Dante threw himself into his new love with such characteristic single-mindedness that, soon, as he himself tells us, “it drove out and destroyed every other thought” (Banquet, II, xii). At some point thereafter—and, since so little of this book dedicated to philosophy was written, it was probably not many years—there must have occurred another crisis like that at the end of the Vita Nuova, but much greater. Dante must have realized the peril in his overdependence on secular wisdom and on his own faculties, and he readjusted his scale of values in such a way as to re-establish the superiority of revealed truth. This crisis is probably represented in Canto I of the Comedy, for it is doubtless from this futile and dangerous self-reliance that Dante is there rescued by Virgil. In the Comedy it is evident that the lover, now definitely returned—both to Beatrice and to her sacred significance—wished to make public confession and amends for his error by weaving it very fittingly into the fabric of his Mount of Purification. Indeed, to the reader thus prepared to understand it, this second cántica can be seen to contain a monumental act of atonement. To clarify his intent and achieve greater effect, Dante planned this episode to occur in a sequence similar to the original. Since all the deviations sprang from the Vita Nuova, some way had to be found to recall that work and its experiences to the reader without disrupting the poem’s artistic unity. This he achieved by a device so effective, so subtle, and at the same time so obvious that its secret has rarely been perceived. To see this we must examine the Purgatorio itself.
Among the distinguishing features of this division of the Comedy is what might be called its “middle” character. Whereas the Inferno is all darkness and the Paradiso is all light, the Purgatorio is a mixture of the two in its alternation of day and night. This comes about naturally, since it is imagined as a mountain rising in the middle of Earth’s southern hemisphere opposite Jerusalem. Arriving there at dawn on Easter Sunday, Dante and Virgil spend four days and three nights in its ascent. As Hell had its vestibule, so Purgatory begins with an “ante-Purgatorio,” the whole base of the mountain up to a certain height. Then comes a gate, and Purgatory itself begins. The poets reach this point in the first night, during Dante’s sleep; it is Canto IX. During the second night they are in the fourth or middle one of the seven vices, Sloth, and again Dante falls asleep; this is Canto XVIII. The end of Purgatory itself is reached, and Dante falls asleep for the final time, in Canto XXVII. The scheme thus revealed is a series of 9’s. At this point, no one familiar with the Vita Nuova can fail to be alerted, remembering the pains its young author had taken to associate the number 9 with Beatrice, because she was herself “a nine, that is, a miracle.” When one sees further that there are precisely three of these 9’s, and that each has a vision associated with it, he cannot help recalling how Dante first saw Beatrice at age 9, saw her again at 18, and concluded the Vita Nuova at 27; and that there was a vision associated with each of those three 9’s. Dante has accomplished his purpose; the alert and knowledgeable reader is prepared for the confrontation with Beatrice. To make this doubly sure, he has the latter say, in her rebuke,
“This man was such, in his vita nova,”
where the last two words have the unaccustomed, though legitimate, meaning of “childhood” or “youth.” The only specific term Beatrice employs here to identify Dante’s transgressions is pargoletta, an endearment used by the poet in a love lyric not addressed to Beatrice. That they are meant to include Dante’s overemphasis on secular studies is made clear two cantos later, where she explains her use of lofty words and concepts:
“They fly so high,” she said, “that you may know what school you followed, and how far behind the truth I speak its feeble doctrines go;
and see that man’s ways, even at his best, are far from God’s as earth is from the heaven whose swiftest wheel turns above all the rest.”
[XXXIII, 85-90]
It should be emphasized that Dante is not here denying the great value of secular wisdom, especially philosophy, for without it he could not have written the Comedy. His purpose is to put such wisdom in its proper place by making it subservient to God, by whom it was ordained to minister to man’s practical intellectual needs, and by excluding it from all questions touching matters of faith. This message, aside from informing the Comedy as a whole, finds its most eloquent expression in the tragic story of Ulysses. It is in the Purgatorio, however, that Dante demonstrates systematically the interrelation of the two wisdoms he believes necessary for the education of mankind for the enjoyment of this life and the life to come.
In contrast with the turbulent complexity of Hell, Dante’s Purgatory is simple, regular, and serene. On the lower reaches below the gate are kept in exile for varying lengths of time those souls who, for various reasons and in various conditions, sought salvation at the last moment. Above, within Purgatory, we find not the multifarious crimes by which vice or sin manifests itself in Hell (or on Earth), but simply the seven Capital Vices that lead to sinful acts. Since the souls here are all saved, and eager to act in accordance with divine will, there is no place among them for violence, malice, fraud, rebelliousness, etc. Each vice is treated on a specific ledge (cornice) that circles the mountain. Souls remain on a given ledge until they feel purged of all slightest subconscious taint of that particular vice, at which point they move up spontaneously.
