Dante the pilgrim has to move on . . . because Pope Adrian V told him to. The pilgrim and Virgil pick their way among the crowds of penitents on the terrace of avarice. There are so many that the poet has to step out with a prophetic curse and a plea for a redeemer.
Read MorePope Adrian V ends his discourse in a strange way: seemingly piqued at the pilgrim Dante before he sounds a note of loneliness, even alienation. Perhaps this loneliness is what avarice does to a soul. Or perhaps it’s what exile has done to Dante.
Read MorePope Adrian V answers the pilgrim Dante’s second question: What is going on here on the fifth terrace of Purgatory? In so doing, the pope offers one of the most misunderstood lines of PURGATORIO and also ties the punishment here back to the subject of falconry.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim gets Virgil’s okay to address one of the penitents on the fifth circle of Mount Purgatory. The pilgrim then finds himself standing over Pope Adrian V, the first pope we meet in PURGATORIO. Or at least it’s Adrian V as far as the Dante the poet is concerned . . . but maybe not as far as history is concerned.
Read MoreDante and Virgil now walk along the fifth terrace of Mount Purgatory, seeing penitent souls who are face down, stuck to the earth, unable to turn over. Virgil wants to get on up to the next terrace but Dante the pilgrim wants to stop and talk to one of these penitents.
Read MoreThe pilgrim may be on his way to the fifth terrace of Purgatory, but he’s still burdened by his dream of the seductive woman and the holy, speedy lady. Virgil comes to the rescue once again—this time with a reinterpretation of that dream (which leaves us a lot of questions!) and a command to look up at the heavens as the ultimate lure of desire.
Read MoreAwakened by the foul smell in his second Purgatorial dream, Dante the pilgrim finds himself out of tune with his surroundings: a bright new day, the sun at his back, and an angel who fans him on to the fifth terrace ahead. Most curious of all, those who mourn are promised “ladies of consolation,” which the pilgrim doesn’t seem to fully recognize.
Read MoreA comparison of the first two dreams of PURGATORIO. What can they tell us about the changing nature of PURGATORIO? What can they show us about the changing character of the pilgrim? And how can they help us understand the new landscapes of PURGATORIO ahead of us?
Read MoreDante’s dream continues with the ugly woman turned beautiful . . . and then into a siren. She sings a song about Ulysses (a song that gets his story wrong but brings him back into COMEDY) before a holy speedy lady descends to request Virgil’s aid in (once again) saving Dante the pilgrim.
Read MoreOur pilgrim Dante falls asleep on the fourth terrace of Mount Purgatory, just as he’s been passed by the racing slothful. The night air is chilly and his dream is chillier: a deformed woman made beautiful by our pilgrim’s act of observing her.
Read MoreThe fifth terrace of Purgatory: a read-through of PURGATORIO, Cantos XIX, XX, and XXI. The terrace of the avaricious, which includes a late-to-repent pope, one of the founders of the French monarchy, and the Roman poet Statius who is so enamored with Virgil that he almost makes a grave mistake in the middle of Purgatory.
Read MoreAs the zealous slothful run on, two more come in the rear, biting the penitents with warnings about sloth. After they’re gone, the pilgrim can finally get some rest. He has a new thought—curiously undefined—which leads him into his second dream in PURGATORIO.
Read MoreAt last, the slothful penitents arrive . . . in a frenzied rush. The horde passes by the pilgrim and Virgil as one soul calls out his story. It speaks a brave truth about the family of a very powerful warlord . . . in fact, the very warlord who has hosted and guarded Dante on the run for years.
Read MoreVirgil has finished his reasoned discourses on love. The pilgrim and he still stand at the cusp of the fourth terrace of Purgatory. Night is coming on and the pilgrim is losing the will to climb on. But don’t go to sleep just yet. You may get run over by the Bacchic frenzy of the slothful.
Read MoreVirgil offers a third discourse on love to show his work and to get close to an understanding of ethics. In doing so, he reaches into Aristotle’s logic of causality and attempts to come to terms with why humans behave they do. But even as he reaches back, he looks forward to our modern understanding of ethics.
Read MoreVirgil has finished his second discourse on love, showing the syllogistic work behind his first discourse. But Virgil must not be too good at rhetoric, because the pilgrim Dante has yet more questions, including one that is fundamental to any religious thinking.
Read MoreAfter the pilgrim’s request that Virgil show his work, the old poet condenses and recasts the basis of thinking in Western culture from its roots in Aristotle. But Virgil’s claims run into specific problems, which Dante the poet tries to solve in the way he knows best: with metaphor.
Read MoreVirgil seems to have reached a conclusion to his discourse on love in PURGATORIO, Canto XVII. But not for the pilgrim. And maybe not for Dante the poet. As Canto XVIII opens, we find the pilgrim asking Virgil to show his work to explain his seemingly air-tight syllogisms about human ethics.
Read MoreA (sort of?) short summary of PURGATORIO, Cantos I through XVII. To see the imaginative sweep. To remember where we’ve been. And to set us up for the questions ahead, both in the remainder of PURGATORIO and indeed on into PARADISO.
Read MoreVirgil concludes his central discourse on love—the center of both PURGATORIO and indeed COMEDY as a whole—on a strangely ambiguous note. After so much certainty about how humans act and why the afterlife is set up as it is, he ends by saying, “I just don’t know”—a wildly discordant note amid so much “truth.”
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