(Purgatorio 10–24)
At the Center of the Universe: Love and Freedom
As Dante will explain in canto 17, purgatory, just like hell, has its own elaborate moral architecture. In Inferno 11, Virgil and Dante came to a halt while they waited for their senses to get adjusted to the stench of hell. There the Roman poet described hell as divided into three major realms: the incontinent, the violent, and the fraudulent. In Purgatorio 17, Virgil explains the architecture of purgatory, and every detail of the design is related to love (Purg. 17.103–5). We can misdirect our inherent love by loving with too little force; we can love lower goods too much, trying to put them to uses they were not intended for; or our self-love can grow to the point that it is out of control, so that it becomes fear that our neighbor will deprive us of the good we long for (17.94–117). In hell the architecture is indebted to a classical way of thinking about good and evil (explicitly borrowed from Aristotle), but in Purgatorio Dante uses the seven terraces to embody the Christian monastic tradition of the seven deadly sins.1 And yet, at the same time, Dante creatively rethinks the seven deadly sins in order to bring them into harmony with the classical structure: lust, gluttony, and avarice are treated as dispositions that correspond to the incontinent sins of upper hell; sloth and wrath (the misuse of the irascible appetites) are linked to the circle of the violent in hell; while pride and envy are treated as faulty dispositions of the intellect, equivalent to sinful use of the intellect among the fraudulent in hell.2
Virgil’s speech on how love comes right at the center of the cosmos happens to be at the center of the Comedy: the fifty-first canto—that is, the first canto of the second half. Meanwhile, Purgatorio 16, Marco Lombardo’s speech on freedom, could be considered the last canto of the first half of the Comedy. Thus, these canti, which literally lie at the heart of the Comedy as a whole, together form a kind of diptych: love and the free response to love are at the heart of the universe. We have a love that irrupts, rushes into, invades, and courses through the world, enticing and persuading human beings to use their freedom to respond to it. This is the drama of human existence.
It is in light of this passionate vision of love—seeking an entry point into the human heart—that we will now turn to the middle canti of Purgatorio, which deal with the seven terraces of purgatory, and how the souls here correct their sinful disposition in an attempt to regain the power to respond to love.
The Prideful Learn to Pray (Purgatorio 10–12)
When the pilgrim finally gets his first glimpse of souls in purgatory proper, he is horrified and worried that reporting their suffering will actively discourage future readers of the poem:
And yet, 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. (Purg. 10.106–8)
The pilgrim sees the proud walking around and around the terrace, carrying such enormous rocks on their backs that their faces, bowed down under the extreme weight, are just millimeters above the earth. In this way, the backs of the proud are broken. With each trembling step, they fear their legs are just about to give out under their burden. And so, with each step, they cry out, “Più non posso” (“More I cannot,” 10.139). Their words are a painful confession that they are nearly broken. And yet, even in the midst of their pain, there emerges a kind of deep recognition: I myself am not able to do this anymore; nevertheless, somehow I find that I continue moving forward. It is as if the words become not so much a cry of despair (“I can’t handle any more of this!”) as an acknowledgment that it is not I who am mounting the strength to continue (“I, alone, am not able”). Carrying the rocks is a tremendous spiritual exercise for the proud; it leads them to realize that they are fueled by the power of another.
In canto 12 we learn that as they painfully inch along, faces hovering just above the ground, the prideful are made to look at images carved into their path. There they see a dozen famous images of pride—for example, Nimrod, the legendary king responsible for the Tower of Babel; Niobe, the mythological figure who boasted she had more children than the goddess Leto; Saul and Sennacherib—and they see the destruction of the proud city of Troy (Purg. 12.34–66). In the Middle Ages, everyone knew these stories. They were used by preachers in sermons, mentioned in scholarly commentaries, reworked by poets in popular verse, or performed in vernacular drama. But the prideful here are forced to read these well-known stories with an attentiveness they had never directed toward these texts before; they read them as if for the first time. The pain of their movements, their own painfully keen consciousness of the littleness of their strength—“Più non posso” (10.139)—sets the context for appreciating their own share in the insolence of man, who forgets that he is supported by another and attempts to rise above the station appointed to him.
These souls do not just undergo this “passive” suffering, though. Rather, through their reading and purgative exercise, they are filled with such a strong desire for transformation, with such a strong desire to be liberated from who they are, that their hearts overflow in prayer:
“O our Father, you who reside in the heavens,
not as one limited, but because of the greater love
you have for those first effects there on high:
“praised be your name and your power
by every creature, given that it is fitting
to render thanks for your sweet breath.
