II. Purgatorio — Dante Alighieri (and Dorothy Sayers)
I. Summary
Book II of Dante’s Divine Comedy begins with Dante’s escape from Hell and his arrival at the Island of Purgatory. The ascension of Mount Purgatory is the sole path that can lead Dante into Paradise; it is the washing away of the “wounds” [sins] common to every human creature. Dante is careful to avoid equating Christianity with pure moralism; the general narrative of Purgatorio is Dante’s coming to terms with the unseen spiritual realities in which fallen creation finds itself. This can be summarized as follows: humans were created for more than life as we know it; something in each of us has gone fatally awry; we are loved perfectly by our Creator who has made a way of both salvation and sanctification for his creatures.
While I have long understood purgatory to be an extra-biblical piece of Roman Catholic theology, I was struck by how down-to-earth Dante’s fictitious experiences in this realm felt to me. In fact, it was surprising to consider that what I call “real life” might have more in common with Dante’s notion of purgatory than I’d have guessed. If the purpose of mortal life (or Dante’s purgatory) is to come to know the truth about God, myself, and salvation/sanctification, the line between “real life” and purgatory becomes very indistinct.
Dante and the rest of the participants of the climb face penance for the Seven Deadly Sins in a specific order: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, and lust. Dorothy Sayers categorizes the first three sins to be faced under the phrase “love perverted” — they are also known as the cold-blooded sins. Sayers describes the last four as “love disordered;” these are the warm-blooded sins (Alighieri, Sayers 1955, 202). This seems to connote a more severe, or baser, quality to pride than it does to lust, though both remain deadly. The penance for different sins is also unique to the sin. But what remains consistent is the function: through the fire (for lust), or starvation (for gluttony) the penitent creature finds sanctification. This process is not to be confused with salvation, or a works-based sanctification. Rather, it is a meeting with truth, mercy, goodness, beauty, and grace — all of which are at work in both Dante’s allegory and our daily lives.
I use this term “meeting” because of the connotation of relationship. Dante meets other entities with regularity (e.g. Manfred in Canto III, 112; Sordello in Canto VI, 73; Oderisi in Canto XI, 79), but he also meets with other, more obviously divine representatives along the way (angels and other mysterious personages). These meetings, this regular connection with other image-bearing beings, transcends notions of simple, “correct” mental comprehension. There can be no sanctification without meeting the Source — which happens to some small degree when meeting any image-bearer. In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis suggests there may be a shedding of false selves that is required before we can hope to meet our “gods” — that in order to come face to face with them, we need to discover our own real face (Lewis 1956, 294). Perhaps the climbing of Mount Purgatory is similar to this process for Dante. As his sins are being erased, perhaps his false faces are falling away. It may be that when all the falseness has finally departed, he may meet and dwell with God as his true self.
II. Evaluation
I find fantasy to be among the most compelling tools for thinking about spiritual realities. The sanctification of humankind surely has more in common with what we often think of as a fairy tale than it does the hard and fast tools of science (e.g. the multiplication table). Does this mean that I find Dante’s Purgatory to be a convincing vision of sanctification? I would not use the term “convincing.” I’m not sure there is any extra-biblical vision of sanctification that I would find convincing. But helpful, valuable, useful… I answer a hearty “yes” to all of these descriptors.
Perhaps the most helpful element in fantastical theorizing is mystery. We do not and will not have all the answers in this mortal realm. Any approach to the study of God that marginalizes mystery is in danger of burdening its adherents with the weighty penance of Dante’s first purgatorial sin: pride. However, with the graceful assistance of mystery, there is a freedom to risk imaginings beyond our limited comprehension. To imagine a God that is beyond us is to incur the risk of imagining wrongly. But to refuse to take this risk is to imagine a man-made God; it is to lie to ourselves.
Placing sanctification into a fantasy story allows Dante to encourage his readers to keep the most open of minds as they consider the mysteries of God and themselves. I’m not convinced that Dante intends for his readers to imagine purgatory as a strictly otherworldly experience. Can there be any doubt that the penance described here could just as easily play out in “real life?” That sanctification could look very similar for the living mortal, albeit with a good deal of poetic license spanning the difference?
The specific “methods” Dante mentions seem of less importance to me than their effect. The methods can all be categorized under “dying to (false) selves.” But the result of this dying process is the final eradication of a variety of selves that have been previously believed in. Any amount of dying to falsehood is indeed useful in this life!
