The Journey Continues in 1300
The action is dated to Holy Week of 1300, the year of the Jubilee of Boniface VIII, and everything that happens after 1300 appears in the poem as prophecy in the mouths of the dead. In Purgatory this reaches Dante's own exile: Oderisi says, in obscure speech, that Dante's neighbors will make him suffer a humiliation like Provenzano's, and the common reading takes it as exile (Canto XI); Conrad Malaspina says that the praise Dante gave his house will be confirmed by deeds, and tradition reads there the hospitality of the Malaspina to the exiled poet, in 1306 (Canto VIII); Forese sees the one most at fault for the ruin of the city dragged at the tail of a beast, and tradition identifies in him his brother, Corso Donati, leader of the Blacks (Canto XXIV); Bonagiunta murmurs the name of a woman who will make Dante fond of Lucca (Canto XXIV); and Hugh Capet speaks, in the future tense, of the outrage of the king of France against the pope at Anagni (Canto XX).
Florence, Italy, and the Two Powers
Dante was a White Guelf in a Florence divided between Guelfs and Ghibellines and, within the Guelfs, between Whites and Blacks; in 1301 the Blacks took the city with Charles of Valois and banished the Whites, and he died in exile, in Ravenna. He believed that the well-being of the world depended on Church and State in harmony, each caring for its own sphere, under a universal emperor. The canticle turns this conviction into argument in three places: the invective against Italy, a slave with no rider, which Sordello's embrace sets off in Canto VI; the Rome of Marco Lombardo, which had two suns, one for the way of the world and another for the way of God, until the sword joined the crozier (Canto XVI); and the princes of the valley, judged one by one for what they failed to do (Canto VII).
Politics is not a digression. It is the way the canticle asks whose fault the lost world is, and Marco Lombardo answers by placing the fault on bad government and, in the same breath, affirming that man is free. Today's reader tires of this passion, and it is also what keeps the poem from being merely a period pamphlet: Dante gives voice to his own feelings, and not only to a thesis.
How the mountain is built
The mountain rises on an island on the hemisphere opposite Jerusalem, and Hell suggests that its earth is the one that rose to flee Lucifer when he fell. Jerusalem and the mountain share one horizon and opposite hemispheres, and so the sun crosses the sky on one side here and on the other there (Canto IV). The order of what is purged is the one Virgil explains in Canto XVII, and the architecture is this:
- Ante-Purgatory, outside the gate: those who converted late, who died by force, excommunicated penitents and the negligent, wait before beginning a time proportional to the delay, unless the prayer of the living shortens it (cantos III to VIII).
- The gate, with three steps and an angel who marks the seven P's on Dante's forehead (Canto IX).
- Ledges 1 to 3, love of the evil of one's neighbor: pride (cantos X to XII), envy (XIII and XIV) and wrath (XV and XVI).
- Ledge 4, slack love of the good: sloth (cantos XVII and XVIII).
- Ledges 5 to 7, excessive love of lesser goods: avarice (cantos XIX to XXI), gluttony (XXII to XXIV) and lust (XXV and XXVI).
- The summit, the Earthly Paradise, with the wall of fire, the forest, the river of two waters and the procession (cantos XXVII to XXXIII).
Hell places the sins of desire near the entrance; here lust is the last ledge, closest to the summit, and pride is the first. The poem does not say why it opens with pride and closes with lust: the doctrine of Canto XVII explains the grouping in threes, not the order.
Who Guides, and How Far
Virgil guides from Canto I of Hell to Canto XXX of Purgatory, and this is natural reason: he leads as far as human intelligence reaches on its own. The poem marks the limits by the question he cannot answer and hands to another. He himself says, in Canto XVIII, that he answers as far as reason sees and that from there on it is a work of faith and of Beatrice; the generation of the soul, in Canto XXV, is explained by Statius; and the waters and plants of Eden, by Matelda (Canto XXVIII). Beatrice is revelation, a concrete woman whom Dante loved, and the one who replaces her at the end of Paradise is Saint Bernard.
Who answers each question matters in the Comedy: the poem uses the exchange of voices to say where philosophy ends and where theology begins.
A realm almost without images
Purgatory has far less visual tradition than Hell: there are centuries of painting, sculpture and manuscript illustration for medieval Hell, and almost nothing equivalent for the mountain. The visual reference falls off even more in Paradise. Dante also explains in a few lines the whole working of the place, the criterion of repentance and the proportion of time in Ante-Purgatory, an economy that in prose would take a whole novel.
Hell has images; Paradise has doctrine; Purgatory has process, and process does not make good illustration. It is the least remembered canticle and the only one that describes the experience of someone trying to change and not yet having succeeded, with relapse, haste, waiting and slow progress. For the ordinary reader it is the one that speaks of his own life.