The educative system employs, first, examples of the virtue opposed to the vice, then examples of the vice punished; the method of presentation is different for each vice, and particularly suited to the posture and condition of the souls undergoing purgation. The Proud, bowed under loads that are proportionate to the gravity of their vice, have ample time, as they creak slowly around, to contemplate marvelously realistic carvings; the Envious, sitting together with their eyes, misused to their sorrow on earth, sewn shut, hear their lessons called out; the Slothful, rushing with the zeal they lacked in life, shout theirs aloud, and so on.
The ingenuity thus called for was admirable enough, but the truly significant feature is the steady pattern of duality, of the interaction of two sets of values. This is most clearly observable in the ordering of the lessons, or examples. First, in every instance, is an example from the life of the Virgin who, Bonaventure said, “. . . shone with every virtue . . . and was most free from the seven Capital Vices.” Priority is thus given to sacred learning. Thereafter on every ledge the lessons are drawn alternately from the Bible and classical history, mythology, or literature. Progress up the mountain is possible only while the sun shines, i.e., under the inspiration of divine wisdom. At the same time we know that the stars representing the four Cardinal Virtues are overhead, though made invisible by the sun’s brightness. In other words, divine wisdom is the sine qua non of education, but the virtues Dante identifies with ancient Rome form its subject matter. At night, when no progress is possible in the active way, the stars representing the Theological Virtues are overhead, and men receive divine wisdom through mystical means, such as dreams and visions. At the end of Purgatory proper, Canto XXVII, Dante is awarded his diploma by Virgil, who, telling him that because his will is now free, healthy, and straight he may follow it freely, adds,
“Lord of yourself I crown and mitre you.”
In other words, Dante is henceforth his own philosopher-king and his own bishop-pope; completely educated in the cardinal and theological virtues, he needs no further formal guidance in this life.
The principle of interaction between the classical and the Christian worlds is repeated once again in the pageant at the end of the cántica. Here Dante recapitulates his theory of the history of man’s fall and redemption and the vicissitudes of the Church, ending in its contemporary degradation, the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Papacy in Avignon. To represent the Church, Dante uses a triumphal two-wheeled chariot. Around the right wheel—indication of their superiority—dance the three Theological Virtues, as maidens each dressed in her appropriate color; around the left wheel dance four others identified as the Cardinal Virtues by the
ir imperial purple. A few terzine later the union of Biblical and classical authority is underlined again by the verses which herald the approach of Beatrice. The first is a paraphrase of Matthew, xxi, “Blessed art thou that comest”; the second are the words of Anchises in the Aeneid, VI, 833: “Oh scatter handfuls of lilies.”
To most modern readers, all this may seem of little importance, and certainly not dangerously controversial; things were quite different in the early 1300’s. To form an idea of how different, we do not need to strain our imaginations; we have only to think of certain fundamentalist groups of our own day and in our own country, among whom to suggest that the Bible is not sufficient by itself for every need is to invite serious trouble. Yet Dante was not content with challenging the Church’s adequacy, though in a figurative and more or less covert form. His insistence that secular wisdom stand beside sacred wisdom in the education of the individual implied a much more dangerous challenge: that secular government stand beside sacred government. In simple terms, the world needed a strong civil state independent of the Church. Such a theory ran counter to the policy and pronouncements of the Holy See, supreme since its defeat of the last of the Hohenstaufen emperors. Now if an author should propound such an unpalatable theory openly, and add to it a proposal to remove and exclude from the Church all of its temporal power now and in the future, we have a book that’s fit for burning, with an author not far removed. Such indeed was to be the fate, so far as possible, of Dante’s last treatise, De Monarchia. Written in Latin, and hence worthy of official notice, in the last years before its author’s death in 1321, it contained the conclusions of Dante’s many years of study and meditation concerning God’s plan for the proper governing of the world. It not only argued the divine authorization of the Empire, the advantages of such a system, its duties in providing civil peace and education; it denied and denounced in strongest terms the official dogma published by Innocent III, which likened the emperor to the Moon, deriving all authority from the Pope as the Sun. Instead, it maintained that emperor and Pope represented two Suns, each receiving light—and authority—directly from God. The world would thus have “the Supreme Pontiff to lead the human race by means of revelation, and the Emperor to guide it to temporal felicity by means of philosophic education.” Since the emperor would be the supreme civil authority and power, there would exist in the world no one for him to envy, no one with greater possessions for him to covet. With nothing to arouse cupiditas, “root of all evils,” he would himself be just, and would stamp out injustice in his subjects. Mankind would thus be able freely to develop its full potential for the enjoyment of this life in which Dante firmly believed. More important sub specie aeternitatis would be the inability of the clergy and the church to acquire wealth, property, and any but spiritual power. In these circumstances its example would encourage men to follow its preachings of the unimportance of worldly goods, and would not have the opposite effect, as under actual conditions.
