If you follow me on Instagram or YouTube you will know by now that the Dante Book Club is back and that it has moved to YouTube!

We’re already 2 cantos deep, so you can watch CANTO 1 and CANTO 2 and check out everyone’s thoughts and comments on my channel.

This year, I decided I will be making bi-weekly videos about the ENTIRE Divine Comedy, so that by the end of the year we will have read Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso!

I’ve made this choice for a few reasons, but mainly because I wanted to be as inclusive as possible and give new people the opportunity to follow along from the beginning, as well as people who have difficulty consuming written text.

I hope you enjoy the new format and find it easy to follow along and chat to other people in the comments.

This is the last time I’ll be doing the Dante book club, so let’s make it a great one!

On a more practical note: all of the cantos I’ve published here will stay up for you to go back to whenever you want, but I WILL NOT be sending out newsletters from this page anymore.

All extra Dante newsletters and my own essays will come from my personal newsletter, so subscribe to that is you want to hear from me.

ALSO! There a several generous people who have opted for a paid subscription on this page - please, unsubscribe!

I cannot express how much I appreciate your support, but I will not be making paid subscriber-only content on this platform, so you’re just giving me money for existing (which is nice, but feels a bit unfair).

So excited for our last HURRAH!

Love,

Alina

We made it! The final canto of Purgatorio is here and it’s short and sweet - but not any less rich in meaning. 

Canto 33 revolves around a conversation between Dante and Beatrice. Finally, after several cantos-long preamble, our man is face to face with his beloved angel-woman (who unfortunately for him brother-zones him in this canto) without any more processions or saints or bizarre re-enactments getting in the way.

The conversation is introduced by a Latin quotation from Psalm 70, which refers to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC which was a representation of the victory of evil over God’s chosen people. 

Hearing the psalm, Beatrice becomes visibly flustered - Dante tells us she changes like the Virgin Mary changed at the sight of her son on the cross. But then the red of her robes overtakes her appearance as if to suggest that she returns to her usual sense of self-possession with renewed force. 

The dialogue between her and Dante has something of the familiar in it (despite Dante’s overt difficulty in grasping what she’s talking about half the time).

Beatrice calls the poet to her side, so that they can have an intimate conversation, and finally, she makes eye contact with him, an experience he describes as being “pierced” by her gaze. As if to emphasise his awkwardness, Dante also tells us that he still fails to address her properly, still unable to “get living voice behind [his] teeth”.

This description of his immediate reaction to their chat reminded me again of the contrast between Virgil and Beatrice that I was writing about a few weeks back. This inarticulate fool is a far cry from the wise journeyman who was ready to trust his judgment which Virgil praised in their last conversation. 

And as if to put the last nail in the coffin of the old Dante, Beatrice continues to chide him: for his past failure to honour her memory by living a righteous life and for the intellectual vanity that has calcified around him closed-off brain and made him into the dummy now standing before her.

But as she speaks, Beatrice is smiling. The fact that Dante is unable at this point to fully understand the mysteries behind her words is not a measure of his inadequacy as much as it is a sign of his humanity. It’s understandable that his mind should fail to fully digest divine knowledge after a lifetime of living off of secular philosophy and science. 

But what is she trying to tell him that he so miserably fails to understand?

Her first allusion seems to refer to the alliance between the Church and the kings of France, symbolized by the eagle as we saw last week - the “vessel that the serpent broke” refers to the bit of the performance in which the eagle flew down on the chariot. 

This unholy alliance, she says, will not escape God’s revenge. She conveys this information through the rather cryptic (for the modern reader) reference to a feudal convention, according to which a murderer could escape revenge if he managed to eat a sop of bread while sitting on the victim’s grave for three consecutive days. 

The point being, a day will come when the Church and the crown of France will have to reckon with their corruption and arrogance, respectively. 

When or how this will happen is conveyed through a mysterious piece of numerological symbolism. To this day, despite many attempts, no one has been able to offer a plausible explanation of what FIVE HUNDRED TEN AND FIVE means.

In the second half of the canto, the inscrutable prophecies slowly fade into the background to make room for a return to description and narrative. 

Beatrice explains that now that Dante has drunk from the Lethe, thus forgetting his “science” as well as his guilt, he will be ready to drink from Eunoe, the other river that flows from the Lethe’s source. Once that ritual is also complete, all intellectual barriers will be lifted and her words will become clear as day to Dante. 

It falls on Matelda to complete this ritual - and this time she also gets explicitly named when Beatrice calls upon her to do so. 

The canto ends with Dante’s admission that he couldn’t possibly describe the freshness of that river nor the effect of its waters upon him (which is ironic considering that Beatrice just told him to take care to write everything down for the rest of us!).

He does, however, tell us that he came back from the “holiest of waves”, remade, pure, and prepared to finally see the stars. 

And that’s it!

I want to say a huge congratulations to everyone who has kept up with the book club for nearly 2 years!! This is the longest commitment I’ve made to anything that wasn’t a contractual obligation (lol) and I’m so proud of all of us for sticking to it every week.

What a joy it has been to go on this journey together x.

I mentioned last week that the last few cantos of Purgatorio are the most theological we’ve come across yet. We leave the realm of exciting plot that we were so used to in Inferno and a lot of Purgatorio and enter the lyrical mood that characterises Dante’s journey through heaven. As such, I invite everyone to read and enjoy the imagery we’re presented with, without too much influence from me. 

I will, however, go through the rich symbolism of this canto, just to make it slightly easier for you to follow - Dante isn’t the most straightforward guy. 

As usual, I like to think of this canto as happening in phases. The opening phase shows us a shift in Dante’s focus from Beatrice back to the procession. In the first moment of the canto we’re told that Beatrice has him completely transfixed, to the point where he can no longer perceive his surroundings through any senses other than sight. Beatrice is smiling and, transfixed by it, Dante has become all eyes in every sense but literal. 

But, just like we can’t stare directly into the sun for more than a few moments, Dante can only look at that “holy smile” for so long before being left without sight. So he moves his gaze back onto the rest of the procession and notices that it has begun to turn on itself and change direction toward the east. 

Just as silently and solemnly as they arrived, the procession moves across the deserted Garden of Eden (which Dante does not fail to remind us is entirely Eve’s fault) and eventually come what looks like a dead tree. 

Here is where we enter the second phase of the canto. Through an embarrassingly thinly veiled allegory, Dante explores the theme of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. The dead, leafless tree is none other than the Tree of Knowledge, from which the first humans chose to eat, thus severing their intimate relationship with and knowledge of God in favour of earthly knowledge. We know that this is the case from the procession’s choral accompaniment which conveniently narrates everything (see lines 43-46).

The Gryphon does the same thing. Stopping before the tree, Dante tells us that the “two-formed” creature (which you will remember from the previous couple of cantos is a representation of Christ), declares 

‘In this way, all that’s true and just is saved’

Then, through an inexplicable motion considering the Gryphon has no hands that we know of, it takes the cross that connected it to Beatrice’s carriage and ties it to the tree. As if by magic, the tree comes back to life as if under the influence of an accelerated spring. The gist being that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross has the power to undo the original sin inherited from Adam and eve’s fall. 

Phase three of the canto sees Dante suddenly fall asleep. This isn’t particularly surprising given the number of times we’ve seen him faint, sleep, dream, and - just earlier in this canto - lose his sight. Scholars interpret the narrative pause that Dante’s sleep enacts as symbol of his powerlessness/ speechlessness in the face of this new and holy landscape. In fact, he does not understand the hymn sung immediately after the tree’s revival and we can only assume how overwhelmed he is after seeing this symbolic reenactment of the Christ’s redemptive act. 

When he wakes up from his sleep Dante realises that Beatrice is no longer with him. But before asking after her whereabouts, he describes the process of waking up at length and with vivid allusions to a couple of biblical episodes. The more straightforward one is that of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, which is echoed in line 72, where a mysterious voice tells Dante to “rise”.

The second, more complex one is laid out in the following verses, where Dante mentions the sleep that Peter, James and John were overcome by. This is in reference to an episode from the Gospel of Luke, chaper 9, where he tells of the Transfiguration of Christ. While in the mountains with Jesus, the three apostles falls asleep while Jesus prays/ communes with God. Upon awakening they find him completely changed, radiant and chatting to the Old Testament prophets Moses and Elias. Both his renewed physical appearance and his interaction with the prophets are a sign of Christ’s unique relation to God’s glory, which the apostles, given their fallible nature, are confused by. 

Confusion is also the main feeling possessing Dante upon awakening - he wants his Beatrice. Seeing this, Matelda intervenes and point him towards the tree, where Beatrice is sitting on one of its giant roots. 

Once again, Dante becomes entranced by her, this time by the sound of her speech, which invites him to pay attention to the chariot, now separated from the Gryphon. 

At this point we’re given another piece of theological theatre which takes up the fourth and final phase of the canto in its entirety. 

At a literal level, a bunch of odd events occur in rapid succession: and eagle appears and attacks the chariot. First it rips at the bark and flowers that decorate it. Then it conjures a vixen who comes and places herself comfortably in the carriage. Then, the eagle returns and “infects” the chariot with its touch, after which the vessel grows feathers. Immediately after that, a dragon crawls from the cracked earth and hurls its tail into the chariot, breaking it. The broken edges grow oxen heads and unicorn-like heads. Finally, among the monstrous heads, a whore appears, as well as her lover, a ferocious giant. 

So what does this all mean?

The general consensus is that these 7 events represent the seven afflictions of the Church, from the early prosecutions at the hands of the Romans to the corruption contemporary to Dante. 

The eagle’s first attack represents the persecutions christians suffered at the hands of Nero and Diocletian - the eagle being an emblem of the Roman Empire. The figure of the vixen represents false prophecy and refers to the early heresies that followed Christ’s ascension. The return of the eagle represents the moment in history when the Emperpr Constantine bestowed wealth and political power upon the Church, thus beginning the eternal battle between secular and spiritual power. The dragon is probably a representation of Islam and the threat Mohamed represented - in Dante’s view he was guilty of triggering a splintering of the Church, symbolised here by the smashing of the chariot into different pieces. The growing of multiple and different heads represents the further breakdown of the Church into smaller units based on the grands of land it received from multiple rulers through history - particularly Charlemagne and Pepin the younger (Dante was not a fan of the French influence on the Vatican).

The kings of France return incarnate in the figure of the giant, whom we see at the end of the canto locked in a kiss with a whore, a pretty obvious reference to the Whore of Babylon, representing the now completely corrupt Church, which Dante has been criticising throughout the whole poem. 

Like I said, a lot of beautiful imagery containing even more narrative potential. I hope you’re enjoying these last few cantos as much as I am. 

Next week is out last one!!

