Canto XXI. The poets continue on their way, and are overtaken by a soul who identifies himself as the poet Statius. He explains how he has just completed his purgation on the cornice of avarice, and how this release was accompanied by the shaking of the moutain, and exultant cries from all the souls.

In Newman’s The Dream of Gerontius the soul of Gerontius, after enduring the vision of God, says

`Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.’

In short, his purgation is a matter of his own will. It is by the will, says St Thomas, that man is joined to God, and so the will does not merely accept, but desires that purging of the attachments to sin which is the business of Purgatory. Purgatory is a punishment in a Pickwickian sense, St Thomas writes that `the nature of punishment is to be against the will’ (Summa Theologiae 1.2ae.87.7), while the punishment of Purgatory is something the will desires, because its overriding aim is the union with God, which both achieves and requires detachment from sin.

This is why Statius tells Dante and Virgil that it is the soul’s own will which knows when purgation is complete, until that moment it embraces the punishment which is the means to its final end. Our penance is a practice run for this willed and embraced detachment from sin and return to our origin in God, a fitting reflection to begin the last two weeks of Lent, traditionally the beginning of Passiontide.


Dante and Virgil converse with the soul of Statius.

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/jpegs/holkham/misc/48/1000/04800476.jpg