This is the first of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Pugatorio. The second is posted here and the third here.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
They are the blessednesses. The quintessential expression of Christian ethical teaching. They form the beginning of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew’s Gospel; and are found in a different tone and register in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Matthew presents us with the classical eight beatitudes; Luke with four together with four contrasting notes of warning, the woes that are the counter to the blessings. Felicity and misery are wonderfully juxtaposed.
But what are the Beatitudes and what do they mean? At once well-known and yet strange; at once compelling and confusing; the Beatitudes concern the summum bonum, the highest good for our humanity. Yet, in the Common Prayer tradition, it may seem that we encounter them rather infrequently, liturgically speaking. The Beatitudes from St. Matthew are appointed to be read on The Feast of All Saints’ which despite its significance only rarely occurs on a Sunday; parts of The Sermon on the Mount including the Beatitudes are read at Evening Prayer on The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity in Year One; hence they are read every two years. It might seem that they are either overlooked or taken for granted, much like the Ten Commandments.
And yet, the Beatitudes are directed to be read in the Penitential Service for use on Ash Wednesday, “if there be no Communion” and an instruction to be given. They are, in other words, part of our Lenten pilgrimage and belong to our Christian vocation, our call to blessedness. It is altogether about what God seeks for us.
The Beatitudes are a necessary part of any consideration of Christian ethics. They challenge and compel as much as they confuse and even mystify. They seem to turn the world on its head. But, as G.K. Chesterton notes “it is because we are standing on our heads that Christ’s philosophy seems upside down.” To ponder the mystery of the Beatitudes is to stand on our feet and to think with Christ. It will challenge us.
Classically there are eight Beatitudes which are presented as the objective ethical teachings of Christ. Far more than a teaching, however, they represent the forms of our actual incorporation into Christ, the forms of his life in us. They are in that sense more than gifts and virtues, as Aquinas notes in contrast to Ambrose who sees the Beatitudes as associated with the cardinal virtues and to Augustine who sees them in relation to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They differ from the virtues and gifts, Aquinas argues, not as habit but as act from habit. They are about our actual participation in the redemption of our humanity in Christ; blessedness is our end which we possess in hope now.
Thus Matthew ends the recitation of the Beatitudes with their application to us: “blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” A reference to the eighth Beatitude, being “persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” it extends to the way in which all the Beatitudes speak to our blessedness in Christ, to the fulfillment and perfection of our humanity in Christ. “Blessed are ye” has to be said really about all of the Beatitudes if we will let their force and meaning hold sway in our hearts and minds. The Beatitudes are both here and now as well as future. They reveal the hope of heaven and both prepare and dispose us in the way of that blessed hope as well as marking the beginnings of that way in us.
The way of purgation is one of the Trinitarian ways of Christian pilgrimage along with the way of illumination and the way of perfection or union. It may be to our benefit to consider how the Beatitudes are used in Dante’s great spiritual classic, the Purgatorio, the second of the three cantiches of his Commedia, which has come to be more commonly called the Divine Comedy. A masterpiece of poetic theology, written in the early 14th century in Italian and notionally set in the Jubilee Year, 1300, it constitutes a summa of medieval and ancient moral and spiritual understanding but in such a way as to speak to all ages. It speaks profoundly to the pilgrimage of the soul to God.
The Purgatorio, alone of the three great canticles, is set in time and marks the upward progress of souls to God. It is not a temporal Hell but is already infused with the joys of heaven, with the blessednesses that belong to the communion of saints. All the souls of the penitent know their blessedness; it is what they strive to attain knowing their end and purpose. They are souls in progess towards their end seeking to be made “pure and prepared to leap into the stars” of the Paradiso, the heaven of God. The Purgatorio explores the process of our being made blessed, something which is the work of the grace of God but a work which perfects but does not destroy our humanity. The famous Thomistic phrase underlies the entire ascent. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it (gratia non tollit naturam sed perficiet). It means that there is a process, a programme. It is the programme of transforming and renewing grace that perfects and restores our wounded and fallen nature.
Because it orients us towards our end in God, the Purgatorio is about our life in pilgrimage. In a way, the whole of the Purgatorio is like the life of the Church in the patterns and disciplines of holy life and prayer, of liturgy and service. Thus the whole ascent is undertaken in prayer, with prayer, and by prayer. What we contemplate are the forms of our disordered souls and the ways in which the disordered loves of our lives are set right, at once purged of the vices and clothed in the virtues.
