Canto XXXIII. Dante and Beatrice walk on together. Beatrice prophesies that the wrongs done by secular power to the Church, and corruptions within the Church, will be put to rights. Matilda dips Dante in the River Eunoe, the twin of the Lethe, which restores his recollections of the good. He is now prepared for the third and final part of his journey.

Beatrice is Dante's God-bearing image. She is a figure of the Church, and of theology, and here she starts to instruct him. He struggles, in part because he is still overawed, but also because he is still in need of the full restoration of his memory in the Eunoe. Matilda is a figure of the active life, which prepares and enables us fully to participate in the contemplation of the mysteries of faith revealed through the Church. Even in the Earthly Paradise, Matilda has her role, of preparing and quickening the mind, building in it the facility to understand what the Church has to teach. In many ways, Lent is Matilda's season --- a season of preparation --- in which all our human capacities are prepared to celebrate the central mystery of the faith. In this way our journey up Mount Purgatory with Dante in Lent can prepare us too, to `mount up to the stars'.

Dante and Statius cross the Eunoe.

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Canto XXXI, XXXII. Beatrice continues to accuse Dante, who confesses his guilt. Matilda draws him through the stream, the Lethe, to Beatrice. Here he sleeps, then wakes to see a second pageant, in which the history of the Church is portrayed, and particularly its troubled relations with secular power. This masque takes place by the tree of knowledge, which is withered and dry, until the Griffon ties the cross-bar of the chariot to it, whereupon it bursts into flower, an image of the glory of the Cross and all it accomplished.

Beatrice's words to Dante set out the heart of his doctrine about love as a means to knowledge of God. His love for Beatrice "bore/Thy love along with it to seek the Good/Past which there's nothing to be eager for", yet after her death he was distracted and fell away. Dante expresses contrition, a reminder that this is a gift of the sacrament of confession, and Dante, now in the earthly paradise, has a greater horror of his past misdeeds than he could have had before.


The pageant of the Church in the Holkham MS.

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Cantos XXIX, XXX. Dante walks along the stream, following Matilda who is on the other side. After a while a masque approaches, with figures representing the books of the Old and New Testaments, the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues. A chariot is drawn by a griffin,dappled red and white in symbolism of both parts of the bible, the divine and human natures in Christ, and the bread and wine of the Eucharist. On this chariot is Beatrice. She reproaches Dante, who weeps.

Dorothy Sayers calls this first masque the Pageant of the Sacrament. It has the form of a Corpus Christi pageant, where the host would be carried on the chariot. It represents, in its figures, the Scriptures which point to the incarnation (Old Testament) and attest to it directly (New Testament). The griffin symbolizes this unity of the scripture, the two-fold nature of Christ, and the sacrament through which we can participate in that mystery directly. However, in this case, Beatrice rides in the Chariot. She is Dante’s own God-bearing image, the sign which first pointed him to God. She is also a symbol of the Church, the mystical body of Christ, and so stands in for the Body of Christ in a sacramental procession. In the second of the two Cantos she speaks plainly of how Dante’s natural talents, and the gift he had been given in his first vision of her, have been squandered. He has, by grace, been brought to this place where man is happy, i.e. where fully human flourishing is possible, but must recognize how he has strayed in the past, and repent.

Today, Holy Thursday, we look back to the upper room, and the institution of the Eucharist, when Christ gave us the sacrament of his body and blood. All symbols draw us to this one, which both shows us the presence of Christ, and makes it real. We have been brought, via the slopes of Mount Purgatory, to this pivotal moment between the Old and New Testament stories, and to the verge of the events of Good Friday which change everything.

Canto XXVIII. Dante walks into the earthly paradise, where he meets a lady, Matilda, who is separated from him by a stream. She tells him that the place is the first home of humankind, and singularly blessed. It is kept from irregularities of weather and seasons by its height; and is in a perpetual spring. The soil is full of seeds of plants as yet unknown. Through the forest flow two streams: Lethe (which obliterates memories of sin) and Eunoe (which restores memory of the good).

Matilda is seen gathering flowers, which links her to Leah in Dante’s previous dream. Leah was a type of the active life, and it is suggested that Matilda represents the perfection of earthly life in the earthly paradise. The earthly paradise, Eden, is a place where man enjoyed God’s friendship and ‘original beatitude’, the enjoyment of a life beyond his natural capacities. This was lost through sin, and man was then even unable fully to achieve natural goodness. Dante has returned to Eden, but this is not the end of his journey. Salvation is not simply restoration of a primal state, but rather a journey beyond it to share in the life of God through the vision of the Trinity. This gift is possible through our being joined to Christ, a result of his incarnation, sacrifice and resurrection, in which we now share sacramentally, in anticipation of that final vision. In short, our destination, by mercy and grace, is even more wonderful than the Eden that Dante portrays in this Canto.

