(Purgatorio 1–9)
Purgatory before Dante
Dante didn’t invent purgatory, of course. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, it was held that after death the soul would have to pass through some sort of trial that would test the depth of its love for Christ. That trial was most often likened to the fire of a crucible, which burns off the dross of gold. This trial was called the ignis purgatories—that is, “cleansing” or “purging” fire. Perhaps surprisingly for many, the basic principles of the doctrine of purgatory are found in the Bible. Although there are many verses in the Bible that were taken in the Middle Ages as hinting at purgatorial aspects of the afterlife, one passage in particular was used more than any other:
Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. (1 Cor. 3:12–15)
This idea of a man being saved through fire, of having worthless works burned away, was universally read for the first one thousand years of the church as referring to some sort of after-death cleansing experience. One early example of this interpretation comes from the Shepherd of Hermas, written as early as AD 70 and almost included among the books of the Bible. In this enigmatic work, a shepherd is given a vision of a tower that is being built of many different stones. The stones that fit into the tower, he is told by an angel, are the just; the stones rejected, the damned. The shepherd asks the angel “whether all stones that were rejected . . . have opportunity for repentance and a place in this tower.” The angel replies: “They have . . . but not until they have been tormented and fulfilled the days of their sins. And then it will happen that they will be transferred out of their torments, if the evil deeds that they have done come into their hearts; but if they do not come into their hearts, they will not be saved, because of their hardheartedness.”1
Over the next thousand years, it’s fair to say that there was a broad consensus among the fathers and medieval authors—everyone from Origen to Augustine to Gregory the Great to Bede to Bernard of Clairvaux—that after death souls yet imperfect in love would undergo some sort of purgatorial, or cleansing, experience. At the same time, no one was sure about the details: some said purgatory was a real, physical place; others said it was only a spiritual place. Some even said that the penitent souls were actually sent to hell to dwell among the damned until the external fires had sufficiently purified their inner love. At that point, an angel would come down to hell to get them out.
With so many undetermined questions, medieval descriptions of the purgatorial experience written before Dante tend to be terrifying. Some of these medieval authors let their imaginations run wild. For example, writing in the early 1100s, Honorius of Autun says that the imperfecti were those who, though saved, endured little pain in life and thus missed out on opportunities for proving their love. After death, they will be sent to hell for seven days, or nine days, or a year, or longer. These souls are “like the wicked son who is turned over to a slave to be whipped,” because “with the permission of the angels, [they are] handed over to demons to be purged.” Honorius then describes the souls’ temporary abode: “unbearable heat, biting cold, hunger, thirst, and various kinds of pain, some having physical causes, some having spiritual causes, such as the pain caused by fear or shame.” There are also “immortal worms, serpents, and dragons, a frightful stench, frightening noises such as hammers striking iron, thick darkness, . . . the depressing din of wails and insults, and finally shackles of fire that bind the limbs of the damned.” Only a little reassuringly, he adds: “But the demons cannot torment them more than they deserve or than the angels permit.” Honorius further warns that “the least of these trials is greater than the greatest that one can imagine in this life.” Likewise, Jacobus de Voragine (1230–98), whom many know as the author of the Golden Legend, says that the just are handed over to be punished by evil demons, although they do enjoy visits from heavenly ministers to cheer them in their suffering.2
Within a century, a consensus on the basic doctrines of purgatory had begun to emerge. Thomas Aquinas, though with much less drama, confirmed the basic insights of Honorius and Jacobus: the least pain in purgatory is greater than the worst pain in life. Aquinas even allowed for the possibility that angels could be responsible for bringing souls to purgatory and then fetching them out again, although he denied that the souls of the just are punished at the hands of dark angels. Rather, God is directly responsible for the pain they experience; in the heat of God’s love they become clean.3 These basic developments—that purgatory is a place separate from hell and that it is a personal encounter with God—had huge theological implications, which would take the next century of visionaries, mystics, and pastors to think through. Dante Alighieri was one of the first to give a concrete, literary vision to all these ideas. As we began to see in Inferno, Dante’s genius is often best found, not so much in what he invented, but in how he used his poetry to render abstract ideas concretely.