See you there x

Last week I wrote about the Virgil-Beatrice dichotomy and the hierarchy between the intellectual and spiritual knowledge they respectively represent. There was still room at that point to argue that a sound intellect is a necessary stepping stone toward spiritual enlightenment - in other words that Virgil’s work was vital to Dante’s current meeting with Beatrice. 

But in canto 31 we see Beatrice tear Dante apart, in a way that undoes all of the confidence that Virgil encourages in him when he says his goodbye at the end of canto 27. 

The canto starts with Beatrice directing the “sword point” of her words at Dante. This is a continuation of the chastisement she began in the previous canto, where she reproached Dante his ease in forgetting about her after her death in favour of another mistress, namely intellectual work. Here, she reprises some of the same themes.

In order for Dante to progress on his journey beyond the earthly paradise, Beatrice demands that he confess his sin, which, as we saw last week, consists in having consciously refused to take the right path in life, despite being blessed with the skills and talents necessary to first of all identify a life compatible with the will of God and then remain on that path.

But Dante, ever the flawed hero, fails to speak. Although he seems to understand pretty quickly that the act of confession is necessary to completing the purgation process, Dante is so overwhelmed, both by the sight of his beloved and by guilt, that he cannot physically utter a word. 

At this, Beatrice continues to elaborate the ways in which he failed to lead a righteous life. Particularly, she explains that his desire for her, which should have led him to a greater understanding of love, and by extension God, was not strong enough to outlast her physical presence. Soon after her death, Dante sought refuge in the “easements, profits, gain or benefit” that came with the approval of his contemporaries, she says. 

Dante, a slobberig mess by this point, manages to acknowledge that seeking earthly accomplishments was weak of him and Beatrice seems appeased. She explains that sin cannot be forgiven until uttered by the sinner and until the latter sits with a sense of “proper shame”. This is a catholic poem after all, and what would catholics be without their shame?! (besides happier, ofc).

In order to make him feel this proper shame, she goes on to elaborate on how he should have lived his life after her death, which she begins with the delightful tercet:

‘Never had art or nature shown to you

such beauty and delight as did those limbs,

in which I was enclosed…’

Might go ahead and use this to describe myself from now on. 

But back to Dante, who, admonished by Beatrice at length, tells us he is at this point simply standing before her, dumb with shame, like a little boy. Juxtaposed to this personal description, Beatrice calls out to him to “raise his beard”, which is ostensibly a marker of maturity. At this point in the canto we reach a climax in the undoing of Dante I mentioned at the beginning of this post. 

The Dante Virgil left us with was dignified and confident - that was the intellectual Dante. Here we have the spiritual Dante, who can only begin to take shape once he does away with the arrogance that comes from the intellectual confidence Virgil instilled in him. 

At this point of total obliteration of the self, Matelda pops up out of nowhere again and finally drags him through the river Lethe, from which once submerged he ends up drinking. 

I’ll take a moment here to remind you of the parallels we drew between the Leah/Rachel and Matelda/Beatrice duos. Just like Leah represented the pragmatic dimension of life and Rachel the intellectual/spiritual one, so Matelda enacts the practical part of Dante’s salvation, after Beatrice carried out the spiritual one. 

Now on the other side of the river, Dante is welcomed by the female incarnations of the virtues, who introduce themselves as nymphs, stars and Beatrice’s maids, and they lead him face to face with her. Beatrice, who has until this point kept her face hidden behind her veil, finally reveals her face, chiefly her incredibly bright “emeralds” - her eyes. 

Here, Dante presents us with a gorgeous piece of imagery. Reflected in Beatrice’s eyes he sees the image of the Gryphon, which as we already discussed is a symbolic incarnation of Christ. A lot has been written about this moment, and I invite you to read as much criticism as you like. Personally, I prefer to indulge in the aesthetic beauty of these last few cantos. 

The same goes for the last phase of the canto, in which, upon request from the divine entities present, Beatrice finally turns her gaze upon Dante. The meeting of their eyes triggers a moment of aphasia in Dante. It’s not just that he is speechless - he does ironically go on and on about how he doesn’t have the words to express what he sees. He is faced with the unexplainable, the unnameable beauty of the perfected, divine version of the woman that had already been on par with angels for him. 

Not only this - having drunk form the Lethe, he has also forgotten his former sinful existence. The very concept of sin has been washed away from his person, thus clearing his soul for the purest of sights. And such visions cannot be expressed in earthly terms.

Canto 30 takes the shape of four main phases. The first describes the way in which the procession described in the previous canto comes to a sudden halt. It opens with one of Dante’s classic bits of maritime imagery, in which we are told that the seven candelabra stop moving. The candelabra are likened to the seven stars of the constellation Ursa Minor, which used to be an important reference point for seafarers in Dante’s time. The allusion here is that in the way that seamen follow the seven stars, so should the good Christian follow the seven candelabra (which as we discussed last week, represent the 7 virtues).

So, “the people of the truth”, namely the prophets/apostles mentioned in the previous canto, have come to a stop. That being said, the scene is by no means static. Song continues to flow from them - one in particular sings the line “Veni, sponsa de Libano!” (Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse!) from the Song of Solomon, while others echo Alleluia and “Benedictus qui venis” (Blessed be the one who comes [to God]).

These are all biblical allusions to the reunion between Christ and his Church (often referred to as his “bride” as well). And, indeed, reunion is the main theme of this canto. On the one hand, Dante is about to enter the kingdom of God. On the other, in the second phase of the canto, he is about to come face to face with his beloved Beatrice.

Her introduction is worthy of the anticipation created around her character all throughout the poem. She is described as appearing from beyond a drifting cloud of flowers held by a group of angels. She wears a green robe and a red dress and her face is hidden behind a thin white veil.

Coming off the heels of canto 29, it won’t be hard for us to identify these colour choices with the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity.

Note here the description of her dress as “the colour of living flame” which is then juxtaposed to the “ancient flame” of line 48 - this is the woman whom Dante loved in life and the one who is about to initiate him to divine love.

But before he can feel the former, Dante is first reminded of the latter. Without even laying eyes directly onto her face, Dante confesses that an incontrollable trembling takes over his body, returning him to his boyhood, when he first saw Beatrice, aged nine.

Overwhelmed by the feeling he turns to Virgil and makes the confession out loud:

“There is not one gram

Of blood in me that does not tremble now.

I recognize the signs of ancient flame”

This last sentence is directly lifted from the Aeneid, where it is uttered by Dido, when in the underworld she remembers the love she had once felt for Aeneas. The choice can’t be anything other than a last tribute to Virgil, because just as he says the words and turns around, Virgil is gone forever.  As if to return him to the present moment, Beatrice calls out to him by his given name. “Dante”, she says, “Virgil is gone, but don’t cry for this loss. There is something else you must weep for before”.

It is at this point that she finally confirms her identity. Form behind the veil, which we are told was fixed over her face with a crown of olive branches (again with the mixed Christian and pagan references), she tells Dante, as well as the rest of us “I am, truly, I am Beatrice”.

There are many things that Beatrice represents for Dante, both Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet. She is a muse, she is the “donna gentile” which inspires love and through that love a higher form of art, she is a guide through Paradise and Dante’s saviour (as she explains in the last part of this canto). But here she appears as one of Dante’s harshest critics.

Some scholars have identified her here and in the following couple of cantos with a Christ figure. And in fact, she begins to question the pilgrim - “what right had you to venture to this mount? Did you not know that all are happy here?”

At this, Dante cannot whit stand even her veiled gaze, so he shifts his eyes to the river, in which he catches a glimpse of himself. And his reflection fills him with shame. This is a very different Dante to a couple of cantos ago when Virgil, in saying goodbye, encouraged him to trust his senses and his desire. Faced with Beatrice, who seems to reflects Dante - the real Dante - back at himself, the pilgrim realises that despite his spiritual journey he is still not fit for Paradise.

The realisation results in a sort of emotional breakdown, described in lines 85-99, where Dante compares his soul to the icy top of a mountain which suddenly thaws and floods the land below. Thus his ego, strengthened by Virgil’s kind words, crumbles and he begins to cry. In many ways you could say that at this particular moment Dante is caught between Virgil and Beatrice. Not just in their capacity as his guides but what they represent: Virgil is a stand in for reason and intellectual work, while Beatrice represents love. Now, before we fall too deep into Jordan Peterson-esque dichotomies I have to clarify that this is divine love, the kind of love that grants access to a greater kind of knowledge than any earthly philosophy. Which is different from the female=emotions; male=logic distinction characteristic of modern incel culture.

Now back to us.

In the last phase of the canto Beatrice expresses her judgment of Dante through a long speech in which she chastises him for his flailing loyalty after her death. She says that far too soon after her death, he renounced her memory in favour of another “mistress” and although he had been blessed by God to find the right path, he consciously chose the false way. The mistress in question is philosophy. What Dante is saying, through Beatrice’s character, is that once the object of his love disappeared, he took up a strictly intellectual existence. But earthly knowledge led his further and further away from God’s will, which how he ended up in the dark wood in which Inferno begins.

Now that he is reunited with the spirit of the woman whose earthly form inspired that first love in him, he can resume the journey on the right path.

But in order to do so, he must “pay a tax”. Although he has already symbolically done penance by  climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante must confess his sin himself. Which he will do in the next canto. See you there!

The canto opens with references to courtly (donna innamorata) and classical (nymph) poetry, however, it is deeply theological. 

In the last 5 cantos of Purgatory, Dante embarks upon a theological argument that will make use of a lot of Scriptural imagery and motifs. In canto 29, he establishes the repertoire of allusions and images that he will be using, through a minute description of what he sees. 

So what does he see?

Dante tells us that he and Matelda continue to walk along their respective riverbanks, like the mirror image of one another, until suddenly, a brilliant light illuminates the forest, like a lightning flash that never fades away. The light is quickly followed by sound, and Dante describes hearing the sweetest most uplifting melody, unlike anything human ears have ever heard. 

Here he stops his description to make a small victim-blaming parenthesis against Eve. Dante feels that in eating the apple, Eve has robbed him of the pleasure to live eternally in this unearthly place. And here’s my parenthesis: it’s interesting that in discourse around humanity’s banishment from the Garden of Eden, it has become standard practice to point the finger at Eve as the person responsible. Eve was weak to trust the serpent, Eve was stupid to eat the apple, Eve was manipulative to give it to Adam - so the elders of the Church say. But I never understood why this argument (ostensibly popularised by men) expects a woman, traditionally believed to be second to man in all aspects, to be strong enough to go toe to toe with the literal Devil but we forgive Adam for being “seduced” by Eve…

Aaaaaanyway.

Overwhelmed by the light and the song and what he starts to see unravel before his eyes, Dante does what any respectable poet would: he invokes the muses. More specifically, he invokes Urania, the muse of geometry and celestial things, thus marking the beginning of the third and final part of his work, in which he will be describing heaven. 

As a sort of prelude to what he’s about to see in Paradiso, Dante is greeted by a procession that is undoubtedly divine in nature. 

