(Purgatorio 25–28)
Dante the Apprentice
In the previous chapter, I discussed how the spiritual exercises of purgatory, especially lectio, lead to that state of prayerfulness that is the precondition for the “deep cleansing” of the purgatorial souls. But what is interesting is that at exactly the same time that Dante dramatizes souls engaged in this transformative reading, he also weaves in and out of these middle canti the theme of writing. In other words, Dante doesn’t just portray souls becoming affectively vulnerable through their lectio; he also stages a number of encounters between the pilgrim and various poets, both ancient and medieval, so that through these meetings and conversations he can work out his own poetic identity.1
The full consequences of this self-portrait can only be fully seen in light of Paradiso, but for now we can note, quite simply, that these middle canti are full of conversations with poets about poetry. In particular, Dante orients these conversations around two poles: the conversations and events that unfold around classical poets (Virgil and Statius in Purg. 21–22), and the conversations and events that Dante holds with contemporary medieval poets (Bonagiunta da Lucca, Arnaut Daniel, and Guido Guinizelli in Purg. 24–26). As we shall see, these conversations culminate in Purgatorio 27 and 28, precisely as the pilgrim reenters humanity’s first home, the garden of Eden, where language was originally born and fitted to reality.
The Poetry of Light
In the midst of the pilgrim’s journey through the terrace of the avaricious, Dante complicates the narrative by introducing a third traveler into the group. He is Statius, the ancient Roman poet, who was born in France, wrote in Latin, and lived a half century after Virgil. He wrote an epic poem about the mythological war over Thebes (Thebaid). In the age of Statius, it was not possible to write an epic without paying homage to the greatest Roman epic (Aeneid), and thus we hear Statius praise Virgil as the one who taught him to be a writer (Purg. 21.94–99). As the conversation between Statius and Virgil continues to unfold in the next canto (Purg. 22), Dante has Statius confess even more: Virgil was not only responsible for helping him become a craftsman of the Latin language, but Virgil—pagan Virgil—also made him a Christian! In their exchange, Virgil gives voice to a doubt: there is no indication in Statius’s poetry that he was a Christian (indeed, as far as modern scholars know, there shouldn’t be any—he never was a Christian). But Dante takes advantage of the silence of history to fill in a backstory of his own devising (like he did with Ulysses). Dante has Statius say that he had indeed become Christian but hid it; he was a closet Christian:
“You first set me on the way
toward Parnassus to drink in its grottoes,
and you first illumined me for God.
“You acted as one who goes through the night
and bears a light behind him. It does no good for him,
but those behind are instructed.
“When you said: ‘The saeculum is renewed;
justice returns and the first age of man,
and new offspring descends from heaven.’
“Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian.” (Purg. 22.64–73)
Virgil, then, was a man who carried a lantern behind his back: it lighted the path for those behind him, although it was of no use to him. The poem that Statius quotes is Virgil’s “Fourth Eclogue,” a lyrical, pastoral poem written as an impassioned expression of hope that peace would soon return to war-torn Italy during the Roman Republic. The imagery the ancient poet used to express his desire, though, was so close to Scripture that later medieval readers accepted it as a prophetic announcement of the imminent advent of Christ:
Now the last age by Cumae’s Sibyl sung
Has come and gone, and the majestic roll
Of circling centuries begins anew:
Justice returns, returns old Saturn’s reign. . . .
The iron shall cease, the golden race arise. . . .
Whatso tracks remain
Of our old wickedness, once done away,
Shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear. . . .
For thee, O boy,
First shall the earth, untilled, pour freely forth
Her childish gifts. . . .
The serpent too shall die,
Die shall the treacherous poison-plant. (Eclogue 4)2
This pagan poem, written several decades before Christ, almost sounds like a Christmas hymn or a passage from Isaiah! There will be no more tilling of the soil, because all plants will spring up in every land; there will be no more avaricious merchants, because all will have what they need; all our crimes will be wiped away, and the peaceful Golden Age will return when a mysterious boy comes to rule the world. Later in the Comedy Dante has the young woman in the garden of Eden, Matelda, tell the three travelers that such pagan, poetic dreaming of the Golden Age wasn’t mere fancy but rather was a groping attempt to recollect the bliss that humanity enjoyed in its infancy (Purg. 28.139–47).
This, then, is the extraordinary compliment that Dante pays classical poetry through Statius’s praise of Virgil. Poetry is not an escape from reality; it is its intensification. It is the attempt to recollect humanity’s origin. As J. R. R. Tolkien put it, good poetry brings with it a “curious thrill,” as if something stirs in you, half wakened from sleep. “There is something remote and strange and beautiful behind the words . . . something which derives its curiously moving quality from some older world.”3
Dante wants us to see, then, that he is the diligent student of these ancient poets, even if separated by more than ten centuries:
[Virgil and Statius] were moving along in front, and solitary I
behind. I was listening to their discourse,
which gave me rich understanding of the poet’s craft. (Purg. 22.127–29)
For Dante, ancient epic poetry represents the attempt to put in words the highest ambitions of human beings. It is the pursuit of the best possible language to frame the subtlest and most elusive dreams of the heart, and thus it involves a lifetime of slow and quiet study of the greatest books by the greatest masters to develop the craft. For Dante, this meant copying them, word by word, with quiet patience, attentively searching out the secrets that undergird their art. And it is this habit of study that Dante represents himself as following when he had his pilgrim listening, with carefully attuned ears, to the private conversations of the two Roman masters about the secrets of their poetry.