This, then, was Dante’s first gift to the medieval tradition: to give vivid and palpable expression to these ideas, a kind of literary incarnation of doctrine. Purgatory becomes a mountainous island in the middle of the sea (where we now put Antarctica), located at the antipodes to where he imagined Jerusalem to be. It can only be approached by angelically driven boats, which travel at dazzling speeds (see Purg. 1). The mountain is extremely steep, and its entry, a gate guarded by an angel, stands halfway up the mountain (see Purg. 9). On the slopes of the lower half of the mountain, the so-called antepurgatory, Dante meets those who held the church in scorn, those who repented late in life, those who died violent deaths, and failed kings. Analogous to the pusillanimous in the narthex of hell, these sinners are not yet allowed within the gate. The seven terraces of purgatory proper follow: the terraces of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust.
As I have said, we admire Dante because he creates such concrete literary worlds, in which abstract systems of thought become incarnate. We also appreciate his exceptional ability to synthesize into one vision the divergent medieval traditions he inherited. Dante’s literary imagination gives us a place every bit as painful and severe as that of earlier authors and yet, almost paradoxically, every bit as merciful and hopeful as the mystics later hinted at. In fact, it is Dante’s juxtaposition of these divergent elements that gives the opening canti of Purgatorio (1–8) such energy. In particular, we will see that Dante’s purgatory is, at once, a place (1) of stern justice, where human beings must accept the consequences of their freedom; (2) of radical humility, where souls must learn to reimagine themselves as completely feeble unless supported by God; (3) of shockingly generous mercy (4) where a divisive community is healed; and (5) of desire, where complacency is overcome.
Purgatory as a Place of Justice and Freedom: Lessons from Cato
One of the most haunting passages of Inferno is that in which the sinners, newly arrived at the banks of Acheron (the first river of hell), curse their parents, their God, their upbringing, everything but themselves:
But those souls, naked and listless,
lost their color and gnashed their teeth,
as soon as they comprehended [Charon’s] brutal words.
They blasphemed God, their parents,
the human race, the place, the time, the seed
of their begetting and their birth. (Inf. 3.100–105 [lines 103–5: trans. Hollander])
In fact, throughout Inferno sinners (e.g., Francesca, Farinata, Pier, and Ugolino) consistently direct blame at other people; they do not accept their freedom. In contrast to hell, responsibility is the first lesson the pilgrim has to learn in Purgatorio: this is your fault!
As soon as Dante and Virgil crawl out of the narrow fissure that has led them from hell to purgatory, they meet
an old man, alone,
whose visage was so worthy of reverence
that no son is bound to show more to his father. (Purg. 1.31–33)
In fact, this severe old man is so deserving of respect that Virgil has Dante kneel down and bow his head (1.49–51), yet another example of Dante’s reverence for antiquity. The bearded old man’s face shines with “the rays of those four holy lights” (1.37), and he addresses Dante and Virgil severely, making sure they have not violated the rules for how to approach the island properly (1.40–48); this is Cato the Younger, nephew of the more famous Cato the Elder, the Roman moralist who demanded the destruction of Carthage. Cato the Younger, though, was even more esteemed in the Middle Ages because, in addition to being a famous practitioner of Stoicism, he was held to have written a book of wise maxims, the Disticha Catonis, which every schoolboy used to learn Latin grammar.
Although Cato the Younger was admired, Dante’s choice to make him the guardian of purgatory would have concerned medieval Christian readers because, in addition to being a pagan, he was also the most important republican opponent to Julius Caesar, an offense that landed other souls, like Brutus and Cassius, in the mouths of Satan (Inf. 34). Furthermore, in his struggle against Caesar, Cato committed suicide when he realized his cause was lost. And so, although admired as a man of action and discipline, the pagan hero had a triple handicap: he was not a Christian, he was a suicide, and he was an opponent of the empire. So what is he doing here, not just in the Christian afterlife, but elevated to such a prestigious role of governance? Why do we not, at the very best, find him in limbo?
Virgil’s speech to Cato might give us a clue:
“May his advent be a delight to you:
he seeks freedom, which is so precious,
as the one who forfeits his own life for it well knows.
