his Hell sin is considered mainly on the side of this formal element, its aversion from the Supreme Good; and its enormity is revealed in the hideousness of its effects. The ethical system of the Inferno, as set forth in Canto xi., combines Aristotle’s threefold division of “dispositions” opposed to mortality into Incontinence, Bestiality, Malice (Ethics vii. 1), with Cicero’s distinction of the two ways by which injury is done as Violence and Fraud (De Officiis i. 13). Dante equates the Aristotelian Bestiality and Malice with the Ciceronian Violence and Fraud respectively. Thus there is the upper Hell of sins proceeding from the irrational part of the soul, divided into five circles. The lower Hell of Bestiality and Malice is the terrible city of Dis, the true kingdom of Lucifer, in which, after the intermediate sixth circle, come three great circles, each divided into a number of sub-divisions, and each separated by a chasm from the one above; the seventh circle of Violence and Bestiality; followed by two circles of Malice—the eighth of simple fraud, and the ninth of treachery. There is some doubt as to how far Dante further equates this division with the seven capital sins recognized by the Church. Although actual deeds are considered in Hell, rather than the sinful propensities which lead to them, it seems plausible to recognise in Incontinence the five lesser capital sins: Luxury, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth (though the treatment of this vice in the Inferno is questionable), and Anger; and to regard the whole of the three circles of the city of Dis as proceeding from and being the visible effects of Envy and Pride, the sins proper to devils according to St. Thomas—seen in their supreme degree in him whose pride made him rebel against his Maker, and whose envy brought death into the world. As an alternative, it may be held that Dante began the Inferno with the intention of basing its ethical system upon the seven capital sins, but abandoned it in favour of a more ample treatment, and that the earlier design has been preserved only in the passage through the upper circles.[31]

Limbo.—In “the first circle that girds the abyss,” Dante sees in Limbo the unbaptised children and the virtuous heathen; without hope, they live in desire; free from physical torment, they suffer the pain of loss. Here Dante differs from Aquinas, who distinguishes the Limbo of the Fathers from the Limbo of the Infants, and who represents unbaptised children as not grieving at all for the loss of the Beatific Vision, but rather rejoicing in natural perfection and a certain participation of the Divine Goodness. The example of Rhipeus in the Paradiso shows that Dante could have saved any of the ancients whom he chose, without any violence to his creed. “Any one,” says Aquinas, “can prepare himself for having faith through what is in natural reason; whence it is said that, if any one who is born in barbarous nations doth what lieth in him, God will reveal to him what is necessary for salvation, either by internal inspiration or by sending a teacher.” The reception of Dante by the five great classical poets as sixth in their company is his own affirmation of poetical succession; for the first time a poet in modern vernacular has attained equality with the masters of antiquity who “wrote poetry with regulated speech and art” (V. E. ii. 4). With them he enters the noble castle of Fame, from which the light of wisdom shone upon the pagan world; within are all the wise and virtuous spirits of antiquity, even Aristotle, “the master of those who know,” whose philosophical authority is for Dante supreme (Inf. iv. 131). Here, too, are certain moderns that “worshipped not God aright”; the Saladin, and Averroës “who made the great comment.”

Upper Hell.—Out of Limbo Dante and Virgil descend into the darkness of the second circle, where the carnal sinners are whirled round and round, “through the nether storm-eddying winds.” At its entrance snarls Minos, a type of the sinner’s disordered and terrified conception of Divine Justice. The Virgilian “Mourning Fields” of the martyrs of love are transformed into a region of active torment, and when, in a lull in the storm, Francesca da Rimini pours forth her piteous story in lines of ineffable pathos, the colouring becomes that of Arthurian romance (Inf. v.). Down again through the third circle of putrid rain and snow, where Cerberus (like the other hellish torturers, merely the effect of the sin, and the sinner’s own creation) tortures the gluttonous (Inf. vi.), and the fourth, where Plutus, demon god of wealth, guards the avaricious and prodigal butting at each other for all eternity, Dante is led to the dark waters of Styx, shortly after midnight, as Friday is passing into the early hours of Saturday (Inf. vii. 97-99). The marsh of Styx represents the fifth circle. Fixed in the slime below are souls, made visible only by the bubbles from their sighs: “Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun, carrying heavy fumes within our hearts: now lie we sullen here in the black mire” (Inf. vii. 121-124). These souls are usually identified as the accidiosi, or slothful. The material element in Sloth is lack of charity; the formal element is sadness, the sadness which takes away the spiritual life and withdraws the mind from the Divine Good. Some commentators think that the slothful are placed in the Ante-Hell, and that these sad souls are those guilty of sullen or sulky anger, in contrast to the violent anger of those fiercer spirits who, naked and miry, are rending each other on the surface of the marsh, over which the poets are ferried by Phlegyas, the boatman of Dis, as Charon of Upper Hell. The Florentine, Filippo Argenti, who bandies bitter words with Dante during the passage, connects Anger with Pride (Inf. viii. 46) and with Bestiality (ibid. 62-63). As Anger leads to violence and fraud for the sake of vengeance, so Phlegyas conveys them to the entrance of the city of Dis, glowing red with eternal fire.

