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.