Purgatorio (135 page)

103–105.
   Beatrice’s charge to Dante is reminiscent of God’s to John, author of the Revelation: “What you see, write in a book, and send it to the seven churches.…” (Apocalypse 1:11).
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109–160.
   The second pageant in the garden of Eden is both dramatically different from the first and exactly like it. In the first instance we were given a description of the Church Triumphant (which exists as an ideal out of time and can only be gathered once history is done) that comes in a temporal form, moving from Genesis to the Apocalypse before Dante’s eyes. Now he sees real history, from just after the founding of the Church until the present, unfolding as a series of events performed in a sort of “dumbshow” in a single place. However, both pageants are presented as allegories, reflecting history, to be sure, but experienced as though they were literally fictive (e.g., the books of the Bible, the griffin, the depredations of the Church), requiring the kind of critical procedure that we expect for what Dante himself referred to (
Convivio
II.i.4–5) as allegory as practiced by the poets.

The rest of the canto will present the history of the Church and of the empire as these two entities make their related voyages through history.
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109–117.
   The first tribulation of the new Church was to be persecuted by the emperors of Rome, beginning with Nero (54–68) while Peter was its first pope (and was crucified in the emperor’s persecution of Christians ca.
A
.
D
. 68), and extending to the reign of Diocletian (284–305).

While the eagle of Jove may signify variously, there is no doubt that here and through the rest of the pageant of the persecution of the Church Militant it represents the empire.
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116.
   The phrase
nave in fortuna
(ship tossed in a tempest) will find its way to the final world prophecy in the poem (
Par
. XXVII.145).
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118–123.
   Beatrice, acting as the embodiment of the Church’s spirit (the chariot representing its physical being, as it were), is able to defeat the forces of heresy, the traditional interpretation of the fox. Portirelli (1804) identified the fox with the “vulpes insidiosos” (insidious foxes) of the Song of Solomon (Canticle 2:15). His adjective, however, is not found in the biblical text, where the foxes are described only as “little,” and the phrase in fact comes from St. Augustine, who identifies heresy and exactly such foxes in his
Enarrationes in Ps. LXXX
, as was noted by Tommaseo (1837). The temporal progression of these scenes would indicate that Dante is thinking of the early centuries of the Church’s history, after the first persecutions and before the Donation of Constantine (see the next note).
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124–129.
   All commentators agree that this invasion of the chariot by the eagle of empire represents the Donation of Constantine in the first third of the fourth century (see note to
Inf
. XIX.115–117). The Church was meant to operate independently of the empire (this is the essential theme of Dante’s
Monarchia
). Here, by being given the “feathers” that belong to empire alone, it is adulterated from its pure form. In this formulation Dante reverses his usual view, which involves seeing the empire’s rights and privileges as being curtailed by the Church. In a sense the point is even stronger expressed this way: the Church is harmed by exercising its authority in the civil realm.

Since the gloss of the Ottimo (1333), the voice from Heaven is generally taken to be that of St. Peter. From the time of the earliest commentators, however, there was an understanding that Dante’s voice from Heaven was a sort of calque on the story that, on the day of the Donation, a voice from Heaven was heard calling out: “Hodie diffusum est venenum in ecclesia Dei” (Today the church of God is suffused by poison).
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130–135.
   While there is some debate about the nature of this particular calamity, most commentators believe it refers to the “schism” in the Church brought about by Mohammed just after the middle years of the seventh century (see the note to
Inf
. XXVIII.22–31 for Dante’s understanding of the relation of Islam to Christianity).
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136–141.
   In a sort of replay of the second calamity (the Donation of Constantine), the chariot is once again covered in imperial feathers. The standard interpretation of these verses is that they refer to the grants of lands to the Church by two French kings, Pepin and Charlemagne, in the second half of the eighth century.

The “plumage,” which the poet suggests was “offered perhaps with kind and innocent intent,” represents once again that which belonged to the empire by God’s intent, and legally, in Dante’s view, could not be surrendered to ecclesiastical authority, even though kings had chosen to do so. See
Paradiso
XX.55–57, where a similar expression is used to indicate that Constantine had sinned grievously, if without meaning to.
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142–147.
   The language and the imagery are clearly indebted to the Apocalypse (Apoc. 13:1) for the beast with seven heads and ten horns. Exactly what this symbolic transformation of the Church signifies is much discussed, with little resolution. In general, all can agree, we here see the corruption wrought by the clergy upon their own institution. In other words, in Dante’s view, the Church had weathered all attacks upon it from within and without until the time of Charlemagne. In the next five centuries she would do such harm to herself as to make those earlier wounds mortal. This period is marked by corruption from the papacy down to the most modestly avaricious friar; Christianity has no enemies as implacable as its own ecclesiastical institutions or its own clergy.
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148–160.
   Strictly speaking, this seventh and final calamity is a vision, since the Church only moved to Avignon in 1309 after the election to the papacy of Clement V in 1305. We have now surveyed, in 52 verses, nearly thirteen centuries of the history of the Church.