The City of Dis.—The gate of the city is defended by fiends, while the Furies appear upon the turrets, girt with greenest hydras and with serpents for hair, calling upon Medusa to come and turn Dante to stone. The Furies are symbols of hopeless remorse, and Medusa of the despair which renders repentance impossible. “A guilty deed is the death of the soul; but to despair is to go down into Hell” (St. Isidore, cf. Virgil’s words to Dante, Inf. ix. 55-57). Virgil can guard Dante from her, but he cannot open the gates; for the city of Dis is the mediaeval counterpart of the Virgilian Tartarus, through which the Sibyl could not lead Aeneas. With the sound of mighty tempest a messenger of Heaven passes the Styx with dry feet, and opens the portal with a little rod; he is a figure drawn from Mercury in the Aeneid (iv.), but here transformed to an Angel, akin to those two terrible beings who summon the dead to rise in Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment.[32] Within the gate, round the circuit of the walls and at the same level as the last circle, the sixth circle confines the Heretics and Epicureans in burning tombs. They seem to hold this intermediate position in accordance with the teaching of St. Thomas that Infidelity, if reduced to one of the capital sins, must be regarded as arising from Pride, but may come also from cupidity or some fleshly illusion; and, in a passage in the Convivio (ii. 9), Dante appears to reduce one form of Heresy to bestialitade. Farinata degli Uberti, the Ghibelline hero of Montaperti, heroic even in Hell, rises to address his fellow countryman; and, from the same blazing sepulchre, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, fondly believing that it is height of genius alone that leads Dante thus scathless through this blind prison, seeks vainly to see his own Guido with him. Emperor and Pope should lead man to blessedness; but Frederick II. and Pope Anastasius are buried here with the rest (Inf. x. 119, xi. 8). The horrible stench that rises from the abyss forces Dante to delay his descent; and, in the pause, Virgil explains the moral structure of Hell, equating the Ciceronian with the Aristotelian division of vice (Inf. xi.), as already indicated, and adding a special explanation of how Usury, the breeding of money from money, is a sin against nature, and violence against the Diety.

Seventh Circle.—They descend the precipice into the seventh circle, at the entrance to which the Minotaur, emblem of Violence and Bestiality, gnaws himself in bestial rage, on the top of the ruin formed by the earthquake when the Redeemer entered Hell. Since we are now within the Devil’s city, fiends begin to appear as torturers, but in this seventh circle they take bestial forms, or forms which are half-bestial and half-human. There are three rounds in this circle. In the first, Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood, the violent against others are immersed to varying depths, and tormented by the Centaurs (Inf. xii.). Murderers and tyrants are here; and Benvenuto supposes that the Centaurs are types of their own hireling soldiers, the instruments of their cruelty upon earth. In the second round, the violent against themselves (Inf. xiii.) are punished in the pathless wood of the Harpies; the suicides, imprisoned in trees and preyed upon by these monsters, are regarded as bestial sinners, because, properly speaking, a man cannot hate himself; the destroyers of their own substance, similarly considered, are hunted by black hell-dogs. Yet in this round is one of the noblest souls in the Inferno, Piero della Vigna, still defending the memory of the imperial master who caused his death. Enclosed by the wood is a third round, the burning plain (Inf. xiv.), where the violent against God are subjected to a slow rain of dilated flakes of fire. Capaneus, the typical blasphemer, is tortured even more by his own fury than by the flaming shower. It is in this round that Dante learns what Virgil tells him is the most notable thing he has yet seen in his pilgrimage (Inf. xiv. 88): the infernal rivers are produced by the tears and sins of all human generations since the golden age, and flow from rock to rock down the circles of Hell, back to Lucifer at the earth’s core (ibid. 103, etc.). “The tears extorted from the sinners, the blood shed by tyrants and murderers, all the filth of the sinful world, flow down below by secret conduits, and are then transformed into instruments of torment” (Witte). There are few things in literature more poignant than Dante’s cry of recognition: Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto (Inf. xv. 30), “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” Nor is there, perhaps, anything that gives us a more terrible conception of Dante’s claim to be the “preacher of justice,” than the fearful doom he has inflicted upon “the dear and kind paternal image” of the sage who had taught him how man makes himself eternal, and upon the great Florentine citizens of the past, whose deeds and honoured names he had ever “rehearsed and heard with affection” (Inf. xvi. 58-60). In the last group of this round are the Usurers, “on the utmost limit of that seventh circle,” where violence passes into fraud (Inf. xvii. 43); and it is worthy of note that the poet finds examples of this sin, not among the persecuted Jews, but in the noble houses of Padua and Florence.

Malebolge.—A yawning abyss, down which the blood-stained Phlegethon dashes with deafening noise, reaches from the seventh to the eighth circle, Malebolge, the realm of Malice. Lured up by the cord which Dante has girt round him and abandons, Geryon, “unclean image of fraud,” a combination of the mythological monster with the apocalyptic Angel of the bottomless pit, bears Dante and Virgil to the place below. Malebolge is divided into ten valleys, with a gulf in the centre. Since they punish Fraud, de l’uom proprio male, “the vice peculiar to man,” the demon tormentors have usually something of the human form (the serpent torturers of the thieves are an exception)—degraded Angels partaking of humanity’s lowest features. Disgusting though many details of this circle may seem to modern taste, they are only terribly realised images of the sins themselves. Panders and seducers (Inf. xviii.), flatterers, simoniacs (xix., Pope Nicholas III.), diviners and sorcerers (xx.), barrators or sellers of justice in public offices (xxi. and xxii.), hypocrites (xxiii.), thieves (xxiv. and xxv.), fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.), sowers of scandal and schism (xxviii.), falsifiers of every kind (xxix. and xxx.)—each class occupies one of the ten valleys of Malebolge, and to each is awarded a special form of punishment representing the crime, observing the contrapasso (Inf. xxviii. 142), the law of retribution. In the meanwhile the sun has risen in the world above, though this makes no difference in Hell where the sun is silent (Inf. xx. 124); it is the morning of Holy Saturday for the Church; the bells have been rung again after the silence of Good Friday, and the Gloria in excelsis sung in anticipation of the morrow’s feast—while Dante is rebuking Pope Nicholas for simony, and hearkening to Guido da Montefeltro’s bitter tale of Pope Boniface’s treachery (Inf. xxvii.). There are few nobler utterances of mediaeval Catholicity than that famous outburst of Dantesque indignation in Canto xix., against the unworthy and simoniacal holders of the papal chair, though restrained by the “reverence for the Great Keys.” In one instance only does Dante seem in personal danger, and, curiously enough, it is in the region of the Barrators (Inf. xxi. and xxii.), with whose sin his ungrateful countrymen had tried to render him infamous; Virgil himself is almost deceived, that is, Dante’s reason is bewildered and his philosophy at fault; but, although hunted as a criminal, not a drop of the boiling pitch lights upon him, nor do the rakes and hooks of the “Evil-claws” as much as graze his skin. Here and there images from external nature relieve the horror: the country shining white with the hoar-frost before the spring (xxiv. 1-15); the fire-flies gleaming below the hill after the long summer day (xxvi. 25-30). The two cantos depicting the fate of the fraudulent counsellors (xxvi. and xxvii.) seem on a different plane from the rest; the sense of increasing degradation in the passage downwards through Malebolge is checked; the story of the last voyage of Ulysses with its spiritual nobility and imaginative splendour, the whole episode of Guido da Montefeltro with its dramatic intensity, are among the greatest creations of poetry. But so repulsive is much of the matter of Malebolge that Dante represents his own moral sense as becoming clouded; in the last valley he listens without disgust, almost with pleasure, to an unsavoury quarrel between the Greek Sinon and the coiner Adam of Brescia (Inf. xxx.), until a sharp rebuke from Virgil restores him to himself: Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia, “for to wish to hear that is a base desire.”