“You know this: to you even death in Utica
did not seem bitter. There you left
that garment that will be gloriously bright on the great day.” (Purg. 1.70–75)
The passage alludes to Cato’s suicide in Utica, in modern-day Tunisia. Before Cato took his life, though, he ensured that his followers were safe; but the way the ancient Roman poet Lucan described Cato’s death must have captivated the Christian Dante. Lucan says that Cato hoped his blood would “redeem all the nations, and [his] death pay the whole penalty” incurred by Rome.4 It seems that Dante was enchanted by this line, and that he borrowed his portrait of Cato from Lucan. Thus, he gave his own readers a portrait of a man so strictly in tune with justice and the good of his community that he had no regrets or reservations about any harm that could result to himself—as if this man, seeking human perfection, arrived at the point where he saw something even beyond human perfection and thus unwittingly participated in a Christlike sacrifice. Cato is then a picture of courage, of justice, of foresight, and of absolute control over his own will, but he brings his human virtues to such a point of perfection that his own life has become a sacrifice for others, a sacrifice he does not regret.
Through his own dedication to what could be known about God’s law through the natural revelation of creation, Cato put himself in the position of one of the faithful from the Old Testament, or as medieval theologians had put it, Cato was the recipient of the gift of “implicit faith.” Here’s how Thomas Aquinas explains the concept: “Many pagans received a revelation concerning Christ. . . . If, however, some were saved without such a revelation, they were not saved without faith in the Savior: for, although they did not have explicit faith, they nevertheless had implicit faith in divine providence, believing God to be the liberator of humankind in ways He would choose according to his pleasure” (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 2, a. 7).5 So, in contrast to the Christian suicide Pier della Vigna, who could only think of his own ruined reputation and gave up when he could see no other way out, Cato had trust that his life meant something within the grander picture and that God would sort out the details if he did his own part. He is, then, a fitting guardian of this most human realm of justice, responsibility, freedom, and trust in providence.
We should also note Cato’s command to Virgil:
“Go and do this: gird him [that is, the pilgrim] round
with a straight reed. Wash his face for him,
so you remove all the stain from it.
“It would not be fitting—with his sight still dimmed
by any mist—to move forward to meet the first of the
ministers from paradise.
“This little island, all the way down to its lowest reach,
there where the waves beat down on it,
brings up reeds out of the soft mud.
“No other plant that puts out leaves
or takes on a hard stem is able to retain its life,
because it cannot sway with the battering waves.” (Purg. 1.94–105)
Dante then must go and bind himself with the flexible reed—the only plant that can grow in the slimy mud and in the shallow waters around the island, because it is the only plant pliant enough to flow and move with the waters as they roll in and out. Every other plant gets hard and rots. At the same time, the reed is a biblical plant. Isaiah, for example, had said that “a bruised reed shall he not break” (Isa. 42:3), a verse that the Gospel of Matthew interprets as applying to the humble, quiet ministry of Christ (Matt. 12:20).
We also have a classical literary allusion: when Aeneas is preparing to visit the underworld, to receive the last advice from his now deceased father, Anchises, he is told that he must first go into a forest and find a magical tree branch made of gold (the Golden Bough). The Sybil explains this strange ritual:
Hidden in a dark tree
is a golden bough, golden in leaves and pliant stem,
sacred to Persephone . . . all the groves
shroud it, and shadows enclose the secret valleys.
But only one who’s taken a gold-leaved fruit from the tree
is allowed to enter earth’s hidden places. (Aen. 6.36–41)
Aeneas does find the Golden Bough, and the tree, magically and instantaneously, sprouts another golden bough to replace the first as soon as Aeneas cuts it off. Similarly, Virgil, after cleaning Dante’s tear-stained cheeks, girds the pilgrim with this reed of humility, using it to bind his cloak about him in the manner of a contemporary Franciscan mendicant. Then the poet notes,
And O! Miracle! The humble plant, just like the one he chose,
was reborn, at once,
in the very spot where he had plucked it. (Purg. 1.134–36)
Dante’s passage is clearly meant to invoke a comparison with Virgil’s Golden Bough. Both the bough and the reed are needed as tokens, keys to gain entry into the mysteries of the afterlife, but the difference between these tokens of entry forces us to reflect on how different the pagan afterlife is from the Christian, and how different the guardians of these realms are: one ruler, Persephone, desires the enchanted branch of gold; the other, Cato, wants a contrite heart and spiritual flexibility. In Dante, it’s not enough to be a virtuous, stouthearted, Aeneas-like hero; you have to seek things even higher than the human, and so you must stoop low in search of the divine grace to do so. In Purgatorio, Dante begins his own epic quest with a lowly scene of washing, a kind of public confession of interior emptiness, an act of radical humility as preparation for the ultimate gift. And it is Cato, that failed hero from antiquity, who teaches the Christian hero how to enter this realm! We must act with justice. We must acknowledge and live under the weight of our freedom, but we also need a radical sense of the fragility of our own projects. Thus, in some ways, Cato’s very failure in his struggle for justice was an indispensable lesson that renders him a suitable guardian of purgatory.