As Dante no doubt foresaw, the De Monarchia was not popular with ecclesiastical authorities. As a matter of fact, they destroyed every manuscript they could get their hands on, and later included it in the first Index librorum prohibitorum. As for the author, many persons believe there to be a connection between this attitude and the mystery which long surrounded the whereabouts of his remains.
It is a curious fact that in the Purgatorio the reasons for unhappy world conditions are much more outspoken in form than is the principle of interaction between the two sets of virtues. Here are some examples:What does it matter that Justinian came
to trim the bit, if no one sits the saddle?
Without him you [Italy] would have less cause for shame!
You priests who, if you heed what God decreed,
should most seek after holiness and leave to Caesar Caesar’s saddle and his steed—
see how the beast grows wild now none restrains
its temper, nor corrects it with the spur
since you set meddling hands upon its reins! [VI, 91-99]
And again, speaking of the causes of injustice and discord:Men, therefore, need restraint by law, and need
a monarch over them who sees at least
the towers of The True City. Laws, indeed,
there are, but who puts nations to their proof?
No one. The shepherd who now leads mankind
can chew the cud, but lacks the cloven hoof.
The people, then, seeing their guide devour
those worldly things to which their hunger turns
graze where he grazes, and ask nothing more.
The bad state of the modern world is due—
as you may see, then—to bad leadership;
and not to natural corruption in you.
Rome used to shine in two suns when her rod
made the world good, and each showed her its way:
one to the ordered world, and one to God.
Now one declining sun puts out the other.
The sword and crook are one, and only evil
can follow from them when they are together;
for neither fears the other, being one. [XVI, 94-112]
The reason why such passages have not incurred official wrath lies probably in their being sporadic outbursts; they need not be interpreted as part of a systematic presentation, as in the case of the scheme for education.
In addition to such matters—and let it be said without wishing to lessen their very real importance—there was other material of much more crucial significance to be presented. In the Comedy’s imitation of the Holy Trinity, this second cántica represents the Second Person, and one of His chief attributes is Wisdom; this is the logical division in which to offer intellectual wisdom. Furthermore, in a poem dedicated to the demonstration of how, by their merits or demerits, men make themselves subject to reward or punishment, there is one central, all-important question to be treated—that of Free Will and the individual’s responsibility for his actions. In introducing the Inferno, I had occasion to point out the care with which it had been constructed so as to give maximum expression to the Trinity, the Perfect Number, and so on. Now I must ask the forbearance of those readers intolerant of all such antic devices while I call attention to the way in which Dante arranged the present discussions. He begins the explanation of responsibility in Canto XVI, continues it in Canto XVII, and concludes it in Canto XVIII. Since there are 33 cantos in the Purgatorio, these are respectively, the last of the first 16, the 17th or middle, and the first of the second 16. But added significance can be had by looking at the three cántiche, or the main body of the poem, less the introductory first canto. What has been said of the Purgatorio then becomes true for the whole; the discussion begins in Canto 49, continues in Canto 50, and concludes in Canto 51, the first of the remaining 49. The subject of the middle canto, either way, is Love as the moving force behind every action of mankind, whether good or evil.
For such instruction as was offered in the Inferno, Aristotle was much the preferred authority. In the presentations of metaphysics, psychology, and physiology which comprise most of the instruction that Dante was making available in the Purgatorio to readers of the vernacular, Aquinas is absolute and unchallenged. This does not mean, naturally, that much of the material was not originally Aristotelian, but rather that in form it is the version, reading, or interpretation chosen or elaborated by St. Thomas.
The first lesson, having established man’s freedom from predestination, shows the need of the free will for discipline administered by an independent civil authority which will curb and direct his inclinations from childhood on. Since a child turns instinctively to anything pleasant, knowing no better, it will pursue valueless pleasures excessively and exclusively unless properly schooled. It is characteristic of Dante’s method that the reader, now halfway through the book, suddenly realizes that he has already had an object lesson back in Canto II. There, among a boatload of souls arrived just after the two poets, Dante meets a dear friend, the musicia
n Casella. All the souls are essentially childlike in their lack of sophistication and experience of the new environment; instead of pursuing their arduous upward path, they sit and indulge in the most innocent of pleasures by listening to the singing of one of Dante’s best lyrics. The necessary discipline is suddenly administered by the stern Cato, and the group hastens off in pursuit of more substantial goods, with Virgil very red of face.