Ninth Circle.—In the centre of Malebolge yawns a huge chasm, like an immense well, where the precipice falls to the ninth and last circle. Like towers round the margin of this pit appear the upper parts of captive Giants, both of Scripture and mythology; Nimrod, Ephialtes, Briareus—the Paladins of the Emperor of Hell defending the last and most secret chamber of his palace. The Giants connect this last circle with Pride (Purg. xii. 28-36), as the mention of Cain does with Envy (Purg. xiv. 133), and Lucifer himself with both Pride and Envy (Inf. vii. 12; Purg. xii. 25; Par. ix. 129, xix. 46, etc.). Treachery is a gigantic version of fraud, by which “is forgotten that love which nature makes, and also that which afterwards is added, giving birth to special trust” (Inf. xi. 61-63); hence the guardians of this circle are monstrosities in magnified human shape. Antaeus (Inf. xxxi.), less guilty, and therefore less fettered than the others, hands Virgil and Dante down into this last circle, where the traitors are eternally consumed in the river Cocytus, which is frozen to a vast dark lake of ice, sloping down to Lucifer. Nowhere else is Dante so utterly pitiless. Hardly can we recognise the man who had fainted with pity at the story of Francesca (Inf. v. 141) in the ruthless inquisitor, who is ready to add to the torture of Bocca degli Abati (inf. xxxii. 97), but will not stretch out his hand to afford a moment’s alleviation to Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi (Inf. xxxiii. 149).

There are four concentric rings in this ninth circle, increasing in pain as they diminish in circumference. In Caina (Inf. xxxii. 58), the treacherous murderers of their kindred are chattering with their teeth like storks. In Antenora (88), traitors to country or party are still more deeply frozen into the ice. Bocca degli Abati, who betrayed the Guelfs to the Ghibellines at Montaperti, is side by side with Buoso da Duera, who, five years later, betrayed the Ghibellines to the lieutenant of Charles of Anjou. Frozen into one hole, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca is gnawing the head of Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa; and the terror and pity of Dante’s lines have made the tale of the dying agonies of the old noble and his children perhaps the most famous episode in the Commedia. The terrible imprecation against Pisa adapts Lucan’s curse upon Egypt after the murder of Pompey to the different geographical conditions of the Tuscan city.[33] In Tolomea (Inf. xxxiii. 124), those who slew treacherously, under mask of hospitality, have only their faces showing above the ice, their tears frozen into a crystalline mask; on earth their bodies ofttimes still seem to live, tenanted by a demon until their time is full, while the soul has already gone down into the ice. In Giudecca (xxxiv. 117) are souls of traitors to their lords and benefactors: “Already I was there (and with fear I put it into verse) where the souls were all covered, and shone through like straw in glass. Some are lying; some stand upright, this on its head, and that upon its soles; another, like a bow, bends face to feet” (Inf. xxxiv. 10-15); silent and immovable, in agonised and everlasting adoration in the court of the Emperor of the dolorious kingdom, who, gigantic and hideous, “from mid-breast stood forth out of the ice.” The most radiant of God’s Angels has become the source of evil, the symbol of sin’s hideousness. His three faces, red, yellow-white, black, are an infernal parody of the Power, Wisdom, Love of the Blessed Trinity. Under each face are two huge bat-like wings, whose helpless flappings freeze all the lake of Cocytus. Tormented by his teeth and claws are the three arch-traitors: Judas Iscariot, who betrayed the Divine Founder of the Church; Brutus and Cassius, who murdered the imperial founder of the Empire. The condemnation of the two latter is an instance of how, while accepting the testimony of his sources as to facts, Dante preserves independence of judgment concerning their moral value; in Lucan’s Pharsalia, Brutus and Cassius are the destined avengers of right, the champions of Roman liberty, Brutus bearing the character with which we are familiar in Shakespeare.

