A Waking Vision and Three Dreams 1. Dante and Purgatory 2. Purgation, Reason, Imagination 3. Dante’s Dreams

Poem written in exile from Florence, c c Written by one of the earliest poets to attempt to write in Italian, a language hardly recorded before mid C13 Dante had previously written short poems, a work of autobiography about his love for Beatrice (the Vita nuova), a treatise on poetics (the Convivio), and a treatise on the vernacular (the De vulgare eloquentia) As well as being a poet and a deep reader of the Latin classics, especially Virgil and Ovid, he was a political thinker, a philosopher, and an amateur theologian, who had made a careful study of Thomas Aquinas in particular The Divine Comedy brings all this (and much more) together into one poetic synthesis, written in 100 cantos (or “songs”), 34 for Hell, 33 for Purgatory, 33 for Paradise The poem was instantly influential/controversial and has remained so When Italy was unified in the mid C19, Florentine was chosen as the official dialect of the new kingdom because of The Divine Comedy

Sandro Botticelli: A Plan of Dante’s Hell (late C15)

Michelino: Dante’s Purgatory (mid C15)

Two images of “St Patrick’s Purgatory,” with punishments inflicted by demons

Doctrines of purgation – that some souls, after death, need to be purged of their sins before they can go to heaven – go back to the early Christian church. (Note: some modern accounts deny this, but evidence is good) However, initially, purgatory and hell are not easily distinguished as separate places The emergence of purgatory as a distinct location takes place only gradually and may not be complete before the C12, if then (or if ever) In hell, punishment is eternal, and is often represented as appropriate to the dominant sin committed by the damned person In Dante’s Inferno, punishment often effectively is that sin. The sinner is self- damned, having refused to abandon some fundamental misdirection of their self and thus “gone astray” as Dante does in the dark wood, but in a way that can’t be fixed In purgatory, by contrast, punishment is cleansing, setting the soul back on the right path. It is nonetheless still appropriate to the sin Dante’s Purgatorio distinguishes purgatorial from infernal punishments by having the souls encounter a positive example (a lure) and a negative example (a goad), as they suffer their punishments. Purgatory is about teaching These join together to set the soul right, so it can continue on its way

The gate of Purgatory (Purgatorio IX)

Dante’s hell and purgatory are inventive fictions, which nonetheless draw on a great deal of “raw data” Some of that is biblical or classical: the apocalyptic books (Daniel and Revelation), Virgil’s “underworld” But all of it (including these last) is visionary. In a real sense, these two places (much more than Heaven) are “created” by the stream of people who visit them in dreams and visions from the C2 BCE onwards What these people see changes as time goes on, partly as religious doctrine changes (though visionaries also have an impact on religious doctrine), partly because later account build on, but also move away from, earlier ones One famous locus for visions of the otherworld in Dante’s day was St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg in Ireland The Divine Comedy is unique in not claiming to be vision or dream. The narrator “came to himself in a dark wood” and proceeds through hell, purgatory, and paradise, across about a week of waking time In Purgatorio, he even falls asleep, three times, as three nights pass Nonetheless, the poem does partly work within versions of the visionary tradition, including The Romance of the Rose and The Dream of Scipio

Beatrice Sent Virgil to Dante to rescue him in the Inferno Initially she represents the “rose” itself, the object of Dante’s desire Dante has loved Beatrice since he was nine (Vita nova) and continued to do so after her early death His desire for her is what keeps him going through the other world However, when he meets Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, she rebuffs his desire, redirecting it towards heaven At this point, she becomes his new guide, and Virgil disappears When he finally encounters the court of heaven, it is as a rose In the Romance of the Rose, the dreamer plucks the rose. Dante only attains it Virgil “Scipio” figure, who acts as Dante’s guide through the other world, introduces him to some of its denizens, and tells him what he needs to know about the cosmos Virgil discusses many things with Dante in Purgatorio. But his most important instruction concerns the nature of the will, what it is, how it goes wrong, and what sets it straight He gives the two central cantos of the poem, 16-17, to this topic Sin is misdirected desire. Purgatory redirects the will by straightening was was crooked Purgatory also redirects the intellect by replacing error with truth

William Blake: Dante’s Paradiso: The Celestial Rose

Sin and Punishment Pride: heavy stones Envy: eyes sewn shut Wrath: choking smoke Sloth: rapid running Avarice: face down Gluttony: mobile fruit tree Lust: passing through flames Pictured stories of the evil proud and beautiful humble Airy voices praise generosity and express envy Visions of love and envy impressed directly on the mind Shouted stories of laziness and zeal Tales of avarice and generosity Voices in tree shout stories of gluttony and fasting Souls cry out stories of right and wrong love, heterosexual and homosexual Goad and Lure

The pavement of Pride (Purgatorio XII.14 ff.)

The ledge of the envious (Purgatorio XIII.25-66)

The ledge of the wrathful (Purgatorio XVI)

As Virgil takes Dante through purgatory, then, he corrects his errors and so purifies his reason. We are assume that a parallel process takes place with the souls in purgatory, as it does in us as readers experiencing it But the system of purgation we actually see involves the will Punishment is physical and painful (cf Augustine’s Literal commentary on Genesis on how souls without bodies can experience pain) But Dante takes more interest in the role of pictures, stories, and other forms of art in redirecting the will as the soul learns to suffer and to accept its suffering This is because, for Dante, the will is made straight largely through the power of imagination The part of the mind that processes sensory information and experiences visions and dreams is uniquely placed either to corrupt the soul or, as here, to participate in its redemption Thus the sinners in purgatory are entertained with stories as they go and their minds are kept occupied with good and bad examples It also means that both Dante and his reader undergo the same process

Canto 9: The Eagle Canto 18: The Siren Canto 27: Leah and Rachel What kinds of dream are these, in Macrobius’s terms? How does each contribute to the action of the poem? How do they relate (do they relate?) to the poem’s treatment of the imagination as a source of teaching?

The river Lethe; Dante meets Beatrice (Purgatorio XXXI )