The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum

Purgatorio

Canto 1

• Dante emerges from Hell with his guide, Virgil. They approach, guided by four stars, and are faced with the custodian of the Mountain of Purgatory, a solitary island surrounded by sea.
• Dante and his guide are instructed to enter elsewhere, somewhere that will be revealed to them by the sun. They turn back and made their “way across the lonely plain, like one returning to a lost pathway, who, till he finds it, seems to move in vain.”
• They reach a point where “dew contends with sun and, seconded by soft sea-winds, wins out because it won’t evaporate.” Virgil then brushes his hand against the dew and uses his hand to mwash Dante’s face, which reveals “the color that Inferno had concealed.”
• Virgil wraps a rush around Dante, that he plucks from the shore. The moment he plucked the plant, an identical one sprung up in its place.
  • The eternal braid.

Canto 2

• A group is brought to the shores of the Mountain of Purgatory by an angel, its wings pointing to the heavens, travelling so fast that it barely sinks, gliding on water’s surface. The angel is so bright that Dante cannot look at it directly.
• The angel leaves and the group ask Dante and Virgil where to go, and Virgil replies “we are strangers here, just as you are; we came but now, a little while before you, though by another path, so difficult and dense that this ascent seems sport to us.”
• Dante tries to embrace one of the members. “O shade—in all except appearance—empty! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back against my chest.”
  • Like an idea: tangible in appearance and thought, intangible physically.
• “To return again to where I am, I journey thus”
• One shade is an old friend of his, and the shade sings him a song of love. The shades all gather and listen, before they are lambasted by the custodian for lagging. The shades disperse, and Dante describes it as a flock of pigeons dispersing at a greater threat and leaving food behind.
• “They left the song behind, turned toward the slope, like those who go and yet do not know where.”
  • A common theme: following a path but not knowing where it leads.

Canto 3

• “Foolish is he who hopes our intellect can reach the end of that unending road only on Substance in three Persons follows. […] had [humans] been able to see all, there would be no need for Mary to give birth.”
• “For he who best discerns the worth of time is most distressed whenever time is lost.”
• “There is no one so lost that the eternal love cannot return—as long as hope shows something green.”
• A man who had repented prior to his death, Manfred, tells Dante that those who had stubbornly disobeyed divine authority but who had repented must wait along the shores of mount purgatory for thirty times the span they had spent in presumptuousness. They can shorten this time by praying appropriately.
• “Those here—through those beyond—advance more quickly.”

Canto 4

• First spur are those who were late to repent by negligence.
• “When something seen or heard secures the soul in stringent grip, time moves and we do not notice it.”
  • Good: getting lost in a wonderful story or song.
  • Not so good: getting lost in ourselves, in shortsighted passions that cause us to neglect the future.
• “The power that perceives the course of time is not the power that captures all the mind; the former has no force—the latter binds.”
  • Discerning time seems logical…discretizing time into chunks and measuring the series. Whereas consciousness as a whole involves love, which binds those chunks together and makes it immeasurable…infinite continuum.
• The bottom of Mount Purgatorio is most steep, practically vertical. Symbolic of how it’s most difficult to get started on a positive habit after shedding a negative habit. To find their way up to an opening, Dante and Virgil needed the help of a group—starting a positive habit requires communal support.
• To rise this steep beginning, Dante must “fly” with wings and pinions of immense desire, “behind the guide who gave me hope and was my light.”
  • Ascension requires faith. Faith inspirits us, turns climbing into flying.
• “The slope climbs higher than my eyes can follow.”
• “This mountain’s of such sort that climbing it is hardest at the start; but as we rise, the slope grows less unkind. Therefore, when this slope seems to you so gentle that climbing farther seems to you so gentle as travelling downstream by boat, you will be where this pathways ends, and there you can expect to out your weariness to rest.”
• On his way up, Dante rests on spurs. On the first spur, curled in a ball with his head beneath his knees in the shade of a boulder, sits Dante’s friend. His friend laments that he must stay on purgatory for as many days as he had lived before being accepted, “since [he] delayed good sighs until the end.”
• “Always the man in whom thought thrusts ahead of thought allows the goal he’s set to move far off—the force of one thought saps the other’s force.”

Canto 5

• The second spur are the late-repentant who died deaths due to violence.