We’re told that seven golden trees appear on the horizon, which upon drawing closer, turn out to be seven tall candelabra. In his amazement, Dante turns to Virgil, who is utterly speechless. This is only a brief mention but an important one in driving home the idea that from this point onward Virgil is not only unsuitable to continue the journey due to his position as a pagan, but he is also useless as a mentor and guide. 

Finally, here comes the procession. At first sight, the group of beings Dante describes looks like nothing more than a group of random, albeit odd people. What they actually are is an embodiment of the structure of the Scripture.

Dante says that once he arrives at a bend in the river where he is closest to the seven candelabra he stops, mesmerized by the streams of coloured light that the candelabra release across the sky. The reference to the seven streams of light is found in the book of Revelation, as well as Isaiah, where the prophet mentions seven representations of the spirit of God. 

Behind the candelabra, there are 24 elders. They represent the 24 books of the Old Testament, through which God spoke to humans before the coming of Christ - the lilies on their heads are a symbol of faith that the redeemer is still to come.

Then come four winged animals, representing the four evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At this point, Dante addresses us directly to explain his inability to describe them more precisely but he does mention Ezekiel, who describes Mark as a lion, John as an eagle, Luke as an ox, and Matthew as a man. 

In their midst, a gryphon draws a chariot. The gryphon was the mystic emblem of Christ, which encapsulated his double nature, human and divine. 

Its head and wings are those of an eagle and they are all golden in colour, to symbolize nobility. The rest of its body is that of a lion, red and white in colour, which symbolizes Christ’s passion and purity respectively.

This is of course all conjecture - while the procession is made up of symbols that Dante takes from the Bible, the gryphon is his own invention, so we don’t know for sure what his intentions were in choosing this creature as a Christ figure.

Most scholars agree that the fact that he chose to make him half eagle, the symbol of imperial Rome, must be related to Dante’s political theory - especially considering that he then compares the image of the chariot to chariots used to celebrate the military triumphs of Rome. 

But it’s hard to believe that Dante was too preoccupied with secular matters at this moment and, in fact, he is quick to observe that this chariot far exceeds in splendour any that has ever existed. If elsewhere the eagle is a symbol of the empire as justice, here we’re talking divine justice. 

After the figure of Christ, we move to the era of the Holy Spirit, which descended upon humanity after the death of Christ and which takes the form of the seven theological and moral virtues. In the procession, they are represented by the seven women walking alongside the chariot, three on one side and four on the other. In the group of three, each woman has a different colour: white (representing Faith), red (Charity), and green (Hope). 

On the other side, the remaining four moral virtues are wearing purple robes - purple being the colour of the Roman Empire (hence imperial purple). They are Courage, Justice, and Temperance, followed by Wisdom, who has a third eye. 

Then there follow two groups of elders, which represent the scriptural books written in the early years of the Church. The first pair represents the Acts of the Apostles, written by Saint Luke, who was a doctor, hence the reference to Hippocrates, and the fourteen epistles of Saint Paul. 

The next four “humble looks” are the four minor Epistles by James, Peter, John, and Jude. 

Behind them, the last man in procession is a personification of Saint John’s Book of Revelation.

I wrote earlier that this canto offers us a list of all the biblical imagery that Dante will be using for the rest of Purgatorio. But that’s not the only interesting about it. First of all, it’s so visually and lyrically stunning. It’s also an impressive display of Dante’s knowledge and close reading of the Bible and other religious texts. But I think it’s also a message for us, the reader, about how he would like us to read his work. Look at the attention he gives to the way that the Bible is subdivided into 24 books of the Old Testament, the gospels of the evangelists, the minor epistles, etc. Check out all these numbers, he seems to say and pay attention to the numbers that my work is structured around. If only he knew how many people have fussed over it for the past seven centuries…

We made it! After more than a year and a half of journeying together through the afterlife, we enter Earthly Paradise. 

Canto 28 is all about pleasure and desire. Virgil’s last words to Dante, at the end of canto 27, encouraged him to trust his sense of pleasure and desire, and as he steps onto the top of Mount Purgatory, that is exactly what he does. 

The first part of the canto is fully descriptive as if to follow the pilgrim’s complete self-abandon to his new surroundings. Immediately, we note the juxtaposition between the “holy forest” of Earthly Paradise and the “dark wood” of Inferno, canto 1. A nice reminder of how far we’ve come. 

Dante is mesmerized - the garden is encrusted in beautiful flowers that grow of their own accord, a pleasant breeze makes the atmospheric conditions just right and birdsong rises from the treetops. The only things capable of pulling him out of this daydream are a brook and the sight of a beautiful woman. Or rather, the river is separating him from her. 

Without telling us her name, which we will discover in canto 31 is Matelda, Dante describes her graceful and confident dance around the river bank, as she gathers multicolored blooms and sings to herself. Desperate to hear her song he bids her closer and she obliges. 

There are two things that stand out here. Dante’s description of the first woman he meets in the realm of God borrows pagan imagery, more specifically the figure of Proserpina (the Roman name for Persephone). This is interesting to me because it shows just how much of a syncretist Dante was, that even on the doorstep of heaven he still makes references to classical antiquity. 

The second thing I love about Matelda’s depiction here is the description of her walk, “scarcely setting foot in front of foot”, which suggests that there’s a floating quality to her presence and which we haven’t seen in any of the souls of hell and purgatory. 

When she finally gets close enough to the river, Dante says she gives him the greatest gift: she raises her eyes.

 I don’t mean to police anyone’s tone here, but the simile between Matelda’s eyes and Venus’s loving gaze reads very sensual to me (It seems like Dante really took “pleasure and desire” very seriously) - especially if we consider the subsequent description of Dante’s dismay at the fact that they are still across the river from one another. 

Luckily, Matelda is slightly more composed and we actually get a bit of dialogue here - well, as expected Dante doesn’t say much, so more of a monologue. 

She confirms that we are, indeed, in the Earthly Paradise, the place in which “through his own fault, Man did not dwell long”. She also gives us some details about the geography of the place, explaining that it raises far above any mountain that exists on Earth. For this reason, the garden is not subject to the laws of the physical world, but rather it exists in relation to the perfect movement of the heavenly spheres which God has set in motion (Dante will see the spheres in Paradise, so it’s ok if that doesn’t make much sense to you right now).

In a similar vein, the plants come from God whose force makes it possible for them to flower and bear fruit without needing a seed to grow from. The river that separates them is also from God. But this isn’t the only interesting thing about this river - its waters make anyone who passes through them forget their sinful past. 

Dante lifted this idea from classical literature as well as the river’s name: Lethe. However, he adds a Christian layer to it. In the pagan Underworld, Lethe simply made the dead forget but Dante’s version of it splits into two. On one side of the Earthly Paradise, the river it’s called Lethe, and it makes you forget about your sins, but on the other, it’s called Eunoe and it makes you remember the times when you were virtuous. 

Another fun note is that the word Eunoe is Dante’s own invention, from the Greek eu- meaning good or well and noesis, meaning knowledge. 

Speaking of knowledge, the canto ends on a “footnote” to use Matelda’s term. Having answered Dante’s question, Matelda volunteers that this is the place that some of those ancient poets dreamt of as Parnassus and where they imagined an Age of Gold where people fed on nectar. 

This nod to Dante’s obsession with classical literature and myth has a finality to it. It’s as if Matelda was telling Dante that although he appreciates his knowledge of the classics, the time has come to stop it with the Proserpina references and prepare his mind for some real knowledge. Which is what Beatrice has in store for him in the next phase of his journey.

The evening is about to fall over Mount Purgatory and the three poets are closer to Earthly Paradise than ever. They just have to walk through a bit of fire. 

All throughout Purgatorio we’ve seen Dante’s position shift slightly from that of an external observer of the punitive function of hell to that of a partial participant in the process of purgation. We’ve seen him talk about the arduous journey up the mountain and we’ve watched angels periodically wipe Ps from his forehead to mark his symbolic purgation of the sin allocated to whichever terrace he had just crossed. 

In canto 27, however, he has to become more literally involved in purgation. After all, he’s about to step into Earthly Paradise and meet his beloved Beatrice, so he needs to be squeaky clean. 

The idea of purity is introduced already in line 8, when we are told that beyond the wall of fire which holds the lustful penitents, Dante can see an angel. The angel stands at the edge of the 7th terrace and sings beati mundo corde the sixth Beatification for the gospel of Matthew, which translates into English as “blessed be the pure of heart”. And as we saw in the previous couple of cantos the fire of the 7th terrace is both a physical representation of the passion that burned in the hearts of the lustful and a means of purifying the soul through physical suffering. 

And should these hints and allusions be too opaque, the angel stops his singing and tells the three poets that they have to let the fire “bite them” before they can proceed to the upper levels of the afterlife. 

Dante is taken aback by the suggestion, which is more than fair - unlike everyone else here, he has a material body and is not quite ready to part with it. But Virgil intervenes and tries to reassure him that nothing bad is going to happen. In doing so he reassumes the tone of an authoritative guide which we were so used to in Inferno. He tells Dante not to fear because while there “may be agony” in purgatory, there is “never death”. It’s unclear where he suddenly got this knowledge about the nature of purgatory, considering he was entirely dependent on other people to find his way up the mountain. 

Nevertheless, he tries to hype Dante up, but as you can imagine “agony” isn’t exactly much better than death, so Dante is still reluctant to quite literally jump in the fire. So Virgil proceeds to appeal to him by bringing up all their past adventures, including how Virgil had led Dante to safety on the back of the monster Geryon. This doesn’t work either, so finally, Virgil reminds Dante that on the other side of the fire, Beatrice awaits. Needless to say, this works. 

This is an interesting and - as usual - not at all random choice. In the context of the Divine Comedy, Beatrice represents the saved soul, spiritual contemplation, and divine love. Which is exactly what awaits Dante in the next phase of his journey. 

But in the context of Dante’s life and literary production, Beatrice represents the muse, the angel-woman who elevates the poet’s work through the inspiration she provides. It’s not a coincidence that Dante only responds to her name being invoked immediately after meeting Guinizzelli and having a conversation about poetry and courtly love. 

So the scorching heat of the fire becomes bearable and Virgil goes on and on about Beatrice, but before they make it through the wall of flames and out on the other side, it’s night. And you know what happens in purgatory at night: nothing. As Dante reminds us in lines 74-75, the natural law of the mountain is such that everyone suddenly runs out of energy and they have to stop whatever they’re doing. So the poets are forced to sit down and “rest” until morning, presumably while they are still in the flames. I say presumably because the fire isn’t mentioned again until 40+ lines later when Virgil talks about “the temporal and eternal flames” that Dante has seen up until this point of his journey, but it’s not clear to me that he means they have just come out of the fire. 

But let me not get ahead of myself. 