George Dunlop Leslie's Matilda

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Canto XXVII. Dante, Statius and Virgil are called by the angel of the cornice to walk through the flames to attain the pass. Dante is terrified, but Virgil urges him on, telling him that Beatrice is on the other side. The angel pronounces the benediction of the pass. Dante’s brow is now clear of all the ‘P’s. With the setting of the sun the poets have to spend the night on the pass, where Dante dreams of Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob and types of the active and reflective life. With dawn the poets press on, and Virgil pronounces Dante now master of his own soul.

Iris Murdoch wrote that `Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ Love of another person can draw us out of self-obsession into an awareness of the reality, the needs and the flourishing of another person. For Dante it does not, or need not, stop there. Love can draw us on to an awareness of the One who created the beloved, and of whose glory the beloved is a reflection. This is why his boyhood encounter with Beatrice in Florence was a pivotal experience, providing the key dramatic mechanism of the Divine Comedy. It is by Beatrice’s intercession that Dante is granted his salutory experience of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, and it is Beatrice, as the figure of theology and the Church, who is to conduct him almost as far as his momentary glimpse of the beatific vision. At this stage we see how Dante’s love for Beatrice enables him to overcome his fear of the fire of the lustful, through which all souls must pass to leave Purgatory and attain the earthly paradise.

Dante’s theology of love is radical and audacious. A young woman of Florence becomes a type of theology, of the Church, of Christ himself; a God-bearing image for Dante in Dorothy Sayers’s expression. This idea is not unique. Perhaps something of it lies behind Chesterton’s words in the dedication to the Ballad of the White Horse:

`Lady, by one light only
We look from Alfred's eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.

Therefore I bring these rhymes to you,
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe,
And laid peace on the sea. ….

And I thought, " I will go with you,
As man with God has gone,
And wander with a wandering star,
The wandering heart of things that are,
The fiery cross of love and war
That like yourself, goes on."

O go you onward ; where you are
Shall honour and laughter be,
Past purple forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home for me.’


The idea was developed by Charles Williams in his Arthurian Poems Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of Summer Stars. For Williams the vision of the beloved can be a `Beatrician moment’ of insight, which can draw us on to God. Consider, for example, the experience of the saracen Palomides, when he sees Isolde theQueen of Cornwall:

`Blessed (I sang) the Cornish queen;
for till to-day no eyes have seen
how curves of golden life define
the straightness of a perfect line,
till the queen's blessed arm became
a rigid bar of golden flame
where well might Archimedes prove
the doctrine of Euclidean love
and draw his demonstrations right
against the unmathematic night
of ignorance and indolence’

For Williams geometry is a figure for knowledge of God, here, as elsewhere in his poem, glimpsed in the form of the beloved.

But Williams is not naïve. His account of love, like Dante’s, is not shallow and vacuous, in the manner of John Lennon and the Beatles. He knows that a gap can emerge between the love of the person and the love of God to which the glory of the beloved can point us. How this is handled is critical. For Palomides there is initial failure and conflict, only eventually redeemed (in his baptism) after he has missed the central quest of the Table, for the Holy Grail. By contrast, for the court poet Taliessin, and his beloved the Lady Dindrane, love leads on to a deeper engagement with the demands of life: for him in his household, the court, and the quest; for her in the cloister and a final quest of her own.

We have seen on the mountain that all movements of the soul towards goods are love, which can go astray. This is why all souls must pass, if only briefly, through the fire of the seventh cornice. At its best the love of another person can be the means by which all our loves can be opened to Divine charity, and so become integrated, and the foundation of our wholeness.

Canto XXVI. On the seventh cornice of Purgatory the lustful are purged, running through fire. Dante meets the shade of Guido Guinicelli, a prominent Italian poet, whose innovative ‘sweet new style’ Dante and others followed. Those guilty of natural and unnatural lusts run in opposite directions, crying out the bridle of their respective lusts, and exchanging embraces as they pass.

It always strikes me as curious that part of the penance of the lustful is exchanging embraces with their fellows as they pass; ‘some penance,’ one might say. Dorothy Sayers’s comment that ‘the image of the sin is also the image and means of the remedy’ seems, at first glance, to miss the mark. Take the avaricious as a contrast. They endure the turning of their attention away from heaven towards the things of earth, as a means of breaking the attachments that their disordered love of wealth created during life. How does running through flames, while exchanging embraces with one’s fellows do the same for lust?