Canto 6

• “But those who are alive within you now can’t live without their warring—even those whom one same wall and one same moat enclose gnaw at each other. Squalid Italy, search round your shores and then look inland—see if any part of you delight in peace.”
• “See how this beast turns fierce because there are no spurs that would correct it.”
  • In speaking of the degeneration of Italy, despite being offered a worthy saddle by ancestors. Lack of diligence, courage, care, and neglecting wisdom left by predecessors creates an untameable beast.
• Dante questions God at the chaos, baseness, and tyrantry of Italy: “Have You turned elsewhere Your just eyes? Or are You, in Your judgment’s depth, devising a good that we cannot foresee, completely dissevered from our understanding?”
• “You will see yourself like that sick woman who finds no rest upon her feather-bed, but, turning, tossing, tries to ease her pain.”
  • Pains of privilege. Manufactured pain.

Canto 7

• “There [Virgil is] with the infant innocents, those whom the teeth of death had seized before they were set free from human sinfulness; there I am with those souls who were not clothed in the three holy virtues—but who knew and followed after all the other virtues.”
  • It seems wrong to me to see infants as impure and needing of cleansing, and their lack of baptism leading them to reside in hell (although at the most shallow rung)
  • Three holy virtues are faith, hope, and charity.
• The second spur is followed by a valley in which live 13th century rulers. The valley is brimming with floral colour and sweet fragrance. Interesting that the path has been upwards since now, and to see these kings they must travel down into a valley.

Canto 8

• “Oh by way of the sad regions, I came this morning; I am still within the first life—although, by this journeying, I earn the other.”
  • Dante in response to where he’s come from. By journeying through the afterlife (a sort of forecasting that sheds light on how living in a particular way may lead you), he approaches everlasting life.

Canto 9

• “At those hours close to morning when the swallow begins her melancholy songs, perhaps in memory of her ancient sufferings, when, free to wander farther from the flesh and less held fast by cares, our intellect’s envisionings become almost divine.”
  • How we dream just before we wake. REM sleep.
• After encountering the angelic gatekeeper in Canto IX of Purgatorio, the Pilgrim must ascend three steps to finally enter Purgatory.
• Each step is different. The first step is polished white marble. The second step is dark purple and crumbling. And the third step is a vibrant red, like fire or blood.
• Commentators tend to associate the three steps with the three stages of repentance. The polished, mirror-like first step represents self-examination. The black and crumbling second step represents grief and sorrow for sin. And the final, flame-red step represents penance and purgation (confessing one’s sins and the purification that follows)

Canto 10

• They rise from a crack to the First Terrace, where three symbols of humility are shown in marble: Mary, David (from David & Goliath) dancing before the Ark, and Emperor Trajan (who was apparently one of the 5 good emperors of Rome. Apparently he was quite philanthropic and improved social welfare)
• “O Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched, whose intellects are sick and cannot see, who place your confidence in backward steps, do you not know that we are worms and born to form the angelic butterfly that soars, without defenses, to confront His judgment? Why does your mind presume to flight when you are still like the imperfect grub, the worm before it has attained its final form?”
  • The proud think they can fly while still burdened with ego. They must lighten their load first, via humility.
• The penalty for the proud is to bear a boulder on their backs, its weight commensurate to the height of their pride.

Canto 11

• The prideful, bearing their burdens, are forced to look at the ground under their heavy load. They once saw highly of themselves, and are now forced to see lowly of themselves.
• Forced to bow before something larger, for they had not bowed when they had lived.
• “Until God has been satisfied, I bear this burden here among the dead because I did not bear this load among the living.”

Canto 12

• Dante walks by a bunch of effigies symbolic of pride: Satan, some giants, Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, Troy, etc.
• “Remember—today will never know another dawn.”
• “O humankind, born for the upward flight, why are you driven back by wind so slight?”
• “How different were these entryways from those of Hell! For here it is with song one enters; down there, it is with savage lamentations.”
• Dante feels lighter ascending from the first terrace. He has shed his pride. One of the seven P’s have been erased from his forehead (which were inscribed upon him by the angel at Purgatory’s entrance). First of the seven sins, down.
• Virgil says that once the seven P’s (penances for sins) are erased, “your feet will be so mastered by good will that they not only will not feel travail but will delight when they are urged uphill.”

Canto 13

• The Second Terrace, are the envious. They have their eyes sewn shut.
• One of the envious: “I rejoiced far more at others’ hurts than at my own good fortune.”

Canto 14

• “My blood was so afire with envy that, when I had seen a man becoming happy, the lividness was plain to see.”
• “O humankind, why do you set your hearts there where our sharing cannot have a part?”
• Dante happens upon Cain, the epitome of envy and jealousy.

