by CCW | 26 March 2014 06:05
This is the second of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio. The first is posted here[1], and the third here[2].
Blessed, indeed, is Mary, the fruit of whose womb is Jesus. Blessed, indeed, is Mary among women and blessed, indeed, among us all. The Feast of the Annunciation falls, more often than not, in the season of Lent yet properly belongs to the consideration of the Beatitudes. No one is more rightly named blessed among humans than her through whom all our blessings come. The Beatitudes are really about the quality of our life in Christ, our being defined by our end in him and our life with him. Mary in so many ways signifies the perfection of our humanity considered simply in itself; the real vocation and purpose of our humanity is seen in her.
The connection between the Beatitudes and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dante’s Purgatorio is about the vision of our humanity in its purity and truth. Just as there is an appropriate Beatitude for each sin that is being purged in relation to the corresponding virtue that is bestowed, so, too, Mary, in Dante’s vision, appears as the exemplar of human virtue in relation to each of the seven deadly sins. Mary serves as the example of the virtue to be acquired over and against each of them and so there is a correspondence between Mary and the Beatitudes in Dante’s careful vision and understanding. She is always the first example of the necessary virtue to be acquired on each of the cornices of Mount Purgatory.
On the cornice of Pride, Mary is the outstanding exemplar of humility which stands in stark contrast to pride. The proud penitents contemplate, while bent double, the images of the Angel’s Ave to Mary and her response, Ecce ancilla Dei, Behold the handmaid of God (Dante substituting, for reasons of meter, Dei for Domini), and, assuming in a kind of ellipsis the rest of her response, her fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word;” words which capture the very essence of humility. It is about our ‘yes’ to God, our being defined not by self-will but by God’s will working through and with our wills; all of which is wonderfully concentrated in the figure of Mary who represents the perfection of our humanity qua human. Only in her purity and perfection – as created by God – can God become man and effect our salvation.
Mary is the pure and blessed virgin. The Feast of the Annunciation marks the temporal beginning of the Incarnation, of God’s intimate entry into the very fabric of our world and day. Her Annunciation is Christ’s conception in her womb. How? Through the mystery of grace. Through her ‘yes’ to God’s Word proclaimed on Angel’s wings. There is the extraordinary wonder of how her intellectual assent to the divine will is the true basis of Christ’s becoming man; it parallels and perfects the idea of creation itself which insists on the priority of the intellectual over the material without which the latter can have no meaning. Christ’s conception at Mary’s Annunciation is a radical statement about the priority of the intellectual over the material but now in an even greater mode, the mode of redemption.
For all that Mary’s virginal conception troubles the empirical mind and disturbs the dogmas of biology, in one way it simply affirms a standard philosophical and religious understanding. It affirms that the world and our humanity is essentially intelligible and spiritual, first and foremost, and that the material and physical world is really part of the intelligible structure of reality. Creation and Annunciation take us to the originating and redeeming principle, to God himself. And therein lies our blessedness.
This can be seen in the subsequent cornices of the Purgatorio in the example of Mary and in the Beatitudes proclaimed and pronounced upon the successful completion of the soul’s penitence. Before turning to Dante’s use of the Beatitudes themselves, it is worth pondering for a moment the way Dante portrays Mary as the exemplar of virtue on the other cornices. This may help us to appreciate the way in which the Beatitudes, too, function in the action of the Purgatorio.
After Pride comes Envy, and Mary functions as the exemplar of compassionate generosity that is the counter to the destructive nature of envy’s vision. What the penitent envious souls hear, for as we shall learn, they cannot see since sight is their problem, we might say, are Mary’s words at the Wedding Feast of Cana of Galilee, namely, “They have no wine.” Mary states beautifully and simply the human condition but in terms of the logic of the Purgatorio, it is really all about others and not herself. “They have no wine,” not ‘I’ have no wine. It expresses a compassion and concern for others that counters the selfish nature of envy which seeks the hurt and not the good of others. In this case, “they have no wine,” is about seeking the good of others.
After Envy comes Wrath. Here the example of Mary is taken from the story of Christ as a boy of twelve being found in the Temple three days after the Passover, sitting and listening to the doctors of the Law. He is found by Mary and Joseph but it is Mary who speaks. What she says, Dante is suggesting, is the very opposite of wrath and anger which is usually incoherent and destructive. Her question to Jesus opens out his response which teaches us so much about who he is for us. “Why hast thou dealt with us so … we sought thee sorrowing.” Rather than seeing this as parental rage, Dante is suggesting that it signals something more purer, a kind of genuine puzzlement that contributes to our thinking about who Christ is and who he is for us. There is a quality of gentleness to Mary’s question that is the counter to wrath and anger.
