Purgatorio (120 page)

121–126.
   The voice reminds the travelers (and the penitents, we assume) first of the “Centaurs, mythical race, half horses and half men, said to have been offspring of Ixion, King of the Lapithae, and a cloud in the shape of Hera [Juno]”
(T
). The Centaurs fought against the Lapiths and Theseus at the wedding feast for Pirithoüs (the friend of Theseus and their half brother) and his bride Hippodamia. The Centaurs attempt to rape the bride and bridesmaids but are prevented by Theseus and others. The final three hundred lines of the scene, which served as Dante’s source, in Ovid (
Metam
. XII.210–535) represent a kind of tumultuous and comic redoing of the battle scenes in the
Iliad
(and in the
Aeneid
), with plenty of body parts and blood.

For the double nature of the Centaurs (beast and man at once), see
Inferno
XII.84.

The Hebrews selected by Gideon to make war upon the Midianites were those who lifted water to their mouths in their cupped hands, as opposed to those who cast themselves down to a stream to drink directly with their mouths (see Judges 7:2–8). The ones remembered here are not the 300 whom he chose to fight, but the 9,700 who were sent back to their tents. These were “slack” in that they gave in totally to their desire to drink, while the 300 displayed a more controlled demeanor, more fitting to those who would require composure even in the heat of battle.
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133–134.
   This voice, we shortly come to understand, comes from the Angel of Temperance.
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137–138.
   Singleton (1973) points out that the description of this angel is indebted to John’s Revelation (Apocalypse 1:9–20). The passage, prologue to John’s vision, tells how the apostle was ordered to write it by Jesus, a scene described in terms that at times closely resemble these.
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145–150.
   The last of the similes in a canto rich with them compares the waft of air from the angel’s wing felt by Dante on his brow to the sweet-smelling breeze of May. Tommaseo (1837) suggested a source in Virgil’s fourth
Georgic
(IV.415): “Haec ait et liquidum ambrosiae diffundit odorem” (She spoke, giving off the flowing fragrance of ambrosia). Cyrene is encouraging her despondent son, Aristaeus, to learn his fate from Proteus.
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151–154.
   Dante now “finishes” the Beatitude (Matthew 5:6) begun in
Purgatorio
XXII. 4–6, “Beati qui esuriunt et sitiunt iustitiam, quoniam ipsi saturabuntur” (Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied). In the first context, applying to those who “thirst” for riches, only
sitiunt
was heard, while here we have the echo only of the word for hunger,
esuriunt
.
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1–3.
   The constellations Taurus and Scorpio are 180 degrees apart. The sun at the antipodes has now moved roughly two hours, from shining down from in front of the constellation Capricorn, then Sagittarius, and now Taurus, or from noon to two o’clock (as, half the world away, in Jerusalem it is two in the morning). Since the travelers had entered this terrace at roughly ten in the morning (
Purg
. XXII.115–120), it results that they have spent roughly four hours among the penitents of Gluttony and will spend approximately the same amount of time from now until they leave the penitents of Lust (see
Purg
. XXVII.65–66), the first two hours traversing the distance between the two terraces (see
Purg
. XXVI.4–6).
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4–9.
   The simile stresses the renewed urgency of the climb, with the three poets, led by Virgil, mounting in single file. Statius is, as will eventually be made plain, in the middle position (see
Purg
. XXVII.48), from which he will shortly respond at length to Dante’s question about the aerial body.
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17–18.
   Virgil’s metaphor has Dante drawing the bowstring of his question so hard and far that the iron tip of his arrow is touching the shaft of his bow. These are the first words spoken by Virgil since
Purgatorio
XXIII.15 (see the note to
Purg
. XXIV.1–3).
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20–21.
   Dante’s question, which has been in the back of his mind since
Purgatorio
XXIII.37–39, addresses the apparent incongruity of the fact that the souls of the penitents of Gluttony seem to grow thin from not ingesting food. Such a phenomenon, he has wrongly assumed, should be associated only with the experience of starvation in a mortal body.
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22–24.
   The reference is to Ovid’s near-epic narrative of the hunt for the Calydonian boar with its unhappy outcome for Meleager (
Metam