Out of the Depths.—It is the night of Easter Eve in our world (Inf. xxxiv. 68) when the poets leave the accursed place. Virgil carries Dante like a child, for man will readily submit himself to the guidance of reason and philosophy when once the nature of sin has been thoroughly comprehended. Down by Lucifer’s shaggy sides, they pass the centre of the universe (lines 76-81, 106-117). Virgil turns with Dante completely round (conversion from sin), so that they find themselves in a chasm left at Lucifer’s fall, below the opposite hemisphere to that which man inhabits. But here it is morning (lines 96, 105, 118), the morning of Easter Eve of the southern hemisphere, which is twelve hours behind the time of its antipodes.[34] Through this space, opposite to “the tomb of Beelzebub,” a rivulet descends, bringing the memory of sin that has been purged in Purgatory back to Lucifer. By a strange and arduous way, typical of the persevering struggle out of vice, Dante with his guide mounts upwards to the clear air; and, on the shores of Purgatory in the southern hemisphere, they “issued forth to rebehold the stars.”

Like the Redeemer of mankind, Dante has been dead and buried part of three days, and it is not yet daybreak on Easter Sunday, “in the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week.”

3. The “Purgatorio”

Structure and Allegorical Meaning.—Purgatory is a steep mountain of surpassing height, on the only land rising out of the sea in the southern hemisphere. Like Hell, it was formed when Lucifer and his followers were cast out of Heaven. To escape him the earth rushed up to form this mountain, and left void the cavern through which Dante ascended (Inf. xxxiv. 125). It is the exact antipodes of Jerusalem and Mount Calvary, rises beyond atmospheric changes, and is crowned by the Earthly Paradise, scene of man’s fall and symbol of blessedness of this life.

In the literal sense the Purgatorio is the essential Purgatory of separated spirits, expiating and exercising, paying the debt of temporal punishment that remains after the guilt has been forgiven; purging away the material element of sin, after the formal element has been remitted. In the allegorical sense it represents the moral purgatory of repentant sinners in this world; and has for subject man, by penance and good works, becoming free from the tyranny of vice, attaining to moral and intellectual freedom. Thus it becomes a symbol of the whole life of man from conversion to death; man, no longer sunk in ignorance and sin, as in the Inferno; not yet soaring aloft on heights of impassioned contemplation, as in the Paradiso; but struggling against difficulties and temptations, making amends for misuse of Free Will, conforming with the practices of the Church, and obeying the imperial authority, until the time comes to pass to the blessedness of another world.

Dante’s open-air treatment of Purgatory seems peculiar to him. Very wonderful is the transition from the dark night of Hell to the “sweet colour of oriental sapphire,” where the star of Love comforts the pilgrim soul, and the four stars of the Southern Cross, which symbolise the cardinal virtues, make all the sky rejoice in their flame—until Easter Day dawns, and from afar the poet “knew the quivering of the sea” (Purg. i. 117). Throughout this second Cantica the sun is our guide by day, and at night the stars are over our head; we behold the glory of sunrise and of sunset as upon earth, but with added beauty, for it is attended by celestial songs and the softly beating wings of angelic presences. Dante spends part of four days, with three nights, in this portion of his pilgrimage; for Purgatory is the symbol of the life of man, and the life of man has four periods. At the end of each day Dante rests and sleeps; before dawn on each day, except the first, a vision prepares him for the work of the day—the work which cannot begin or proceed save in the light of the sun, for man can advance no step in this spiritual expiation without the light of God’s grace. But the fourth day does not close, like the other three, in night; for it corresponds to that fourth and last stage of man’s life, in which the soul “returns to God, as to that port whence she set out, when she came to enter upon the sea of this life” (Conv. iv. 28).

There are three main divisions of the mountain. From the shore to the gate of St. Peter is Ante-Purgatory, still subject to atmospheric changes. Within the gate is Purgatory proper, with its seven terraces bounded above by a ring of purifying flames. Thence the way leads up to the Earthly Paradise; for by these purgatorial pains the fall of Adam is repaired, and the soul of man regains the state of innocence.

Ante-Purgatory.—In Ante-Purgatory Dante passes Easter Day and the following night. Here the souls of those who died in contumacy of the Church are detained at the foot of the mountain, and may not yet begin the ascent; and the negligent, who deferred their conversion, and who now have to defer their purification, are waiting humbly around the lower slopes. For here purgation has not yet begun; this is the place where time makes amends for time (Purg. xxiii. 84).

Upon the face of Cato, the guardian of the shore and mountain, so shines the light of the four mystical stars, that he seems illumined with the very light of the sun of Divine Grace (Purg. i. 37-39). Cato, “the severest champion of true liberty,” “to kindle the love of liberty in the world, gave proof of how dear he held her by preferring to depart from life a free man, rather than remain alive bereft of liberty” (Mon. ii. 5). He was one of those who “saw and believed that this goal of human life is solely rigid virtue” (Conv. iv. 6). Thus from Lucan’s Pharsalia, Dante has recreated this austere and glorious figure to be the warden of the spiritual kingdom where virtue is made perfect by love and true liberty attained.

At sunrise the white-robed and white-winged Angel of Faith brings the ransomed souls over the ocean from the banks of the Tiber, where the redeemed gather, as the lost do upon the shores of Acheron (Purg. ii.). The In exitu Israel of their psalm signifies mystically, in Dante’s allegory, the passing of the holy soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory (Epist. x. 7). His own song of love on the lips of Casella has peculiar fitness at the entrance of the realm of hope and purgation; for, in the eyes of that mystical lady, of whom Love discourses, is the anticipation of Paradise, and yet she is the example of humility—the humility in sign of which Dante has girded himself with a rush. As they turn towards the ascent, the excommunicated draw near, led by Manfred; cut off from the body of the Church by the Pontiff’s curse, they were reunited to its soul by tardy repentance. The episode of Manfred is a counterpart to that of Celestine in the corresponding canto of the Inferno. Dante would clearly show the difference of God’s judgment from that of man. The figure of the canonised pope-hermit, whom the world extolled as a perfect type of Christian renunciation, and who died in the odour of sanctity, is contrasted with that of the worldly king who died excommunicate, and whose name was tainted with suspicion of incest and parricide: “Horrible were my sins, but Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it” (Purg. iii. 121-123).

