Purgatorio (121 page)

85–99.
   The “afterlife” of a shade is compared to its taking the form of a rainbow when the soul “imprints” itself upon the surrounding air to make itself reassemble the memory of its former body out of thin air. It is as inseparable from the higher soul as a flame is from its fire.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

100–108.
   The conclusion of Statius’s demonstration of the nature of a shade’s aerial body relies, as readers since Pietro di Dante (1340) have realized, on Virgil’s description of the condition of the souls in his afterworld,
Aeneid
VI.730–751. Among the details found there are the smiles and tears of which Dante speaks here (see
Aen
. VI.733 and vv. 103–104).
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

109.
   The word
tortura
(translated as “circling”) here perhaps has two meanings: “turning” and “torture,” thus describing both the spatial and the punitive aspects of the terrace: one makes a tighter circle there as one burns. An interpreter is free to choose either alternative; a translator is forced to decide on one.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

112–117.
   Some readers have difficulty visualizing what Dante here describes. Flames shoot out from the wall of the cliff, at first horizontally, but then driven back and up by a wind moving sharply upward from below at the edge of the terrace, thus making the flames move up and past the face of the wall and freeing a narrow path that is flame-free at the outer edge of the terrace.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

121.
   The hymn sung by the penitents of Lust has caused some confusion in the modern age because the hymn
“Summae Deus clementiae”
(“God of supreme clemency”) does not seem appropriate to the recriminations of the lustful, while the hymn
“Summae Parens clementiae”
does. However, the early commentators knew this hymn by the same first line as we today know the former. Its text, in a form that is probably close to or identical with that known by Dante, is found in the commentary of Jacopo della Lana (1324). The third stanza hopes for God’s annealing fire to combat the passion of lust.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

128.
   “I know no man.” These are part of Mary’s words in answer to the angel’s announcement (Luke 1:34) that she will bear a child: “How shall this be, since I know no man?” This is Mary’s seventh appearance on the mountain as the primary exemplar of a virtue opposing the relevant vice. Edward Moore (Moor.1899.1), pp. 63 and 194, suggests that Dante may have derived his idea of having Mary represent the “antidote” to each of the seven sins from St. Bonaventure
(Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis)
.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

130–132.
   The second exemplar of Chastity is Diana, her story drawn from Ovid (
Metam.
II.401–530), the tale of the wood nymph Helice (Callisto), who paid for Jupiter’s seduction and impregnation of her when, at the request of outraged Juno, Diana banished her from her woodlands. She was turned into a bear by Juno, and then, by the now more kind Jupiter, into the constellation Ursa Major.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

133–135.
   See Pertile (Pert.2001.1), p. 62, for discomfort with Dante’s unique use of anonymous exemplars here. Porena (1946) was perhaps the first commentator to give voice to a similar disquiet (Bosco/Reggio [1979] do also), suggesting that we expect a third example drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition but receive instead exemplars that he rightly characterizes as being “indeterminate” and “impersonal.” John S. Carroll (1904), while not dealing with this anomaly directly, may have found a reason for Dante’s decision in a desire to champion the importance of marriage and the acceptability, indeed the desirability, of sexual concourse between husbands and wives. In this formulation Dante resorts to anonymity for his married couples in order to justify sexual pleasure for all who are married, in covert polemic against such overly zealous clerics as those who called for even marital abstinence.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

138–139.
   The word
piaga
(wound) is used here, as it was used at
Purgatorio
XXIV.38 for Bonagiunta and his companions, to refer to the “wound” of sin. Does it also refer to the letter P incised on them? Those who believe that all the penitents on the mountain bear this sign would naturally believe so (see notes to
Purg
. IX.112, XXI.22–24, and XXII.1–6). On the other hand, if only Dante bears this letter on his forehead, the reference would be to the inner wound of sin, as would seem more natural, and as Portirelli (1804) believed, arguing that the
cura
(treatment) represented the external application of fire and
pasti
(diet), the internal process of reflection upon the exemplars of the chaste life.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

