Who He Is
Marco Lombardo is a voice inside the smoke. The third turn of the mountain, that of wrath, is darker than Hell and than a night without a planet, and Dante walks through it with eyes closed, behind Virgil, as the blind man follows his guide. It is from there that someone asks who this is that cleaves the fumes and speaks of him as if counting time by the calends. The poem gives no more of him than he says himself: a Lombard, called Marco, who knew the world and loved the worth at which everyone has now slackened the bow. It does not say what house he came from, what he did, or why he is there. What makes him important is what he answers to a doubt of Dante's: if the world is lost, whose is the fault, heaven's or men's? The answer is the doctrinal pair of the thesis of love that Virgil will give at the center of the poem.
Trajectory
In Canto XVI of Purgatory Dante reaches the smoke with the guide offering him his shoulder. He hears voices asking peace and mercy of the Lamb of God, all with the same word, and Virgil confirms that they are spirits who untie the knot of wrath. A voice asks who this is that passes, and Dante, after saying that he goes up with the band that death dissolves, coming through infernal anguish and by the grace of God, asks the shade to say who he was:
Lombardo fui, e fu’ chiamato Marco; / del mondo seppi, e quel valore amai / al quale ha or ciascun disteso l’arco., I was a Lombard, and I was called Marco; I knew the world, and I loved that worth at which everyone has now slackened the bow.
Marco says that Dante goes up straight and asks him to pray for him. Dante promises, but confesses that a doubt bursts within him, and that unless it is undone it will stay: it was simple, now it is doubled, because Marco's sentence confirms what he had already heard from Guido del Duca on the earlier ledge, that the world is a desert of all virtue. He asks for the cause, so that he may see it and show it to others, because some place it in heaven and others down here. Marco lets out a sigh that pain squeezes from him and answers that the world is blind, and that Dante comes from it: the living carry every cause up to heaven, as if everything were moved by necessity. The thesis comes in two stages. In the first he concedes what he can:
Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia; / non dico tutti, ma, posto ch’i’ ’l dica, / lume v’è dato a bene e a malizia, / e libero voler; che, se fatica / ne le prime battaglie col ciel dura, / poi vince tutto, se ben si notrica., The heavens initiate your movements; I do not say all of them, but, granting that I say it, light is given to you for good and for evil, and free will, which, if it endures toil in the first battles with heaven, afterward conquers all, if it is well nourished.
The heavens initiate the movements, but they leave light for good and for evil, and free will, which struggles in the first battles and conquers afterward if well nourished. In the second stage, the soul leaves the hand of the one who loves it like a little girl who weeps and laughs, and runs to whatever amuses her:
Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggia / prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla / che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia, / l’anima semplicetta che sa nulla, / salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore, / volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla., It comes forth from the hand of Him who loves it before it exists, like a girl who, weeping and laughing, plays like a child: the simple little soul that knows nothing, except that, moved by a joyful maker, it gladly turns to whatever amuses it.
That is why there is law. Marco explains the remedy and its failure:
Onde convenne legge per fren porre; / convenne rege aver, che discernesse / de la vera cittade almen la torre. / Le leggi son, ma chi pon mano ad esse? / Nullo, però che ’l pastor che procede, / rugumar può, ma non ha l’unghie fesse;, Hence it was needful to set law as a bridle; it was needful to have a ruler who could at least discern the tower of the true city. The laws exist, but who lays a hand on them? No one, because the shepherd who goes before can ruminate, but does not have split hooves.
Where law must be a bridle, a ruler is needed who at least discerns the tower of the true city. The laws exist, but no one applies them, because the shepherd who goes before ruminates and does not have split hooves, and the people, seeing the guide look at the same goods it covets, feeds only on them. The proof is Rome:
Soleva Roma, che ’l buon mondo feo, / due soli aver, che l’una e l’altra strada / facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo. / L’un l’altro ha spento; ed è giunta la spada / col pasturale, e l’un con l’altro insieme / per viva forza mal convien che vada;, Rome, which made the good world, used to have two suns, which made both roads visible, the road of the world and the road of God. One has put out the other, and the sword has been joined to the crook, and the one with the other, joined together by living force, must of necessity go badly.
Before Frederick had his quarrel, in the land watered by the Adige and the Po, worth and courtesy were found; now whoever, out of shame, would avoid speaking with the good passes through there without fear, because he will not find them. Three old men remain, in whom the old age rebukes the new: Currado da Palazzo, the good Gherardo, and Guido da Castello. And Marco closes with the conclusion of his argument:
Dì oggimai che la Chiesa di Roma, / per confondere in sé due reggimenti, / cade nel fango, e sé brutta e la soma». / «O Marco mio», diss’ io, «bene argomenti; / e or discerno perché dal retaggio / li figli di Levì furono essenti., Say from now on that the Church of Rome, by confusing two governments in itself, falls into the mire and makes both itself and its burden filthy. O my Marco, I said, you argue well; and now I discern why the sons of Levi were exempt from the inheritance.
Dante accepts and recalls why the sons of Levi were exempt from inheritance. He asks which Gherardo this is, and Marco answers that the Tuscan's tone deceives or tempts him, and that he knows him by no other surname, unless he took it from his daughter Gaia. Marco takes his leave, because the whiteness of the light already shows in the smoke and he must leave before the angel sees him. He turns his back and wants to hear no more.
Themes Embodied
Marco embodies Fate and free will as doctrine spoken by a man of the court. The heavens initiate, the will conquers if well nourished, the soul is simple and runs after the first small good, and law is the bridle. Politics lies in the passage from cause to cause: the evil world is not corrupted nature, it is bad governance, and the proof is the mixing of Rome's two powers. Wrath, which the turn cures, appears only in the setting: the smoke that blots out the world and the voices that ask peace of the Lamb.
Marco affirms free will and accuses the government, and leaves the two things side by side. The poem does not say how much each weighs, and the question stays open: if the soul comes out simple and runs after the small good, who answers for its sin, the soul or the shepherd who led it badly?
Divergent Readings
In a shorter reading, the passage is a doctrinal pair that precedes the thesis of love, and speaks of free will that resists heaven when well exercised:
One canto before Virgil's doctrine, a shade called Marco Lombardo answers Dante's question about why the world is so corrupt: it is not heaven that compels evil, it is free will that resists heaven when well exercised; if the stars decided everything there would be no merit or guilt, and the doctrine of disordered love in the next canto makes sense only because the choice to love badly is free; the fault, says Marco Lombardo, is not the stars', it is of a world without government that let the bridle of the laws go slack.Se così fosse, in voi fora distrutto / libero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia / per ben letizia, e per male aver lutto, If it were so, free will would be destroyed in you, and it would not be justice to have joy for good and grief for evil.
The text supports two readings of the image of the two suns. In the first, it is nostalgia for an Empire that once worked. In the second, it is an ideal of separate powers, which the verb in the past presents as already lived and which the poem still proposes. Tradition reads the figure of the ruminating shepherd as the pope who knows the doctrine and does not separate the temporal from the spiritual, yet the text says only shepherd.
Relationships
- Dante: the living man whose doubled doubt he undoes, and to whom he asks prayer.
- Virgil: the guide who, in the next canto, will give the theory of love that Marco's answer prepares.
- Beatrice: to whom Virgil hands, in Canto XVIII, the term free will that Marco had already put another way.