"Love follows knowledge."
"Beauty above all beauty!"
– St. Catherine of Siena

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Comments to Dante's Purgatorio, Cantos XXIX to XXXIII, Part 3

Some random and concluding thoughts on the last four cantos.

When the pageantry starts singing “Veni, sponsa, de Lebanoí” at the beginning of Canto XXX, is this supposed to be ironic?  I don’t think it’s supposed to, and I haven’t seen any commentary suggesting that, but it does seem odd that the drama develops along the sacrament of confession instead of the sacrament of marriage.  It’s also interesting that the quotes from Virgil’s work as Virgil departs here are examples of flawed male/female relationships.  Both Orpheus and Eurydice and Dido and Aeneas are tragic love affairs.  Indeed, Dido breaks a vow she made to the gods and fails at the duty of governing her country, and ultimately commits suicide.  I can’t imagine these allusions being an accident.  Dante the author could have picked a quote from The Aeneid concerning Aeneas’ dutiful wife, Olivia.  I don’t know what to make of it, and none of the commentary I’ve come across speaks to it.  Dante’s relationship to Beatrice is supposed to be platonic.  Both the Orpheus and Dido examples suggest relationships otherwise.

Dante the author takes the beauty of his poetry to a more sublime level when he starts describing the beauty of earthly paradise.  Here the poet is reaching his poetic skill and maturity, having learned that the only subject that rises to grand eloquence is the subject of God and His creation.  Before the fall, the earth was paradise, but sin entered and the earth became subject to decay and disorder.  God in His promise for a return to purity preserved a portion of that paradise on top of the purgatorial mountain, and Dante the character is awe-struck.

While I walked on among so many first fruits,
this foretaste of eternal beauty, enchanted
though desiring joys still greater,

beneath the green boughs the air before us
seemed to become a blazing fire
and that sweet sound could now be heard as song.

O sacred Virgins, if fasting, cold, or sleepless nights
I've ever suffered for your sake,
necessity drives me to call for my reward.

Now let the springs of Helicon pour forth
and let Urania help me with her choir
to put in verse things hard for thought.  (Purg. XXIX. 31-42)

Here Dante appeals to the muses once again to let him reach for language that can match the beauty about him, the beauty where the air itself is so charged it seems at the moment of bursting into flame and where every sound seems like the sweet sound of song.

That image of Dante on his knees sobbing as Beatrice reviews his sins is a special one for me.  When my time has come and I stand or maybe fall to my knees before Christ as he reviews my sinful life, I can’t help but think that is how I will react, sobbing and penitent and humble.  Will Christ be just as harsh?  Or will He be tender and understanding?  Measure for measure?  Have mercy on me Lord.

The pageantry in Canto XXIX is fascinating.  Narratively it creates a grand entrance for the person we have been waiting for since the beginning of Inferno.  Visually it is stunning and recreates some of the medieval life that must have been typical in Dante’s day.  Such feasts still occur in old world towns.  I’m familiar with some of them from my native Italy, but even here in the US in Italian neighborhoods we still have such feasts.  The feast of San Genaro in New York City’s Little Italy is perhaps the most famous.  My old neighborhood in Brooklyn put on the feast of Santa Rosalia every year.  My current parish has recently started a procession to honor Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  A procession is the central element of the feast and you carry statues and banners, and in the more elaborate ones, those participating dress in particular costume.  In Canto XXIX, the people in the procession are analogs of saints, virtues, and scripture itself.

Here’s another thought on the pageant.  In Homer’s and Virgil’s epics there is usually a delineation of some central symbol of the work.  If I’m remembering correctly, in the Illiad one such long delineation is of Achilles’ shield.  Such delineations are part of the genre of an epic.  A more recent example is found in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick where the whale body parts are delineated.  Dante here finds a way to delineate the fundamental elements of Christianity with the personification of its elements.

Once Dante the character has been absolved of his sins by the dip in the river Lethe, he now is fully capable of seeing Beatrice’s face.  When he is returned to her presence, he sees her “second beauty” her smile.  Finally the tension built up with her scolding and inquisition is resolved.  The first beauty is that of the eyes, where one looks into another’s soul.  But the second beauty is of the welcoming look of the mouth, where one takes into one’s heart the beloved. 

As I said to Kerstin, I have always found the allegory in Canto XXXII to be anticlimactic.  After the intense drama of finally meeting Beatrice, her inquisition, and his confession, I’m usually too stunned to appreciate this section.  But in this reading I finally see the significance.  The history of the Church is crucial to salvation history and reflects the sins of mankind.  The heresies and attacks on the church are a result of the sinful people, and such people we have encountered as characters throughout Inferno and Purgatorio.  This drama is the culmination of Dante’s theory of sin and history. 

If the dunking into Lethe is more of an absolution than a baptism, is the dunking into the second river, Eunoe, the baptism?  Some look at the two rivers as a sort of dual baptizing process, but I tend to think of Lethe as the conclusion of the confessional and Eunoe as the true baptism.  Lethe flushes out the shame of his sins, but in Eunoe he is made new, or more accurately he is remade to be what he was intended by heaven to be.  Here’s how Beatrice describes it as she implores Matelda to take him.  In the first tercet she is referring to Lethe, the second to Eunoe.

…“Perhaps a greater care,
which often strips us of remembrance,
has veiled the eyes of his mind in darkness.

'But see Eunoe streaming forth there.
Bring him to it and, as you are accustomed,
revive the powers that are dead in him.'  (XXXIII. 124-129)

To “revive” is to bring back what was once there.  Interesting that Lethe is the name of a river in classical Greek myth, also a river of forgetfulness, but Eunoe is Dante’s invention.  It’s almost as if there are the Cardinal virtues which come from the classical world and the Christian virtues that come from the New Testament.  If you break the word “Eunoe” down into morphemes, one gets from Greek, “eu” meaning “good” and “noe” meaning mind.  So what Dante is saying here is that the river creates “good mind.”  So what happens when one enters heaven in Christianity, one is no longer cable of choosing to sin.  Being dipped in Eunoe is Dante’s process for it.  The concluding dip and rise out of the river are worth quoting.

As a gentle spirit that makes no excuses
but makes another's will its own
as soon as any signal makes that clear,

so, once she held me by the hand, the lady moved
and, as though she were mistress of that place,
said to Statius: 'Now come with him.'

If, reader, I had more ample space to write,
I should sing at least in part the sweetness
of the drink that never would have sated me,

but, since all the sheets
readied for this second canticle are full,
the curb of art lets me proceed no farther.

From those most holy waters
I came away remade, as are new plants
renewed with new-sprung leaves,
pure and prepared to rise up to the stars. (XXXIII. 130-145)

Statius is still with him!  Dante is “renewed” like plants “with new sprung leaves.”  He is now “pure” and reinvigorated to “rise up” to heaven.  His purgation has concluded.  As I pointed out at the end of Inferno, all three canticles end with the word “stars.” 

With that I have concluded my exegesis of Purgatorio.  I do hope you got something out of it.  If I went over your head anywhere, please ask me questions.  I tried to simplify it as much as I could.  It is such a rich work I doubt I did it justice.  If you have read along, I hope someday you’ll reread it again, and perhaps often.  Not only is it great literature—the greatest in my opinion!—but I think it moves the Christian heart.  When I came back to my faith, Dante’s Divine Comedy had a great role in it.  It really can lead you to devotion.


I project to start reading Paradisio, the last of the three canticles, sometime in January.  So if you haven’t read any of these first two canticles, you can start now and be ready for the January discussion.

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