Purgatorio

[clock ticking] [bell rings] Before we say anything about metamorphosis, we have to bring up another figure in comedy Pia.

Remember her in Purgatorio five? She is that woman who arises very quietly amongst those who did not repent adequately or repented too late and she makes that crazy statement, "Siena made me; Maremma unmade me" at Purgatorio five line one thirty-four.

She is most likely sitting back behind Piccarda as Francesca is sitting behind.

Certainly that line, "Siena made me; Maremma unmade me" is a line of metamorphosis.

You can send me half the proceeds.

Um, but in Dante's Divine Comedy, the 13th canto of Purgatorio.

Now, The Divine Comedy is three books.

The Inferno, which you're most, which you're most familiar with, Purgatorio, and then there's Paradiso.

And so it's, it's hell, purgatory, and heaven.

And in the 13th canto of the second book in Purgatory, the, the, the, the Italian poet, Dante, he describes the punishments of different people for different kinds of sins.

He says, "You hear about so-and-so's house?" And I said, "Yeah.

Yeah, yeah." He says, "He got a lot of money for it." "Yeah." And then he says, then this other friend says to me, "So what's he flying these days? What's he flying these days?" He wanted to know what kind of private jet he had.

[clock ticking] [bell dinging] We've already seen Piccarda in comedy.

She was mentioned by her brother Forese Donati in Purgatorio Cantos twenty-three and twenty-four.

There Dante meets his friend Forese and they have many discussions which we'll talk about in a minute, but they also along the way talk about his sister Piccarda.

Dante wonders where Piccarda is and Forese says, "Ah, she's already gone on to high Olympus." Well, here she is in high Olympus.

You should note that the rhyme scheme here is mirrored from Purgatorio.

Here her name Piccarda at line forty-nine is paired with the word in the rhyme riguarda in line forty-seven and that sequence Piccarda riguarda is reflective of Purgatorio twenty-four, ten and twelve.

Those two lines have the same rhyme sequence when there they are talking about Piccarda.

Forese mentions her beauty back in Purgatorio.

Across Europe, there were even artistic depictions.

Dante's Purgatorio gives us a vivid image of mountains where penitents climb towards paradise while being smoothed by angels, a metaphor for spiritual purification.

Fast forward to the modern era.

The Catholic Church softened its view on purgatory in the twentieth century, focusing less on the physical suffering and more on the intention and readiness to be reconciled with God.

Now this inclination to evil is to be conquered only by a superior force, and the whole problem, both of philosophy and of religion, a problem as old as the world and yet new with each individual, is summed up in the question, Where shall I find this superior force which shall make me inclined to goodness and shall renew the spiritual health which is essential for the right conduct of life? To this question there are still given many different answers.

Dante, in the famous 27th canto of the Purgatorio, says, When underneath us was the stairway all, run o'er, and we were on the highest step.

Vigilius fastened upon me his eyes, and said, By intellect and art I here have brought thee.

By the guidance of reason, then, the traveller has been led to the holy mountain, where at last he hears his guide say, Take thine own pleasure for the guide henceforth.

Now this inclination to evil is to be conquered only by a superior force, and the whole problem, both of philosophy and of religion, a problem as old as the world and yet new with each individual, is summed up in the question, Where shall I find this superior force which shall make me inclined to goodness and shall renew the spiritual health which is essential for the right conduct of life? To this question there are still given many different answers.

Dante, in the famous 27th canto of the Purgatorio, says, When underneath us was the stairway all, run o'er, and we were on the highest step.

Vigilius fastened upon me his eyes, and said, By intellect and art I here have brought thee.

By the guidance of reason, then, the traveller has been led to the holy mountain, where at last he hears his guide say, Take thine own pleasure for the guide henceforth.

They worked well.

And then after a bit, I said, I ended up with 102 podcasts on Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

And I thought, I want a bigger audience.

I'm going to try to publish this.

And if you would like, I'm not going to explain the troubadours on this episode.

If you want to know more about the troubadours, I discuss them at some length in the Ezra Pound episode of The Invisible College and in, I think, more than one of the episodes on Dante in The Invisible College because Dante was hugely influenced by the troubadours in his development of the love poetry in La Vita Nuova and in his actual portrayal of some of the troubadours, particularly in the Purgatorio.

So I would go listen to the Pound and Dante episodes.

I don't have time here to rehearse those medieval poets who arguably invented modern poetry, poetry as we know it today through their influence on figures like Dante and Petrarch.

So here is where the framework gets genuinely interesting instead of just grim, because Dante did something remarkable here.

In his poem, in the Divine Comedy, in Purgatorio, on the terraces where the lustful are purified, Dante included souls associated with the same category of sin as Guido, walking through fire on their way to heaven.

That's in Purgatorio 26.

Same category, different destination.

In Dante's theology, what damned a soul was never the category, it was the dying unrepentant, which means even inside the poem's own logic, Guido's placement tells us not just something about the act of that he did, but something Dante was claiming about the state of Guido's very soul at death.