Sordello Teaches Virgil a Lesson: Radical Humility in Christian Purgatory
Already in canto 1, the figure of Cato (a self-sacrificing hero, a master of discipline, and a failure) provides a complicated lesson on the virtues needed to be successful in this realm. Paradoxically, purgatory is a place of extreme effort, sweat, responsibility, and self-control and, at the same time, a place of radical humility, radical openness to the gift of being. The laws of purgatory are crafted to provide those hardworking souls with the constant reminder of how they are completely feeble without the assistance of God and without the assistance of their neighbor. With their weakness constantly fresh on their minds, they are put, almost for the first time, in a position where they can appreciate that even their own power of choice, their freedom, is a gift. This is a hard lesson for old, magnanimous Virgil to learn.
In Inferno 8–9, the Roman poet, shut out of Dis, is enraged that such base and vile demons would dare to oppose him, the noble guide appointed to oversee this mission of light and justice. But here in purgatory, Virgil will have many more such encounters with his own limitations. For instance, in Purgatorio 6, Virgil and Dante meet a minor medieval poet, Sordello, who is delighted to learn that the man who stands before him is not just a fellow countryman (they were both from Lombardy) but an ancient celebrity: “O glory of the Latins . . . through whom / our language showed what it was capable of, / O eternal honor of the land whence I come,” he rhapsodizes (Purg. 7.16–18). But interestingly, Sordello, a vastly inferior talent to Virgil, becomes the instructor of the great teacher in a moment that shows how Virgil is increasingly out of place in the midst of this Christian world of humility. Virgil notes that it’s getting late, and he expresses a desire to get some more miles in before it gets too dark. At this point Sordello shocks the ancient poet, informing him that here no one can climb at night:
“How is that? . . . If someone wants
to ascend at night, would he be impeded
by someone, or would it be that he was not able?” (Purg. 7.49–51)
Virgil, the self-reliant figure of virtue and discipline, can’t imagine why you might not want to get a bit of work done in the evening as well. This is the response he gets:
And the good Sordello rubbed his finger on the ground,
saying: “You see? This very line
you would not cross after the sun’s parting,
“not because something prevented the ascent;
no, nothing other than the darkness of the night.
It binds the will in helplessness.” (Purg. 7.52–57)
To that, Virgil stands quasi ammirando, as if in bewildered amazement (7.61). In purgatory, the very laws of the place are designed to reinforce the experience of your powerlessness. If the light is not shining, if a soul is not filled with that energy that comes from the sun, then it cannot even move; its very legs and arms have to be energized from an outside source. In this extraordinary way, the souls are reminded that what they often took for granted—their health, intelligence, strength, even their power of choice—is something they had very little control over. Their lives are a radical gift from another.
This lesson of humility is reinforced another time, in the Valley of the Kings, the beautiful vale into which Sordello leads Dante and Virgil. Here a group of failed medieval kings, who spent their treasuries fighting one another on earth, are made to dwell for a time in the same valley, in peace. They also are made to pray together, in unison (Purg. 8.10–18).