Through a narrow gap they begin the ascent, which is so hard at the outset, but grows ever lighter as man ascends. Among the negligent through indolence, Belacqua seems as lazy as upon earth (Purg. iv.); but his laziness is now its own punishment. At midday Virgil’s swift rebuke (Purg. v. 10-15) cures his pupil of one fatal obstacle to following philosophy in the search of moral and intellectual liberty—human respect. Among those cut off by violent deaths is Buonconte da Montefeltro, the story of whose fate, Canto v., is in designed contrast with the soul’s tragedy that came from his father’s lips out of the torturing flames of Malebolge (Inf. xxvii.). The lacrimetta of the dying knight—the “little tear” that saved his eternal part from the fiend (Purg. v. 107)—has become one of the priceless pearls in the treasury of the world’s poetry. All these souls ask for remembrance in prayer, that their delay may be shortened, and Virgil’s explanation centers upon the power of love to reach for expiation from beyond the grave (vi. 37-39). In these earlier cantos of the Purgatorio, there are constant traces of the deep impression made upon Dante by the story of Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas, in Books v. and vi. of the Aeneid.

The Valley of the Princes.—They come to the solitary and lion-like soul of Sordello, whose loving greeting to his Mantuan countryman gives occasion to Dante’s superb and famous outburst of Italian patriotism: Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello (Purg. vi. 76 et seq.); which shows a striking correspondence with the great passage where Lucan laments the overthrow of Roman liberty at Pharsalia (Phars. vii. 440 et seq.). The part of Sordello is very similar to that of Musaeus in the Aeneid, Book vi.; he leads Virgil and Dante to the Valley of the Princes, which corresponds to Elysium, the verdant vale where Aeneas met Anchises. Dante probably reconstructed the troubadour’s personality from his own famous poem on the death of Blacatz, a Provençal hero of the thirteenth century, in which he upbraids and derides the kings and princes of Christendom, beginning with Frederick II., and ends with a proud assertion that he will speak the whole truth in spite of the powerful barons whom he may offend. So here, in the Valley of the Princes, where those are detained who neglected some peculiarly lofty mission, or postponed their spiritual welfare to worldly and political care, Sordello, beginning with the Emperor-elect, Rudolph of Hapsburg (Purg. vii. 94), points out the descendants or successors of those whom he had rebuked in the other life. Here, singing together to the Queen of Mercy, the deadliest foes sit side by side, consoling each other; Rudolph of Hapsburg with Ottocar of Bohemia, Charles of Anjou with Peter of Aragon; a motive found previously in the vision of Tundal, where, however, the kings are naturally Irish. On Henry of England Sordello had been more severe when he lived. After sunset, in the light of three brighter stars, that symbolise the three theological virtues, Dante has pleasant talk with Nino Visconti and Currado Malaspina (Purg. viii.). And, as evening closes in, two golden-haired Angels, green-clad and green-winged, the Angels of Hope with the flaming but blunted swords of justice tempered with mercy, defend the noble souls from the assault of an evil serpent. In the literal sense, this episode (which seems a relic from earlier mediaeval visions) may imply that souls in Purgatory have not the intrinsic impossibility of sinning that is possessed by the blessed of Paradise, but are kept absolutely free from any sin by the Divine Providence. In the allegorical sense, the meaning clearly is that the way to moral and intellectual freedom is a hard one, and temptations to fall back in despair are many. The tempter would draw man back from regaining the Earthly Paradise, from which he has once caused his expulsion.

The Mystic Eagle and the Gate of Purgatory.—Just before the dawn Dante dreams of a golden eagle snatching him up to the sphere of fire, and, waking when the sun is more than two hours high, finds that Lucia has brought him to the Gate of Purgatory. Mystically, the eagle seems to represent the poet’s own spirit, dreaming that he can soar unaided to the very outskirts of Paradise; but he wakes to realise that Divine grace indicates the preliminary stage of purification. The gate of St. Peter with its three steps, of white marble, exactly mirroring the whole man, of darkest purple cracked in the figure of the Cross, of flaming red porphyry, represents the Sacrament of Penance with its three parts: Contrition, Confession, Satisfaction based upon the love of God. The mournfully robed Angel of Obedience seated on the rock of diamond, with dazzling face and flashing sword, is the confessor. His silver and gold keys, of judgment and absolution, open the gate to Dante; the seven P’s traced by his sword on the poet’s forehead are to be effaced one by one in his ascent (Purg. ix.).

Moral Topography.—Within the gate is Purgatory proper with its seven terraces, each devoted to the purgation of one of the seven capital sins, “out of which other vices spring, especially in the way of final causation” (Aquinas). Whereas in the Inferno sin was considered in its manifold and multiform effects, in the Purgatorio it is regarded in its causes, and all referred to disordered love. The formal element, the aversion from the imperishable good, which is the essence of Hell, has been forgiven; the material element, the conversion to the good that perishes, the disordered love, is now to be purged from the soul. In the allegorical or moral sense, since love, as Aquinas says, is “the ultimate cause of the true activities of every agent,” it is clear that man’s first duty in life is to set love in order; and, indeed, the whole moral basis of Dante’s Purgatory rests upon the definition of St. Augustine that virtue is ordo amoris, “the ordering of love.” In the first three terraces, sins of the spirit are expiated; in the fourth terrace, sloth, which is both spiritual and carnal; in the fifth, sixth, seventh terraces, sins of the flesh. This purgation, which involves both pain of loss for a time and punishment of sense, is effected by turning with fervent love to God and detesting what hinders union with Him. Therefore, at the beginning of each terrace, examples are seen or heard of virtue contrary to the sin, in order to excite the suffering souls to extirpate its very roots; and, at the end, examples of its result or punishment (the “bit and bridle”). These examples are chosen with characteristic Dantesque impartiality alike from Scripture and legend or mythology; but, in each case, an example from the life of the Blessed Virgin is opposed to each capital sin. At the end of each terrace stands an Angel—personification of one of the virtues opposed to the sins or vices. These seven Angels in their successive apparitions are among the divinest things of beauty in the sacred poem. It is only when sin is completely purged away that man can contemplate the exceeding beauty, the “awful loveliness” of the contrary virtue.