Love and Language (Purgatorio 26)
For Dante, Statius and Virgil were the masters of epic poetry, the long poems that describe the great tasks and undertakings of magnanimous heroes in language that is highly elevated above ordinary speech. Dante styles himself as the student of these morally serious epic poets, but, fascinatingly, he also has his pilgrim meet and talk with and even declare himself the faithful disciple of contemporary lyric poets. These poets are not the Latin-using, venerable poets of antiquity but the passionate, fashionable love poets who wrote in the vernacular close to Dante’s own time: the troubadour Arnaut Daniel (who wrote in Provençal) and Guido Guinizelli (from Bologna, who wrote in Italian in the century before Dante).
In canto 24, Guido Guinizelli is referred to as the great poet who wrote in the “sweet new style,” because he aimed to praise love and provide philosophical reflections on beauty. In his most famous poem, Guinizelli meditates on the relationship between love and beauty, saying that love is to the noble heart as heat is to the flame: the two naturally accompany one another. Guinizelli finishes that poem in a bold way:
My lady, God will say to me, “How could you presume?”
when my soul is before him:
“You passed beyond the heavens and came all the way to me
And you used me as a likeness to vain love;
All praise is due to me
And the queen of this worthy realm. . . .”
But I will be able to say to Him: “[My lady] had the likeness of an angel
who was of your kingdom.
The failure is not mine, if I set my love on her.”4
It is an audacious claim by the poet: he prefers earthly and tangible beauty to abstract ideas in a far-off place—earthly experience of love more than theological reflection. Not surprisingly, now, in this terrace, poets such as Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel have to be purged of that preference for earthly love over heavenly love, as Arnaut says at the end of canto 26:
“I am Arnaut, who weep and make my way in song.
I see with grief at the folly behind me,
and I see, with delight, the joy for which I hope before me.” (Purg. 26.142–44)
But Dante doesn’t dismiss this lyric poetry and earthly love; rather, he suggests that their interior fire was the secret of their success! Perhaps to our surprise, Dante now reenacts the same reverence for his father figure, Guinizelli, that Statius had shown for Virgil (in canto 22). Like Statius, who was overwhelmed by the revelation that it was the great Virgil who stood before him (Purg. 21.121–36), Dante is astounded to learn that he stands before Guido Guinizelli, who had been the father
of me and many others—my betters—who always
used the rhymes of love that are sweet and graceful.
And without hearing or saying a thing, lost in thought, I went on
for a long time, staring at him . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Tell me what is the reason you hold me
so dear in your speaking and in your looks.”
And I to him: “Your sweet lines,
which, as long as modern custom will endure,
will make precious even the ink used to write them.” (Purg. 26.97–101, 106, 110–14)
Guinizelli, unlike Virgil, deflects this praise, pointing out that vernacular writers will always be coming in and out of fashion because the language changes so fast.
Dante’s Epic and Lyric Pilgrimage
This, then, is how Dante explored the roots of his own poetry. On the one hand, he, the modern poet, has a reverence for the past; he eavesdrops on the conversation of Statius and Virgil and learns the secrets of the classic craft that aims to return to the garden. On the other hand, the Italian poet hints that the classic craft is not enough; rather, he needs to draw on the resources of the love poet, who spent his life trying to give external form to his interior experience. Within his epic journey, Dante needs a lyric reality.
Dante is trying to do the impossible: to have the power, depth, gravity, magnanimity, and thoughtfulness of classical verse, while injecting into it the inspiration, timeliness, urgency, and vitality of the contemporary. Dante is writing a new epic: the epic of love. Like two sides of an arch, both traditions are needed to support Dante’s project. Dante, though he praises Guinizelli, admits how quickly the modern fad fades. Nothing looks so dated so quickly as fashion and popular customs. But in the narrative part of Purgatorio 26, Dante hints at the limitations of the epic tradition.
Virgil fails to motivate the pilgrim, who is faced with one last ordeal: walking through a wall of fire. Virgil and Statius won’t feel any pain at all when they pass through these flames, but, as we might expect, this is the moment that Dante, the man who spent most of his life writing hot love poems, has been dreading. The angel calls to Dante, “Blessed are they who are clean in heart,” and then says, “There is no going on unless you taste the bite, / of fire, you holy souls” (Purg. 27.10–11). When the pilgrim hears this, he freezes: “For this reason, when I understood his words, I became / like a man who has been put into his grave” (27.14–15). Dante won’t budge. Virgil tries to comfort him with all of those unconvincing arguments that a parent or teacher uses: he tells him that this bitter medicine will be good; it might be painful, but it won’t last too long. All these words are without any motivational power. And so Virgil tries one last argument:
When he saw me stay where I was, yet still and unmoving,
disturbed, he said: “Now look, son,
this wall is between you and Beatrice.” (Purg. 27.34–36)
That’s what was needed. At the name of Beatrice, Dante plunges into the fire, which is hot beyond imagination:
As soon as I was within, I would have cast myself
into a boiling caldron of molten glass to cool myself,
so intense was that burning heat, beyond all measure.