In fact, Dante mentions nine flawed kings and princes, all of whom died between 1274 and 1292—that is, the kings who reigned and fought when Dante was a boy. Keep in mind that the children and grandchildren of these aristocrats and royalty were still alive in Dante’s day! But the fiery Florentine, who has now assumed the untiring voice of the prophet, pulls no punches. The pilgrim sees Emperor Rudolph of Austria, who fought a war to secure his throne but entirely neglected Italy and thus lost the opportunity to spare Italy the divisive problems to come, and he sees King Ottocar, who was killed by Emperor Rudolph in battle. Thus, enemies are united in the valley of peace. There is also Pedro III, king of Aragon, and Charles I of Anjou, who in life were also enemies, fighting over succession to the Sicilian throne. Indeed, throughout these canti, Dante convicts these kings as guilty of what I call the “trust-fund phenomenon”—that is, the phenomenon in which the generation that receives everything falls off from the older one. Dante says the children of royalty hang like rotting fruit on the withering branches of the family tree because the heirs do not seek the nobility of the heart of their fathers: “Rarely does human nobility rise up through the branches” (Purg. 7.121).
But the primary disciplina Dante’s kings have to undergo is a peculiarly humility-enforcing exercise: long before they are admitted to purgatory proper, they have to make atonement for misusing their positions of wealth and political office. Toward nightfall every evening, they turn to face the east and chant “Te Lucis” (the liturgical hymn of praise used on solemn occasions). Then they all turn pale in nervous anticipation, because each night a serpent comes silently into this garden from some unexpected direction. Sordello explains that each night two angels are sent from the bosom of Mary to guard the valley from this serpent. This comes as startling news to the pilgrim:
And so I—unaware of what path—
turned around, and then I drew near,
now cold with fear, to the trusted shoulders [that is, Virgil]. (Purg. 8.40–42)
The serpent, then, slips into this garden, but soon after this, while the kings are praying, the angels chase it off. Every night these failed kings have to endure, even participate in, this performance, like one of those plays in which the actors leave the stage and mingle with the audience. In life the failed kings, spiritual trust-fund babies, took up their inherited duties but without true nobility of heart. They were not alert to the constant and insidious threat of the serpent slinking back into the garden. They ought to have been vigilant for their people, vigilant over their households, vigilant over their hearts, but they took up their office and their wealth as if they were their possessions to dispose of as they wished. Here in purgatory they have to get used to thinking about their vulnerability and fragility—their need to stand in spiritual vigilance.
In Dante’s purgatory, souls have to recognize their own powerlessness, and yet, at the same time, this is not a passive place, like some spiritual operating room where you go under and the surgeon repairs you while you sleep. Rather, Dante has made a purgatory that demands absolute activity, tremendous expenditures of sweat and energy, and the realization that the very power to be reformed lies outside your soul. Humility is openness to the radical gift of another.
Surprising Abundance of Mercy
One of the most beautiful aspects of Dante’s Purgatorio is how easy it is to come by mercy, because he who offers it is so quick to pour it forth. It would be as if a soul suffering from thirst in a desert begged for a tiny bit of water squeezed from a medicine dropper and got a barrelful dumped on it instead. In Purgatorio, mercy is “under pressure,” waiting to irrupt into the world. This is most clearly portrayed in the pilgrim’s encounter with Manfred (Purg. 3) and Buonconte da Montefeltro (Purg. 5).
Manfred was the illegitimate son of Emperor Frederick II, whom we met among the heretics (Inf. 10). In Dante’s mind, Frederick II, in his struggle with the medieval papacy, attempted to wrest power from the church and, in doing so, went beyond politics to set himself up as an alternative to the church, thus creating a false dichotomy between the temporal and the spiritual. Manfred continued his father’s political campaign, moving ever farther north from Sicily and southern Italy in a slow attempt to conquer the entirety of the Italian peninsula. His advance was stopped by a joint papal and French force at the Battle of Benevento in 1266.
The important point for us is that Manfred’s inclusion among the saved would have shocked many of Dante’s first readers, especially the papal-supporting, republican, middle-class nouveau riches of Guelph Florence. It would be a little bit like if you told Democrats that you had had a vision of the afterlife, and George Bush and Donald Trump were there in bliss; or if you included Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a book intended for a Republican readership. “Manfred?” Dante’s Florentine readers would have asked. The warmongering son of a heretic who tried to divest the church of its property? Dante does, of course, make Manfred admit that “horrible were my sins” (Purg. 3.121). It is also true that he is here in antepurgatory because he spent most of his life holding the church and her sacraments in contempt. In Dante’s purgatory, the rule is that for every year a soul held the church in contempt—that is, every year it thought that it did not need the help of “institutionalized religion”—it has to wait for thirty years in antepurgatory even before it is allowed through the gate.