Canto 15

• “For when your longings center on things such that sharing them apportions less to each, then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs. But if the love within the Highest Sphere should turn your longing heavenward, the fear inhabiting your breast would disappear; for there, the more there are who say ‘ours,’ so much the greater is the good possessed by each—so much more love burns in that cloister.”
• Third terrace is the wrathful
• “‘What shall we do to one who’d injure us if one who loves us earns our condemnation?’”
  • If you see what we do to people we love, wait till you see what we do to people we hate
• “I asked [What’s wrong with you?] so that your feet might find more force: so must one urge the indolent, too slow to use their waking time when it returns.”

Canto 16

• The sin of wrath is punished by dark smoke.
• Within the smoke the wrathful sing in unison, “that fullest concord seemed to be among them.” What once sowed discordance (their wrath) is being brought together by love. “As they [sing] they loose the knot of anger.”
• “At first, [the soul] savors trivial goods; these would beguile the soul, and it runs after them, unless there’s guide or rein to rule its love.”
• To protect people from their greed, laws are set in place to curb it, and sage rulers. But those sage rulers are no more, “and thus the people, who can see their guide snatch only that good for which they feel some greed, would feed on that and seek no further.”
  • When good rule is lost and laws are no longer applied, people support rulers that can promise them those trivial goods, that do them harm, for which they greedily desire. Applicable to today’s politicians (the president of the USA is Trump, a businessman, and Musk, the richest man in the world, is increasingly involved in government)—the swinging of politics to prioritize economic gain as the ultimate good.
• Rome had made the world good through two suns, illuminating two paths: the world’s path and God’s. “[The world’s] path has eclipsed the other; now the sword has joined the shepherd’s crook; the two together must of necessity result in evil, because, so joined, one need not fear the other.”
  • The risk of worldly pleasures corrupting government. The sword—representative of worldly economic gain (which was gained via warfare)—and rule combine to form evil.
• Virgil speaks of two types of love: natural and mental. All creatures have natural love, and it is always without error. Mental love, however, may choose an evil object or err through too much or too little vigour.
• “As long as [mental love] is directed towards the First Good and tends toward secondary goods with measure, it cannot be the cause of evil pleasure.”
  • The highest virtues above all. Moderate pursuit of earthly goods.
• “Love is the seed in you of every virtue and of all acts deserving punishment.”
  • Evil is born out of love.
• Virgil talks of perverted love (a sort of ill will toward one’s neighbour) giving rise to pride, envy, and wrath, defective or lax love giving rise to sloth, and hints as worldly love giving rise to avarice, gluttony, and lust.

Canto 18

• “Now you can plainly see how deeply hidden truth is from scrutinists who would insist that every love is, in itself, praiseworthy; and they are led to error by the matter of love, because it may seem—always—good; but not each seal is fine, although the wax is.”
  • Like this metaphor. How it is applied is what matters. The product itself is pure, but if it is applied clumsily or carelessly, what good is it? Like paint and a painting, fibre and clothing, etc.
• Man’s tending toward desire’s primal objects are in us “just as in bees there is the honey making urge, such primal will deserves no praise, and it deserves no blame.”
• “Now, that all other longs may conform to this first will [primal urges], there is in you, inborn, the power that counsels, keeper of the threshold of your assent: this is the principle of which your merit may be judged, for it garners and winnows good and evil longings.”
  • That counsel is conscience, a product of natural selection of a higher degree, in a rung above the individual in the hierarchy. Will I act on behalf of the good of the group?, it asks.
• The slothful are made to run without rest, “driven on, as [Dante] made out, by righteous will as well as by just love.”
• “Quick, quick, lest time be lost through insufficient love; where urge for good is keen, grace finds new green.”

Canto 19

• Dante has a dream of a siren, who approaches him ugly and sickly but, when he sets his eyes on her, becomes beautifully irresistible. Beatrice protects Dante from her, setting her into confusion. Virgil comes and rips off her disguise, exposing her belly which released a wicked stench.
  • Symbolic of the allure of earthly goods…attractive, yet they decay, unlike everlasting lofty goods.
• The avaricious are tied to the ground face down, and chant “my soul clings to the ground.” Represents how attachment to earthly goods hinders our ability to look to something higher.
• “As avarice annulled in us the love of any other good, and thus we lost our chance for righteous works, so justice here fetters our hands and feet and holds us captive.”

Canto 20

• “I was the root of the obnoxious plant that overshadows all the Christian lands, so that fine fruit can rarely rise from them.”
  • Lovely metaphor for greed. The large plant that towers above the rest and hoards all the light. How may new plants grow if that tree allows no light to pass?
• The mountain trembles and Dante doesn’t understand why. Virgil assures him to not “be afraid, as long as I’m your guide.” Dante doesn’t figure out what caused it. Perhaps a lesson on “bad shit happens, but have faith in me and things will work out. You won’t always understand why the bad shit happens, you’re only mortal after all.”