“May the peace of your kingdom come to us,
for if it doesn’t come toward us, we are impotent by ourselves,
even if we try with all of the strength of our intellect.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Give to us today the daily manna
without which he who grows weary in going forward
goes backward through this dry desert.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“This, our virtue that is overcome so easily,
don’t put it to the test by the ancient adversary,
but deliver us from him who goads it [to evil].
“This last prayer, dear Lord,
is now not offered for ourselves, for whom there is no need,
but for those who remain behind us.” (Purg. 11.1–9, 13–15, 19–24)
This is, of course, the Lord’s Prayer, but with important variations. For Dante’s audience, this passage of the poem would have been astounding, because it was in the vernacular, not in Latin; thus, his audience would have had the strange experience of hearing a familiar text breaking through in the unfamiliar and “homely” language of everyday speech. When we look closer, we realize that Dante has not translated the prayer word for word; rather, his souls perform a kind of spontaneous rewriting of the biblical and liturgical prayer. The forty-nine words of the Latin prayer become the Italian prayer of more than 160 words, as if in the vernacular the Latin prayer releases its potential energy, like the uncoiling of a compressed spring. The “Our Father which art in heaven” becomes three whole verses (Purg. 11.1–3), emphasizing God’s transcendence; the “hallowed be thy name” is amplified into “praised be your name and your power / by every creature, given that it is fitting / to render thanks for your sweet breath” (11.4–6), lines replete with echoes of Saint Francis’s “Canticle of Brother Sun.”3 “Thy kingdom come” becomes “May the peace of your kingdom come to us, / for if it doesn’t come toward us, we are impotent by ourselves, / even if we try with all of the strength of our intellect” (11.7–9), which particularly emphasizes the complete impotence of the prideful to get to the kingdom on their own. Finally, the phrase “deliver us from evil” must become a prayer not “for ourselves, for whom there is no need, / but for those who remain behind us” (11.23–24), because the prideful spent too much time on earth using first-person pronouns. In other words, the old, tired prayer now becomes fresh, custom-tailored to their particular measure.
The British scholar Matthew Treherne has commented on this prayer by referencing David Ford’s understanding of the “moods of theology,” by which he means not emotional moods but grammatical moods. Those who have studied Latin remember learning all those pesky endings for verbs. There are endings for indicative verbs (that is, the mood in which we simply assert and say what is: “The sun is shining brightly”). There are endings for verbs of command and ordering, the so-called imperative mood: “Run to the mountains,” as Cato says. There are the moods of the subjunctive—that is, verbs used for tentative and exploratory statements. The subjunctive can also be used as a “hortatory”—that is, a verb of exhortation, the expression of desire that something be the case, which is not yet. Ford and Treherne point out that most of the time we conduct theology in the indicative and imperative moods. That is, we say, “God is like this”; “his law is like this”; therefore, “act this way.” These are not wrong, of course, but what is fascinating and exciting about the Comedy is that, as it progresses, it increasingly adds these layers of complexity. And so here, in canto 11 of Purgatorio, we find theology beginning to move into a subjunctive or optative mood, a mood of longing, expressing from the depths of the heart a desire that something be the case. The souls express a desire that they step into that reality that they had believed in their heads but had not gripped with their hearts. Dante’s language becomes performative; that is, it does not just describe a reality but tries to speak it into existence through the utterance of a new prayer.4
Sapia’s Evil Eyes (Purgatorio 13)
When the pilgrim climbs up onto the next terrace, he sees the souls of the envious and is struck with pity:
I do not think there is a man who walks the earth in our day
who is so hard that he would not be pricked
by compassion at what I saw then:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Souls] appeared to me covered in rough sackcloth,
and each one bore up another with his shoulder,
and all of them were supported by the bank of rock.
Just as the blind, who lack sustenance,
stand at pardons to ask for their needs,
and one lowers his head onto another . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
an iron wire punctures the eyelids of all
and sews them shut. (Purg. 13.52–54, 58–63, 70–71)
Here are the envious: their eyes are sewn shut by metal wire. Blind, they are forced to lean on one another’s shoulders. Their neighbors, whose good they envied, have now become the only way they don’t fall down. Without their neighbors, they have no support. In this way, the envious are made to feel their radical weakness, and then they are given one another to help them bear it. They are sustained by those human beings they had treated as competitors in life.