And yet this unlikely soul did get into purgatory, seemingly at the absolute last moment. After he was sliced by two deadly blows, he tells us, wounds he still bears in purgatory, he had just enough blood in his body to turn “in tears to Him who freely pardons” (Purg. 3.120). But we should note another interesting narrative detail: Manfred, when he introduces himself to Dante, does not describe himself as you would expect a medieval leader to do—that is, according to his father’s line, as the son of a powerful emperor, Frederick II—but rather he introduces himself as the grandson of Empress Constance, as if in seeking his true, spiritual inheritance he had to skip a generation and seek out a female relative, a grandmother, for his true lineage. In the light of eternity, Manfred is forced to reenvision his life and find that the inheritance he truly received was not what he would have reckoned important in his earthly life.
Just two canti later, we meet another soul who died a violent death. This time, though, the soul had not held “institutionalized religion” in contempt, like Manfred, but rather he had put off repenting until the absolute last second. The soul is that of Buonconte da Montefeltro, the son of Guido da Montefeltro (whom we met in Inferno 27), the false counselor turned Franciscan who went back to the game just one last time, thereby sealing his fate in hell. You will remember that although the father, Guido, thought he was in the fold, a demon came to drag him down to hell at his death because he had not actually been repentant for his final evil deed (Inf. 27.118–20). His son, Buonconte, continued in the ways of his father: he too was a good general. But in his final battle, fate caught up with him; he was wounded in the throat, and as he wandered across the field, barely able to speak, he had just enough breath to whisper “Maria” (i.e., the Blessed Virgin) before he fell to the ground.
Dante, then, gives us a man of violence and blood who spent his whole life campaigning, delighting in the destruction of his enemies. You would think that for such a bloody life a trip straight to hell would be within the order of justice. But in Purgatorio, mercy is surprisingly abundant; you ask for a drop and get a shower. And so Dante depicts this miniscule act of true piety—a whispered “Maria”—as sufficient to win for this soul an eternity in bliss. And thus Buonconte’s death plays out just the opposite from how his father’s did. Guido, confident that he had covered his bases, goes to hell; Buonconte, even if only in a single instant, makes one sincere expression of his need for help and will ultimately enter into heaven. Buonconte relates that when the demon came to claim his rightful property—that is, Buonconte’s soul—the dark angel was surprised and enraged to find that Buonconte would not be his property. Rather, the soul of Buonconte is snatched up by God’s angel. The demon, in disbelief and with contempt, asks the angel, “You carry off with you the eternal part of him / because of a tiny tear [una lagrimetta]?” (Purg. 5.106–7). But the answer, of course, is yes. A little tear finds an ocean of mercy in reply.
Healing the Divisive Human Community
Purgatory, then, is the explosive place where a soul’s vision of the world is restored, where one comes to see that God’s mercy was very near, just under the surface, throughout one’s life. But it is also a place where the soul has to be restored to a harmonious position within the human community. Souls in hell, in the pursuit of the goods of the world, were willing to break from communion with the human community to get those things; they wanted their political office so badly that they were willing to cheat on campaign laws, or wanted victory so badly on the battlefield that they were willing to use evil engines of war to destroy the gullible. The souls in purgatory sincerely renounced, even if at the very last minute, their desire to operate within this divisive system. And yet they still have to be brought back into the human community, still have to learn how to work in a nonindividualistic way—a task that is easier said than done! When you’ve spent your life calculating how to win friends and manipulate people, or strategically planning how to get ahead, or how to start a lucrative business despite the fact that it makes a worthless product, then it’s hard to submit your will to a group and truly love their good. The souls in purgatory spent their whole lives doing the opposite. In Dante’s purgatory, as we will see, souls have to lean on one another for support, chant prayers in perfect harmony with those who surround them, and rely on one another for the support of prayer.
This reintegration back into the human community is dramatized vividly among the people outside the gate, where they have to wait until those back on earth—the very souls they meant to utilize for their profit in life—pray for them. The souls in Purgatorio 5, for example, almost trample one another to get to the pilgrim when they discover he is still alive:
I have not seen stars shoot
through a placid sky at nightfall,
nor bursts of lightning, when the sun is hot, move so quickly
as these [messengers] returned upward—in no time!