As the poets sit down, Dante begins “ruminating” on what he has seen and heard thus far. He describes this new state of affairs through pastoral imagery, suggesting that the two poets guarded him as shepherds protect their flocks from predators. And before long a sleep comes over him and he has another one of his semi-prophetic dreams. 

A woman appears to him in the act of gathering flowers and she sings, to no one in particular, that her name is Leah and that her hands are always doing/making something. Her sister, Rachel, will always be found contemplating her own image in the looking glass.

This is a biblical reference. Leah and Rachel were both married to Jason because… well their father Laban was essentially a psychopath (read about Leah here).

Leah and Rachel are often presented as opposites and this is also their function here. Leah is representative of labour while Rachel embodies contemplation. Their appearance here is tied to the theme of time and how humans choose to use it - either actively involved in the practical concerns of life or dedicating one’s life to intellectual matters. 

Dante was himself a political activist, so it’s very unlike him to diminish work as an expression of human will, but as he is about to enter Earthly Paradise, he realizes that in order to understand the spiritual truths about to be revealed to him, he has to lean into the pure reason. 

Leah and Rachel also foreshadow the two people Dante is about to meet next - Matilda and Beatrice. But before we can get to them, we must first say goodbye to our beloved Virgil. 

As dawn returns, Dante wakes up and is ready to climb the remaining distance to the edge of the 7h terrace and cross into Earthly Paradise. However, once the poets come out of the fire, Virgil reveals that this is as far as he can go. 

The canto closes with Virgil’s heartfelt parting words, in which he encourages Dante to trust the clear sense of judgment he has developed over the course of the last few days under Virgil’s guidance. 

Dante’s will is “healthy, upright, free and whole”, he says. So there’s no need for his guidance anymore. And in a ceremonial gesture that mirrors the beginning of the journey when he bound Dante with a reed, Virgil now crowns him master of his own life.

We continue our journey through the 7th terrace, where the lustful are purging their sin by walking through a ring of fire extending around the mountain. 

Immediately, we get to the matter of Dante’s corporality - as he tries to keep his distance from the fire by walking parallel to it, his body casts a shadow on the flames. I’ll pause here for a second to complain about my translation (the Robin Kirkpatrick), which says that Dante’s shadow “made fire seem fierier”. The Italian word, “rovente”, which can, of course, be translated as “fiery”, comes from the Latin verb rubeo, which means to “be red” or “become red”. In this context, I think what Dante is referring to is the way fire looks a deeper red in the dark than it does in the daytime (hence it is his shadow that makes the fire “rovente”) which is such a clever and subtle piece of imagery and it breaks my heart that while in Italian we get this pretty visual, the English reader of this edition gets “the fire seems fierier”. Like, really??

Rant over. 

Just like every dead soul we’ve met throughout the entire poem, upon noticing that he casts a shadow, the lustful are curious to know Dante’s story. So they flock to him and start to ask questions. It’s worth noting the way the penitents move towards Dante but are careful not to get too close “where they should not be burned” (line 15). For several canto’s now we’ve seen that the penitents are different from the sinners of Inferno in that they rejoice at the opportunity to suffer. This is unsurprising since in hell the pain is as pointless as it is endless, whereas here pain =purgation and ultimately leads to salvation, albeit hundreds of years away.

This idea of a group of souls choosing to stay in the flames is reminiscent of the third ring of the 7th circle of hell, which held the violent against God. You will remember that the sinners were sentenced to an eternity of laying down (blasphemous), crouching (usurers), or running (sodomites) on a circle of burning sand while flakes of fire rained down on them. The sodomites were the only ones allowed to move so that they could get a bit of relief from the scorching heat. 

I bring this up because, for reasons I haven’t really read much about (and the comment to my edition of Purgatorio seems to ignore completely), the terrace of Lust holds both people who have sinned of passion in heterosexual and homosexual relationships. 

Dante says that before he can tell the penitents anything about himself, another group of spirits arrives through the flames behind them. The members of the two groups kiss and without stopping they shout offenses at each other, one group in reference to Sodom and Gomorrah and the other in reference to Pasiphae, before separating again.

We’ve already seen that each terrace comes with examples of the sin purged there and of the opposing virtue. As usual, the examples we get are both biblical and pagan in origin. The Sodom and Gomorrah cry is obviously related to the cities’ history of sexual depravity, particularly homosexuality. Pasiphae you will remember from the story of the Minotaur: she was the wife of Minos, who after seeing the Cretan Bull, asked Daedalus to build her wooden cow so she could climb in and have sex with it. The rest is… Well, not exactly history, but you get my point. 

What is obvious here is that for some reason Dante chose to lump the gays and the straights together here, while in Inferno they were not only separated but homosexuality was punished several circles (and therefore degrees of gravity) deeper down than lust in heterosexual people. I wonder what made him decide that homosexuality, although still a sin, is less serious than it was when he wrote Inferno… 

There are two things that I want to linger on from the central part of the canto. The first is that in explaining who he is and why he gets to walk through the realms of the afterlife while still alive, Dante says “I make this climb to be no longer blind” (line 58), which is my favourite thing he says about the purpose of his journey in the whole poem. It’s even better if you consider that he had struggled with his eyesight for most of his life. 

The second is the way he chooses to tell us that homosexuality is being purged here. After telling the spirit addressing him about himself, Dante asks the still-nameless soul to name some of the lustful. The man says there are too many to name and also he doesn’t know all of them. But he confirms that the second crowd is full of people who ‘offended as did Caesar - who once heard “you queen!”’. This is in reference to a story by Suetonius according to which Julius Caesar had become a bottom for the king of Bithynia and his troops knew about it and even called him “queen”. Incredible gossip. 

Anyway, in the last part of the canto, we find out that the man speaking is Guido Guinizzelli, an academic and jurist from Bologna, poet of the Stilnovo tradition and responsible for the concept that the capacity to love is the defining feature of true nobility and that love can only exists in noble hearts. Many scholars see Guinizzelli as Dante’s main influence in writing Vita Nova, the work he wrote to celebrate Beatrice after her death. 

Dante is visibly flustered to be speaking to one of his main influences, but as we have already seen almost every time he meets a great poet, the person in question is actually super respectful and flattering to Dante… Probably nothing suspicious going on. 

The same happens with the last person we meet in this canto, the Occitan poet Arnaut Daniel, known predominantly for his canzoni. Both Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel wrote in their mother tongues, so it’s not random that Dante praises both of them as some of the greatest poets - after all, he is writing in his vernacular, too. 

The canto ends with a short speech from Arnaut himself, which Dante attempts to reproduce in the poet’s original language. I trust that whatever edition you’re reading provided a translation of this part as well. Ultimately, I don’t think the point of this last part is what Arnaut actually says, but rather, it’s an opportunity for Dante to show off his skill and knowledge of foreign vernaculars, as well as (in my opinion), an opportunity to show that vernacular languages in general are an appropriate medium for high literature.

It only took Dante 33 cantos of writing about hell and 24 of purgatory to finally ask the question: if these are spirits, how come their appearance mimics the physical consequences of their punishment?

Corporality in the afterlife has already been touched upon here and there (think about Pier delle Vigne in the forest of the suicides, for instance), but in canto 25, Dante finally decides to get into the (pseudo) scientific nitty-gritty of his imaginings. Not that he needed to - in fact, I’d go as far as saying that we did not need this long-winded Christian take on Aristotelian biology. But, in case you hadn’t noticed by now, it’s very important for Dante to be universally acknowledged as a philosopher and man of science as well as a poet. 

So here we are. 

Dante asks Virgil how is it possible that the gluttons look emaciated despite no longer needing food. A straightforward enough question, if you ask me, however, the answer is less so. As we’ve already grown accustomed to in Purgatorio, Virgil’s knowledge of what’s going on here is limited. As such, he has often spoken in metaphors and analogies and this is no different. To explain the relationship between body and soul, he first makes a literary reference to the story of Meleager, who Ovid writes about in Metamorphoses.

The story goes that when he was born his life was magically connected to a burning log that his mother had stolen from a fire. After he killed his mother’s brothers as an adult, the woman threw the log back into the fire and when it was consumed by the flames Meleager died. Since this example does little in the way of clearing up things, Virgil then invites Dante to think of a mirror and the way an object’s reflection imitates it. Finally, he gives up, deferring to Statius who, having been saved, has access to divine information that Virgil will never accede to. 

Statius’s explanation is as follows: inside the stomach, everything that a human being eats is reworked into a substance called “chyle”, which is then passed to the liver, where it is turned into a rough kind of blood. This blood is then sent to the heart where it is “perfected”. This perfect blood has formative powers, meaning it can become tissue and organs of the body. However, a small percentage of this blood remains in the heart where it undergoes a third process of refinement. In the case of women, this blood becomes menstrual blood, which has the passive power to create independent life. In men, it becomes semen, which is (according to Dante) the active ingredient in creating independent life. When the two types of blood combine, a fetus is biologically generated. 

After some time has passed, however, God personally intervenes in the biological process by bestowing “memory, intelligence and will” (v. 82) upon the newly created human. 

These qualities (which form the rational) combine with the spiritual soul in the way the sun rays combine with the juice of grapes to form wine. And just like you cannot separate wine into its distinct components, you cannot separate the rational soul from the spiritual one after death. On the contrary, Statius explains that at death a sort of rebirth takes place, in which the soul is the main component. And since the soul is an expression of the individual’s full being, it will radiate its self-consciousness into the semblance of physical matter. So since the penitent gluttons’ salient trait in life was insatiable hunger, in death they take the shape of people who have never known satiety. Hence the emaciation. 

Needless to say to the modern reader this can come across as needlessly technical, not to mention factually incorrect. Sperm is not the product of the most refined blood in an individual’s body and the female reproductive cells are by no means “passive”. But hey, Aristotle couldn’t get everything right. As for Dante - he just really wanted to have a finger in all the intellectual pies…

Suddenly, two-thirds of the canto in, we move from chit-chat to action. The way up to the seventh and last terrace is extremely narrow and flanked by a steep valley on one side and soaring flames on the other. This is where lust is being purged. 

The image of fire is so evocative here: those who have been consumed by romantic passion - traditionally represented by flames - have to walk through fire to purge their sin. But beyond the symbolic relationship between flames and love, in medieval tradition fire more generally signifies purity, from representations of the Christian Holy Spirit as a flying flame, to the more pragmatic uses of fire as a disinfectant. So it’s not a coincidence that Dante himself will have to pass through the wall of fire before he steps through the last terrace and into the Earthly Paradise. 

And as we’ve been accustomed to, the penitents can be heard singing a hymn, this time the 7th-century ‘Summae Deus clementiae’, which is pretty on the nose considering that one of its verses literally asks God to help the praying individual to contain their lust. 

The canto closes with an elegant confirmation that all these songs have been a tool of purgation. Watching the penitents walk through the fire and sing the hymn over and over, he says

‘This form of song will serve for them, I think,

throughout the time the fire is scorching them.