In canto 13, the pilgrim will speak to a woman whom we have already mentioned: the Sienese aristocrat Sapia. According to Dante’s imaginative version of her life, Sapia is here now because she was envious of her own well-born relations: so much so that one day, looking out of a tower and seeing her family members destroyed on the battlefield, her heart flared up with joy to see her competition—those who had always got the better portion, those who had been written into her uncle’s will—brought low.
Envy is an extraordinary passion. In its essence it is, as medieval theologians put it, “the displeasure at another’s good.” Envy is that secret voice in the heart that, when your friend calls you and tells you about his job promotion, whispers with quiet discontent. Or envy is that voice that murmurs when your old classmate from high school shows up and looks far better than you do. Envy is the first, untamed response of the heart, which would, if allowed to do so, take the good thing it finds out of existence. In your heart of hearts, if asked on your first impulse, you would rather obliterate a good rather than let it shine as something unpossessed by you.
It’s somewhat humorous to note, then, that Sapia, even in the afterlife, is still in the process of being cleansed of this vice. We detect a note of envy at the end of her speech to the pilgrim: “But you? Who are you that goes about asking after our conditions / bearing eyes that are not sewn?” (Purg. 13.130–31). She’s not perfect, but she’s on her way. We see an interior joy beginning to well up within. When Dante asks the group of souls if any among them is Italian, Sapia replies:
“O my brother, each is a citizen
of the one true city; but what you mean to say is,
‘who lived in Italy as a pilgrim.’” (Purg. 13.94–96)
You can imagine meeting people who lived thousands of years ago within boundaries that no longer exist. Those places would seem so puny and insignificant after the centuries. The souls in hell, though, are fixed and frozen in those outdated things. In contrast, we see here that Sapia has begun to view life sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity; to look at those things that were so important for an envious person—what precisely belongs to whom and when and how—in a new light. Sapia is beginning to love as a member of the human community.
Marco Lombardo’s Wrath and Human Freedom (Purgatorio 16)
On the ledge where the wrathful are purified, the souls chant the “Agnus Dei” (the liturgical prayer that begins “Lamb of God . . .”) while progressing through thick smoke, like that fatty smoke that comes off the grill. The smoke stings, and so they have to keep their eyes tightly shut against it. Here Dante meets an old courtier who lived in what Dante would have thought of as the “good old days,” about a century before he wrote. This courtier, Marco Lombardo, is portrayed as the perfect knight, chivalrous, commanding, brave: “[I] knew the world, and I loved that valor / but men of our day have relaxed the bow” (Purg. 16.47–48). Not surprisingly, the pilgrim takes the opportunity to ask Marco his favorite question: why the “world is such a wasteland / of every virtue . . . / and weighed down by malice, covered by it” (16.58–60). To which Marco heaves a heavy sigh and replies:
“You who live today assign every cause
to the heavens alone, as though they drew
everything along with themselves through strict necessity.
“But this would obliterate in you your free will, if it were so,
and there would be no justice in taking
delight for good and suffering sorrow for evil.
“The heavens initiate your movements,
not all of them, but even if I had said that,
a light has been given you for good and for malice,
“as well as freedom of the will.” (Purg. 16.67–76)
In other words, Marco Lombardo attacks those who would blame the evil of the world on environmental factors: we might say neuroscience, psychology, or mental illness, while Dante’s contemporaries would have said the influence of the heavenly bodies on our dispositions and temperaments—in other words, astrology. While admitting that environmental circumstances do shape our inclinations, Marco insists they cannot account for everything, otherwise human beings would be left guiltless for their faults and undeserving of reward for their virtuous choices. Purgatory is a place of personal responsibility. This is your fault. Marco then goes on to explain how it is that the soul abuses its freedom, and to do so he likens the soul to a capricious little girl (Purg. 16.85–93). Dante’s vision of the soul, then, is delightfully free of any oppressive, puritanical vision of its latent evil. Rather, the soul is pulled toward goods, like a little girl of seven who is delighted by wildflowers along the way and digresses to skip out toward them. But the appetite, if not managed by reason, will keep skipping along after this and then that and eventually lose itself, having strayed from the path. Sin, then, is getting distracted by a minor good, exalting it, and looking to it for something that it is too shallow to possess fully. Marco concludes his speech by saying that if the law and just rulers do not come to the aid of their communities by holding the reins, then simple souls will keep chasing after their own desires and stray from the path; the world will devolve into the chaotic and broken democracy of pleasure it has become.5
We pointed out above that, in the midst of this dark smoke, the souls are singing the “Agnus Dei,” the part of the liturgy that repeats, “Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” As they sing, Dante adds, “there was one word for all, and one mode / so that it seemed full harmony dwelt among them” (Purg. 16.20–21). Those who were wrathful, who had a tendency to divide the world into neat little categories of “us” and “them,” to identify groups of people as their enemies, are now made to rejoin the human community—in harmony. Whereas in life they prayed and longed almost exclusively for justice and vengeance, they now are made to pray for mercy.