3.
   Virgil’s brief admonition will be his only utterance in this canto, which, like the twenty-fourth, is heavily involved in questions regarding vernacular poetry, thus necessarily marginalizing Virgil’s presence.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

4–6.
   Dante, according to the calculations of Trucchi (1936), having begun his climb of the mountain at due east at the antipodes, has now reached a point some 25 degrees short of due west. As for the time, it has apparently taken a bit more than two hours to climb between the two terraces (see note to
Purg
. XXV.1–3).
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

7–9.
   A shadow cast upon flames does indeed make them glow a darker color. (See Abrams [Abra.1985.1] for a consideration of this image as emblematic of the themes of this canto.) Once again Dante’s presence in the body serves as a provocation to a group of penitents.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

12.
   At
Inferno
VI.36 the poet speaks of the shades of the gluttons as “lor vanità che par persona” (their emptiness, which seems real bodies). Here the penitents remark at Dante’s condition; his body does not seem to be, like theirs, “fictitious,” airy (about which state we have just heard Statius’s lengthy disquisition).
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

15.
   Their impulse, reversing Dante’s, is
not
to leave the searing flames. Again we sense the eagerness of penitents to undergo their purgation. See the remark of Forese Donati, “I speak of pain but should say solace” (
Purg
. XXIII.72).
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

16–20.
   The speaker is Guido Guinizzelli (see note to verse 92), the previous Italian poet to whom, we will learn, Dante now feels the greatest allegiance. While Guido may or may not be correct in thinking Dante is following the two other souls out of reverence rather than from lack of zeal (or fear of the flames that he must enter), what he cannot know (and never discovers) is that these are the great shades of Virgil and Statius. We, however, do know and realize that this scene is the last in a series that began in the cantos devoted to Statius (XX–XXII), a program devoted to an exploration of the nature of Dante’s poetics in relation to those of other poets: Statius, Bonagiunta (who throws in Giacomo da Lentini and Guittone d’Arezzo for good measure), and, in this canto, Guinizzelli (adding Giraud de Borneil and poor Guittone again) and Arnaut Daniel. No other part of the poem is as extensively or as richly concerned with the purposes of poetry.

There is some debate among the commentators about the metaphoric or literal nature of the thirst to which Guido refers: “answer me, since I burn with thirst and fire” (verse 18). While hunger and thirst were the natural penalties undergone by the penitent gluttons, there is no such
contrapasso
here. Further, Guido’s description of his cosufferers’ “thirst” (vv. 20–21) is surely metaphoric, thus suggesting that this first mention of thirst is also. For this view, among others, see Pertile (Pert.1993.3), p. 381. On the other hand, the fire of which he speaks is literal enough, as Dante will find out in the next canto (
Purg
. XXVII.49–51), and his aerial body surely allows him to feel such sensations.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

31–36.
   This remarkable simile, a rare medieval manifestation of a moment of fraternal affection between heterosexuals and homosexuals, is striking. The passage probably reflects Paul’s admonition in Romans 16:16: “Greet one another with a holy kiss,” as was suggested by Scartazzini (1900). For the ants, see Virgil’s memorable simile in
Aeneid
IV.402–407. Aeneas’s men, preparing their ships for departure from Carthage, are described as follows: “Just so do ants, when winter’s on their mind, pillage great stores of grain and fill their houses to the beams. Over the fields moves a black column, carrying their spoil through the grass along their narrow path; some heave the huge seeds upon their shoulders, some shape up the columns, rebuking their delay. All the path fairly shines with labor.”
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

40.
   Those who have argued that the sin punished in
Inferno
XV and XVI is not homosexuality (see the endnote to
Inf
. XVI) are hard pressed to account for the obvious reference of the word “Sodom” repeated here, found first in
Inferno
XI.50 to refer to the sinners on the barren sands of homosexuality. The early commentators have no doubt whatsoever about all this. See, for example, John of Serravalle (1416): “And from this city, Sodom, the sin against nature took its name, just as simony did from Simon [Magus].” Each group cries out the appropriate exemplar(s) of its sin, the first the homosexuals, calling out the names of these two “cities of the plain” (see Genesis 19:1–28), the
locus classicus
for homosexual lust, where the men of Sodom ask Lot to give them for their sexual pleasure the two angels who have come to Lot and whom they take for men (Genesis 19:4–11).