The structure of the Purgatorio is most instructive. We contemplate the seven deadly sins and the means of their being cleansed from us. There is a prayer appropriate to each sin; a virtue to be contemplated and acquired; the sin itself to be known and rejected; and, then, when the discipline has been accomplished, a benediction to be pronounced. The benedictions of the Purgatorio are all from the Beatitudes. They correspond to the particular vices or sins as the counter perfection that is the truth of the Christian soul in its pilgrimage to its home in God.
It will be instructive to consider the Beatitudes, then, by way of reference to the seven deadly sins in the logic of the Purgatorio. But first, a few considerations about The Beatitudes themselves and about The Seven Deadly Sins. What are they?
The word, beatitude, is ???????? in the Greek. It relates to the ethical teaching of Plato and Aristotle inaugurated by Socrates who constantly and consistently asked the question about the good life. Happiness is what all people seek. But happiness has a more objective quality to it in the ancient cultures – to ideas about what is right and good – than it does for us in the contemporary world. Happiness for us is invariably subjective and circumstantial and as such makes little sense in relation to the Beatitudes. There is nothing happy about persecution or about mourning, for instance. That there can be something blessed about such conditions is only possible through the kind of perspective about human life which the Beatitudes present. It is about our life seen in relation to our highest end, our end in God, the summum bonum of our humanity. God becomes the measure which we seek. His will conditions ours. It benefits us to lay hold of an explicitly theological kind of language, one which tempers and even redeems the more prosaic and secular language of our quotidian lives; such is the weight of the word, blessedness.
This is especially the case given the paradoxical qualities of the Beatitudes which seem to turn the world on its head. Actually, they are about nothing less than putting our lives and our world on the foundation of heavenly grace.
So, what are the Beatitudes?
Blessed are poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
They end, we have suggested, with the note of application to the actual experience of our lives. “Blessed are ye … rejoice, and be exceeding glad.” Somehow we are not to be defined simply by the outward conditions and circumstances of our lives, the happenstance and accident of everyday life. No. The Beatitudes speak to the inward realities of our souls.
But our souls are in sorry disarray. Dante, drawing upon a long and profound tradition of reflection about human personality seen in terms of our loves and desires, organizes the Purgatorio around the Christian categorization of the sins of the soul, the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. They are, in the order of the Purgatorio and in the order of ascent from the worst to the least worst, as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, covetousness (or avarice), gluttony, and lust.
There is the spiritual sense that pride, the deadliest of the deadlies, we might say, is implicit and present to a greater or lesser degree in all of these sins. It is the head and source of all sin. It belongs to the further genius of Dante to group these sins in terms of a theological understanding about love (amor). Our loves are in disarray but in one of three ways: love perverted; love defective; and love excessive. Thus under love perverted we will consider pride, envy and wrath. Love defective – our lukewarm, indifferent kind of love – is sloth. Love excessive is captured in the sins of avarice, gluttony and lust. The seven deadly sins are the root sins or the capital sins within which the whole panorama of sin in all of its disarray is embraced and understood. All sin is here.
In the imaginative geography of Dante, Purgatory is a mountain of great height and immensity. The pilgrimage is an upward climb. “Behold,” Jesus says in the great Gospel on Quinquagesima Sunday, “we go up to Jerusalem,” a Jerusalem which has taken on a profound symbolic meaning in the Christian understanding and is ultimately expressed by Dante in his Paradiso, the celestial paradise. The Purgatorio is about a kind of spiritual mountain climbing in which the struggle of our lives is the overcoming of our sins. At the top of the mountain, we arrive at the earthly paradise. We arrive, however, where we were meant to begin only so as to achieve our end.
The journey of the Purgatorio is to arrive at our true starting point and to know it for the first time. It is not our end, not our home, but the stepping off point to our true end in God, signified in Dante’s Paradiso. There is something quite profound in such a Christian understanding of the journey of the soul to God. In the terrestrial or earthly paradise at the end of the ascent of the Purgatorio, the pilgrim Dante beholds the pageant of Revelation and the Sacrament and the pageant of the confusion of Church and State. In other words, through the ascent of the Purgatorio he arrives at a new and different place of instruction and learning; first, at the hands of the mysterious Mathilda, the handmaiden of his beloved Beatrice, whose name perhaps suggests the learning of the things of God, and, then, from Beatrice herself. His guide up the long mountain climb, now more as a companion, is the great poet of Roman antiquity, Virgil.