The harlot and the giant, the whore of Babylon “with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication” (Apocalypse 17:2) and Philip IV of France, bring the terrible history to its conclusion. The chariot no longer has to do with Beatrice, replaced by this wanton spirit that gives herself to all and any, and is now controlled by France. Dante’s reaction to the “Avignonian captivity” is proof, if any is needed, that he is not the Protestant
avant la lettre
that some have tried to find in him. Indeed, the last and only potentially (if fleeting) hopeful sign we find in the gradually darkening antitriumph of the Church Militant is that the whore gazes on Dante, thus gaining for herself a beating from her gigantic paramour. What does Dante represent now? Is he the embodiment of the truly faithful Christians who hope that their Church will be cleansed? of the Italian faithful left back on this side of the Alps? or is he Dante himself? This penultimate detail of a difficult and encompassing allegorical pageant has left many readers perplexed. Its final one is clear in its pessimism. The giant responds to his lover’s wayward glance by releasing the chariot from its binding to the tree and dragging it deeper into the forest, which now looks less like Eden than it resembles France.
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1–3.
   The last canto of
Purgatorio
begins, like those of
Inferno
and
Paradiso
, with poetry (see
Inf
. XXXIV.1 and
Par
. XXXIII.1–39). In all three cases, the poem cited is in another voice than Dante’s. In the first two cases this voice is Latin, first that of Venantius Fortunatus (his hymn of the cross), now that of David (his hymn for the desolation of Jerusalem, Psalm 78 [79], which begins, “O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance”). Thus do the seven virtues respond to the present culminating moment in the history of the Church Militant. As Benvenuto explains (1380), just as the various gentile nations had invaded and oppressed the Holy Land because of the sins of the Jews, so now has God again allowed foreigners, in this case the French, to take possession of Holy Church because of the sins of the latter-day “Romans.”
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7–12.
   The words that Beatrice sings reflect closely Jesus’ words to his disciples (John 16:16), “
A little while and you shall not see me; and again a little while and you shall see me
, because I go to the Father.” Since the disciples are puzzled by these words, Jesus explains them: Now they may weep, but their sorrow will be turned to joy (John 16:20). The disciples are finally won over, finally believe that Jesus comes from God (John 16:30). Jesus ends his remarks by promising them peace after their tribulation and concludes, “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Thus do these twelve opening verses of the last canto of
Purgatorio
move from a tragic sense of loss to a celebratory and comic vision of the eventual triumph of Christ and his Church.

Beatrice’s words also have a particular and local meaning for Dante, who wept at her death and thought he had lost her forever; she has come back into his life.
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13–15.
   This tercet reminds the reader exactly who is present in this scene (see the note to
Purg.
XXXII.88), Beatrice, her handmaids (the seven virtues), Dante, Matelda, and Statius. Not only is the Church Triumphant no longer in sight, the Church Militant has been dragged off to France.

The way in which Statius is referred to (“the sage who had remained”) reminds the reader, yet again, of the absence of Virgil, denied this moment.
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16–18.
   Those that allegorize the nine steps taken by Beatrice argue that they represent the years between the accession of Pope Clement V in 1305, who agreed to King Philip’s desire to move the papacy to France (which he did in 1309), and the deaths of Clement and Philip in 1314, thus possibly allowing the tenth step to point to the advent of the new leader in 1315. About such things there can be little or no certainty, but the hypothesis is attractive. Nonetheless, one should probably be aware that, except for a rather contorted effort by Francesco da Buti (1385), none of the early commentators, generally so fond of allegorizing, offers anything more than a literal reading of the detail. The allegorical reading of the ten steps as ten years is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century discovery, e.g., as it is found in Carroll (1904).
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23.
   This is the first time Beatrice addresses Dante as “brother.” One senses, again, that her desire to rebuke Dante is (temporarily) suspended. But see vv. 85–90.

Beatrice for the first time, and in keeping with the spirit of her citation of John 16:16 in vv. 10–12, turns her attention to the future, and to Dante’s future, now that the world’s and his own sinful past have been dealt with.
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25–28.
   Benvenuto (1380) compares Dante to a student in the presence of his teacher, and indeed this is the opening moment in what might be called Dante’s education in theology, which will last for another thirty cantos.
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31–33.
   Before she presents her prophecy, Beatrice charges Dante with the responsibility for reporting it precisely, not in the mode of a man who is talking in his sleep. Almost all the commentators take the passage literally and as applying in some general way. But Beatrice’s words are very hard on poor Dante, since she makes it clear that, at least in her (infallible) opinion, his actual words, uttered at some previous time, have indeed been correctly characterized in this way. But when? Perhaps the later passage in this canto (vv. 85–90) that is devoted to his previous intellectual meanderings may shed some light on exactly what she means. For now the subject is left unexplored.
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34–36.
   The language, referring to the destruction of the Church as detailed in the preceding canto, is distinctly reflective of the Apocalypse (Apoc. 17:8, “The beast that you saw was, and is not”).

The word
suppe
(here translated “hindrance” only to make sense in its context) has been variously understood. Many of the early commentators believed it referred to the cakes left on the tomb of a murderer’s victim in a Greek custom reborn in Florence; if the murderer came to the tomb and ate of these cakes for nine consecutive days, he would then be safe from the offended family’s vengeance (and for that reason the families of the slain person would keep watch over the tomb). See Portirelli (1804) for a restatement of this interpretation, which is at least as old as the commentary of Jacopo della Lana. Others think the reference is to the bread soaked in wine on which an oath is sworn between vassal and lord; still others of the offal which the
veltro
will despise (see
Inf
. I.103), and which is related to the “sop” to Cerberus of
Aeneid
VI.420. None of these “sops,” however, would seem to offer a cause for fear, and are thus difficult to rationalize in this context.
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