First Terrace.—Steep and narrow is the path up to the first terrace, where Pride is purged away (Purg. x). Carved upon the mountain side are fair white marble images of wondrous beauty, setting forth great examples of Humility, alike in “them of low degree” (Mary at the Annunciation) and in “the mighty” (David and Trajan, rulers respectively of the chosen people of the two dispensations, the Jews and the Romans). Wearily and painfully the souls of the proud pass round, pressed down by terrible weights, reciting a paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer, for themselves and those they have left on earth. And seldom has the Catholic doctrine of prayer for the dead been more winningly set forth than in Dante’s comment (xi. 31-36). A partaker in some degree of their punishment, Dante, all bowed down, goes with these souls; he speaks with Omberto Aldobrandesco, who is expiating pride of birth, and Oderisi of Gubbio, the miniaturist, who is purifying his soul from pride of intellect. The latter points out the great Ghibelline burgher statesman of Siena, Provenzano Salvani, expiating pride of dominion—the sin which turned so many an Italian patriot of the Middle Ages into a tyrant. Figured upon the pavement below their feet are examples of Pride’s punishment, like the designs on the pavement of the Duomo of Siena (Purg. xii.). Noon has passed when the Angel of Humility shows the way up to the next terrace, and with the waving of his wing removes the first P from Dante’s forehead. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” celestial voices sing, as, with almost all weariness gone since Pride is expiated, Dante ascends the steep way.

Second Terrace.—In the second and narrower circle Envy is purged. Examples of charity, “courteous invitations to the table of Love,” are cited by invisible spirits flying past. The envious, clothed in haircloth, lean helplessly shoulder to shoulder against the rock, their eyelids sewn up with iron stitching. Sapia of Siena, the kinswoman of Provenzano Salvani, at whose fall and the defeat of her countrymen she rejoiced, tells her history in lines of singular beauty (Purg. xiii.). Guido del Duca denounces the evil dispositions of the inhabitants of Tuscany, and bewails the degeneracy of the noble houses with the consequent decay of chivalry in his own province of Romagna; envious on earth of prosperity of others, these souls mourn now for its decline (xiv.). Like peals of thunder the cries of spirits follow each other in citing Envy’s punishment. As they go towards the sunset, the dazzling Angel of Fraternal Love removes the mark of Envy. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Rejoice thou that conquerest.” As they mount Virgil expounds the difference between material goods, which are diminished by sharing and beget envy, and the infinite good of Paradise, where love increases with every soul that enters into the joy of the Lord, and its communication is measured only by the charity of each soul that is made its mirror (Purg. xv.).

Third Terrace.—On reaching the third terrace where Anger is purged, Dante sees examples of meekness and forgiveness in vision. From the black, pungent, and tormenting smoke which envelopes the souls of the once wrathful, who now call upon the Lamb of God for peace and mercy, the Lombard Marco reconciles Free Will with stellar influence, and ascribes the evil condition of Italy and the world to the neglect of law, the confusion of the spiritual and temporal power, and the papal usurpation of imperial rights (Purg. xvi.). In this terrace Dante again partakes of the pains of the penitent souls. As the sun is setting, he issues from the dark mist. A most significant passage on the power of the imagination to form images not derived from the senses (xvii. 13-18) introduces the visions of Anger’s punishment, from which the poet is roused by the dazzling splendour of the Angel of Peace or Meekness, who fans away the third P and shows the way up: “Blessed are the peacemakers who are without evil wrath.”

Fourth Terrace.—The stars are appearing as they reach the fourth terrace, where souls are purged from Sloth. We saw that, in the Inferno, the Aristotelian division of things to be morally shunned was discussed, and the ethical structure of the first canticle expounded, in the circle intermediate between Incontinence and Malice (Inf. xi.); so, in the Purgatorio, a compulsory pause in the terrace intermediate between sins of spirit and sins of flesh is selected by Virgil for his great discourse upon Love, on which is based the moral system of the second realm (Purg. xvii. 91-139, xviii. 13-75). It is practically a sermon on the text of Jacopone da Todi, Ordena questo amore, tu che m’ami, “Set this love in order, thou that lovest me”; since in rational beings disordered love produces the seven capital vices. Pride, Envy, Anger are regarded as distorted love; Sloth as defective love; Avarice, Gluttony, Luxury as excessive love. Love is the golden net whereby God draws back to Himself all creatures that He has made, whether inanimate, sensitive, or rational—by the tendencies or inclinations He has given them to make them seek the end for which they are ordered and disposed, according to the Eternal Law. Rational beings alone have Free Will, by which man merits or demerits from the Divine Justice, according as he inclines to good or evil loves. Love’s tendency to good is the precious material upon which Free Will acts like the craftsman’s hand, to fashion a satyr’s mask or a crucifix.

At the end of this discourse, the slothful rush by at full speed in the moonlight, so full of longing to lose no time through too little love, that the Abbot of San Zeno cannot stop while he answers Virgil’s question; those in front cry out examples of alacrity in Mary and Caesar; those behind chant Sloth’s punishment in the chosen people of the Old Testament and the Trojan ancestors of the Romans.

