Dante’s Road Trip: Purgatory

Dante tours Hell in part 1, but then in part 2 he wanders up the mountain of Purgatory, before getting to Heaven in Part 3. It isn’t hard to see why Inferno is the most well-known part. It gets the dual benefit of being the start of the story, so people would naturally read it first, and being full of gruesome punishments for sins. Why nobody has taken advantage of the gory details of the Inferno to make some modern horror blockbuster is totally beyond me.

The structure of Purgatory is interesting. In the Inferno, the sins are organized along Aristotelian lines and the punishments are the literal extensions of the sins. The message: you chose to live like this in life and so now you can live like this for all eternity.

Purgatory is organized on Christian lines, with levels representing the Seven Deadly Sins. The sins are all variations on loving wrong. The three lower levels (Pride, Envy, Wrath) are love of the wrong thing—varieties of love of self. The three upper levels (Avarice and Prodigality, Gluttony, Lust) are love in the right general direction, but lacking appropriate moderation. The middle level (Sloth) is just a deficiency of love. Then add in two levels before you get to Purgatory Proper—the excommunicated and the late repentant; people in these circles have to spend a lot of time hanging around before they are let into Purgatory Itself. Then, at the very top of the mountain is Eden, the last stop before being purged of all sin and heading off to Paradise.

While the punishments in the Inferno are all logical extensions of the sin stripped to its essence, the punishments in Purgatory force the soul to stop engaging in the sin. So, for example, in the circle of Pride, the souls are forced to carry large weights on their backs, causing the souls to look down at the ground, remembering that they are not God, but rather grounded beings created by God. In the circle of Lust, the souls constantly give one anther chaste kisses, showing love without carnality.

In the Inferno, souls were confined to a particular level forever; in Purgatory, the souls go from one level to the next as they purge themselves of sin after sin. The amount of time a soul spends on each level is proportional to how prevalent the sin was in the person’s life. This leads to one of my favorite bits in the entire Divine Comedy.

When he is talking with people in the circle of Envy, Dante says he won’t spend much time there, but he will spend a lot of time in the circle of Pride. It’s not only funny, but it is deep: the reason Dante does not Envy is because he is so full of Pride. Indeed, even saying how little time he will spend in the circle of Envy is an example of his Pride. Then later in the circle, Dante is chastised because his eyes are still looking on the ground instead of upward. Looking at the ground is exactly what the souls are doing in the circle of Pride. Dante falters because being in the circle of Envy increased his Pride. But here is the really interesting part; Dante’s pride is seen as he constantly talks about himself in this work as if he is the greatest poet of all time. This very poem is why he is so proud. But, 700 years later one thing is pretty obvious; Dante is, in fact, the greatest poet of all time. (OK, maybe Shakespeare beats him.)

Throughout Purgatory, Dante does a masterful job weaving in Biblical imagery and making it his own. For example, early on, Dante gets to the gate of Purgatory and encounters angels. What follows morphs the story from Genesis of the angel being posted at the gate of Eden to keep the humans out. Dante sees the angels and then suddenly a serpent shows up and Dante is terrified. It seems a bit frightening, but that is because Dante forgot about the angels, who easily beat back the serpent; there was actually never any danger from the serpent. Here in Dante the angels are posted at the gate of Purgatory (within which is Eden itself) not to keep humans out, but to keep the serpent out.

There are lots of things like that. At one point, we hear a reciting of something a whole lot like the Lord’s Prayer, but Dante rewrote it to make it more artful. As Dante says in another place:
Reader, you surely understand that I am raising 
the level of my subject here. Do not wonder, 
therefore, if I sustain it with more artifice.

(That is the Hollanders’ translation, far and away the best translation of Dante. Both the translation itself and the notes are outstanding.)

When Dante gets to Eden, there is a masterpiece of taking the visions of John, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Daniel and working out a new vision with exactly the same sort of poetic metaphor inherent in every part. It feels like reading the Biblical authors, but it is a unique picture. In what may be the most brilliant thing in the whole story, Dante wades into a discussion on whether the angelic beings have four or six wings. Any normal person would have noted that John (who said six) and Ezekiel (who said four) needed an independent observer to decide and now that Dante has seen them, John was right. Instead, the narrative says that Dante and Ezekiel disagree and notes that John has said that Dante was right. Dante’s vision is thus not just in the style of the Biblical visions; Dante’s vision is more credible and accurate than those visions. The Biblical writers are imitating Dante!

Then there is another vision at the very end that seems like a mash-up of the book of Daniel and Virgil’s Aeneid. Both Daniel and Virgil provide visions of the sweep of human history. Daniel’s vision, according to Christian commentaries, ends at the time of Christ. Virgil’s vision-narrative happens when Aeneas is in Hades and ends with the time of Augustine. Dante’s vision ends with the harlot and the beast, which is ripped right out of John’s Revelation and is the very last thing in Revelation before heading off to an eternal heaven. So, once again Dante is ripping off all the source texts and making something shockingly original.

Speaking of Virgil, he also plays a fascinating role in Purgatory. Dante had him as a guide through Inferno, but Virgil keeps plodding along with Dante through Purgatory. Since Virgil is a permanent resident of Limbo in the Inferno, why is he Dante’s guide? Why doesn’t Dante get a Christian guide? It is only in the Canto XXII of Purgatory (over half-way through the entire Divine Comedy) that we get an answer. Dante and Virgil have met Statius, an Italian poet of some note. Statius explains that he found Christianity by reading Virgil, who is described as a guy who has the light behind his back which does no good for Virgil, but much good for those who came after. Dante was playing a long game in setting this up. Just as Virgil led Statius, he now leads Dante…but only Virgil’s followers benefit from the light Virgil provides.

I suspect, by the way, that Dante drops Statius in here to draw a flattering comparison to himself. Suddenly there is another poet who used Virgil as a muse who is traveling through Purgatory…but Statius is acknowledging his inferiority to Virgil, whereas Dante in a million ways keeps pointing out how much better he is than Virgil.

When they get to Eden, Virgil explains that the journey is done. That is odd. We know there is a whole part remaining. But from Virgil’s perspective, there are just the two journeys. Once you hit the end of the climb up the mountain of Purgatory, Paradise awaits…journey is done. And now Virgil gets to head back down to the Inferno.

We the Readers, however, get to keep traveling with Dante as he journeys up toward Paradise. But before doing so, it is well worth pausing to admire the masterpiece that is Purgatory. It is a perfect bridge; as we find out in the next part, there is a massive difference between Heaven and Hell (obviously not the most shocking revelation), but Dante with supreme art blends the characteristics of the Inferno and Paradise in crafting Purgatory. The Inferno is marked by literally hellish landscapes. Purgatory is full of descriptions of exquisite beauty. By the time we get to the overwhelming beauty of Eden, it is jarring to think back to the horrors of the Inferno.

Harold Bloom declared that Purgatory was his favorite section of The Divine Comedy because it was the only section on earth itself. Presumably he said this for the shock value (Bloom was like that), but nevertheless, he was pointing to something real. The Inferno is the worst of humanity; Paradise is the best. Purgatory is the muddled mess of life, the lives we are all actually living. Things aren’t perfect yet, but if you look around, you’ll notice those hints of paradise lurking in the landscape. Notice the beauty of the steps leading into Purgatory which gives hints of heaven. Then notice that such glimpses are all around you right now.

Related Posts
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, “Dante’s Road Trip: Inferno”
George MacDonald, The Light Princess, “The Gravity of Love”