Sloth marks the sole candidate for the category of love deficient. It stands by itself. The contrasting virtue to sloth is about purposive work and about getting on with it straightway. And so the Marian example is taken from the account of Mary going into the hill country of Judea to see Elizabeth. It is the story which follows directly upon the account of the Annunciation. It is the story of the visitation, the meeting of the mothers of Israel, for Elizabeth, in her old age, is miraculously with child, the child who will be John the Baptist. The point against the debilitating nature of sloth is that Mary “arose … and went with haste unto the hill country of Judea” No procrastinating; no putting off until tomorrow. It signals the idea of being moved by the good to communicate the good to others, directly, immediately, even “with haste.”
The last of the three deadly sins are Covetousness, Gluttony, and Lust. Here again, Mary provides the necessary and contrasting virtue. In the case of the Covetous, the contrasting image is that of the birth of Jesus; the idea that Mary gives birth to him who is born for us. It signals the divine generosity of spirit, the idea of giving rather than the getting. In the case of gluttony, the contrasting virtue concerns our being defined not by the appetites of the body but by the dictates of the mind. The Marian reference is again to the story of the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee but this time more in terms of what Mary says, namely, “whatsoever he tells you to do, do it.” It is about our obedience to God’s Word rather than to the rumblings of our bellies!
The last cornice of the Purgatorio concerns the penitent souls of the lustful. The Marian exemplar returns us the story of the Annunciation and to the moment of spiritual questioning, not about the why of the divine purpose – such was the folly of Zacharias, the husband of aged Elizabeth and the father of John the Baptist, and which resulted in him being made dumb for his presumption – but about the how. “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” It is about her chastity which stands in stark contrast to the impetuosity of lust; its wilful thoughtlessness. The refusal to be mature in love is the refusal to be intelligent in love. It signals, too, the priority of the intellect without which our passions remain in such sorry disarray; our intellect, that is to say, as informed and perfected by divine grace.
While the Purgatorio is filled with the liturgical canticles, prayers and music of the Church, the symbol of the human community in the truth of its activity as seeking and serving God, there are as well the sonnets and poems of romantic love, Dante’s among them, several of which appear in the Purgatorio. Among those there is an ode from Dante’s Vita Nuova, a sonnet entitled, “Ladies who have intelligence in love.” This appears in the course of the movement through the cornices of love excessive, specifically on the cornice of the gluttonous. It is really about what defines you; the appetites of the mind or those of the body? On such a question turns all our blessedness.
The example of Mary on those last two cornices only emphasizes the point and shows that she above all others is the seat of wisdom, the paragon of “ladies who have intelligence in love.” An Anglican spiritual writer in the 17th century, Anthony Stafford, observes in his work, The Female Glory, that Mary is not simply an exemplar or model for women but for all, men and women. It is about being intelligent in love. This is Dante’s point, too, in making Mary everywhere the quintessential exemplar of human virtue.
This brief examination of the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the structure of the Purgatorio complements and amplifies our consideration of the place of the Beatitudes in the moments of purgation and perfection. We have already had occasion to see the appropriate application of the first Beatitude to the purging of pride, the first of the deadly sins and the one which is present in all the rest. Before looking at the Beatitudes in relation to envy, wrath and sloth, it may be useful to consider the question about the correspondences between the virtues and vices of the soul and the Beatitudes as presented by Dante.
How do they line up? There are, after all, seven deadly sins and eight Beatitudes. How are the vices ordered? Which Beatitudes are seen as related to the corresponding virtue to which vice? Is there one and one only way of thinking about this?
As we have seen, Dante following Aquinas, has already argued that the Beatitudes speak both to the attainment of perfection and to the means of its attainment. They speak to us here and now and in relation to the glory of heaven. Dante, too, presents the seven deadly sins in a certain order. How he relates the Beatitudes to them is most instructive. Not all have followed his path.
The American Catholic popular philosopher, Peter Kreeft, for example, orders the seven deadly sins and, consequently, the relation of the Beatitudes to them, rather differently. He has to face, of course, the same problem as Dante about how to relate seven sins to eight blessednesses. We shall see the different ways in which this is accomplished.
Kreeft orders them as follows. The sin of pride has, as with Dante, the corresponding virtue and blessedness of humility signaled in the Beatitude, “blessed are the poor in spirit.” But, next, he places avarice, where Dante, following earlier precedent, places envy. Kreeft posits the Beatitude of mercy as the counter and corresponding virtue to the sin of avarice. This is, perhaps, quite telling and reflects upon the power of property and acquisitiveness in the contemporary culture in ways that is different from Dante’s world.
Kreeft places envy as the third of the seven deadlies and sets against it the Beatitude of “those who mourn.” This is followed next, as with Dante, with the sin of wrath, and, as with Dante, Kreeft sees the Beatitude of the “peace-makers” as its appropriate counter but also includes, as Dante doesn’t, the Beatitude about “the meek inheriting the earth” as another counter to the vice of wrath. Dante will posit the Beatitude of the “peace-makers” as the counter to wrath but rather than double up two Beatitudes, Dante deliberately excludes two of the Beatitudes from his overall schemata.