The Siren and the Angel of Zeal.—Before the dawn of the third day in Purgatory, Dante has in his sleep a marvellous dream of the Siren (sensual seduction, concupiscence of the flesh), from which he is delivered by a holy and alert lady who calls upon Virgil (prevenient grace, or the wisdom and prudence of Proverbs vii.). The Siren is the dream-prelude to the purgation of sins of the flesh, as the Eagle had been to that of sins of the spirit. The sun has risen; and the Angel of Zeal (or of Spiritual Joy) cancels the fourth P and shows the way up to the next terrace. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall have their souls wed to consolation.” Sloth is a heaviness and sadness which weighs down the soul, a sadness at spiritual good, to be fought by thinking on spiritual things. Most fitly then do the wings of the Angel of Zeal point upwards, and his words tell of a nobler sorrow, a mourning which shall be followed by Divine consolation (Purg. xix.).

Fifth Terrace.—In the fifth terrace, the avaricious and prodigal, whose souls on earth cleaved to the dust, lie face downwards to earth; unable to move hand or foot until the sin of Covetousness is purged away, the sin which, according to Aquinas, “although not absolutely the greatest of sins, yet has in some sense a greater deformity than the rest, since by it the human heart is subjected even to external things.” Pope Adrian V. tells the story of his tardy conversion, and has tender words for his niece Alagia, the wife of Moroello Malaspina (Purg. xix.). It is a companion episode to that of Nicholas III. in the corresponding canto of the Inferno. In this circle the souls themselves cry out the examples and warnings, by day and night respectively. The soul of Hugh Capet, “the root of the evil plant which overshadows all the Christian earth,” pours forth bitter sarcasm and scathing invective upon all the royal house of France, the great Guelf power that opposed the Empire, oppressed Italy, and wrought scandal in the Church. A monument of poetic infamy is especially raised to Philip the Fair and the three Carlos; and there are few more glorious examples of Christian magnanimity than the burning words in which Dante, distinguishing the man from the office, brands the sacrilege of Anagni, the outrage committed upon him whom the poet held as his own deadliest foe, and yet the unworthy Vicar of Christ. Nowhere else, save in the reference to the Jubilee (Purg. ii. 98, 99), does Dante treat Boniface as lawful pope (cf. Inf. xix. 52-57; Par. ix. 142, xxvii. 22-24). It has been thought that Canto xx. was composed while the Church was ostensibly supporting the policy of Henry VII.; before attacking the Templars, the French king had endeavoured to renew the outrage of Anagni by inducing Pope Clement to condemn the memory of Boniface. With a mighty earthquake, a universal chorus of Gloria in excelsis from the suffering souls, the poet Statius is liberated, and joins Dante and Virgil (Purg. xxi.). He explains how the pains of Purgatory are voluntarily endured, since, against the hypothetic or absolute will with which they desire the bliss of Paradise, the souls suffer these purifying pains with the conditional or actual will, the same inclination or impulse or desire (talento) which they formerly had to sin. Thus it is free will itself that imposes the purgatorial process, and that alone shows the soul when purification is complete. The delicious scene of the recognition of Virgil by Statius is full of that peculiarly tender Dantesque playfulness that informs the two Eclogues; Dante’s affectionate humour in dealing with those he loved is one of the most attractive aspects of his character, and one perhaps too often missed.

Sixth Terrace.—The Angel of Justice has removed the fifth P from Dante’s forehead, opposing in his song the thirst of justice to that of gain. As they mount, Statius explains to Virgil how he was converted from prodigality by a line in the Aeneid, and led to Christianity by the fourth Eclogue (Purg. xxii.). The conversion of a pagan to Christianity through reading Virgil occurs in a story told by Vincent of Beauvais; Dante was probably influenced in applying this to Statius, representing him as a secret convert to the true faith, by his study of the Thebaid; for there, in the last book, Statius describes the Altar of Mercy at Athens in language which harmonises with the words of Christ in the Gospels and the address of his own contemporary, St. Paul, to the Athenians in the Acts. The poets pursue their way with greater confidence now that Statius is with them, and reach the sixth terrace, where unseen spirits cry out examples of temperance from the tree beneath which drunkenness and gluttony are purged. The spirits, terribly wasted, suffer intense torments of hunger and thirst in the presence of most tempting food and drink; but the sanctifying pain is a solace, desired even as Christ willed to die for man. With the soul of Forese Donati, Dante holds loving converse; the memory of their dissolute lives together is still grievous; the poet makes amends for his old slander of Forese’s wife Nella, by the tender lines now placed upon her husband’s lips (Purg. xxiii. 85-93). Forese darkly foretells the death of Corso Donati, which appears to be the latest event in Florentine history mentioned in the poem (xxiv. 82-90). Whatever the friendship of these two had been on earth, it was fair and lovely indeed on the Mount of Purgation.

Amongst many others are Pope Martin IV. and the poet Bonagiunta of Lucca, whose talk with Dante upon the dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style,” is one of the landmarks for the student of poetry (Purg. xxiv. 49-60). Dante’s famous definition of his own position expresses, in another form, the truth that all great poetry is the “transfigured life” of its author:[35] “I am one who, when Love inspires me, note, and give utterance in that fashion which he dictates within.” It is already anticipated in the prose passage prefixed to the Donne che avete in the Vita Nuova (xix.), and completes the conception of poetry set forth in the De Vulgari Eloquentia.