My sweet father, to comfort me,
kept moving along, all the while reminding me of Beatrice,
saying: “Her eyes! Already, I seem to see them.” (Purg. 27.49–54)
What the poet of magnanimity failed to accomplish through lofty epic words, he was able to accomplish through the magnetic power of love. The lyric of love and the magnanimity of epic are needed together. Dante’s epic journey has a lyrical interiority.
In Humanity’s First Home (Purgatorio 27–28)
When the pilgrim arrives at the other side of the fiery wall, he participates in a ritualistic ceremony. On the borders of Eden, Virgil declares the pilgrim whole, healthy, and morally restored.
“I have brought you here by learning and by art.
Now, take the inclination of your heart as your guide.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Look at the sun that shines there before you;
look at the grasses, flowers, and trees,
which here the soil produces of itself.
“Until those happy, beautiful eyes come,
that, once with tears, made me come to you,
you can seat yourself or you can go among these things.
“No longer wait for a word or nod from me.
Your will is free, upright, and healthy.
It would be folly not to do what your heart suggests:
for this, I crown you and miter you sovereign of yourself.” (Purg. 27.130–31, 133–42)
Dante is now his own bishop and his own king. He doesn’t need law, judge, or pope now to regulate his behavior. He doesn’t even need rules. He is now free. Ordinarily, the advice to follow the desire of your heart is terrible, isn’t it? But here, with his passions under control, all that Dante has to do is consult his desire. What he wants is good, and that which is good is inherently desirable. He has once again returned to the original state of justice.
With this moral constitution, the pilgrim walks back into the original home of humanity. Thus, the twenty-eighth canto of Purgatorio is a momentous one, whose dramatic action has been long anticipated. It is the apex of the mountain of purgatory and has been the goal of the pilgrim’s journey throughout this canticle. The moment is psychologically charged with those emotions of relief, joy, and surprise that usually attend a homecoming, but it is intensified, because the pilgrim represents all of humanity. Dante the poet needs a special poetic power to capture the joyful and long-awaited event.
Purgatorio 28, then, is a kind of poetic manifesto, an instantiation of what the Christian disciple of Virgil and son of Guinizelli can accomplish. And if that were not enough pressure, there is also the fact that according to medieval theory, Eden was the place wherein language was born and fitted perfectly to the reality it was meant to signify, before the rift emerged between words and things. Eden is where Adam, the so-called name giver (nomothetēs), was inspired to use words to name creation around him (see Gen. 2:19–20). In a certain sense, Adam was the father of poetry, given that he was the ultimate, God-inspired practitioner of language.
With so much anticipation, it is exciting to see how Dante actually does represent his brief sojourn into this linguistically charged locale. From the opening lines of canto 28, the poet describes not so much the details of the garden as the pilgrim’s experience:
Keenly eager now to search within and about
the sacred wood, so dense and alive
that it tempered for my eyes the brilliance of the new day,
without waiting any longer, I left the bank
taking to the open, with slow and stately steps. (Purg. 28.1–5)
Whatever we know of the garden is filtered through the pilgrim’s subjective response to it. We learn of the sweet breeze, but only as it strikes his brow. We hear of the river because it bars his progress. The whole scene has almost a cinematic quality, filmed, as it were, from a first-person angle, so that what is described always has the feel of being viewed through the pilgrim’s eyes.
It is this extraordinary use of the lyrical, then, that marks Dante’s entry into the garden. The pilgrim, who has now returned to the original state of justice, has also returned to an original state of language. To get at this original, divinely inspired language used at the dawn of creation, the poet has to develop a poetry that traces its genealogy through two lines of descent. The first part of his inheritance is from those poets who cultivated an exalted, epic language, needed to describe humanity’s epic struggle to return to the spiritual landscape of its origin. It is the poetry of learning, but also of virtue, piety, discipline, and study. The second part is from the vernacular love poetry, which cultivated the intense, the personal, the immediate, and the present, in direct contrast to the long view of history. Its power lay in its ability to bracket off all else but the immediate, first-person experience of overwhelming love. The genius of Dante’s poetry, then, is that it maps these two traditions on top of one another, uncovering the radical joy of the garden, what Augustine and Aquinas called magnitudo delectationis (intense delight), which man now recalls only as a half-remembered dream. Dante uses the intensity of the first-person view of lyrical poetry so that goodness, justice, and joy come across not as the dull virtues they often strike us as, but as spiritually radioactive, even erotically desirable. Dante rewrites Virgil through Guinizelli. And in doing so, he makes us nostalgic for the original state of purity and justice.5