But our interest is in the role of the Beatitudes in this upward ascent of the soul to God. In the imaginative time-frame of the Purgatorio, the journey extends from Easter morning to the Wednesday of Easter week. This should remind us that the pilgrimage of Lent is only possible through the triumph of Easter. It is because we know the story, in some sense, that we embrace the disciplines and lessons of Lent willingly and joyfully. In the Purgatorio, the penitent souls love their punishments because they are the purifying means of their perfection, the necessary means of achieving their end in God, blessedness. This time-frame, too, connects with the liturgical life of the Church in the cycle of Lent and Easter, particularly in terms of Easter week where time itself seems almost suspended. The Gospel for The Octave Day of Easter, for instance, taken from John’s Gospel, places us in the mystery of the Resurrection on “the same day at evening,” suggesting something of the way in which the temporal world has been caught up into the eternity of God; the way, too, in which blessedness is already present, as the Psalmist puts it, in those “whose heart are the pilgrim ways; / who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well; / yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings” (Ps. 84. 6).
Humility is the condition of the journey of the Purgatorio even as it is of Lent, itself the image of the Christian journey of the soul to God. The Second Sunday in Lent reminds us, through story of the Canaanite Woman, that humility and perservance are the necessary conditions of the journey. In the Purgatorio, Dante is girded with a reed, the symbol of humility. We do not presume upon our righteousness but only upon the grace of Christ. The crumbs which fall from the master’s table are more than provision enough and are already a foretaste of the heavenly banquet of divine love. We are sustained in the journey by the blessed Sacrament and Word of God’s Word and Son.
The Beatitudes belong to the moral and theological understanding of the human soul. They speak to the forms of our participation in the grace of Christ.
Hell is about what we want for ourselves. Heaven is about what God wants for us. The Purgatorio is about our wills wanting what God wants for us in the face of our acknowledgement of sin. Purgatory proper begins with an ascent by grace to St. Peter’s gate and to three steps of three different colours symbolizing confession, contrition and satisfaction. The foreheads of the penitent souls are marked there with the seven ‘Ps’ symbolic of the seven peccati, the seven deadly sins. These three aspects of “the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage,” as the Anglican poet, George Herbert puts it, of the life of prayer itself, we might say, run through the whole of our liturgy albeit in the more reformed pattern of contrition, confession and satisfaction.
The shift from beginning with contrition rather than confession reflects, I think, a more reformed sensibility about the self and self-awareness. Confession and contrition are closely connected but the idea of contrition is about our sorrow and regret that arises from the awareness of sin itself. “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, guiltie of dust and sinne,” as Herbert puts it before drawing out the confession of unkindness and ungratefulness, themselves forms of the pride of self, we might say, which affect our relationship to others and to God.
But Dante also recognizes those other conditions of soul which have not arrived at such an explicit understanding. He invents what is called ante-purgatory in which there are, first, the excommunicate, and then, the late-repentant further sub-divided into the indolent, the unshriven and the preoccupied. All are heaven-bound because there has been at least some stirring of the will towards what God seeks for us just not very much! The excommunicate have not sought reconciliation during their life-time; the indolent have been just too lazy to be bothered with the spiritual disciplines of the Faith which require our activity; and so neither have a prayer assigned to them – they await a certain period of time before ascending to Purgatory proper.
The unshriven and the pre-occupied also wait upon God’s mercy but since circumstances are partly responsible – either dying by accident or battle without repentance or through busyness with worldly affairs having neglected their prayers – they are given a prayer to say during the time of their waiting. This is an important feature of Dante’s Purgatorio and reminds us again of how the ascent is very much like the life of the Church. The Purgatorio is infused with the language of grace by way of the canticles and prayers and hymns of the Church. It is in this context that the Beatitudes appear but only in relation to Purgatory proper, to the soul’s clearer sense of its sinfulness and to the increase of its active desire for God.
The prayer for the unshriven is the great penitential psalm, Psalm 51, the miserere mei; “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness.” It signals an important aspect of all penitence, namely the recognition of the prior goodness of God and that sin is fundamentally against God, “against thee only have I sinned, and done that which is evil in thy sight.” It acknowledges the goodness of God as that which we have betrayed and so have bereft ourselves of blessedness. There can be only our turning back to him.
