Joy in the Midst of Sorrow
From a certain perspective, Purgatorio is like Inferno: souls in purgatory have to endure forms of suffering as extreme as any inflicted on the unrepentant in hell. At the end of Purgatorio 10, for example, the pilgrim sees the proud carrying huge rocks on their backs: “Behold, here they are,” says Virgil, “though they come with slow steps” (Purg. 10.100). They are pitifully weighed down, so much so that they worry their shaking legs will give way any second. But there is one huge difference between this suffering and what might have been imposed on them in hell: here, in purgatory, these repentant souls suffer voluntarily. They give their wills to accepting their condition. And thus they possess hope, even joy, that this suffering is dynamic, transformative, and liberating.
In hell, no soul at any time imagines that it can be delivered from the evil it has chosen. More frightening still, the damned souls don’t seem to want to be. They find their wills frozen forever, tightly grasping the misery of being separated from God and of being isolated from the human community. They won’t let go; they can’t. In purgatory, though, souls are animated by the grace of God; they give up, exhale, and let go of all that hatred and attachment to evil. They even do the unthinkable: they begin to desire the cleansing that comes from purgation. Thus, in the same passage alluded to above, the poet says:
But, reader, I don’t want you to lose your nerve,
and back off your good intentions, just because you heard
how God wants the debt to be paid.
Do not dwell upon the nature of the suffering:
think about what will follow. (Purg. 10.106–10)
Thus, if hell is a subhuman nightmare, full of darkness and confusion, like living within a Hieronymous Bosch painting, and if paradise is being drowned in a superhuman exaltation of joy, then purgatory is that state in between. It is the most relatable; it is the most human. By this I mean purgatory is the place of transformation and of hope in the midst of bitterness. Or as Dante puts it,
O proud Christians! You miserable wretches!
Your minds are sick. . . .
Don’t you see that we are worms,
though born to become the angelic butterfly? (Purg. 10.121–22, 124–25)
Dante carefully formed Purgatorio so that the poetry parallels this spiritual condition of joy emerging in the midst of sorrow. We find, again and again, little oases of pastoral verse tucked away within the stern narrative of suffering. In Purgatorio 7, for example, the Valley of Kings is described as alive with an unearthly brightness that would make even the “fresh emerald, the moment it has been split” (7.75) seem pale. In Purgatorio 28, Dante walks into the garden of Eden and sees a stream so clean that the purest on earth now seem to him defiled (28.28–30). Even from the very beginning of Purgatorio, we hear notes in a sweet and tranquil key. When the pilgrim first stepped into hell, he endured an emotional breakdown on account of the overwhelming tumult of the screams and lamentations of the “pusillanimous” (Inf. 3.22–27). In contrast, at the beginning of Purgatorio, we have this:
Sweet color of oriental sapphire . . .
brought delight to my eyes once more
as soon as I had left behind that dead air. . . .
The beautiful planet that makes us strong at love
was making all the east to smile. . . .
I turned to the right and . . .
I saw four stars
never seen before except by the first members of the human race.
The sky seemed to take delight in their flaming. (Purg. 1.13–26)
Dante seems to want us to note the radical difference between the Schoenberg-like atonality of his first canticle and the sad but majestic Brahms-like music of Purgatorio.
In addition to building these lyrical oases into his landscape of wonders, marvels, and suffering, Dante also gives us glimpses of the inner joy and peace that are beginning to take root in the individual souls of this realm, even while they endure spectacularly ascetic exercises. In Purgatorio, then, the poet dramatizes a new set of emotions. All of those tears and instances of crying in hell begin to taper off in Purgatorio, while smiling and laughter, almost nonexistent in Inferno (sorridere, “to smile,” is used only once!), become a regular feature of the second canticle (e.g., Purg. 1.20; 2.83; 3.12; 12.136; 21.127; 25.103; 28.67, 76). This inner joy that bubbles up and works its way out in laughter or smiling is a perfect symbol for the goal of purgatory: transformation from the inside out. Although it is true that souls must pay off the “debt” of their sins to Divine Justice, Dante, rather brilliantly, reinterprets this scholastic understanding: the debt to be paid, what God is owed, is desire, inner fire, love (fervor amoris, or what Dante calls foco d’amor; see Purg. 6.34–42).
Head Knowledge and Heart Knowledge
For Dante and the medieval tradition, the souls of purgatory are, of course, “saved,” forgiven their sins, but they are not yet ready to see God.1 Their ability to participate in the heavenly community is still limited by the vicious habits they did not devote themselves to reforming in life. Their heads are in the right place, but their “hearts” are not there, or, more accurately in terms of medieval terminology, their affectus has not yet been kindled.2 Closing the gap between head knowledge and heart knowledge, though, is a long, slow, and difficult process, one that will take time and repetition, because purgatorial souls still have with them those negative moral dispositions they spent much of their lives rationalizing.
Dante illustrates the survival of this old mind-set, often humorously, throughout Purgatorio. In canto 2, for example, we meet Casella, an old friend of Dante’s, who dallied before departing for purgatory. Not surprisingly, he now causes the other souls to put off their serious work of purgation and thus becomes the reason for the excoriating lecture from Cato (Purg. 2.120–23). Two canti later, Belacqua is explicitly identified as a soul who has taken up his “customary earthly ways” of laziness (4.126). Among the prideful, Omberto Aldobrandesco, who admits to having loved the nobility of his family too much in life, introduces himself as “the son of a great Tuscan,” the son of Guglielmo Aldobrandesco (11.58–59). He then cannot suppress his curiosity about whether the pilgrim has heard of his famous family (11.60). Other examples will be discussed. Suffice it to say that, in the language of medieval monastic speculation on purgatory, these souls are boni but yet imperfecti (good but not fully formed).