It might come as a bit of a surprise, then, that in the midst of these souls singing for mercy, Marco Lombardo delivers an angry rant on how evil the world has grown. He says that there are only three righteous men left in the world, and that even these just men long for death because they are surrounded by a corrupt world (Purg. 16.121–26). He says that the Church of Rome has befouled herself and stumbled into the mud, making herself filthy. What’s going on? Is Marco still displaying his disposition to wrath?
For Dante and medieval moral theologians, anger is not a sin. To be sure, anger can far too easily become sinful, but this happens only when it transgresses its appropriate boundaries. In fact, for Dante and for Aquinas, it is possible to sin by not being angry enough! Fundamentally, anger is the desire for revenge; thus, it is possible to have just anger and to possess the appropriate passion that injustice be corrected. At the same time, the medieval masters knew that it’s almost impossible for anger not to slip into sinful anger. In fact, Aquinas, following an earlier monastic tradition, says that anger has “six daughters”; that is, anger can give birth to various sinful offspring, such as quarreling (the propensity to start a fight because you are mad about something else) and contempt (anger that goes beyond an offense at an injustice and leads the angered soul to hate the person absolutely). Aquinas also mentions a cancerous form of anger, what he calls “swelling of the mind,” which is an obsessive fixation of anger, an inability to think about anything else. Thus, for Dante as for Aquinas, sinful anger—wrath—is a metastasis of a legitimate desire for justice.6
All of this helps us understand the contrapasso in canto 16. The souls have to dwell within the smoke and yet remain unharmed by it—that is, keep their vision from being clouded, even while desiring that justice be enacted. They are obligated to remain within very strict boundaries—that is, to dwell within the stinging smoke, without leaving it. Marco Lombardo agrees to walk with the pilgrim, but only “as far as is permitted” (Purg. 16.34). In other words, the souls here are instructed in how to hate the evils of the world, while hating within the appropriate boundaries of reason. What a tall order! To be angry, without sinning! It seems almost impossible to be able to do this on your own.
Materialism and Depression: On Sloth and Avarice (Purgatorio 18–24)
After leaving the wrathful behind, Dante and Virgil climb up onto the fourth terrace, where they encounter the slothful. The one spokesman for the terrace is a former monk: “I was Abbot of San Zeno at Verona,” he tells the pilgrim (Purg. 18.118). In this canto, acedia is more than just laziness (although that is a part of it). It’s deeper and more dangerous. In fact, in the Christian tradition, acedia, what we now call “sloth,” was a vice particularly feared by monks. At its root, it is a deep, spiritual sorrow that paralyzes the will, makes you dull to doing good, and makes you incapable of enjoying the good things of life, even when you are surrounded by them. Acedia leads you to assume that everyone around is better off and that no one actually cares if you are well. Mary Carruthers quotes from John Cassian’s Institutes (10.2) to illustrate the concern monks had regarding this spiritual cancer:
When depression attacks the wretched monk it engenders a loathing for his situation, dislike of his cell, and contemptuous disparagement of his brethren. . . . It makes him desultory at any task to be done within the walls of his cell. He makes much of monasteries that are situated afar off, and talks about their advantageous positions and healthier sites. He describes the community of brothers there, how friendly and how deeply spiritual they are: while in contrast everything to hand is disagreeable. . . . He looks anxiously this way and that, unhappy because no brother is coming to see him; he goes in and out of his cell and continuously looks at the sun as if it were slow in setting.7
Clearly, the old monks knew something about psychology! Their description of the difficulty of working within the cell could as well apply to the dorm room or office.