Canto 21

• “For tears and smiles are both so faithful to the feelings that have prompted them that true feeling escapes the will that would subdue.”
  • Tears and (authentic) smiles are honest signals

Canto 22

• “Love that is kindled by virtue, will, in another, find reply, as long as that love’s flame appears without.”

• Love flourishes when service is done for others, done for the without

• Virgil talks of the first circle of hell from which he resides, referring to it as a “blind prison.” Reminiscent of Plato’s cave.

Canto 23

• The gluttonous are the sixth terrace. They are eternally famished and thirsty, and must pass by a tree that sprays water they cannot drink and puffs perfumes of sweet fruit they cannot eat.

Canto 24

• “Ladies who have intelligence of love.”
• “Blessed are those whom grave illumines so, that, in their breasts, the love of taste does not awake too much desire—whose hungering is always in just measure.”

Canto 25

• “Potentially, [the soul] bears with it the human and divine; but with the human powers mute, the rest—intelligence and memory and will—are more acute in action than they were.”

Canto 26

• “As ants, in their dark company, will touch their muzzles, each to each, perhaps to seek news of their fortunes and their journeyings.”
• The lustful’s punishment is being blasted by fire for purification

Canto 27

• Dante dreams about Leah (Jacob’s first wife) and her sister Rachel. Leah represents the active life on earth, where one must work to adorn itself with virtue, and Rachel the contemplative life, the study of heavenly truths that allow one to see God’s beauty.
• Virgil to Dante, upon nearing paradise: “My son, you’ve seen the temporary fire [purgatory] and the eternal fire [hell]; you have reach the place past which my powers cannot see. I’ve brought you here through intellect and art; from now on, let your pleasure be your guide; you’re past the steep and past the narrow paths.”
  • Intellect and art can only go so far…faith reaches beyond.

Canto 28

• Dante reaches earthly paradise, the divine forest. Interesting how he began in a forest, lost, and now he walks through a forest, guided by Good.
• “Man’s fault made him exchange frank laughter and sweet sport for lamentation and for anxiousness.”
  • Near term desire over long term pleasure.
• There is an eternal stream that splits in two. Drinking from one cleanses one’s memory of sin, the other restores memories of virtue.

Canto 29

• In reference to a description he couldn’t elaborate on: “since I must spend elsewhere, I can’t be lavish here.”

Canto 30

• “But where the soul has finer vigor, there precisely—when untitled or badly seeded—will that terrain grow wilder and more noxious.”
• “He turned his footsteps toward an untrue path; he followed counterfeits of goodness, which will never pay in full what they have promised.”
• “He fell so far there were no other means to lead him to salvation, except this: to let him see the people who were lost.”
  • The purpose of this journey made explicit.

Canto 31

• Four dancing nymphs, symbolizing the four cardinal virtues (wisdom/prudence, courage, justice, temperance) lead Dante, but mention that they will pass him off to the three theological virtues (charity, hope, and faith) to take him further: “we’ll be your guides unto her eyes; but it will be the three beyond, who see more deeply, who’ll help you penetrate her joyous light.”
  • Indicates that charity, hope, and faith are more profound. In some sense, they are. Charity reaches the self outwards in space, to increase one’s sense of kinship. Hope and faith extend one’s concept of self forth in time. One could argue that a true sense of justice encapsulates these three.

Canto 32

• Beatrice asks Dante to watch the chariot as an eagle (symbolizing Rome and their persecution of Christians), a fox (heresies), and a dragon (Islam, who at the time reconquered the holy land) destroyed the chariot.
• Then, the chariot turned into a seven headed beast, three of the heads of which were double horned and three single horned (3 worst sins-pride, envy, wrath, and 4 earthly sins of sloth, greed, glut, and lust)
• A whore and a giant appear, symbolizing the whore of Babylon (sign of the Anti Christ) and her allies (i.e., those rulers that propagate her evil)

Canto 33

• Talks of the forbidden tree of knowledge, and Dante’s inability to understand it signalling his departure from earthly thought that tries to intellectualize it, a proof of his spiritual progress
• “From that most holy wave I now returned to Beatrice; remade, as new trees are renewed when they bring forth new boughs, I was pure and prepared to climb unto the stars.”
  • As at the end of inferno, he is following a metaphorical stream (the holy wave) and climbing towards the stars