In Dante’s day, the acknowledged experts for overcoming this gap between head knowledge and heart knowledge were monastic spiritual writers such as Guigo II, Peter of Celles, John of Fecampe, and Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, in addition to more famous writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux. These spiritual masters specialized in constructing personal exercises (disciplinae) that could lead to deep transformation—that is, exercises through which souls became capable over time of not just assenting to truth but also loving it, desiring it, and responding with affectus. They were rather like personal trainers for the soul. It is not surprising, then, to find throughout Purgatorio a monastic flavor: we find souls fasting, engaging in acts of penance, singing hymns, praying, wearing dark-colored habits (Purg. 13.48), submitting their identity to the group, and speaking about heaven as the “cloister” (15.57) where Christ is “abbot” (26.129). They have to follow a liturgical schedule and force their voices into the unison of the monophonic chants that season the canticle. The first time we meet them, they are singing “together with one voice” (2.47).3 In this way Dante’s purgatory very much embodies those “spiritual exercises” that Peter of Celle described in his handbook on how to achieve deep transformation:
The true religious voluntarily and freely desires regular discipline in order to be tied back from the appetites of the flesh. . . . The bonds of religion are . . . silence, fasting, and seclusion of the cloister, ways of acting which do not attract attention, compassion and fraternal love, paternal reverence, reading and persistent prayer, recollection of past evils, fear of death, the fire of purgatory, eternal fire.4
The souls within Purgatorio, then, who were spiritually flabby in life, must submit themselves to such disciplinae in death. And yet, for Dante, each one of these monastic disciplinae (that is, silence, fasting, fraternal love, paternal reverence, reading, recollection of past evils, the practice of fear) are all aimed at developing an interior spirit of prayerfulness. As Inferno is to tears, and Paradiso is to dance, Purgatorio is to prayer. Purgatorio is the canticle of prayer: souls argue about it (Purg. 6.28–48), practice it (Purg. 11), get better at it, beg for it (6.1–27). For the souls in hell, it is an impossibility (see Francesca’s comments in Inf. 5.91–93); for the souls in Purgatorio, their “only prayer . . . was that others pray” (Purg. 6.26).
In light of the centrality of prayer, it is fascinating to note how Dante dramatizes his penitent souls as “stepping into” biblical prayer; purgatory becomes a stage where biblical prayers are enacted and performed. The exercises of the souls are choreographed so that the penitent find themselves in a position where the dead text, the dead letter, the boring doctrine they “knew” on earth now becomes their script for heartfelt expression. For instance, in Purgatorio 2 the souls being ferried by the angel across the sea sing, “In exitu Israel . . .” (“When Israel went out of Egypt . . . ,” Ps. 114)—that is, the psalm that tells how the Israelites were rescued from Egypt by passing through the Red Sea. But now the relevance of the biblical text for their own lives is impossible to miss, as they, guided by a heavenly minister, cross unharmed the violent sea that consumed even the boldest voyagers (we hear echoes of the voyage of Ulysses here; see Purg. 1.130–32). Thus, a psalm that must have seemed a bit of outdated history now becomes vital, fresh, and urgent. Purgatorial souls step into, sing, and perform what was before merely a written text.
In the next canto, Virgil ponders, with head meditatively bowed, which way he and Dante should take to get up the mountain. The Christian pilgrim, though, lifts his head and sees a band of souls coming down from the mountains:
“Lift up,” I said, “your eyes, master!
Look: here are some who will give us guidance
if you can’t, all by yourself, figure it out.” (Purg. 3.61–63)
In other words, the pilgrim looks up toward the mountains and is excited to see the help they need to move forward—which is to say, he “enacts” or “performs” another biblical text: “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help” (Ps. 121:1).
In this way, the architecture of purgatory and the spiritual disciplines to which the souls submit combine to create the conditions for prayerfulness. For Dante, prayer is the focal point of all these disciplinae because it is that precious state of longing in which the soul, convinced of its own lack of resources and frustrated with its cramped condition, opens up, addresses God as if he were close by, and dwells longingly in his presence. In this state of vulnerability and openness, souls establish a connection with God, and as long as they remain connected in this intense way, they undergo the transformative experience of being made into something like him. Prayer is the opposite of the tight grip of the souls in hell; it is the opening of the gates of the heart, an effort to allow God to come, cleanse, and dwell within. But it’s a war to keep the gates of the heart open, to keep open the channel for God’s love to flow into the heart; thus the exercises the souls must endure are designed to put them in a state of vulnerability so that they will continue to feel the need to open their hearts yet again. Being convinced of your own brokenness creates longing. Longing is what opens the heart, and openness is the requisite condition for God’s transformative dwelling within: prayer.
In this introductory chapter, I have discussed the interior journey of the souls in Purgatorio. In the next chapter, I will discuss the physical landscape of the mountain—that is, how Dante took a hodgepodge of teachings from his predecessors and used them to construct a concrete, literary place. I will then show how the opening canti of Purgatorio illustrate how Dante’s mountain is the ideal place for helping souls accomplish their inward journey.