the ice in which traitors are buried is the coldness of the heart from which all love has been expelled.1 In Dante's Purgatory the sinners are arranged as follows: lustful, gluttonous, avaricious (and prodigal), slothful, wrathful, envious, proud. Sloth intervenes between avarice and anger; envy and pride correspond to the violence, deceit, and treachery of Hell; there is no place for paganism or heresy. The difference is a natural one. Hell is the eternal abode of those who die unrepentant; Purgatory is a place of passage for those who, whatever their crimes may have been, die penitent within the Church. In Purgatory we have to do only with man's fundamental evil dispositions, of which the soul is to be cleansed; in Hell souls are tortured for specific acts, the multifarious fruit of these dispositions. The seven capital sins had long been defined by Church writers, and their order, in the main, was pretty well established. In the Moralia of Gregory the Great (XXXI, Cap. 45) they are arranged as in Dante. All the sins in the Lower Hell are originally caused by Envy and Pride. Pride, indeed, is the foundation of all sin, inasmuch as sin consists in defying God's law; this doctrine is laid down by St. Cyprian, and recurs in Gregory. Sloth, or lukewarmness in love of the Lord and his creatures, does not lead to acts; in so far as it belongs in the nether world at all, it has its proper place in the Vestibule. The unbaptized are beyond redemption, and therefore Purgatory is denied them. What becomes of repentant heretics we are not told, but we may assume that their penance must be paid in the circle of pride." The mystic journey occurs in 1300, the year of the great Papal jubilee proclaimed by Boniface VIII. It was a time of general religious enthusiasm, an appropriate moment for a moral awakening. The date is given vaguely in the opening line of the poem, definitely in Inf. XXI, 112–4. This latter passage tells us also that the descent was begun on the anniversary of the crucifixion. This may mean March 25, the real date, or Good Friday, the movable Church anniversary. Good Friday in 1300 fell on April 8, and sev 1 See diagram on p. vii. Cf. M. Porena, Commento grafico alla Divina Commedia, 1902. 2 Cf. Moore, II, 152; D' Ovidio, 241; M. Scherillo, Alcuni capitoli della biografia di Dante, 1896, 396 ff; E. G. Parodi in Bull., XV, 182. eral references in the poem seem to fit that day better than March 25. Inf. XX, 127 and Purg. XXIII, 119 inform us that the moon was full the night before; in reality the full moon occurred in 1300 on April 5, but in the ecclesiastical calendar for that year the Paschal full moon was set down for the night of April 7. Purg. I, 19–20 represents Venus as the morning star two days later; this was the case in 1301, not in 1300, but here again it was surely the almanac that led Dante astray. There is a peculiar fitness in starting on the downward journey on the evening of Good Friday, when day and hour are conducive to gloom. The ascent of Purgatory, on the other hand, begins at a time when everything suggests hope, the morning of Easter Sunday. Throughout the poem we are apparently to think of sunrise and sunset as occurring at six o'clock. It is, then, on the night of April 7, 1300, that Dante comes to his senses in the dark wood of sin. The next day he spends in trying to struggle out, directing his steps toward the sunlit mountain of righteousness; but three beasts - his evil habits - impede his progress. When all seems lost, Virgil, or Reason, appears and offers to lead him out by another way. They enter Hell at sunset on April 8, and spend the night and the next day in their spiral course, turning always to the left as they descend. In Hell they go by the time of Jerusalem, which is directly over the bottom of the pit. When they reach the centre of the earth, they pass beyond, climbing along the shaggy side of Satan, who is planted there; then, of course, they are under the opposite hemisphere, whose middle point is Purgatory, between which and Jerusalem there is a difference of twelve hours. Dante represents Virgil and himself, therefore, as gaining twelve hours when they pass the earth's centre: they have a new Saturday before them, and they use all that and the following night in climbing out, by a dark, winding passage, to the other side of the earth, where they emerge on the Island of Purgatory on Sunday morning. Dante has turned his back on sin, has laboriously weaned himself from it, and is now ready to clease his soul by penance.1 1 Cf. Moore, III, 177, 372, and The Time References in the Divina Commedia, 1887; also, Modern Language Review, III, 376. There has been much controversy over the year and the day of the vision. Some astronomers would put it in 1301. Virgil evidently represents Reason, human understanding, as opposed to Revelation, heavenly intelligence, embodied in Beatrice. One may ask why he was chosen for this function, rather than Aristotle, 'il filosofo,' 'maestro di color che sanno.' For many centuries the Eneid had been the best of school-books, the one from which pupils learned grammar, rhetoric, history, mythology. It was expounded literally and allegorically. Its author, at least until Aristotle was discovered in the 12th century, was universally regarded as the wisest man of antiquity, the personification of the best that humanity, without superhuman enlightenment, could achieve; and even in 1300 his fame was scarcely dimmed by the greater glory of the Greek philosopher. Moreover, he had already proved, in the sixth book of the Æneid, his competence as a guide to the other world. People generally believed, too, that in his fourth Eclogue he had unconsciously prophesied the coming of Christ. Furthermore, Aristotle was to Dante only a book, while Virgil had been so long a figure in popular and scholarly legend that he had become a distinct personality, one with whom it was a joy to travel and from whom it was anguish to part. Lastly, Dante felt for the master of his childhood, his model in later years, a warm personal gratitude that he was eager to express: 1 'Tu se' lo mio maestro e il mio autore; Tu se' solo colui da cui io tolsi Lo bello stile che m' ha fatto onore.' 