Dante inventively imagines an extraordinary spiritual disciplina to correct the slothful disposition: the accidiosi are made to run with an energy greater than that displayed in any other canto. In fact, the pilgrim is only able to catch part of what the abbot of San Zeno says to him, because the penitent soul is shouting out his story over his shoulder as he races past (Purg. 18.127–28). Although canto 18 begins reflectively, it literally ends in this race. The energy of love unexpectedly irrupts in the midst of the abstract conversation of the two learned poets:
But this drowsiness was ripped away from me,
all of a sudden, by a group of people. . . .
At one time the Ismenus, and the Asopus too, saw
along their banks at night a massive herd
when the Thebans needed Bacchus.
Similarly, a large group sliced through the circle.
I could see, as they came toward us,
that they were spurred on by righteous will and just love.
Soon they were upon us, because they were running,
and they all moved like one huge mob:
and two in front, while weeping, were shouting:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Quickly, quickly, lest time be lost
for little love.” And the rest, behind them:
“So that our zeal for doing good make grace green again.” (Purg. 18.88–89, 91–99, 103–5)
They run, then, as a frenzied mob, shouting to one another to add even more speed to their race. In fact, they are compared to the Bacchic revelers of ancient Thebes, who employed wine, wild music, and crazy dancing in their religious ritual. In opposition to the indifferent, who are stung by wasps to keep them moving after a meaningless banner, each of these runners submits to this disciplina in order that he may develop the ability to exert himself voluntarily in a frenzied outpouring of joy. This, then, is the contrapasso for those who reform slack love.
In the next terrace, we find an equally dramatic scene: the penitents on the fifth terrace of Mount Purgatory are bolted, as it were, face down onto the ground, with arms and legs stretched out, with noses squashed and foreheads flattened. They are forced to stare directly at the floor of the terrace. Dante has the spokesman of canto 19, the pope Adrian V, explain the fitting nature of this contrapasso for those who spent too much time in life fixated on earthly wealth:
“Just as our eye was not raised
on high, fixed rather on earthly things,
so does justice make our vision plunge toward the earth.
“Because avarice quenched our love for each good,
and thus spoiled our good works,
so justice here holds us fast.” (Purg. 19.118–23)
The vice of avarice, or covetousness, was also a vice feared by Christian monks. Many theological writers repeated the biblical warning that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). Monks such as Evagrius feared avarice because it was an appetite that could never reach satiety. As Evagrius puts it in his Eight Thoughts, “The sea is never filled up even though it takes in a multitude of rivers; the desire of the avaricious person cannot get its fill of riches.”8 Avarice makes you feverish in your labor and work, to get to the next stage, to meet the next goal. Unlike the slothful, the avaricious are self-motivated, but the problem is that they forget why they started climbing the ladder in the first place. Avarice is a kind of materialistic warping of the theological virtue of hope. In this way Dante’s contrapasso is perfect: the law of the terrace is that the souls are rigidly fixed and bolted down, unable to move. Enslaved in this position, they begin to crave the freedom of mobility that the man who is not weighed down has. Or, again, as Evagrius puts it: “The monk free of possessions is like an athlete who cannot be thrown and a light runner who speedily attains ‘the prize.’”9
Dante’s French Bakery: The Gluttonous (Purgatorio 22–24)
In the sixth terrace, the pilgrim and his guide meet the gluttonous, who have to endure what I call the purgation of the French bakery. You can imagine arriving early in the morning on a cold day at a French bakery: the smell of butter and chocolate and freshly baked bread is in the air, as well as strong coffee. But you have to sit there at the table, smelling the scents and watching others eat, all morning long. In a similar way, Dante’s gluttonous souls are forced to smell the delicious fragrances that come from a talking tree, as well as listen to examples of temperate eating (such as Daniel and John the Baptist; Purg. 22.131–52). If avarice takes place when desire for material things eclipses desire for all intangible goods (e.g., friendships, relationships, virtues, and wisdom), then gluttony is living as if only festive moments of sensual enjoyment are invigorating. The medieval concept of gluttony was more than overeating: it was dainty eating, food snobbery, and the party life. This is the disposition of both the young thirtysomething who lives for the metropolitan culinary scene and the American college student living the party life. The glutton feels that every activity he must do is dull and tiring, except that which happens on the weekend. It should not surprise us, then, that in canto 23 Dante runs into his old drinking buddy, Forese Donati. Dante is overjoyed to see him and actually a bit shocked that he made it:
“If you call to mind
what you were with me, and I was with you,
remembering that now would still be painful.” (Purg. 23.115–17)
Keep in mind that the souls throughout this region are chanting verses from the penitential Psalm 51—for example, verse 15: “O Lord, open thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.” This narrative detail helps us appreciate Dante’s critique of gluttony: the problem with the party life is that it effectively eclipses concerns for all else; or, to put it otherwise, if the lips and mouth are overemployed in consumption of physical things, then they are not available for the use of the higher end of praise.