With this concern and fed by foods like this,

Sin’s final wound is sewn up once again.’

This canto is all movement. Physically, lyrically, and narratively, there’s a non-stop back and forth to it that keeps us (and that includes Dante) on our toes. 

From the opening, we are told that the walking and talking have not stopped. Dante and Forese are advancing along the 6th terrace catching up about whatever it is that 13th-century mates who haven’t seen each other since one of them died have to talk about. 

This is until Dante asks for news of Forese’s sister, Piccarda, who we are told (with a Greek pagan reference to Mount Olympus) is enjoying herself in heaven. Then, seemingly unprompted, Forese offers to name a bunch of other people purging the sin of gluttony on the terrace, explaining that although they have been deprived of their likeness (remember they are skinny beyond recognition) they still have their names. 

This is an interesting detail if you think back at the concept of personal identity all throughout Inferno: the way that every soul was desperate to be recognised and remembered or the way that the suicides were deprived of their bodies suggests that stripping a soul of its identity is yet another punitive layer of hell. 

But here, among the saved, everyone still has their name attached to them, despite their (temporarily) corrupted appearance. Another big difference between these souls and those in hell is their attitude toward Dante. Last year we read of multiple instances in which the sinners were hostile to Dante in some way or other and, contrary to the recognition theme I mentioned above, some who even hated the fact that he knew them. But this is because in hell naming also meant shaming. Here the souls have no problem with being recognised. 

Forese goes on to name a few historical figures - a pope here, a nobleman there - but the one person that captures Dante’s attention is Bonagiunta Orbicciani degli Overardi, a judge and notary from Lucca, who also dabbled in poetry around the same time as Dante. 

In fact, the most hilarious bit of their interaction is that Bonagiunta recognises Dante as the author of Vita nuova, the part prose part verse work he wrote after Beatrice’s death. Not exactly the most humble introduction to a character. 

But then, when Bonagiunta expresses admiration for Dante’s style, the latter explains that he was merely the scribe of that which Love told him to write. You have to give it to him, no one does false modesty like Dante. Especially when you consider that the false modesty is actually a dig at Bonagiunta and the poetry of his master, Guittone d’Arezzo, another famous poet of the time known for his particularly wordy and overly contrived style. By saying that he “simply follows” the dictates of Love, Dante claims a degree of spontaneity and a direct connection to the muses/poetic genius/ whatever you want to call it, than those who sit around and think about the hardest most complicated sentences they can possibly come up with. 

Not only this, but he actually makes Bonagiunta acknowledge his poetic shortcomings. The fact that we haven’t really heard of Bonagiunta outside of this appearance in Dante’s own work makes it pretty clear that his work wasn’t very good. But did Dante have to add insult to injury? 

Bonagiunta also adds a small prediction to the prophecy count - apparently, a woman has just been born (scholars have no idea who this might be) who will be very kind to Dante in the early years of his exile.

But we don’t have time to linger on Dante’s delicious pettiness or any more prophecies because immediately Forese jumps back into the conversation to say that he will have to leave Dante behind because he has been wasting precious time walking at his pace. But, like the great pal he is, he asks Dante when they’ll see each other again - which is basically asking Dante when he’s gonna die! 

Dante says that he doesn’t know, but considering the state of Florence, fingers crossed it’s soon??? Hilarious exchange.

In the next section of the canto, the three poets come to a second tree, which just like the first is in the shape of an upside-down triangle. This one is also ripe with fruit and surrounded by spirits who cry and beg it for a bit of food until suddenly they lose interest in it. My reading here is that the humiliation drains the desire for earthly pleasure out of them, thus purging the sin they committed in life. It’s as if they lust below the tree until they have no lust left… Would be interested to hear other theories if you have any. 

Like the previous tree, this one also has a voice between its branches, presenting the sinners with examples of gluttony punished. The first example is that of the centaurs who got drunk at a wedding and tried to rape the women guests but were killed by Theseus. 

The second is from a biblical episode in which the Hebrew general Gideon forbids some of his soldiers who had indulged their appetites to partake in the battle against Midian and get a share of the spoils. As we’ve been accustomed to, these examples draw from Christian and pagan traditions. 

The last phase of the canto brings us back to Dante and the poets, who have been walking in silence for 1000 steps, and suddenly they hear a disembodied voice ask where they’re off to so deep in thought. The voice belongs to the angel that guards the staircase to the 7th terrace. 

We don’t get a description of it beyond being told that it has an oxymoronic presence: it’s more red and bright than the hottest furnace, but its physical proximity sends a cooling breeze toward Dante. Like all the other angels, it erases one of the Ps from Dante’s forehead - the penultimate one! - and shares a few words of praise and beatitude. But instead of transcribing a Pslam verse, Dante presents his own idea of what it means to be blessed: to feel a hungering continuously, but in a just and measured way. It’s unclear what this looks like in practical terms, but it seems to me similar to the Epicurean concept of balanced enjoyment of life’s pleasures and not the ascetic renunciation that has been popular with Christianity at various points. 

The theme of literary genealogy continues to branch out from the previous two cantos and into the opening of canto 23. 

The canto starts with a hunting simile in which Dante compares his awed stare at the upside-down triangle tree we walked upon at the end of canto 22 to the searching eyes of a hunter of small birds. What he means to say is that he’s getting distracted and is falling behind, at which point Virgil, his “more-than-father”, tells him to hurry and keep up with him and Statius. 

It wouldn’t be a stretch for me to suggest that the image in lines 7-9 of Virgil and Statius walking ahead in conversation with each other and Dante trailing after them is a manifestation of the literary family tree that Dante has been trying to create over the past few cantos. And when we meet a couple of literary figures contemporary to Dante in this canto and the next, we’ll see that tree branch out horizontally, too.

But despite Dante’s familiarity with the person he’s about to meet in this canto, their encounter isn’t entirely seamless.

As the poets make their way along the 6th terrace, they’re overtaken by a crowd of penitents who go round and round seemingly mesmerized by the tree and singing “Labia mea, Domine”, a line from Psalm 50:15, which is often translated into English as “O Lord, open my lips”. As Dante is about to find out momentarily, the 6th terrace is where spirits atone for gluttony. 

Watching the entranced crowd pass him by Dante becomes in turn entranced by them, more specifically by their physical appearance. He writes

‘Each one was dark and hollow round the eyes,

pallid in feature, and so gaunt and waste

their skin was formed to show the very bone.’

The description is significant both because of how evocative it is and because this is actually the first time that we get this type of Inferno-esque description in Purgatory. Last year we grew accustomed to the paradox underpinning Dante’s description of the sinners he met in hell: they were immaterial specters but somehow suffered various degrees of physical decay. But up until this point of Purgatory, we haven’t come across such vivid descriptions of corporal punishment. In part because a lot of the pain of purgatory seems to be of a moral/spiritual nature, but in my opinion also because a lot of the souls here are probably pretty far along the process of purgation and therefore closer to their human form.

But greed - of which gluttony is a subcategory - is a very special sin in Dante’s book (I couldn’t help the pun). Robin Kirkpatrick, whose translation I’ve been reading, makes an excellent point that, for Dante, greed is the opposite of justice. He writes

“Justice is the highest virtue that human beings are capable of and ensures that one individual lives in a well-proportioned relationship with another. Gluttons, in seeking more than their share, distort that balance.”

For this reason, he argues, their punishment is a distortion of their physical being. 

The same distortion of personhood is implied in Inferno 6, where Ciacco, a sinner from the circle of gluttony, tells Dante that he was a contemporary Florentine, but the former fails to recognise him. 

In Purgatorio, however, the souls seem to have the word OMO stamped in their faces (presumably because the hollows of their eyes look like O’s and their browbones and noses look like the letter M), which is an archaic form of the Italian ‘uomo’ meaning man. So, although distorted by sin, these people are still recognisable human beings. 

This glimmer of recognition becomes a fully-fledged moment of recognition like we have seen many times before when one of the penitents speaks to Dante and the latter recognizes the voice of his friend Forese Donati. In life, Forese was a distant cousin of Gemma Donati, Dante’s wife, and a rather lowbrow poet himself. He’s most famous for a series of tenzoni (a tenzone is a type of offensive poetic exchange - think rap battle or diss track) he and Dante exchanged in their youth. 

This is an interesting detail when it comes to the literary family tree I mentioned above: what exactly is Dante trying to say about the state of contemporary poetry by placing poets like Virgil and Statius at the root of the tree and presenting us with Forese’s insult-poetry as an example of what the most recent branches look like?

Forese explains that the process of purgation for gluttony involves an all-consuming “thirsting” and “hungering” triggered by the aromas released from the oddly shaped tree. The experience is incredibly painful, but this is a pain that the penitents welcome in the same way that Christ welcomed the cross (line 73) because going through it brings them closer to God. He also explains, in response to Dante’s puzzlement, that he made it so far up the mountain despite only being dead for five human years thanks to his wife Nella’s prayers - this is the first time that we actually see the effects of human prayers on behalf of the dead. 

Thinking about his beloved Nella, triggers a bizarre and pretty misogynistic critique of Florence in Forese. He says that his wife is so not like all the other Florentine women who have taken up the scandalous fashion of wearing revealing necklines which makes them more vulgar than the women of Sardinia or Saracen women. But, he adds, what is to be expected of the women of a city that has been overrun by corruption even among its most virtuous citizens (men, I imagine)?

After his rant, Forese wants to hear how come Dante, a living man, has made it here. The explanation, which we all have now heard a dozen times, closes the canto. 

Dante begins the canto by locating us in space: he and his travel companions have gone past the angel guarding the staircase between the 5th and 6th terrace, another P has disappeared from his forehead and we are now walking among the gluttonous. 

But it will be a while until we actually learn anything about this new environment and the spirits in it. 

First, we get a rare note about Dante’s own embodied experience of Purgatory. It’s been already mentioned that according to the (magical) laws of physics on Mount Purgatory, traveling through the lower terraces is significantly more difficult than at the top of the mountain. If you remember, in one of the earlier cantos Dante observes that the staircase between one terrace and the next gets gradually less steep - this is a physical manifestation of the process of purgation. It’s as if to say that the farther a person is from God, the more difficult it is to advance in their journey toward heaven. 

On a more personal note, Dante’s “lightness” is also related to the fact that, as it was explained when the first P vanished from his forehead, as Dante completes new stages of his pilgrimage his own soul undergoes a process of purgation. It’s not unusual that he would mention this “freedom from toil” he speaks of in line 8. After all, avarice/greed - symbolised by the she-wolf - is the sin that leads to all the other types of corruption spiritual and social, in Dante’s view. So it’s no big surprise when the conversation returns to the topic of avarice.