The prayer of the pre-occupied is the Salve Regina, a Marian devotion which looks to Mary as the Queen of Heaven, reminding us once again of the fundamental orientation of our humanity; in short, to the blessedness of Heaven. A second prayer is appointed for the first night on the Mountain while resting in the Valley of the Rulers, another form of the preoccupied, namely those who are preoccupied with political and institutional life, like many a priest and pastor, especially rectors! That prayer is the Compline Hymn, Te Lucis ante Terminum, found in the Canadian Prayer Book as part of the Night Office, An Order for Compline (BCP, p. 723).
Before the ending of the day,
Creator of the world, we pray
That with thy wonted favour thou
Wouldst be our guard and keeper now…
It belongs to the rule of the mountain that there can be no progress, no climbing in the night but only in the light of the day. The night is ‘under the mercy,’ however, of the three stars that complement the four morning stars that greeted the pilgrim at the outset of the Purgatorio. The four stars symbolize the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice while the three stars signify the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. What we are given to see is how the classical or cardinal virtues are not extinguished or destroyed but transformed by the theological virtues, principally love, to become the forms of love in us, the love which has its fullest perfection in the Beatitudes. This is the theme of the three pre-Lenten Sundays as well which both point us to Lent and prepare us for the pilgrim ways.
Thus, these aspects of prayer in ante-purgatory anticipate the Beatitudes, too.
Pride
Pride is the greatest and the worst of the seven deadly sins. Dante pictures the proud as bent double and bowed down with heavy stones; their punishment is to contemplate what they were too proud to consider, the ground of our humanity. Pride is about being puffed up and so full of ourselves that we deny the reality of others and the reality of our own creation. Bent double and bowed down, the penitent proud contemplate the images of humility signified in the Blessed Virgin Mary, King David, and the Emperor Trajan, examples drawn from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the Old and New Testament, and from pagan antiquity, which are sculpted on the rock face of the mountain. This will become a repeated pattern in the cornices of the Purgatorio and reveal something of the interplay of nature and grace and of the way in which ancient wisdom has been recapitulated in the Christian vision.
Contemplating the virtue of humility is the spur to their devotion. It is about awakening in them that which the proud have denied. But it also belongs to penitence to contemplate the actual sin itself and so that, too, is part of the journey. Their sin is made visible to them in the engraven images of the sin and fall of Pride seen in the figure of Satan, and several other figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. It is presented in the form of an acrostic, the sequence of verses of Dante’s terza rima spelling, in Italian, the word Man (Uom). Man is the Proud One who cuts himself off from God and from every other human being. Thus a profound theological insight is conveyed through a remarkable literary device.
The Prayer of the Proud is instructive, too, for it is the prayer for all Christians and frequently so, the prayer which shapes every prayer, the paternoster, the Lord’s Prayer, albeit with one important qualification. In the logic of Dante’s Purgatorio, the penitent proud are already heavenward bound. Thus the petition about not being led into temptation and about being delivered from evil no longer applies to them personally; it is, however, the prayer for all Christians in their earthly pilgrimage. Here the penitent proud pray the Lord’s Prayer not only to acquire the virtue of humility but out of that humility they pray it for others, the others whom they have denied and ignored in their pride. It is the activity of humility in them.
This last prayer is not made for us – we know,
Dear Lord, that it is needless – but for those
Who still remain behind us we pray so.
This marks another important feature of the pilgrimage of Lent. It is not a solitary journey. It is about our life in the body of Christ, the Church. Our prayers place us in the communion of saints, in the company of the blessed. This brings us then to the benediction pronounced when the proud have completed their penance and have the first “P” erased from their foreheads. The benediction for the Proud is the first Beatitude.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The poor in spirit are the humble ones, the ones who are open to the things of God, the ones in whom God’s will lives and moves. They do not presume upon themselves but upon the mercy of God for only so can his life live in us and we in him. It is a most fitting benediction. It speaks to the deeper truth of humility. Humility is the condition of our participation in the blessedness of God. It is the condition of our journeying in Faith, learning the truth of ourselves as found in the mercy and the goodness of God. “Blessed,” indeed, “are the poor in spirit”. In the logic of the Beatitudes the so called reward of this first blessedness is the same as the eighth, thus completing the octave. It suggests, too, that as pride is the deadliest of the sins and the one which lurks in them all, so, too, humility is the quality of soul that must be in us all if ever we are to be blessed. It is only in humility that we may eat of the crumbs which fall from the master’s table and discover that our daily bread in his will for us, on earth as it is in heaven.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Fr. David Curry
The Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio
Meditation # I
March 18th, 2014