Reading into Prayer: Summing Up the Middle Canti of Purgatorio
As I said in the previous chapter, although the souls in Purgatorio are “saved,” they are not yet ready to see God, and thus they are assigned the various spiritual exercises in these middle canti (such as those mentioned by Peter of Celles: fasting, fraternal love, recollection of past evils, and so forth). While all of these exercises are useful, medieval spiritual masters of Dante’s day recommended a spiritual exercise that was held as more valuable than any other for creating the conditions of prayerfulness: lectio (what we could call “deep reading”). On closer inspection, lectio is everywhere in the middle canti of Purgatorio.
In his Scala claustralium (The Ladder of Monks), one of the great medieval authorities on lectio, the Carthusian monk Guigo II, describes this deep reading as a ladder with four steps, which, like Jacob’s ladder, stands on the ground but “penetrates the clouds of heaven and explores the secrets of heaven.”10 The first step of the ladder consists in an attentive and quiet reading of the plain text of Scripture, in which each of the words is pronounced slowly, letter by letter, while the reader has an intense expectation that the scriptural passage under consideration is, as Guigo says, “sweet and full of meaning.” The second step is what Guigo calls meditatio, in which the reader seeks a fuller explanation for the text he has read. For example, when meditating on a verse such as “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8), the reader takes each phrase in turn, asking why Scripture says this and not something else, such as “Blessed are those who are pure in body.” The mind also plays freely over all of Scripture, in search of other scriptural passages connected to the subject. The mind recalls, for instance, how Psalm 24 says that those who have “clean hands, and a pure heart” will ascend to God; or how the psalmist prayed, “Create in me a clean heart, O Lord” (Ps. 51:10); or how Job “made a covenant with [his] eyes” (Job 31:1). Meditatio then builds up this network of connections, of parallels and contrasts. It then continues on to ask what it means to “see God,” meditating on what that experience would be like and how it must supremely satisfy all desires. And finally meditatio asks how one might go about acquiring such “cleanness of heart.”
This chain of thoughts leads the soul to see—indeed, feel—the greatness of the promise of the vision of God, but in light of the vision of God’s greatness, the soul begins to feel how weak it is, how little able it is to attain that vision. The soul is thus led to the third rung of the ladder, the impassioned state of oratio (or prayer), in which the soul is pained by its inability to conform itself to truth. It pants, thirsts, and longs for heavenly things. In oratio, the soul no longer longs to hear about God but wants to taste an experience of him. In this state of prayer, according to Guigo, “increased desire” comes and “fire is ignited.” In short, this process of meditating on words leads to a point where speech ends: “By words such as these and similar ones the desire is inflamed: in this way the soul’s affectus is stretched out broad.” Guigo says that tears are the certain sign that one will have such an affective experience, for they effect the inner washing, the inner purgation (tellingly called purgatio): “O blessed tears, through which interior blemishes are purged.” Oratio leads directly into this fourth stage, what Guigo calls contemplatio—that is, the precious moment in which the desire for healing becomes a fleeting moment of unity with God.
Such an affective end was the goal for all monastic deep reading, and it was for this reason that it was woven into the fabric of a medieval monk’s day:
Lectio divina was one of the lengthiest and most important exercises of the medieval cloister. With manual labor and the office, it was a primary enterprise. This sacred reading took place each day, lasting several hours—about six in the winter and three in the summer because of that season’s more important agricultural work. On Sundays and major feast days lectio filled all the canon’s free time. Each remained in the cloister or scriptorium, covering his head with his hood for the sake of easier recollection, to read the scriptures or the Fathers of the Church in order to find God.11
It is also this kind of lectio that is woven into the fabric of Purgatorio. It helps us understand what all of those voices and examples and carvings are doing in each terrace in each of the middle canti of Purgatorio. For example, in 19.73, the avaricious pray Psalm 119:25: “My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me according to thy word”; that is, they repeat the psalmist’s despairing cry to God for help. But now the souls of the avaricious, who are bolted to the ground, “see” up close how their own fixation on earthly things prevented them from making such heartfelt prayers in life. Through their posture they literally reenact the biblical prayer, and thus in their hearts they pray a biblical verse, now in a heartfelt way. Adrian V, in fact, politely asks the pilgrim to leave him alone to his tears (Purg. 19.139–41). If we remember Guigo’s words about tears presaging affectus, then we realize he has already reached the level of oratio, a painful conviction regarding his own powerlessness and a longing for God to come and cleanse within.