As the (now three) poets begin their journey through the 6th terrace, Virgil takes a special interest in Statius. Since the latter showed such great admiration for him, Virgil says that he hopes Statius won’t take offense if he asks a particularly personal question, namely: How can someone as intellectually refined as you harbour such an ugly feeling as avarice? 

Statius, after acknowledging the spiritual fallibility of intellectuals, reveals that actually, his sin was not avarice but rather prodigality.

If you’ve been here since our reading of Inferno last year, you will remember that in the 4th circle of hell, avarice and prodigality were punished together. Sinners would push heavy boulders around in a circle, avaricious on one side and prodigal on the other, and they would then crash into each other in the middle, where they shouted insults at one another. 

At the time I wrote that the reason behind this coupling is that, although in contrasting ways, both sets of people sinned by having a disproportionate interest in material belongings. Either by hoarding wealth or by spending too much, the avaricious and the prodigal strayed from the Aristotelian concept of moderation. 

The same logic applies here, and Statius clarifies that he didn’t end up in Purgatory because of avarice, on the contrary, he spent too much money (which is a kind of greed in its own way). Luckily, he explains, he eventually saw the error of his ways thanks to a verse from Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas condemns the avarice that led Polymnestor to kill the young Polydorus, the son of Priam, who had been entrusted to him alongside a huge amount of riches after the fall of Troy. Once his eyes were open to his prodigality, he explains, Statius quickly repented for the rest of his sins too. 

This is unclear to Virgil because, as he says, when Statius wrote the Thebaid there was no trace of Christianity in his poetry. In the real world this is because, as I wrote last week, there is no proof that Statius actually converted. But in Dante’s world, not only did Statius become quite the devout Christian, but he came to his conversion through Virgil’s poetry. 

Statius explains that he kept his conversion a secret for fear of persecution, which became rampant during the reign of the emperor Domitian. During that time Statius did his best to help the Christian prophets who got caught spreading the word but he was too scared to come out as a Christian himself. For this reason, he says, he spent an extra 400 years in terrace four where souls atone for sloth (in his case in the sense of a lack of zeal for God).

But the salient theme of Statius’s conversion, real or fictional, is that it was mediated by poetry and more specifically Virgil’s poetry. He says that Virgil’s verses about the beginning of a new race, “born of Heaven”, resonated with the teachings of those preaching Christians that were becoming so popular at the time. Of course, we know that Virgil had no way of knowing about Christ and that he was actually referring to Aeneas and the Italian people. Nonetheless, to Statius Virgil quickly became a guide towards God through his poetry. 

It’s hard not to look at this part of the canto as a case of Dante speaking about himself through another character. All this business about Virgil being a guide towards God for a poet who was “lost” in his sinful ways is far too familiar to ignore. 

But I think that this part is also another example of Dante’s inner struggle to come to terms with the fact that some people will not make it into the Kingdom of God, no matter how exceptional they were, if they did not accept Christ as their saviour. We’ve already seen this in the 7th circle of hell when Dante met his beloved teacher Brunetto Latini, who besides being gay led an exemplary life. 

Virgil’s “sin” is even more innocuous: he was born too early to know about Christianity. And to add insult to injury, his poetry is now a gateway drug into the church for others and he still has to stay in hell. One thing about the Christian god, he does not bend the rules. 

After another bit of chit-chat between Virgil and Statius where they catch up on which other ancient literary figures are in hell, the three poets arrive at a tree that tapers like an inverted pyramid, with wide branches at the top that gradually become shorter the closer they get to the trunk. Immediately, the image of a tree in the terrace of gluttony brings to mind the tree of knowledge from the Garden of Eden. But we’ll get more into that in the next canto. 

The tree seems to be emitting voices that give examples of restraint, which is the virtue corresponding to gluttony. First, we hear about the Virgin Mary at the Marriage at Cana, where she asks Jesus to help the guests despite her own needs. Then the voice tells of the Roman women who only drank water and of Daniel, who persuaded the children of Israel to live only on lentils and water and received knowledge and skill as a reward from God. Lastly, the voice mentions Saint John the Baptist who lives off of honey and locusts.

With such a menu on the table, I wonder what the gluttons have to do to atone for their disproportionate love of food. Stay tuned xx

In my first year of undergrad, I had a compulsory module called “How to read texts”. I remember sitting on a bench in Gordon Square looking over the syllabus and wondering if the degree I’d chosen was the best use of £28,000 since I clearly already knew how to read. In fact, I was doing it at that exact moment.

Fast-forward almost five years and over one thousand Dante newsletter readers later, the question I get the most from people online and off is the same: how do you read Dante? In the most literal way possible - where do you even start?

Read more

Our last canto ended with a terrible earthquake that left Dante with a thousand questions he didn’t dare ask. But this doesn’t mean they’re gone - in fact, canto 21 opens with the same burning desire to know what on Mount Purgatory is going on. 

In true Divine Comedy style, Dante expresses his curiosity through a biblical image, more specifically the episode of Jesus’s meeting with a Samaritan woman told in the gospel of John. He says that his thirst for knowing the source of the earthquake was as intense as the thirst for salvation that plagued the Samaritan woman when Jesus revealed himself to her as Christ the son of God. 

This is a significant image because, in that story, Jesus tells the woman that anyone who follows him will be granted salvation, which was not the case according to the Old Testament, according to which the Messiah was meant to come and save the chosen race, namely Jewish people. By telling a Samaritan woman that she can be saved if she believes in him, Jesus opens the path to salvation to anyone who will convert. 

Dante doesn’t use this as an opening image randomly. One of the predominant themes of canto 21 is conversion, personified by the appearance of Dante and Virgil’s new travel companion, the Roman poet Statius. But let me not get ahead of myself. 

As Dante thinks over the itching questions he - for some reason - doesn’t have the courage to pose to Virgil, a voice calls out to them. For Virgil, who has been struggling to find his way through Purgatory this whole time, this is an opportunity to ask for directions and/or details about this place that he is so unfamiliar with. So he does exactly that.

But since this new soul is a poet himself, he can’t not notice the subtext to Virgil’s propitiatory address in lines 16-18, where he wishes the man that the “heavenly council that keeps me bound in eternal exile, may grant you a place withing that happy court.”

So Statius asks the obvious: is you’re one of those souls that God won’t let into the upper realms, then how did you get here?

At which Virgil politely directly him to the Ps on Dante’s forehead, which are sufficient proof that at least one of them is allowed to travel freely. In fact, he explains, the thread of Dante’s life, which Clotho casts, hasn’t even been cut yet. This is a pagan reference to the three Fates or Moirae, sisters who oversaw the lives of humans. Clotho measured the thread, Lachesis spun it into the various events of the person’s life and Athropos cut it at the moment of death. 

Virgil also explains what we already know: he himself is bound to Hell in eternity, but has been called upon to guide Dante as far as possible on his way among the dead, given that “his eyes as yet don’t see as our eyes do”.

This explanation over, Statius launches into a lengthy explanation of his own. Mount Purgatory is an incredibly static environment, he says. There are no winds or rains or fires to disturb its peace. Every tremor that might shake it happens through divine will. The earthquake they all just witnessed was a ritual marking of a soul’s purgation coming to an end. As it  happens, it’s Statius himself who, after over 500 years of penance, has finally been granted permission to start his journey up into Heaven. 

It’s interesting that Dante has chosen this particular historical figure to use as an example of what happens to the souls of Purgatory when they have finished atoning and can enter the Kingdom of God. Mostly because a few of the biographical details he makes Statius state about himself are not true. For instance, Statius was not from Toulouse, as he says in line 89. And more importantly, there is no historical evidence that Statius had converted to Christianity. So to have him here as the picture of the saved pagan man of letters is a choice. Especially when placed side by side with Virgil, who doesn’t get this redemptive treatment. 

The second part of the encounter between the three sheds a tiny bit more light on Dante’s choice. After introducing himself as the celebrated author of Thebaid and the unfinished Achilleid, Statius reveals that “the seed” that sprang his passion for poetry was Virgil’s Aeneid. So influential was Virgil’s work that he would happily live another year in the pain of Purgatory if that meant that he could have lived at the same time and place as Virgil on Earth. Virgil’s reaction to this is so pure and wholesome, I always smile when reading this passage. Of course, in Dante’s literary eyes, Virgil is countless times the poet that Statius is. But from Virgil’s position as an eternal sinner, to be so highly spoken of by someone who has just received the grace of God is an immense honour. 

Dante also smiles at this coincidence, but mostly because it’s funny to hear one of the poets he admires gush about someone else, and to see his favourite poet and guide blush at the compliment. The whole scene almost gives Dante the upper hand. As if he is the wise and collected voice of reason while the other two are temporarily incapacitated by their very big feelings. 

But the overarching theme of this scene (which will continue in canto 22) is poetry and the power of poetry - sacred or spiritual - to inspire and inform the search for truth. Ultimately, if Virgil’s poetry wasn’t there to work its magic, pagan as it was, maybe Statius would have never converted. And we already know that without Virgil there would be no Dante: no Dante the pilgrim because the beasts in canto one would have probably eaten him alive, and no Dante the poet, because he owes so much of his style to Virgil’s work. 

The canto closes with an even more endearing image of mutual admiration. Dante eventually tells Statius that actually, his guide is THE Virgil and the latter throws himself at his idol’s feet. Virgil reminds him that he cannot hug them because they are both nothing more than shades. In doing so, he affectionately calls him “brother”. 

Statius in turn responds with the heart-melting 

“Now you grasp how great 

the love that warms my heart for you must be, 

when I dismiss from mind our emptiness,

treating a shadow as a thing of weight.’

Canto 20 is a tricky one for most readers. Not because it’s actually difficult from a structural or conceptual perspective; it’s simply so dense with historical references that it becomes hard to follow for the modern reader. Luckily we’re going to get through it together. 

The whole canto takes place on the 5th terrace, which as we saw last week, is where penitents are purging the sin of avarice. Canto 19 ended after Dante’s conversation with Pope Hadrian V and in this canto, he will speak to another historical figure, this time a politician. But before he gets to that, as usual, Dante likes to set the scene. 

In the first lines of the canto Dante tells us that although his thirst for knowledge is not even close to being satisfied, he feels compelled to leave Hadrian behind and keep moving so as to not upset Virgil. So he starts walking again, but the ground on the 5th terrace is littered with so many penitents - who as you will remember from last week are lying face down on the ground and crying - that he can barely move. 

He is both enraged and heartbroken at the sight of them, which triggers an impassioned speech against the “wolf bitch” whose corrupting influence has landed all these people here. You will remember from the very first canto of the Comedy that the wolf, more specifically the she-wolf, is one of the three beasts that blocks Dante’s path out of the dark wood and toward the sunny hill. We saw at the time that the dark wood symbolized sin, the sunny hill represented God and the three beasts each stood for a specific sin. The she-wolf was greed, which in Dante’s view was the worst of all the sins. 