When they got there, they turned back around toward us with all the others,
like a flock that is dispersed without order. (Purg. 5.37–42)
The laws of the place dictate that you either have to wait the allotted time that counterbalances your delayed repentance, or have your time of waiting lessened on account of being the beneficiary of the sincere prayers of those on earth. Thus, in purgatory, the fact that souls can have mercy won for them helps condition them to love the human community again, because they are now dependent on its members.
My favorite example of such reintegration comes from a later passage. In canto 13, a Sienese aristocrat, Sapia, confesses that she spent her whole life envying the success of those around her. And she too would have had to spend a lot of time in the prepurgatorial realm of waiting, given her delayed repentance. But then she found surprising and unsolicited help:
“Peace: I desired peace with God only at the very end
of my life; and nor would my debt
have been reduced through penance
“if it had not been that that man held me in his devout memory:
Peter the combseller, in his holy prayers!
He sorrowed for me, in his charity.” (Purg. 13.124–29)
Extraordinary lines! Peter the combseller, the equivalent of the immigrant street vendor, prayed for her! A man whom the moneyed, aristocratic Sapia would have had nothing but contempt for in life becomes a soul with whom she now has a spiritual bond. Through his prayer for her, he has become someone she spiritually leans on. Through such acts of love, the human community, divisive on earth, is slowly knit back together.
Overcoming Complacency
Finally, purgatory is a place of desire, a place where complacency must be overcome. Here in antepurgatory, those lackadaisical souls who stood up God in life now have to wait, to feel the time tick by, to grow impatient and frustrated and almost beside themselves, until there is such an overwhelming desire to just start their purgation that they are, at last, ready to begin. One of Dante’s most beloved authors, Richard of St. Victor, said desire—what he even called a “violent desire”—plays a crucial role in the spiritual life. God doesn’t give us what we don’t want, and thus a holy, burning, passionate desire is a prerequisite for the spiritual life.6 Similarly, in canto 2 we hear Cato upbraid the souls for standing around. He shouts at them in fury, “Correte al monte!” (“Run you sluggish souls, toward the mountain!” Purg. 2.122). Overcoming complacency is also a theme in canto 4, where Dante and Virgil see the lazy soul of Belacqua resting in the shade. Dante points him out to Virgil:
“O my dear lord,” I said, “lay your eyes on that one
who looks more negligent
than if laziness were his sister.”
He then turned toward us and paid us heed,
lifting his face just higher than his thighs,
and said: “You go on up, if you’re so strong.” (Purg. 4.109–14)
It is then that Dante recognizes an old friend from Florence:
His lazy actions and his curt words
moved my lips a little into a smile.
I then began: “Belacqua? I see I don’t have to sorrow
“for you any longer; but why are you just
seated here? Are you waiting for a guide,
or is it just that you’ve taken up your old ways?”
And he: “O brother, going up? What’s the point,
since he wouldn’t let me enter into suffering—
the angel of God who is seated up there at the gate.
“No. It is first required that the heavens wheel around me,
as I sit here outside, as long as I took in life,
delaying righteous sighs until the very end.
“That is, unless some prayer helps me first,
that rises up from a heart that lives in grace.” (Purg. 4.121–34)
It is clear that Belacqua will be here a long time. He has not yet been touched by that holy impatience, that keen desire to get his soul ready to see God.
But there is one other note to add on Belacqua. When Dante the pilgrim arrives at the gate of purgatory, the angel tells him that Peter has entrusted the keys of this place to him, with these instructions: “It is from Peter that I have them; and he told me that I should err / in opening rather than in keeping it locked / if people should cast themselves to the ground at my feet” (Purg. 9.127–29). It is only in light of the angel’s commission that we notice how limited Belacqua’s understanding of purgatory is. Belacqua had asked the pilgrim, rather dejectedly, “Going up? What’s the point?” But from the vantage of the gate, we realize that if Belacqua’s desire were greater, it would find its fulfillment. The only thing regulating his ascent, then, is his own lack of desire. If he but requested a drop of water!