For reasons that belong to the logic of the Purgatorio, Dante leaves out of the consideration altogether the Beatitude about the meek who are said to inherit the earth. Why? Because the whole orientation and direction of the Purgatorio is heavenward.
Kreeft, in his schemata about the seven deadly sins in relation to the Beatitudes, locates the Beatitude about “those who hunger and thirst after righteousness” as the counter to sloth. Dante does not. He will actually split that Beatitude but sees that the counter to sloth is better found in the Beatitude about “those who mourn.” The Beatitude about “those who hunger and thirst after righteousness” is split by Dante into the respective virtuous counters to covetousness – those who hunger after righteousness counter the hungering after possessions – and to gluttony, of which thirsting after righteousness is the virtuous counter. Kreeft, on the other hand, sees the Beatitude about the “persecuted” as the countering virtue to gluttony. The logic, I suppose, is that a commitment to truth is always about something more than our bodily appetites and so, if we are “persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” then that stands in stark contrast to our inordinate love of food.
Both Kreeft and Dante are at one in locating the Beatitude of the pure in heart as the counter to the sin of lust.
This comparative exercise compels us to consider the relation of the Beatitudes as virtues seen as the counter to the vices. There is no one-to-one correspondence, though it would seem that a good argument can be made about certain virtues and certain vices as oppositest one or another. But the deeper point, perhaps, is that the Beatitudes do not simply reduce themselves to such a pattern and scenario because the Beatitudes function more primarily in terms of our incorporation into the life of Christ, the life of the soul as redeemed and perfected.
Dante deliberately leaves out of the Purgatorio, two of the Beatitudes, the Beatitude about “the meek inheriting the earth” and the Beatitude about “those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” The souls of the Purgatorio are set upon heaven and they are beyond persecution. Their punishments are not persecutory but purgations willingly embraced as the necessary conditions for achieving their perfection and their heavenly end. Dante’s splitting the Beatitude about “hungering and thirsting after righteousness” means, too, that he sees a connection between covetousness and gluttony, the one more general, the other more particular, and that for both the issue is the justice of creation in general and the particular forms of our consumption. There is a sharpness and a clarity to this kind of thinking though it challenges, perhaps, some of our own contemporary assumptions.
Looking at the role and place of Mary as the exemplar of Blessedness has provided an overview of the vices and their purgation in the Purgatorio. The proud, as we have seen, are bent double and contemplate both the images of humility and pride, sculpted in stone so well as to seem alive. The Beatitude pronounced upon the release of the penitent proud and at the erasure of the first ‘P’ for sin and for pride is about those who are “poor in spirit.” The next deadly sin is Envy. How is it imaged? And what is the Beatitude that corresponds to this vice of the soul?
The envious are depicted as sitting cloaked in grey almost indistinguishable from the stone of the mountain. They cry out to Mary and the Saints, to the company of Heaven, we might say, in perfect accord with what their sin expressly denies, namely the joy of others and our mutual joy and delight in God and in one another. How is their sin imaged? In a very powerful way and one which excites our pity. “I think there is no man so dispiteous /walking the earth,” Dante says, “whose heart would not be stung by what I saw, could he but see them thus.”
There is something altogether striking about the way envy is imaged. Here the punishment is the sin itself. They are depicted with their eyes sown shut with an iron wire, like the sealing of the eyes of hawks and other birds of prey. It is an arresting image and one which captures the true meaning of envy. The examples of the contrasting virtue of generosity and of the sin itself are conveyed by means of voices in the air – through things heard not seen. The sin of envy has to do with how we view things, As the penitent Sapia explains to Dante, “my heart conceived/More joy from others’ loss than my own gain.” The envious take delight in the pain and loss of others and not their good against which they are set. This is why envy belongs in the category of love perverted. The Germans, too, have a word for this: schadenfreude, which is about taking delight in another’s hurt or loss.
The envious contemplate the contrasting virtue of generosity as well as their own envy, eyes shut but ears open. What is the Beatitude which is bestowed upon the completion of their purgatorial penance? It is the Beatitude about mercy. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Of all the Beatitudes this is the only one which shows the paradox of the same, as Kreeft notes. All the other Beatitudes are about the paradox of difference in which there is a complete contrast, for instance, between pride and humility, or between mourning and being comforted. Mercy is a higher form of justice and justice involves relationship.
Dante here is following the teaching of Thomas Aquinas who explains the logic of this Beatitude in relation to envy. “Envy,” he says, “is the direct opposite of mercy … for the envious man is saddened by his neighbour’s prosperity, whereas the merciful man is saddened by his neighbour’s misfortune; hence the envious are not merciful, and conversely” (S.T., II.IIae, q.36.3). The merciful are not envious. They rejoice in all that belongs to the good of others and they are saddened by anything that diminishes the good of others.
