Purgatory, by Dante Alighieri

After coming through Hell, the poet Dante emerges to see stars and the night sky before making his way to the Isle of Purgatory, which he must pass before reaching Paradise and his lost love Beatrice who will guide him back to Earth. In this second part of his longer work, The Divine Comedy, Dante introduces us to a new vision of Purgatory, different from the one the Catholics preach. In that version of Purgatory, souls are sent to wait out the end of the world when they'll be admitted into the Kingdom of Heaven at the Second Coming. In Dante's Purgatory, souls are sent to purge themselves of their sins before being sent to Heaven.

When Dante arrives, he and Virgil are met by Cato of Utica who tells Virgil he must cleanse Dante's face with dew and gird him with a reed before entering Purgatory. Cato also chastises the pair against loitering when Dante, before boarding the boat that will take them to the Isle, stops to talk with his friend Castella. As they arrive at the foot of the mountain that leads to Purgatory, they meet another soul, Manfredi, King of Naples who implores Dante to tell Manfredi's daughter, Costanza, Queen of Arragon, how her father died.

The whole of Purgatory details Dante and Virgil's ascent of the mountain, and who they meet on their way up. Other souls include Belacqua, a poet from Dante's time who says he must linger there in Purgatory as punishment for having put off his repentance until the last minute. Also on the mountain are 3 souls who, Dante learns, are merely there until there is space for them in Paradise, their repentances having been cut off by their own violent deaths.

Eventually they reach the gates of Purgatory and are admitted and presented with the seven cornices of Purgatory where the souls are who must have their different sins purged.

On the first cornice, they see spirits suffering out their humility by bearing heavy stones on their backs. The second cornice holds those souls guilty of envy. These souls are dressed in sackcloth and their eyes are sewn shut with iron thread. On the third cornice is anger, countered by patience. On the fourth cornice, gloominess and indifference are purged The fifth cornice is for avarice, and the sixth for gluttony. Finally, on the highest cornice they meet those souls charged with incontinence, whose sins are purged in fire.

On each cornice, Dante and Virgil hear spirits detailing historic accounts of people displaying instances of the opposite of each sin. For avarice there is poverty, for gluttony, temperance, and so on.

Finally at the top of the mountain, Virgil allows Dante to make his way to meet Beatrice in Paradise.

The political slant that was so prevalent in Inferno is, thankfully, not so evident in Purgatory. In fact, the only time it ever really came to the forefront was when Virgil met fellow countryman Sordella the Mantuan and Dante raged against the "unnatural divisions with which Italy, and more specifically Florence, was distracted".

Instead of a political manifesto, Purgatory presents the reader with a slew of images and symbols which, if not for the footnotes from the editor of my edition, most of them would have flown right past me. For instance, when Dante dreams of two women, I probably would have missed the point of it being a symbolic dream of Dante considering either the active life or the contemplative. And am I the only one who didn't know the gryphon is a symbol for Christ?

It's no question Purgatory is much more theological than Inferno, even if he was in Hell.

Another difference between the two is a less symbolic one. In Hell, there is no day or night, no pure air and stars that Dante could look up at. However, in Purgatory there are days and nights and time passes. Dante sleeps, he dreams, he sees the sun rise. In Hell, we learn the Devil lives in the middle of a block of ice, while Purgatory has fire. Souls in Hell are condemned to spend eternity suffering there, but in Purgatory, souls can cleanse themselves of those sins and be released into Paradise.

The language is still dry as anything--in fact, aside from reading Purgatory, I did some research on my own and that really helped clear up some of the things that slipped past me with all the "Lo!"s and "thine"s. Still, a work as regarded as this one, a modern translation of it would be nice to find, but for a first read, the work almost demands to be read in its original form (or as original as one can get, considering Dante was Italian and not English). Now, on to Paradise.



My review of Dante's Inferno:
http://www.epinions.com/content_141098389124