1 Cf. D. Comparetti, Virgilio nel medio evo, 1872, 2d ed., 1896; English translation by E. F. M. Benecke, 1895. CANTO I ARGUMENT THIS canto, which serves as a general introduction to the poem, is more formal in its allegory than those which follow; it affords, in some measure, a key to the whole interpretation. The author has purposely enveloped its incidents in a veil of mystery, which enhances its impressiveness. It is the night of April 7, the night before Good Friday in the great jubilee year, 1300. Dante, at the age of thirty-five, suddenly becomes aware that he is astray in the dark wood of worldliness. In terror he seeks refuge at the foot of the mountain of rectitude, whose summit is lit by the rising sun. The sun, here and elsewhere, typifies enlightenment, perhaps more specifically, as Flamini suggests, righteous choice, the intelligent use of the free will. When Dante tries to scale the hill, three beasts beset his path, a leopard, a lion, and a wolf — the same creatures that appear in Jer. v, 6: 'Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces.' Apparently he has a fair prospect of passing the first two, at least the leopard, but the wolf drives him back. These animals evidently stand for Dante's vicious habits, which prevent his reform. The old commentators interpreted them respectively as luxury, pride, and avarice; this would imply (unless we understand the poet's whole experience to be generic, not individual) that Dante's dominant sin was avarice, which is scarcely believable. A modern view, upheld by Flamini, is, in spite of some grave objections, far more satisfactory in itself and more in harmony with the whole structure of the poem. Inasmuch as the sins of Hell fall under the three heads, Incontinence, Violence, and Fraud, it is natural that the beasts should stand for corresponding practices: the ravening wolf is Incontinence of any kind, the raging lion is Violence, the swift and stealthy leopard is Fraud. St. Thomas and Richard of St. Victor, two of Dante's favorite authors, saw in the spotted pard a fit symbol of fraudulence. We may understand, then, from the episode, that Dante could perhaps have overcome the graver sins of Fraud and Violence, but was unable, without heavenly aid, to rid himself of some of the habits of Incontinence. At this crisis Reason, personified in Virgil, comes, at divine bidding, to the sinner's rescue. He declares that escape is possible only by another route, which will lead them through Hell: we cannot run away from evil before we know what it really is; a rational understanding of human wickedness must precede reformation. The wolf, he says, is ravaging the world, and will continue to do so until a Hound shall appear and drive it back into Hell, whence it first came. This Hound is obviously a redeemer who shall set the world aright. If we compare this passage with another prophecy in Purg. XXXIII, 40-45, it is tolerably clear that he is to be a temporal rather than a spiritual saviour - a great Emperor whose mission it shall be to establish the balance of power, restore justice, and guide erring humanity. Such an Emperor, destined to come at the end of the world, was not unknown to legend; his advent appears to have been sometimes associated with the annus canicularis, the period of Sirius, the dog-star. As the prediction was still unfulfilled at the time of writing, Dante naturally made it vague; in fact, he rendered Delphic obscurity doubly obscure by adding the mysterious words 'tra Feltro e Feltro.' We know that the poet entertained great hopes of the youthful leader, Can Grande della Scala, in Dante's last years the chief representative of the Imperial power in Italy. It is possible that he so constructed his prognostication as to make its application to Can Grande evident in case those hopes should be realized, but not obtrusive in case they were not. 'Veltro' easily suggests Can Grande; 'Feltro e Feltro' may point to the towns of Feltre and Monte Feltro. Dante's conception of the just Emperor was perhaps influenced by current stories of the Grand Khan of Tartary, who was said to despise wealth and to live simply in a 'felt' tent, and whose title had a strange likeness to the name of the Imperial Vicar General. For the allegory of the beasts, see Flam., II, 115 ff. For the Veltro: V. Cian, Sulle orme del Veltro, 1897; A. Bassermann, Veltro, Gross-Chan und Kaisersage, 1902, and also Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte, VIII, 5 (where Bassermann points out a strange similarity between Dante's phraseology and that of a passage in the Alexandrian Greek prophecies called Oracula Sibyllina). The interpretation and the coinage of prophecy had a great vogue in the 13th and 14th centuries. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 1. In the Convivio, IV, xxiv, 30-1, Dante says that 'il colmo del nostro arco è nelli trentacinque.' Cf. Ps. xc (Vulg. lxxxix), 10: 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten.' 2. Mi ritrovai, 'I came to my senses.' |