Purgatorio (93 page)
Authors: Dante
65.
Perhaps no passage in a poem that refers to David more than to any other personage from the Old Testament (see Holl.1973.1) is more compelling in establishing the “figural relationship” between the two poets. Dante, too, is the “humble psalmist,” David’s modern counterpart. It seems just to say that no one has developed this observation as well as has Barolini (see especially Baro.1984.1, pp. 275–78). Tommaseo long ago (1837) dealt with this scene as a metaphor for great Dante’s low vernacular poetry performed beneath the scornful gaze of pedantry: “But Dante is more than poet in certain respects, because he does not fear to appear less than poet and dances with his robe hitched up; but princess Michal—I might call her ‘pedantry’—sniffs from the window.”
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67–69.
Where David, down among the common people and dancing without kingly dignity, reflects the low comedic world, Michal, high above the crowd and separate from it, scornful, seems to represent the lofty, “tragic,” or noble view. David here serves as a forerunner for Jesus, who will identify himself with humility, while Michal seems to be associated with all those who resist humility in the name of pride.
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73–93.
The longest of these three scenes concerns Trajan, emperor of Rome in the years 98–117. Of those whom Dante depicts as being saved, to whom all or most Christians would deny, or at least question, that status (Cato [
Purg
. I.75], Statius [
Purg
. XXII.73], Trajan [
Par
. XX.44], and Ripheus [
Par
. XX.68]), only for Trajan does there exist a tradition that considered him saved. This result of St. Gregory’s prayers is even allowed as possible by St. Thomas, in what seems an unusually latitudinarian gesture, recorded in the
Summa theologica
(as was perhaps first noted by Lombardi [1791]):
ST
III, Suppl., quaest. 71, art. 5, obj. 5 [for the text in English see Singleton’s note to verse 75]). That what seems to modern ears an unbelievable story should have had the support of so rigorous a thinker as Thomas still astounds readers. Yet, if one looks closely, one sees that Thomas does hedge his bet: Trajan’s salvation by Gregory’s intervention is “probable”
(potest probabiliter aestimari)
; further, according to Thomas, “as others say”
(secundum quosdam)
, Trajan may have only had his punishment put back until Judgment Day. Dante betrays no such hesitation: the salvation of Trajan is Gregory’s “great victory” (verse 75). Dante is in an enviable position, both possessing Thomas’s support and being able to outdo him in enthusiasm.
For some of the many medieval texts that support the miraculous salvation of Trajan and for an array of possible sources for the dialogue between Trajan and the widow, including Trajan’s column in Rome, see Vickers (Vick.1983.1), pp. 70–72, 75–79.
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73.
For the term
storïata
see Singleton: “a depiction in art, even as stained-glass windows or initial letters in manuscripts or frescoed walls were said to be ‘historiated’ ” with historical or legendary material.
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75.
St. Gregory, known as Gregory the Great, was pope from 590 to 604. His lengthy commentary on the Book of Job (the
Moralia
), one of the most influential writings of the earlier Middle Ages, offers a different and happier understanding of Job’s story than is prevalent today, insisting that it has a truly “comic” resolution, rebinding Job to God and restoring his family. Dante mentions Gregory twice, here and in
Paradiso
XX.106–117, in connection with the salvation of Trajan, and he is referred to in the last sphere of the heavens as one of the saved (
Par
. XXVIII.133), despite the fact that he had made small errors in listing the orders of the angelic hierarchy (as had Dante himself in
Conv
. II.v.6) in the
Moralia
.
For information about which popes are saved and which are damned according to the
Commedia
see note to
Inferno
VII.46–48.
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76.
Having been told of Gregory’s “great victory,” we are now told in what it consisted: the pope has saved a (dead) pagan emperor. The way the text is handled reminds us of Dante’s continuing hostility to the Church’s insistence on the hierocrat position, in which the emperor is seen as totally dependent upon the Church for his authority. Gregory’s intervention for a great Roman emperor has, in Dante’s eyes, a different style and sets a better standard.
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77–81.
The rapid strokes that fill in the details of this intaglio show that Dante is fully capable of producing the scene in pictures. But in the following dozen verses, pushing the limits of the art he attributes to God, but which he has invented, he reports only the “visible speech” wrought by what he saw, that is, the words induced by the carving rather than the carving itself.
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82–93.
The exchange between the widow and Trajan, a sort of polite
tenzone
, involves six speeches. The widow seeks, Trajan denies; she seeks again and is again denied; she appeals to Trajan’s moral character and he accedes, touched in those two treasured Roman inner qualities, respect for
iustitia
and
pietas
.
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94–96.
What is new to Dante is not so to God (but this does not reduce the novelty or the excitement of it for Dante [see verse 104] or for us).
For the program in the intaglios see Austin (Aust.1932.2); for ekphrasis in this canto see Heffernan (Heff.1993.1).
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97–99.
These images of humility reflect the pattern that we will find on each terrace: first
exempla
of the virtue that directly opposes the vice repented (here humility and pride), ultimately
exempla
of the vice itself (see
Purg
. XII.25–63). Thus the penitents are at first encouraged and finally warned lest they backslide.
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100–102.