The Seventh Terrace.—Passing another tree, a shoot from the tree of knowledge, beneath which the purging pangs are renewed, and from whose branches spirit voices proclaim examples of gluttony’s punishment, they are summoned upwards by the glowing and dazzling Angel of Abstinence, fragrant with grass and flowers as the air of May. As they ascend the narrow stairs towards the last terrace, Statius explains the generation of the body and the infusion of the rational soul, which exists, after the body’s death, invested with an aerial body as a shade (Purg. xxv. 31 et seq.). Apparently it is because revelation has some voice in these high matters that the Christian Statius gives Dante this exposition, instead of Virgil, and at the latter’s request; until the seventh terrace is reached, where sensual passion is expiated in the bosom of the great burning. Singing to the God of Supreme Clemency, crying aloud examples of chastity or of lust’s punishment, two bands of souls, divided according to the nature of their sin, pass through the fire in opposite ways (Purg. xxvi.). Here is Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, father of the poets of the dolce stil nuovo, whom Dante gazes upon in rapt admiration, and addresses with impassioned love and worship. But Guinizelli—with that humility which is so characteristically Dante’s own—indicates as miglior fabbro del parlar materno, a “better craftsman of his mother-tongue,” Arnaut Daniel, the cunning Provençal song-smith, who invented the sestina, and whose metrical skill and originality won for him a higher place in the estimation of the poet of the rime pietrose than modern students of the troubadours are usually disposed to concede.

The Purging Fire.—At sunset the Angel of Purity, singing “Blessed are the clean of heart,” bids the poets pass through the flames that lie between them and the last stairway—the purging fire that is the wall between Dante and Beatrice. Dante endures the “burning without measure”; and they reach the ascent, greeted by dazzling light and celestial strains of Venite benedicti Patris mei. The Cherubims with the flaming sword, “turning every way to keep the way of the tree of life” (Gen. iii. 24), are thus welcoming man’s restoration to the Garden of Eden, as the serpent had endeavoured to impede it in the Valley of the Princes. Now it is a delight to mount; but night comes on, and Dante, watched over by Statius and Virgil, falls asleep on the stairs (Purg. xxvii.).

Leah and Liberty.—Just before dawn, prelude to the new day, he dreams of Leah, a young and lovely lady gathering flowers in a meadow. The theologians took Leah as type of the active life, and Rachel, her sister, of the contemplative; a symbolism to which Richard of St. Victor gave a more mystical colour, by interpreting Leah as “affection inflamed by divine inspiration, composing itself to the norm of justice.” Leah may then represent the affection, thus inflamed and ordered, which is the perfection of the active life. At sunrise the topmost stair of Purgatory is reached, and Virgil, who can himself discern no further, resigns his guidance at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Dante’s judgment has been made free, right, and whole; per ch’ io te sovra te corono e mitrio, “wherefore I crown and mitre thee over thyself” (xxvii. 142). It has been supposed that Virgil is here resigning to Dante the crown and mitre of the Emperor; mitratus et coronatus was the expression used for the coronation of an Emperor when the Pope placed upon his head a mitre and a crown, which afterwards were united in the mitred crown, as seen in the great fresco at Santa Maria Novella. Others refer the crown to temporal or imperial authority, and the mitre to spiritual or ecclesiastical; for (Mon. iii. 4) “if man had remained in the state of innocence in which he was made by God, he would have had no need of such directive regimens,” which are “remedial against the infirmity of sin.” Dante, purified from sin, has regained this state of innocence, and has attained that liberty through which “we have our felicity here as men and our felicity elsewhere as Gods” (Mon. i. 12). In any case, Virgil is confirming the freedom which Dante has sought and gained by the passage through Purgatory.

The Earthly Paradise and Matelda.—The Earthly Paradise represents “blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s natural powers” (Mon. iii. 16). This blessedness is found in the twofold exercise of the mind: the practical, which “consists in ourselves working virtuously, that is, in integrity, with prudence, with temperance, with fortitude, and with justice”; and the speculative, which consists “in considering the works of God and of nature” (Conv. iv. 22). In this Earthly Paradise, the music of whose birds and trees has surely passed into the wonderful six cantos that close the Purgatorio, Dante meets, amidst the flowers on Lethe’s banks, the glorified realisation of the Leah of his dream (Purg. xxviii.). She has been taken as symbolising the glorified active life in the state of recovered Eden, realising in the Church of Christ what Leah had dimly prefigured in the Old Testament; the active Christian life; innocentia bonorum operum, the virtuous use of earthly things, directly ordered to the love of our neighbour; the temporal felicity of the Earthly Paradise. Since the purgatorial process is the freeing of the soul from disordered love, we may follow Richard’s interpretation of Leah, and take her as representing love rightly ordered and inflamed by divine inspiration. Presently she is called Matelda (xxxiii. 119), and it is probable that she is the idealised presentment of a real person. All the earliest commentators, excepting the Ottimo, identify her with the great Countess of Tuscany, in support of which view might be urged the historical work of the Countess in the revival of the study of Roman Law at Bologna—Roman Law being, for Dante, the secular counterpart of the “perfect law of liberty.” Some modern commentators prefer to seek her prototype in one or other of the ladies of Vita Nuova; for instance, in that lady of very sweet speech who had rebuked Dante at the crisis of his “new life.” Others have attempted to identify her with Mechthild of Magdeburg or Mechthild of Hackeborn, two German mystical writers of the latter part of the thirteenth century whose works show occasional analogies with the Commedia. It may be observed that her counterpart, as Rachel to Leah, is not Beatrice, as sometimes supposed, but St. Bernard, in the closing cantos of the Paradiso. Matelda explains her joyous aspect by referring Dante to the Psalm Delectasti (Ps. 92, 91 Vulgate), and her discourse of Eden and its rivers (realising the Golden Age sung by the classical poets) communicates to Virgil and Statius her own celestial joy: “Thou has given me, O Lord, a delight in what Thou hast made: in the works of Thy hands I shall rejoice.” She points out to Dante’s gaze the wondrous pageant, which astonishes Virgil as much as his pupil, the mystical procession that represents the triumphal march of the Church (Purg. xxix.).