Perhaps the purification of our loves requires, ultimately, that our natural love becomes a sharing in Divine charity. As such that becomes a love for all God’s creatures, a delight in them all. In our earthly life the deepest love is properly reserved to one other. When it is ultimately transformed by Charity it becomes, properly, addressed to all. That purification requires our breaking the attachments of disordered love – obsessiveness, unreason – which hold them in thrall.



The Bodleian’s collection of illustrations from Purgatorio misses this Canto and a number that follow.

Canto XXV. As the poets proceed up the pass to the final cornice Dante asks Virgil how it is that the souls of the gluttonous can appear emaciated when they are not embodied. Virgil asks Statius to explain, and much of the canto is Statius’s discourse, which sets out an Aristotelian account of the human soul. The poets then reach the cornice of the lustful, where the souls run through fire, reciting classical and scriptural examples of chastity.

Statius gives Dante an extended account of the origin of the human soul. This is based on Aristotle’s account of substances (hylomorphism), as Christianized in the writing of St Thomas. It is important to remember that, in Aristotle’s account of form and matter, these are not components of a substance (as gin and tonic are components of a drink), but rather are the substance considered under different aspects: what constrains the substance to be this kind of thing, rather than another (form), and what makes a particular substance this instance, subject to change, rather than another instance of the same thing (matter). The human soul is pure form. It gives the individual human capacity to grow (the vegetative soul) and to respond actively to its environment (the animal soul), but also gives it the rational attributes: memory, mind and will. None of these can be adequately explained in material terms (although they require our bodies for their functioning). The human being is a unity of soul and body, again not as two components but rather a whole considered under two aspects. The souls that Dante meets are ‘shades’, less than fully human in that they are not embodied humanly, but only in a perturbation of the light. ‘My soul is not me’ in St Thomas’s slogan. At the same time, I cannot fully account for the capacity of the rational soul in material terms. This is not an argument for a ‘ghost in the machine.’ Rather it is the recognition that, for example, my sense of the meaning of a word cannot depend on some internal, privately-owned, sensation, if it is to be a shared meaning with others.

Our devotional reading of Dante need not become hung-up on the Aristotelian and medieval account of substance, or its details of embryology. What matters is the recognition that to be human is to be a particular kind of creature with special capacities and potentials, which can be exercised for good or ill. It is the movement of the will, directed by the mind, which develops vice and virtue in the whole person; and we, having come from God our creator, can impede or co-operate with His eternal will which draws us back to Himself.


Statius speaking to Dante

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Canto XXIV. Dante and his companions continue on their way, Dante still speaking with Forese. They find a second tree, where the souls undergoing purgation hear a voice recite the bridle of gluttony. Dante is told that this second tree is a descendant of the tree of knowledge, `the tree that fed that greed of Eve’ in the words of the voice that speaks the bridle. The angel of temperance wipes a further ‘P’ from Dante’s brow, and he, Virgil and Statius continue up the pass.

Dante has relatively little to say about gluttony, as such, and in this Canto a good deal of the talk is about Florence, and poetry. Dante’s poetry on love is foundational to the Divine Comedy, and we shall see more about that in later Cantos. Perhaps he has the liberty to discuss his poetry this close to the top of the mountain precisely because of the importance of his understanding of love to the rest of the narrative, whereas at the bottom (see Canto 2) verse and song was a distraction for the newly-arrived souls, who were chastised by Cato.

Dante meets the Angel of Temperance.


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Canto XXIII. The three poets continue their progress around the cornice, and meet the souls of the gluttonous, who are emaciated. One, Forese Donati, is a friend of Dante, and explains that he has made rapid progress up the mountain because of the prayers of his widow. He prophesies Dante’s problems in Florence, and punishments for that city.

In the Summa Theologiae (1a.2ae.148.1) St Thomas asks whether gluttony really is a sin. Afterall, the drive towards food and drink is a basic human instinct. He concludes that it is, because the root and beginning of the sin is not in the drive itself, but begins when this becomes detached from reason. ‘Gluttony denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire.’ By inordinate desire he means that which ‘ leav[es] the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists: and a thing is said to be a sin through being contrary to virtue.’ From what we have seen before, we might depart from virtuous use of food and drink in various ways. Mostly we tend to eat too much, but I once heard a Dominican friar give the example of someone who, at a surprise party, fails to join in whole-heartedly. This too is a failure in temperance, and is a sin which might be purged amid the gluttonous.

Forese shows Dante the tree of the gluttonous.

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