The New York Review of Books - USA (2021-12-16)

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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