The Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio: Meditation III
This is the third of three Lenten meditations on the Beatitudes in Dante’s Purgatorio. The first is posted here and the second here.
“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God”
“Then the sermons begin,” one critic of the Purgatorio has observed, commenting on an important and integral feature of the journey of ascent. One of the essential ways of pilgrimage is the way of illumination; one form of illumination is through learning and learning through instruction and discourse. It says, perhaps, more about our world and day than much about Dante’s that we are ambivalent, if not hostile to instruction and learning. Sermons, it seems, are much to be endured and little to be appreciated.
The upward journey of the soul through the cornices of the Purgatorio entails a number of discourses. They are didactic accounts and yet they are fully part of the imaginative ascent of the soul to God. They belong to the essential orthodoxy of Dante’s poetic vision and they relate to a number of critical and important Christian and philosophical and theological ideas. Along with the discourses, there are as well two dreams.
Dreams and discourses. Both contribute to the way of illumination, the path of learning. “Friend, go up higher” could be the refrain of the Purgatorio. The first dream happens in the transition from the terraces of Ante-Purgatory to the cornices of Purgatory proper. The second dream is “the dream of the siren” that appropriately marks the beginning of the purgation of “love excessive” on the last three cornices of Mount Purgatory, the purging of the deadly but lesser sins of avarice, gluttony, and lust.
The discourses deal with an interesting array of questions: questions about the super-expressive nature of the Good which when shared is increased not decreased; questions about love and free will as the explicit counter to all and any kind of material determinism – just one of the ways in which Dante speaks to every age; questions about the forms of bodies, of spiritual bodies; questions, too, about human individuality countering the Islamic Philosopher, Averroes, whose teaching about the “passive intellect” effectively denies the rational and immortal individual soul without which the whole journey is meaningless; but, above all, the discourses underscore the essential insight about amor, love, as the defining principle of the soul’s life and character.