Indeed, in every one of the middle canti, we see souls meditating on classical and biblical examples of vice and virtue, but Purgatorio 20 and 24 give us the best insight into the practice of lectio in purgatory. In canto 20, the pilgrim speaks with Hugh Capet, the founder of the French dynastic line that was still ruling in Dante’s day, the Capetians. Here Hugh makes yet another of those savage political denunciations of the evil shepherds of Dante’s day,12 but what is more important for us are the details surrounding Hugh’s speech. Dante at first doesn’t know who he is. As he is passing through the ranks of prostrate souls, he hears one soul shout out, “Dolce Maria!” (O sweet Mary!), “in tearful lamentation, / just like a woman does when she is giving birth” (Purg. 20.20–21). This soul is clearly deep in some personal meditation and is so moved by what he meditatively sees in his imagination that he shouts out with compassion as if Mary were standing before him. But then the voice goes on: “How poor you were / can been seen by that inn / where you set down your holy burden” (20.22–24). While meditating on how Mary gave birth in the stable, Hugh is so moved that he himself shouts out, as if he were a woman in labor (20.20–21)! Thus, we have a great example of a soul entering imaginatively into the scene and dwelling in it with such a vivid imagination that his affectus has been warmed; the text has come alive within him. His lectio is turning into prayer.
Later, Hugh explains to the pilgrim that souls in purgatory do not just “go over [these stories] again and again” (Purg. 20.103), but they also “celebrate” (20.113) the destruction of Heliodorus and shout out loud with righteous anger, apostrophizing Crassus and mocking him for his taste for gold (20.116–17).13 Some souls are loud and some are quiet in the vocalizations of their condemnations. The more passion they feel over evil, the more their hearts are pricked and goaded to express that righteous anger or joy in the good (20.118–21). They cry out “according to the zeal that spurs our speech” (the key word is l’affezion [= affectus], 20.119).
With this in mind, when we come back to Hugh’s speech, in which he decries the political evil of his day, we note another detail: Hugh offers a prophecy in which he likens the besieged pope to Christ and the reckless French king to Pilate (Purg. 20.87–93). His righteous anger is clearly shaped by biblical passages of longing:
“O my Lord, when shall I be made happy
by seeing your vengeance! Concealed for now, it
makes your wrath sweet in your secret thoughts.” (Purg. 20.94–96)
Hugh’s biblically molded outcry is a sign that the sin to which he was once prone—the avaricious acquisition of land—is now becoming repulsive to him. His heart is being rewritten through his deep, affective lectio.
But it is in canto 23 that we find these things even more evocatively portrayed. As we have said, this is where Dante meets Forese Donati, his old drinking buddy. Donati and the other penitent gluttonous souls are “dark and sunken in the eyes, / pallid in the face, and so gaunt / that the skin took all its form from the bones” (Purg. 23.22–24). Then the poet says something amazing:
Their eye sockets looked like rings with gems;
and he who sees “omo” written into the visage of men
would have recognized the “m.” (Purg. 23.31–33)
In other words, their faces have become so thin, their eyes so sunken, that the nose and cheek bones form the letter m, with the eyes forming two o’s in the middle—that is, spelling out the word omo, Latin and Italian for “man.” This is an extraordinary moment. We know that Forese, like the others, is reading in a meditative way, contemplating the examples of temperance, while performing these exercises of fasting. And thus, while he is reading, his very face, his very visage, is being rewritten, so that his humanity is now becoming apparent once again. Forese, then, was like a text poorly written, but now it is being scratched out, and through his cooperation with God he is being rewritten to become the text he was meant to be. His humanity, as represented by the word omo, is being restored. His deep reading is the vehicle by which he is being rewritten in prayer.