The logic is quite wonderful and is further confirmed in the Purgatorio by Virgil’s first Discourse on Love which happens in the transition from the Second Cornice to the Third. That discourse emphasizes how the more things are shared, the greater the wealth or benefit for all; it is the wealth of charity.
Because the more there are who there can say
‘Ours’, the more goods each has, and charity
Burns in that cloister with a larger ray.
Generosity is a form of divine charity and participates in the mercy of God. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” The Latin word, misericordes, expresses a larger sense of mercy; it reflects the aspect of our hearts – cordes– merciful-hearted or tender-hearted with the further connotations of sympathy and being generous-minded. We recall Dante’s reaction, too, at seeing the envious. What was awakened in him was pity, a form of misericordes, we might say.
The First Discourse on Love reminds us that the ascent is educational; it is altogether about lessons learned; they are the lessons of love. Mercy is the counter to envy but mercy, too, is what governs the ascent. We live under the mercy and in constant need of God’s mercy. It is what we pray for ourselves and for one another. To do so is to seek the goodness of God for ourselves and others.
The Third Cornice purges the last of the sins of love perverted, Wrath. Their penance is again the objectification of their sin. The sin of Wrath is imaged by way of souls staggering about blindly in smoke; their penance is to endure the sin itself, the way wrath clouds our judgment and results in rash and destructive actions. Their prayer is the Agnus Dei. Along with Mary, always the exemplar of virtue, there are other examples of meekness or gentleness of spirit, the counter to wrath, such as St. Stephen, who prays for his foes in the face of their wrath and fury.
The exemplars of the contrasting virtue as well as the emblems of the sin itself are conveyed through visions of the mind. This underscores the thoughtlessness of wrath, the absence of the rule of thought in the soul. The Beatitude that rightly complements the soul’s liberation from the smoky confusions of “the wrath of man” which “worketh not the righteousness of God” is that of the peace-makers, the pacifici. Wrath creates dissension and leads to destruction. To the contrary, the peace-makers seek harmony and union which contribute to the building up of the community of love, not its destruction.
The Fourth Cornice treats an aspect of disordered love that is love defective. The sin is sloth. Who are the slothful? Well, there are a rather large number of forms of sloth. We tend to think of it simply as laziness but there are different kinds of laziness. Unlike the previous cornices where the punishment is the sin itself, here the punishment is its exact opposite. In place of doing nothing or not doing what one should be doing, the slothful penitent ones are imaged as ceaselessly running. The soul is in motion for that is what it means to be a living soul. Love is motion towards another. The problem with the slothful is that their love is too slack, too indifferent, too luke-warm.
As Dorothy Sayers points out sloth or in the Latin, acedia, is insidious and takes many different forms: such as an indifferent and careless attitude; such as a kind of acquiescence in evil under the guise of tolerance; such as a refusal to be moved by anything good or beautiful – disillusionment; such as a kind of world-weariness; such as an intellectual withdrawal, escapism of one sort or another. In every way it is, as she says, “that whole poisoning of the will” which ultimately contributes to morbid introspection and despair. It is a kind of failure to think and act upon what is good and true. It seems to me that sloth also infects the super-busy, meaning those who are busy doing everything except what they should be doing. That, too, is a failure of the will, particularly, an intellectual failure of the will.
Most appropriately, then, it is on this Fourth Cornice that Virgil provides his Second Discourse on Love and on Free Will while the slothful contemplate the counter examples of zeal, which are about our active willing of the good, as well as the examples of sloth. These examples are conveyed by means of the voices of penitent souls. Alone of all the souls of Purgatory proper, the Slothful have no verbal prayer; their prayer is their activity. Labora est ora. Work is prayer. The problem with sloth is the failure to will what belongs to our being as spiritual creatures. For, as Virgil teaches Dante, “the soul … is created apt for love.” The slothful are weak and deficient in love and therefore unmoved by the good. Voltaire captures this in an enlightenment context in the figure of Lord Pococurante, Lord Care-Little, in his novel, Candide. The lack of care or love means that we are unmoved by anything or for anyone.
What then is the Beatitude which corresponds to the purging of sloth in us and the erasing of yet another ‘P’ from our foreheads? It is the Beatitude of “those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” There is something great and comforting to be gained through being able to care for others even in the loss of loved ones. Only those who care can mourn; only so can they be comforted. Love is alive and active in them, like Mary running to the hills in haste to see her cousin Elizabeth, running to convey the good and great news that the Lord is with her and through her he is with us and only so shall we be blessed.
Fr. David Curry
The Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio II
Meditation II
March 25th, 2014
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