The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

(EriveltonMoraes) #1
10 The New York Review

will graduate from one terrace to an-
other, and beyond. The sinners in Hell,
by contrast, remain forever without
prospect of release. It is the difference
between the foreclosure of despair and
the expansiveness of hope. We humans
dwell in the openness of time, and
Purgatory is the only realm in Dante’s
Comedy where time matters.
Dante had journeyed through Hell
as an insomniac, experiencing the sort
of nightmarish visions brought on by
prolonged sleep deprivation. In Purga-
tory he and Virgil are under strict or-
ders from the angelic guardians of the
realm to halt their ascent of the moun-
tain toward evening and, at least in
Dante’s case, to sleep at night. On each
of the three nights he spends on Mount
Purgatory, Dante has vivid dreams,
and with each new dawn he wakes up
restored.

Indeed, restoration marks the very
purpose of the purgatorial process.
While Hell figures as a great gash in
the body of Earth, where all the vices
that disfigure the soul and human his-
tory fester, Purgatory is where the
slow, laborious work of healing takes
place. Dante, whose pilgrim arrives
on the realm’s shores on Easter morn-
ing, calls it the soul’s rebeautification
(“Creature who cleanse yourself/to
go back beautiful to your Creator,”
he addresses a penitent in Purgatorio
16). The penitential ordeals of Dante’s
Purgatory—many of them as harsh as
the punishments in Hell—are intended
to restore the prelapsarian probity of
human nature and prepare the way
for a return to Eden, which Dante lo-
cates at the mountain’s summit. Dante
himself will enter Eden at the end of
his journey through the second realm,
and so will all the other penitents after
completing their purgation. From that
garden of recovered innocence they
too, like Dante’s pilgrim, will ascend
into heaven.
The transition from Hell to Purgatory
marks a shift from the psychic depths
probed by Dante’s Inferno to the reme-
dial ethics represented in his Purgato-
rio. Nothing—not even Shakespeare’s
soliloquies—can compete with the de-
vious, self- serving, and self- deceptive
psychology of the speeches Dante de-
vises for his sinners in Inferno. Black
offers a psychoanalytic interpretation
of Purgatorio in the commentary to
his translation, yet psychoanalysis has
a great deal more to work with in In-

ferno than in Purgatorio. To adopt a
psychoanalytic distinction of my own,
I would say that Dante’s sinners in Hell
“act out” the psychology of their pun-
ishments, while the penitents in Pur-
gatory “work through” the ordeals of
their self- overcoming.
Purgatorio in fact suggests a behav-
ioralist rather than a psychoanalytic
approach to rehabilitation. Dante
shared the medieval Christian notion
that vice entrenches itself in habits, and
like most behavioralists he knew that
nothing is more difficult to alter than
habits or states of mind that have be-
come deeply ingrained over time. In
Dante’s Purgatory the penitents labor
to reform impulses and behaviors that,
over a lifetime, have hardened into
quasi- innate dispositions.
The penitents could not redirect
their behavioral habits and desires in

such a manner, transmuting self- love
into love of the common good, if the
human will was not intrinsically free.
Dante understood the will’s freedom
in a Christian sense: not as freedom
to do as we choose but the choice to
submit or not to submit to the dictates
of divine dispensation. In one of the
most pregnant formulations of the
Comedy, the character Marco Lom-
bardo declares to Dante, “A maggior
forza e a miglior natura/liberi soggia-
cete.” In Black’s version: “To a greater
force and to a better nature /you, al-
though free, are subject.” In Bang’s
more compact, and in some ways more
exact, rendition: “You’re the free sub-
ject of a greater force, /And a better na-
ture.” The “you” here refers to human
beings in general.
Marco Lombardo’s disquisition on
free will, human nature, and the moral
good takes place in the middle can-
ticle’s middle cantos, that is to say at
the very center of The Divine Comedy,
for the main preoccupation of Dante’s
poem revolves around the problem of
misdirected love, as well as human his-
tory’s abysmal failure to take its direc-
tives from the mandates of human and
divine justice. Through the speeches of
Marco Lombardo and Virgil in the po-
em’s central cantos, Dante attributes
wayward love not to the stars or an
inherent depravity of human nature,
but to bad education, lax enforcement
of just laws, and forms of government
that promote rather than restrain
human cupidity. All in all, he had a
sane, sociopolitical, behavior- based

Rachel Owen: Inferno XVI, from Illustrations for Dante’s ‘Inferno’

Estate of Rachel Owen

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