Dante’s delectation has delayed the travelers long enough so that even this slow-moving band of penitents, coming along behind them, can become visible to Virgil (but not to the art-absorbed Dante), even though the path was totally bare when the two poets arrived on it (vv. 25–26). It is a curious fact of this art-filled canto that, of the two poets, Virgil has clearly the shorter attention span to give to art. He feels he has to urge Dante to take his eyes off Gabriel and Mary (verse 46) in order to examine David, and now interrupts Dante’s delectation in the images of Trajan and the widow in order to get him to look at
real
souls. (He is obviously himself not nearly so absorbed by God’s art.) It is a bit difficult to know what to make of these moments. Virgil resembles the less art-responsive member of a couple in a museum, waiting for his friend, totally absorbed, to finish looking so that their tour may continue. Further, the word used to describe Virgil’s distracting locution is
mormorava
(murmured). Dante uses it seven other times in the poem, and it usually denotes some form of less-than-clear speech, uttered in this way because the speaker is in pain or distracted (in the only preceding occurrence,
Inf
. XXVI.86, it is the riven, speaking flame of Ulysses that murmurs). For Dante to put together the very word that for him most stands for eloquence,
poeta
, with “murmured” is striking. No one has, with the exception of Vickers, paid attention to the curious and disturbing notion that Virgil, of all people, should murmur. Here is her formulation, in partial response to that word: “The placing of Virgil face to face with divine assurance of the salvation of Trajan, a man of no more faith than he, cannot but emphasize the enigma of Virgil’s situation” (Vick.1983.1, p. 72). She goes on to speculate that the salvation of Trajan by intervention of Gregory inevitably brings to mind another great medieval legend, that of St. Paul praying for the soul of Virgil at his tomb near Naples, a potential intervention on behalf of damned Virgil that, as far as everyone who has dealt with it is concerned, was obviously not successful.
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103–105.
Vickers (Vick.1983.1), pp. 80–81, discusses Benvenuto’s connecting the historiated walls of Carthage, with their account of the fall of Troy in
Aeneid
I.453–495, and this scene, and then goes on to suggest that “Aeneas is rapt in the esthetic experience and weeps; Dante the pilgrim is rapt and delights. The one reads defeat (emptiness); the other triumphs (fullness).”
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106–111.
Dante’s third address to us, his readers, is an appeal that we accept the necessity of treatment for our ills before we are eventually free of them. Since the “punishments” of the saved do not seem, at first blush, all that much more pleasant than the pains of the damned, the poet wishes to emphasize the great gulf that separates them: those in hell are eternal; these here are time-bound and will cease at least by the Day of Judgment.
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112–120.
This passage has caused much discussion but is in fact not as difficult as it has been made to seem. The purpose of the entire passage is to get Dante to understand that what he is looking at is human and not merely a procession of mobile rocks. Virgil says he, too, had trouble making this fact out at first, but eventually could see that there were beings moving beneath the rocks. A single gesture makes this clear: they beat their breasts. And it is a gesture that accords with the penitential feelings of the penitent prideful, as Moore (Moor.1896.1), p. 49, clearly pointed out, citing Luke 18:13, where the publican beats his breast in humility.
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121–129.
The poet’s second apostrophe of the canto (see vv. 106–111 for the first) is not, strictly speaking, an address to the reader but rather a castigation of all those Christians (and thus, one would expect,
not
all his readers) who have turned away from God.
One of the most celebrated metaphors of the poem, the “angelic butterfly” that each of us has as a potential destiny, is what most of us will not become.
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128.
While God wills that we, caterpillars that we are, become butterflies, Heaven-bound souls, we choose to be even less than those worms that are capable of that transformation, and have bent our wills to be such. As commentators have shown,
antomata
is Dante’s version of Aristotle’s creatures born, not of other creatures, but of the putrefaction of vegetable matter, as when the sun beats down on the mud—see
De generatione animalium
III.1, as cited by Benvenuto. See also Aristotle’s
Historia animalium
V.19, as cited by Pasquini/Quaglio (1982), where Aristotle distinguishes, as Dante does here, between worms that can turn into butterflies and those, defective, which cannot. The meaning clearly seems to be that we are born worms, but turn ourselves into still lesser beings, formally imperfect worms, as though we had not been bred by creatures with rational souls. Benvenuto concludes by quoting Job (but actually the Psalms: 21:7 [22:6]): “Vermis sum ego et non homo” (I am a worm, not a man—Benvenuto may have conflated that passage with Job 25:6).
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130–135.
In a canto so concerned with art, and highly mimetic art in particular, it seems only natural that the poet would have wanted to conclude with a simile, one of this artisan’s specialties. We may be surprised to realize that this is the first one in this canto, that we have not seen one since well back in the last canto (
Purg
. IX.34–42). A corbel is a sculpted human figure, often crudely realistic, and thus part of the low-mimetic tradition, used to decorate the element that joins a weight-bearing column to the roof- or floor-beam that it supports.
The notion that an artifact can be so “realistic” that, although it is not real, but a fiction, as it were, it can cause an observer real distress, continues the mimetic concern so evident in this canto and also stands as a sort of emblem of the poem as a whole, with its insistence on its literal truth dizzyingly countered by its less evident but clear admission that it is in fact invented by a poet, if one who will only write fictions that seem (and claim) to be utterly true. For discussion of this passage in this light see Barolini (Baro.1992.1), pp. 125–26.
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