And here he is, restating that opinion in line 11, where he addresses the imaginary wolf saying “you snatch more prey than all the other beasts”. 

The next verse also harks back at that first canto, where the she-wolf was described as painfully thin and growing hungrier the more she eats. Here we see her as “endlessly hollow” in her “hungering”.

And just like the first canto mentions a hound who will come and chase the she-wolf away (which at the time I wrote could be symbolic of Christ in the religious reading of the poem or an emperor in the secular reading). Here Dante seems to be referring exclusively to the second coming of Christ, whose arrival would finally rid humanity of avarice. 

But despite the religious undertones, canto 20 remains a major political one. This becomes clear once Dante meets the central figure of the canto, whose identity is not revealed until the second half. First, we hear him. 

As we’ve grown accustomed to for every level of Purgatory, as he makes his way through the 5th terrace, Dante is presented with examples of virtue - in this case voluntary poverty - as well as examples of avarice punished. A disembodied voice cries out words of worship first for the Virgin Mary, who gave birth in the humility of a stable, then for the Roman consul Fabricius, who refused an enormous bribe offered to him by the enemies of Rome to betray his troops and lastly for Saint Nicholas, who according to Christian tradition had saved three sisters from prostitution by gifting them golden coins every night when they slept to help them save up for their dowries. 

Dante follows the sound of the voice and when he is finally close enough to the man, asks him about himself, promising that he will make sure to remember him once he makes it back to the world of the living. 

But in a Divine Comedy first (at least this far), this soul doesn’t care for that. His name is Hugo Capet and, he says, he doesn’t expect anyone in Italy to pray for him. The reason for this, as it will emerge from the stories he has to tell, is that he was the founder of the Capetian dynasty, a family of French noblemen who replaced the Carolingian family as the main ruling family in Europe. As he explains in his rather lengthy speech, Hugo’s descendants were responsible for taking over the kingdom of Sicily and eventually forming an alliance (the terms of which they don’t actually mean to respect, it later turns out) with Pope Boniface VIII, through which they take over Florence and get Dante and a lot of his friends exiled. 

Politically, the Capetian dynasty and their greed-based politics took Italy the closest it would be to becoming a nation-state for a while, which is why Dante places Hugo here. You might be thinking “actually Alina, that does not explain why Hugo is here and not in Hell”. And you would be right to think that. Not only is Hugo indirectly responsible for Dante’s exile, but the nation-state, which he and his sons were bringing about, is the exact opposite of the imperialist political model that Dante advocated for. Not to mention there is no historical evidence that Hugo ever repented for his views or asked for forgiveness. 

However, instead of putting Hugo in hell, as Dante usually does with people he disapproves of, he brings him to Purgatory to use him as a spokesperson for Dante’s own political views. And is there a more powerful way to shove your own views down people’s throats than to make them come from the mouth of your opponents under the pretense that they have “come to their senses”?

We see in Hugo’s “prophecy” in line 70, not only a criticism of his family’s greed but a condemnation of his descendants as the new killers of Christ because of their work to block Italy’s return to a strong Holy Roman Empire. The language used in Hugo’s delivery of the prophecy, with the “O avarice” interjection in line 82 and the anaphora in lines 86 through 91, fuses the historical with the biblical. Not only are the enemies of the empire politically wrong (according to Dante’s political sympathies), but they are acting against the will of God. This is why greed, the main motor behind the actions of these men, is such a dangerous sin. 

Hugo closes his diatribe with a list of examples of punished guilt, from Pygmalion who killed his uncle to take over his wealth, to Midas, who was killed by his own greed after he asked that everything he touched turn to gold - including his food! 

He ends the list with an image of Crassus, one of the members of the Roman triumvirate alongside Caesar and Brutus, who was famous for his wealth and whose enemies filled his mouth with melted gold after he died. 

Once again, Dante can tell that Virgil wants him to move on, and so he does, but suddenly an earthquake shakes Mount Purgatory. A thousand questions run through his mind, but too afraid to disturb his guide, Dante just continues walking. 

Something tells me he won’t be silent for long, so I’ll meet you here next week to get some answers.

Canto 19 is short and sweet, which after last week’s double installment I expect you will be happy to hear. 

In this canto, Dante opens the narrative at dawn with a very creepy dream. But before he actually gets to the dream he uses one of his super niche metaphors to let us know it is dawn. 

He says that it was the hour when the geomancers, which were a type of fortunetellers who draw random dots with sticks and then trace lines over them until the result looks like a geometrical figure (I know), saw their signs of Greater Fortune in the sky. 

Greater Fortune was a figure that contained some dots arranged in the same way as some stars from the Aquarius and Pieces constellations, which could be seen just before dawn. All this to say: it’s almost dawn and the poets can start trying to find their way to the 5th terrace. 

But before Dante can move, he is taken over by a sudden sleep in which he sees an old crone approach him. The woman doesn’t speak until Dante makes eye contact with her at which point she becomes so beautiful that he cannot make himself look away. She also starts to sing a song that reveals that she is a siren and that she has led many men astray with her charms, including the great Ulysses. Before she can finish her song, however, another woman appears, “holy and alert”, and she starts calling out for Virgil, who comes over and literally guts the siren, exposing her fetid insides. 

It’s not revealed who the holy woman is - you can take your pick from the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucia, Beatrice, an angelic personification of caritas or temperance or reason - but the old lady turned siren is none other than the personification of avarice. 

In fact, as soon as Dante wakes up from the dream, he and Virgil hear a voice calling them to the next staircase, which will take them up to the 5th terrace, where souls are atoning for that exact sin. 

This angel is beautifully described as having a kinder and more gentle voice than you could ever hear among the living as well as swan-like wings. As Dante and Virgil walk past it, it says “blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” and wipes away the 4th P off Dante’s forehead, to signify that he has overcome sloth. 

And up we go into the terrace of the avaricious, which Virgil explains is where people work their way out of the grip of the old crone Dante saw, thus confirming the symbolic value of the dream. 

Terrace 5 is full of people who are lying down on their front with their faces on the ground and crying and sighing into the earth. The contrapasso relationship between vice and punishment here is that these people who spent their lives caring so much about material things (and therefore looking down at their earthly realities rather than turning their faces to God), shall atone by literally looking at the ground as closely as possible. 

They also sing - although not entirely intelligibly - Adhesit pavimento anima mea, from Psalm 119:25 and meaning ‘I cleave to the ground’, a renunciation of earthly possessions. 

At this point, Dante and Virgil have a brief back and forth about which way they should go and one of the penitents answers that they should keep right and they’ll get to the next staircase. 

But of course, Dante now wants to know more about the man and this is how we find out that the person speaking is none other than Ottobono dei Fieschi who became Pope Hadrian V in 1276, although only for 38 days (he died).

Hadrian is only one of two popes in the whole of the Divine Comedy who are not consigned to Hell. And even he is present here as a vehicle for a critique of the Church. He tells Dante that when he became pope, he was just as intent on continuing to strengthen the Vatican’s economic and political position as the rest of his fellow clergymen. 

But towards the end of his life, he says, he discovered the false nature of the life he had lived. Just like the siren from the start of the canto, outwardly beautiful but rotten on the inside, Hadrian realised that the life of riches he had lived up until that point was not only hollow but corrupted. 

The canto closes with a reminder of the love of God as the great equalizer. Hearing that he is being addressed by a pope, Dante kneels next to Hadrian. But the man tells him to stand up. After all, they are both “co-servants” of the same power. He adds a verse from the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus, speaking to the Saduccees, says that there will be no such thing as social rank in the kingdom of God. 

On a last note, Hadrian mentions his niece Alagia to Dante, the last remaining virtuous person in his family, and the only one who could pray for him and thus help him advance to heaven sooner. 

The second part of canto 17 is taken up entirely by Virgil’s meditation on love as the root of both virtue and sin, how they relate to free will, and to the structure of purgatory. The explanation also takes up most of canto 18, so I decided, in the name of clarity, to do both of them together this week. So here we go!

In the opening to canto 17, Dante continues his running play on light and dark, outer sight and inner vision. As the sun goes down on Mount Purgatory, Dante’s mind is taken over by imagination and he sees three examples of punished anger. The first one is Procne and Philomel who we know from canto 9 where we learned that they were turned into birds after Philomel killed her children and fed them to her husband because he raped Procne. 

The second example is the crucifixion of Haman, minister of the king of Persia, who ordered all the Jews of Persia to be murdered because Mortdecai (his wife’s father) refused to bow to him.

Lastly,  Amata, queen of Latium, killed herself out of spite when she found out that her daughter Lavinia was promised to Aeneas, who had previously fought against Latium.

Dante’s “sleep” is shattered by a voice that calls out to the pilgrims, guiding them to the staircase to the 4th terrace. He can’t see what it is and is confused as to why this voice would gratuitously offer advice. 

But Virgil explains that it’s a divine spirit and, as such, it offers the information needed to the poets before they have to ask, which is the real definition of “caritas” mentioned in the previous canto. 

As they walk past the angel it says “beati pacifici - of violent wrath they’re free” to signify that Dante and now conquered anger and it brushes the poet’s forehead with its wing (it’s implied that this is done to delete another P from his forehead).

But by the time this is done daylight has fully disappeared and the poets are now forced to stop their journey until it returns. 

While they wait for the night to pass Dante asks Virgil to tell him about the new terrace they are in, saying that since their bodies have to sit still, they might as well keep their intellects busy.

Virgil obliges, but instead of simply saying “this is the 4th terrace where souls purge the sin of sloth”, he gives us a full-on theology lesson. 

He says that this is the place where people whose love of good “fell short of what it ought to be” get purged. By this, he means that the people here didn’t interest themselves in anything in particular (you will remember the slothful of hell who were running around in Ante-Inferno chased by bees and flies).

You might think that not caring about anything - good or bad - or being passive about one’s life is different from not loving anything. And you would be right. 

So why does Virgil define the slothful as people whose love of good “fell short of what it ought to be”?

Sensing that this might be somewhat cryptic for Dante (and us), Virgil decides to start from the beginning. He explains that all humans are born equipped with two types of love: love of mind and natural love. Natural love is that which they inherited from God and it can never lead them astray. The other, however, the so-called “mind-love” can attach itself to the wrong thing and therefore give rise to sin. 

Mind-love becomes sinful when it attaches itself to ill rather than good and, Virgil explains, since humans can’t love their own harm, it follows that their mind-love attaches itself to the ill of their neighbours. 

This gives rise to the three sins we’ve seen thus far: pride, when we want to assert ourselves over our neighbour, envy, when we desire our neighbour’s downfall and wrath, when we want to seek revenge on our neighbour. 

Another way that love can lead to sin, Virgil says, is through the love of things that in themselves cannot lead to the peace that we all so crave, in other words, material things. The sins rising from love’s attachment to these things are avarice, gluttony, and lust and we will encounter them in the last three terraces.