“…Only when the last, lingering vestige of unconscious assent has been purged away can one see one’s own sin as it appears to God — as something unspeakably vile and hideous. The sight is unbearable to human nature… therefore, as soon as realization is complete and confession made, the remembrance of sin is mercifully drowned in oblivion” (Alighieri, Sayers 1955, 319). In considering how Dante’s presentation of sin and grace compare to my own, I find familiarity in the oscillations of awareness of sin and/or guilt. It is easy to agree with sinfulness in principle; easy to admit imperfection and the missing of the mark. “Nobody’s perfect,” we often shrug. But this is clearly out of phase with the heart of the tax collector who beat his chest and asked for mercy. That a “complete” realization of sin should be unbearable — this is something I have come very close to experiencing once or twice in my life. There is certainly a “remembrance” that is too burdensome to carry, and grace eventually allows it to be “drowned in oblivion.”
The biblical history of Israel also demonstrates a kind of oscillation. Over the centuries there are recalibrations and there are devolutions; times of deep and sorrowful repentance (leading to periods of greater affection toward God), and times of faithless ignorance. It seems reasonable to expect this sort of oscillation in one’s own life, and in the metanarrative of the story of all of humanity as well.
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The poetic sensibility of Dante feels more lifelike to me than many modern treatments of spiritual issues. The Divine Comedy is a big picture and highly nuanced work. Few modern treatments would tackle all the deadly sins, nor would they entertain what surely seems like unmitigated vagaries to the modern reader. Yet this is very much how real life seems: it’s a journey that often feels uncertain in which complicated creatures encounter a wide diversity of issues.
For years I tried to make sin and sanctification simple, because it had been presented simply to me for most of my life. It was supposed to be obvious and easy: repent, do right, love God, go and sin no more. Motives rarely factored in, and the notion of growing into repentance over time or laboring through it was foreign. That spiritual progress would rarely if ever be a straight line was not given regular credence. Strange that in our “advanced” culture many struggle to find the patience to carefully consider a work such as The Divine Comedy. Yet it seems to reflect reality more accurately than what is supplied or demanded in the modern spiritual economy.
III. Application
Regardless of the pros and cons of a specific cultural moment, people must still be met where they are. The Apostle Paul models this very well in both the book of Acts and his letters to various churches. I would argue that C.S. Lewis (and Dorothy Sayers, too, among many others) did the same for their generation. Lewis tirelessly crafted new and connective methods for his culture to reencounter ancient writings (both Christian and secular) for which it had lost its taste and appreciation. This is one of the challenges facing the teacher of today. Rather than declare Dante as superior to the current Top 10 Christian books, the concerned teacher must find relevant ways to whet modern appetites for the difficult treasures found in Dante.
The most profound corrections Dante offers to the western twenty-first century church are inherent recognitions of mystery and process. It may be that salvation is totally achieved at the moment of the completion of the sinner’s prayer, but sanctification is most certainly not. Both humility and the changing of creaturely “want-to” (or the wanting to “want-to”) evolve as the creature-Creator relationship (and others) evolves.
At odds with this sensibility are the extremely popular self-help lists (e.g. 10 Reasons, 10 Principles, 10 Rules, et cetera). The demand for quick and simple clarity is understandable, but these have less in common with the teaching methods of Jesus than does Purgatorio. Jesus rarely gave people the answers they thought they wanted. Dante proves himself willing to spend time on both mystery and process.
In Canto XXIX, 108 the mystery of the two natures of Christ (human and divine) are represented by the Gryphon. “So far as he is bird (divine) he is of gold incorruptible; so far as he is animal (human) he is mingled of red and white” (Alighieri, Sayers 1955, 305). This mythological image locates the mystery of Christ beyond both academia and church tradition, which the divine must transcend in order to be divine.
The risk associated with mystical works such as Purgatorio may be the exaggeration of mystery to the point of mythologizing too much of the biblical narrative. While academic approaches (such as theological methods) have their limitations, they also have value. Too much emphasis on the mystical can undermine the more balanced approach.
The Church’s desperate need to remain connected to Dante, and indeed a great many other “old” authors (e.g. Boethius, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and many others) can best be explained by C.S. Lewis: “We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century-the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’-lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books” (Lewis 1970, 202).
Works Cited
Dante Alighieri, and Dorothy L. (Dorothy Leigh) Sayers. 1955. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri : the Florentine : Cantica II, Purgatory = Il Purgatorio. Harmondsworth, Eng. ;: Penguin Books.
Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), and Fritz Eichenberg. 1956. Till We Have Faces : a Myth Retold. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples). 1970. God in the Dock : Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Originally published at http://justinpatton.wordpress.com on October 23, 2023.
