Canto XXV

How babies are made (according to Dante)

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.’