It is not at all coincidental that Virgil should give this explanation on the fourth terrace, which is exactly in the middle of Mount Purgatory as well as the terrace where the sin purged resulted from a complete absence of love. 

The fourth terrace is then a sort of turning point. We saw in Inferno that up to circle 6 we had carnal sins, which were considered less serious because they reflected human weakness rather than maliciousness, whereas from the 7th circle on the sinners had committed premeditated sins. 

Here Dante turns the order on its head: the malicious sins are at the bottom of the mountain and the sins that represent a weakness of the flesh are at the top.

When Virgil is done with his explanation, Dante observes that if natural love and mind-love are innate, then surely humans are not to be held responsible for their virtues or their sins. 

Virgil (presumably tired of Dante’s questions) says that he can only explain the dynamics between free will and human’s innate propensity to love in logical terms. He adds that Dante will have to wait until he meets Beatrice for a comprehensive explanation. As we’ve already seen, Virgil is not privy to the mysteries of faith, so he can only move within the limits of reason, which is why Dante’s bigger theological questions aren’t fully tackled until Paradise.

Virgil does however say a bit more about free will. He says that the urge to love, whether it be right or wrong things, exists in humans like the urge to make honey in bees. But humans also have the capacity to distinguish between the quality of the things that they gravitate towards. We all have the “power to rein love back”.

Dante seems content with this reply and as he sits down to ruminate over Virgil’s words, a running crowd of souls appears. They run as fast as the Thebans ran in their ecstatic dances of worship to the god Bacchus. As they approach the poets, two of them shout words of encouragement to the others trying to spur them on in their chase. These are the slothful and as you might have guessed, they have to run without respite in death to purge the sin of inactivity in life. 

The encouragements they shout to the crowd are examples of action and urgency: the first one is a reference to the Virgin Mary, who upon finding out she was carrying the son of God ran to tell her cousin Elisabeth about her pregnancy; the second is about an episode in Julius Caesar’s De Bello Civili, where he quickly organised the siege of Massilia. 

Virgil addresses the group and asks them to speak to Dante about their plight and maybe also show them the way to the next staircase. Since they cannot stop, one of them quickly shouts a few sentences as he goes. His name is Gerard and he says he was an abbot at the powerful abbey of San Zeno. We don’t really know if this guy actually existed or if Dante just placed him here as an excuse to criticise the passivity of the Church. Either way, here he is. 

The canto ends with Dante thinking about all he has seen and heard and as he does so, falling asleep.

Over the past couple of cantos we’ve been going from blinding angelic light, to inner sight, to - now - complete darkness. 

Canto 16 opens with a description of thick dark smoke. Darker even than the ones we saw in hell, according to Dante, and so dense that it seems to weave a coarse fabric that itches the eyes. Because of it, Dante is forced to close his eyes and, with a hand on Virgil’s shoulder, he slowly makes his way through the third terrace, careful not no get cut off from his guide. 

We are on the third terrace, where the penitents purge the sin of anger. 

Since Dante can’t see anything, the canto’s imagery revolves entirely around hearing, starting with the words “Agnus Dei”, which he hears coming from a multitude of voices that all sing them in unison. 

A voice nearby breaks off from the song and addresses Dante directly to ask, as many others have before, who this seemingly alive person is. Dante indulges the voice’s curiosity and after introducing himself asks the spirit if he would do the same, while also walking to the next staircase, such that the sound of his voice can guide them through the dark. 

The penitent is Marco Lombardo, whom Dante scholars have identified as a minor nobleman from Venice or the nearby regions. We don’t know the story of the sin that landed him in this area of purgatory. But, as many commentators have noted, the circumstances of Marco’s life are irrelevant to Dante because he pretty much uses the man as a stand-in for himself/ mouthpiece of his own political views. 

Yes, that’s right, this is a political canto. Well, politico-ethical-theological (excuse my clunky terminology. We don’t all have Dante’s gift for brevity).

The canto revolves around the idea of free will and how it functions in relation to predestination and divine intervention. 

According to Marco, humans place far too much importance on “the stars” (by which he intends not astrology but divine will). And far too many take it a step further and use predestination as an excuse for their wrongdoing, acting as if they had no free will. 

But we do.

‘The stars initiate your vital moves’, he says, but

‘You have a mind that planets cannot rule or start concern’.

The question of free will and its relationship to sin is one of Dante’s greatest preoccupations. It’s present at the very beginning of the Commedia, when Dante finds himself lost in a dark forest, having lost the right - meaning reasoned or wise - path. And in fact, it’s not a coincidence that the topic comes up here at a time when the poet is “in the dark”. 

Darkness here symbolizes the absence of reason. The penitents of the third terrace are expiating the sin of anger, which for Dante is a loss of control over one’s ability to think straight and see things for what they really are. At a linguistic level, in Italian, we say that you are so angry you “see black” (the English equivalent is “seeing red”). So the contrapasso here is that those who have “seen black” due to their anger in life, shall literally see black in death until they’ve made up for their mistake. 

But the inability to see, as we already saw last week, is an opportunity to reach a clearer, inner vision. And this is definitely the case for Marco, who goes on an impassioned diatribe against the state of modern Italy. 

The country needs a king, a pastor, to show people the right path since left to their own devices - their own free will - they seem to make all the wrong choices. 

But ever since that land bathed by the rivers Po and Adige (meaning northern Italy), turned against Federico II - you’ll remember him from Inferno as Dante’s favourite candidate for Emperor - the country has essentially gone to shit. Anyone who would blush in speaking to a virtuous man can walk through that land in the safe knowledge that they will not blush once, he says.

This is because the two suns - Church and State - that used to illuminate the right path, have become one in the hands of the greedy Pope (another one of Dante’s political views which you will remember from Inferno). 

There remain only three virtuous men in the whole country: Currado da Palazzo, Gherardo da Camino, and Guido da Castello. The first two both happened to have belonged to Dante’s political party, while the third was named “the honest Lombard” by the French for his honesty in dealing with French travelers who passed through Lombardy. Needless to say that although all these men are remembered as generally upstanding members of society, they also happened to have held political views that significantly overlapped with Dante’s. 

But this last name Dante says he has not heard of, which Marco takes as a sign of just how corrupt modern society is. The separate threads of sight and sound come together here: Dante’s world is one where the names of virtuous men fall on deaf ears and where anger has blinded men pushing them further away from the narrow path. 

Speaking of paths, as Marco admonishes Dante for not recognising the name of one of the last few great men, they’ve also arrived at the foot of the next staircase, where the light of an angel awaits.

In terms of structure and themes, canto 15 is one of my favourites so far. It’s divided into two distinct parts, each revolving around outer and inner sight and their physical aspects, light and darkness.

Dante uses the opening verses to establish the position of the sun in the sky. We are told that it’s the hour of Vespers, which in liturgical terms means it’s three hours before sunset. And since it’s three hours before sunset in Purgatory, based on Dante’s geography, it is three hours before sunrise in Jerusalem, which means that in Florence (which in line 6 he calls “our clime”) it’s midnight. 

Suddenly, Dante says, a greater splendour than that of the sun dazes him, to the point that he has to raise his hand and shield his eyes from it. The light is not only bright but it seems to come from everywhere as if reflected by the surface of the mountainside as it would reflect from a glass or a body of water. 

Personally, I love this image, however, the simile in lines 16-22 with the reference to the theorem that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence (which Dante probably knew from Euclid’s Optics) felt super clunky to me. And I don’t often criticise Dante’s stylistic choices. But we move on. 

The source of light is an angel, who waits for the two poets at the bottom of the staircase to the 3rd terrace. Virgil explains that the angel is here, as others will be in the future, to wipe off another P from Dante’s forehead. 

He also explains that, although Dante finds angels difficult to look at right now - presumably because of his spiritual inadequacy - as they continue up the mountain, “such things as these will bring not stupor, but delight” (v. 31-32).

The angel also reveals something related to this: the stair to the third terrace is less steep than those before, which emphasises the idea that the further into the journey of purgation the soul gets, the easier the going gets. 

As they leave the angel behind, Dante is thinking back on the conversations he had on the second terrace and expresses his confusion to Virgil. In the previous canto, the envious Guido del Duca is lamenting his sin (envy) and the way it made him “flush to liver green” when he saw someone else’s joy. 

In lines 86-88, he says: 

You human creatures, why repose your hearts

Where you are banned from mutual exchange?

Dante (like the rest of us, I imagine) doesn’t fully understand the veiled meaning of this outburst. 

Virgil’s explanation is the following: in the human understanding of wealth, resources are limited, which is why people feel envy when they see someone else succeed. In their mind, someone else’s success means that there’s now less success left in the world. 

And while this might be the case for material success, when it comes to divine Love, not only is there enough for everyone, but the more people rejoice in each other’s closeness to God, the brighter that love burns. In fact, the word used to define this love here is caritas, which is Latin for “love”, “compassion”, “charity”. As a concept, caritas expresses an overall lenient and loving disposition towards those around you.

Dante, who is still thinking in human terms, still doesn’t get how a good distributed to a larger number of people can make each of them richer than if distributed to a few. Virgil does his best to restate the above, but eventually ends the explanation by telling Dante to ask Beatrice when he gets to heaven if he still doesn’t get it. 

At this point, as if in response to Dante’s failure to “see” Virgil’s point, the latter begins to have a “sudden-seeing ecstasy”.

Without going too far into detail, Dante describes a three-part vision that reveals to him three different instances of gentleness. 

The first one is a scene from the episode of Christ in the Temple, when while at the market with his parents, Jesus leaves them and sneaks into the temple where he starts discussing theology with the church elders. Dante sees the part when Mary bursts into the building and her relief at finding her son far exceeds the anger she felt at his disobedience. 

The second scene reveals the wife of Pisistratus, the ruler of Athens, in the process of asking him to avenge their daughter. One day, when the girl was out and about, a boy who liked her kissed her in public, which the mother took as an affront and wanted him punished. But Pisistratus disagrees and says something along the lines of “what are we going to do to those who hate us if this (punishment) is what we do to those who love us?”

Now, line 101 does say something about a “rash embrace”, which suggests a relative lack of consent from the girl, but clearly, this is not a problem for the 13th-century reader. 

The last example of gentleness is a crucifixion scene, in which Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, looks down on the Israelite crowd that crucified him for heresy and asks God to forgive them. 

When he comes back from his trance-like state, Virgil tells Dante that his steps looked like those of a drunk man. Dante wants to explain why that was and what he saw, but Virgil reveals that actually, he can read Dante’s mind???? 

He says that actually, he was just commenting on his walk because he wanted Dante to speed up the pace lol. 

At this point, Dante looks up and sees before them a rising cloud of smoke, dark as night and which “took from us our eyesight and pure air”. 

What or who is on fire, we’ll find out next week.