When I was fourteen I had the following items temporarily confiscated at a Christian extreme sports summer camp: Time magazine, Seventeen magazine, and Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. (I don’t remember much about the extreme sports; I know it was billed as a sort of zip-lining, belaying, rock-scrambling center, but mostly I just played tennis and politely avoided signing a virginity pledge.) I don’t suppose I really believed I would have time to read all of them in a four-week session, but I wanted very much to be seen reading them by my fellow Christian extreme sports campers. Instead the Dante books were whisked away to the infirmary and bound together with masking tape that I had to gingerly peel off myself at the end of summer.
I spent the rest of the summer after camp making my way through the Purgatorio and sorting through everything I’d heard at camp. The difference between a broadly centrist evangelical home environment in suburban Chicago and fundamentalist-flexible evangelical summer camp in rural Missouri is significant; this had been my first real encounter with young-earth creationism and Christian complementarianism, and I’d come away puzzled and contemplative. A very earnest Bible teacher with a Ned Flanders mustache had drawn a diagram of the antediluvian earth to explain how an atmospheric canopy might have enabled Methuselah to reach 969 years and that the likeliest inspiration for my desire to become a pastor someday was the devil seeking to overturn male headship. He was also very kind to me. It seemed fairly reasonable that he was incorrect both about the canopy and the nature of female leadership, but his authority seemed both plausible and well-intended, so I dutifully turned the possibilities over in my mind for a few weeks before deciding against them.
One gets the sense, in both the Inferno and the Purgatorio, that Dante wishes very badly to include his guide Virgil among the ranks of the blessed rather than in Limbo, where the shades of great spirits are “only so far punished that without hope we live on in desire.” The air there is alive with the sound of constant, eternal sighing, and Dante’s heart is “seized in great grief” to think of all the worthy souls who dwell there (Inf. Canto IV). At the end of Purgatorio, Virgil is quietly swapped out for Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, after leading Dante through the final wall of fire at the end of the Terrace of Lust, where the soon-to-be-redeemed transmit quick, careful greetings like ants tapping antennae together to avoid the kind of lingering touch that dawdles into sin. The lustful are divided into two groups that hustle swiftly around the terrace, each calling out homo- and heterosexual examples of carnality like rival sports fans: “Sodom and Gomorrah!” “Pasiphaë!”
Th’ escorting spirits turn’d with gentle looks
Toward me, and the Mantuan spake: “My son,
Here torment thou mayst feel, but canst not death.
Remember thee, remember thee, if I
Safe e’en on Geryon brought thee: now I come
More near to God, wilt thou not trust me now?
Of this be sure: though in its womb that flame
A thousand years contain’d thee, from thy head
No hair should perish. If thou doubt my truth,
Approach, and with thy hands thy vesture’s hem
Stretch forth, and for thyself confirm belief.
Lay now all fear, O lay all fear aside.
Turn hither, and come onward undismay’d.”
I still, though conscience urg’d’ no step advanc’d.
When still he saw me fix’d and obstinate,
Somewhat disturb’d he cried: “Mark now, my son,
From Beatrice thou art by this wall
Divided.” As at Thisbe’s name the eye
Of Pyramus was open’d (when life ebb’d
Fast from his veins), and took one parting glance,
While vermeil dyed the mulberry; thus I turn’d
To my sage guide, relenting, when I heard
The name, that springs forever in my breast.
He shook his forehead; and, “How long,” he said,
“Linger we now?” then smil’d, as one would smile
Upon a child, that eyes the fruit and yields.
Into the fire before me then he walk’d;
And Statius, who erewhile no little space
Had parted us, he pray’d to come behind.
I would have cast me into molten glass
To cool me, when I enter’d; so intense
Rag’d the conflagrant mass. The sire belov’d,
To comfort me, as he proceeded, still
Of Beatrice talk’d. “Her eyes,” saith he,
“E’en now I seem to view.” From the other side
A voice, that sang, did guide us, and the voice
Following, with heedful ear, we issued forth,
There where the path led upward.
—Inferno Canto XXVII
Another river, another pair of guide and guided, another traveler convinced his journey is ending in destruction just before emerging safely on the other side. Virgil, unlike Hopeful, can stir no higher than the Earthly Paradise, and cannot comment on matters celestial; Dante must exchange a man he has never met for a woman he saw twice before she died. They pass together through the fire, and Virgil offers Dante both “crown and mitre, sovereign o’er thyself.” At the top of Mount Purgatory Dante is dazzled by a succession of women—Leah, Rachel, Matilda, the seven heavenly Virtues, Jerome’s elders, the epistles and a griffin—and finally Beatrice, heading the processional. The sight of the woman he loves sweeping grandly down the aisle sends Dante into a panic: He has climbed out of Hell, scaled Purgatory, knocks on the gate of Heaven only to come down with cold feet. It’s at this point that he turns to Virgil for, oddly, maternal comfort: “towards Virgil I turn’d me to leftward, panting, like a babe/That flees for refuge to his mother’s breast.” But there is no Virgil to offer comfort nor even say goodbye to:
But Virgil had bereav’d us of himself,
Virgil, my best-lov’d father; Virgil, he
To whom I gave me up for safety: nor,
All, our prime mother lost, avail’d to save
My undew’d cheeks from blur of soiling tears.
“Dante, weep not, that Virgil leaves thee: nay,
Weep thou not yet: behooves thee feel the edge
Of other sword, and thou shalt weep for that.”
—Inferno Canto XXX
Don’t cry for him—I’ll give you something to cry about. To put it another way: Do not cry when you lose the things you love that kept you from God, cry over the things you love that keep you from God. The man with the Ned Flanders mustache was wrong about me, but not because I was not a woman. (For that matter, I’m not a pastor, either.) To say As a woman, approach God thusly or As a man, do not approach God in such-and-such a manner, but in thus-and-so a manner is to put the cart before the horse. Dante approaches Paradise “return’d from the most holy wave, regenerate / If ’en as new plants renew’d with foliage new/Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars,” purged of sinful memories by the river Lethe and restored to memories of virtue by the river Eunoe.
In The Music Man, the mayor’s wife, Eulalie, teaches dance to the leading ladies of the town and can periodically be heard in the background instructing them in a voice that is somehow both unusually deep and delivered in falsetto: “Lovely, ladies, lovely and turn. Take the body with you!” I found that line unutterably hilarious, and often repeat it to myself whenever I’m in a rush to get out the door: “Taaaaake the body with you.” If ultimately the goal is “neither to marry nor be given in marriage, like the angels” (Matt. 22:30), then it may be that the body, and the rules governing the body, and the standards and strictures appertaining to the body, must needs be checked at the gate between the earthly and the celestial, but something must be resurrected, and until then, you’ve got to take the body with you. It may be, after all, that the body is only confiscated and bound with masking tape before being returned from the infirmary, and if you can’t undo the marks left on the cover it’s still legible once you open to the front page.