Dante's Divine Comedy by Thomson Ian;

Author:Thomson, Ian; [Thomson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

8

Purgation

‘And every creature shall be purified’

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Dr Faustus

‘Man, slow down, don’t walk so fast

All you got to do is take your time

We’ll get there

Stay in the road’

CHAMPION JACK DUPREE, Strollin’

At the end of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil climb down Satan’s body and out past his great reeking feet to a tunnel that will conduct them to a purgatorial in-between land and, eventually, to Paradise regained. Dante has seen all there is of human sin by the time he reaches the poem’s purgatorial place of repentance and regeneration. If the dark wood of the Inferno represented the state of sin into which Dante had fallen after Beatrice died, Purgatorio represents the moral perfection that should be aspired to in life.

It is a bright Easter Sunday morning pervaded by a quickened sense of life. The lungs fill with clean air, the grass is green underfoot and the sky shines serene overhead. Dante has left behind the filth and horror of the infernal realm in order to embark on ‘better waters’ (migliori acque). Purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible but it was widely believed in medieval Italy that it was located in Sicily on the summit of Mount Etna, the volcano. Perhaps with this topography in mind, Dante imagines Purgatory as a great conical mountain rising from the sea into the sunshine and up towards God. Purgatory envisaged in this way was a departure from most traditions of the time. Medieval authors located this Tolkien-like Middle Kingdom underground, often inside a deep cave; for Dante, however, Purgatory was a halfway house between Heaven and earth that looked skywards towards grace. The shores of Mount Purgatory on to which the poet and his ‘leader’ Virgil emerge are described in tones of the romantic melancholy that Shelley so admired.

We then came out across a solitary shore

that never saw its waters navigated

by any man who knew how to return.

Dante, standing on the shores of the island of Mount Purgatory, is dazzled by a white light approaching from across the sea:

And, having briefly drawn my eyes away

To ask my leader what this light could be,

I found it now grown greater and more bright.

The light, a spooky evanescence, shimmers like the ‘star-seeped milky flowing mystic sea’ of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’. It emanates from an angel, who is propelling a boat along with its beating wings; in the boat are the souls of the Redeemed. Dante’s gift for invention in Purgatorio is remarkable. From Homer to Rimbaud to J. G. Ballard, one of the functions of great literature has been to invoke believable ‘other worlds’. In his 1962 novel The Drowned World Ballard turned London into a seething jungle swamp; afterwards in The Crystal World he petrified the world into a subtropical crystalline forest. The hallucinated clarity and strangeness of Ballard’s imagery was in its own way Dantean: Purgatorio is distinguished by its imaginative strangeness as Dante writes with the curiosity of a foreigner captivated by everything new. Already at the start of the canticle we are in an other-worldly realm.

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