What has long been problematic is the fact that, in
Inferno
, we find the heterosexual lustful punished in the realm of Incontinence, while those guilty of homoerotic behavior are in that of Violence (against nature, in their case). That these two groups are now purging themselves on the same terrace may be the result of the changed ground rules for the sins of the two
cantiche
more than of any supposed change of heart on Dante’s part, that is, Dante no longer has the option of fitting these two different bands onto an Aristotelian/Ciceronian grid, but must associate them with one of the seven capital vices, which leaves him little choice. Nonetheless, no matter what his intentions, the effect is to make the reader feel that the poet has now softened his views. The notion of Pertile (Pert.1993.3), p. 388, that the impulse to love is the same in hetero- and homosexuals and that, since in purgatory only the impulse (or predisposition) toward sin is purged, there is no longer any need to distinguish between them, is interesting but difficult to accept. In
Inferno
homosexuality is treated as a sin of hardened will, and one would be hard pressed to show that this does not make the “impulse” that drives it different from that behind the sins of Incontinence.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

41–42.
   The heterosexuals call out the name of Pasiphaë (see
Inf
. XII.12–13 and note), the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who had Daedalus build for her a wooden frame covered with a cowhide so that she could be mounted by a bull. The child of this union was the Minotaur. Pasiphaë here is clearly meant to represent the animalistic nature of unrestrained lust, not some sort of sodomy.
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

43–48.
   The hypothetical nature of this simile is underlined by Dante’s use of the subjunctive mood for its main verb
(volasser)
. Cranes do not and would not migrate simultaneously in two different directions, north to the Riphean mountains and also south to the sands of the (Libyan?) desert. Dante has developed the passage on the model, perhaps, of some of Lucan’s similes concerning cranes (see note to
Purg.
XXIV.64–74), but the resemblance does not seem more than casual, if the closest would seem to be that found at
Pharsalia
VII.832–834.

The “former song” of the penitents is the hymn
“Summae Deus clementiae”
punctuated by the words of Mary at the Annunciation and those regarding Diana’s chaste anger at Callisto (
Purg
. XXV.121–132). Each subgroup also then sends up “the cry that most befits” it, that is, either “Sodom and Gomorrah” or “Pasiphaë.”
[return to
English
/
Italian
]

55–66.
   Dante at last responds to the request of the penitents, if only to some degree, since he does not fully identify himself, in keeping with his avoidance of doing so on other terraces. He defines himself in terms of his intermediate age (neither youthful and unripe nor ancient and ripe), tells them what they suspected (he is here in the flesh, not in the aerial body), and that Beatrice (not named, and decidedly not the sort of woman penitents here “do time” for) draws him heavenward. Thus he admits to his miraculous presence among them, but gives no information that might genuinely satisfy their curiosity. In return for relatively little he asks to know the identity of those with whom he speaks and the condition of the group that has moved away from them.

His evasive behavior here allows him to avoid naming himself uselessly to those who do not know him (see his similar avoidance with Sapia [
Purg
. XIII.133–138], Guido del Duca [
Purg
. XIV.20–21], and Marco the Lombard [
Purg
. XVI.37–42]). Those who recognize Dante in purgatory are as follows: Casella (
Purg
. II.76–78); Belacqua (recognized by Dante at
Purg
. IV.109–123; it would seem that he knows Dante but does not, in his laconic, sardonic way, reveal that he does); Nino Visconti (
Purg
. VIII.46–57); Oderisi (
Purg
. XI.76); Forese (
Purg
. XXIII.40–42); and Bonagiunta (
Purg
. XXIV.35–36).
[return to
English
/
Italian
]