. VIII.260–546). He, son of the king of Calydon and of Althaea, killed this rampaging animal and gave its skin to Atalanta, with whom he was in love. Althaea’s two brothers, Plexippus and Toxeus, take the remains of the beast back from her. Enraged at the insult to his honor, Meleager kills them. Seeing the corpses of her brothers brought into the temple where she was giving thanks for her son’s victory, and learning who had killed them, Althaea is moved to take vengeance, even upon her own son. When he was born, the three Fates had determined that he would live only so long as a firebrand remained unconsumed in a fire into which it had been cast. Hearing this, Althaea snatched the burning log-end from the fire and doused it in water. Now she took up again this piece of wood, which she had preserved, and cast it into a fire, thus causing the death of her own son. Virgil’s point is that if Dante had understood this principle, that there is a vital relationship between what seem unrelated phenomena (e.g., the burning of a log-end and the death of a man), he would have already understood the relationship between body and soul here in purgatory.
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25–27.
   As a second instance of this principle, Virgil offers the example of a person’s movements being reflected in a mirror; once again, to an ignorant observer, the two phenomena might seem to have independent and unrelated causes if the observer did not understand the principle of reflection (e.g., two Marx brothers in sleeping garments facing each other in an open doorway and moving in harmony).
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28–30.
   It is as though Virgil himself understands that his explanations, relying on physical laws, do not explain the deeper principles involved in the fact that these souls respond with physical symptoms to a moral sensation. Dealing with this passage, Pietro di Dante (1340) allegorizes Virgil as “rational philosophy” and Statius, “a Christian poet,” as “moral philosophy.” It might seem more to the point to realize that Statius, as a saved Christian, simply knows by revelation some mysterious things that are not known by others, e.g., all ordinary mortals and all souls who are not saved.
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31–33.
   Statius excuses himself for revealing an essential Christian mystery in the presence of a pagan because of his love for this particular pagan. John of Serravalle (1415) speaks of Virgil’s belief (learned from Plato’s
Timaeus
, according to Benvenuto’s commentary on
Inf
. I. 10–12) that the souls of humans come from the stars and return to them. While we cannot be certain that Dante shared the first part of this view (and see
Par
. IV.22–24 for his denial of the second), the “eternal plan” is at significant variance from Plato, as Statius’s lecture will make plain.
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34–108.
   For a summary of the main points of Statius’s lecture on embryology, see the Outline of this canto, above. For extremely useful notes on Dante’s sources in these verses (37–88), Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroës, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, along with reference to Bruno Nardi’s important contribution to our awareness of Dante’s schooling in such matters, see Singleton’s commentary to them. This “lecture” is put to the task of justifying Dante’s presentation of spiritual beings as still possessing, for the purposes of purgation, their bodily senses even though they have no bodies. Souls in Heaven, we will discover, have no such “aerial bodies,” but are present as pure spirit.
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37–42.
   The “perfect blood” is the end result of a series of four “digestions” within the body: in the stomach, the liver, the heart, the members. Sperm is what remains after the “fourth digestion” of the blood, which informs the various members of the body (e.g., heart, brain).
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48
.  “The perfect place from which it springs” is the heart, from which it flows to become sperm.
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52–54.
   The vegetative soul is the first one formed. Unlike the vegetative soul of things that have no higher nature, ours is only the beginning—our soul has not yet “come to shore,” its “voyage” has only begun. The vegetative soul enables the growth of the physical body. This capacity we share with animate matter (things that grow, e.g., plants, as opposed to inanimate matter, e.g., rocks) and the animals.
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56–57.
   Now, at first resembling the lowest form of animate life, the sea-sponge, the animal soul begins to take life. This second soul is known as the “sensitive soul,” and is the seat of human emotion, a capacity we share with the animals.
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61.
   What Dante has not yet heard (and thus cannot understand) is how this “animal” embryo can and does become a human being, i.e., how it receives its rational soul. The word “fante,” here translated “human,” strictly speaking means “one who speaks.” Thus an “infant”
(in-fans)
is a human who cannot yet speak. Here Dante, through Statius, is speaking precisely, but not technically. He means to indicate that the rational soul, once it is joined to the embryo, only then makes this new creature potentially fully human. And this third capacity of the soul we share with no other mortal beings (angels are nothing but rational soul, having no bodily form). For these three faculties as found in each single human soul, see the note to
Purgatorio
IV.1–15.
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62–66.
   The question of the “possible intellect” was of considerable interest in Dante’s day and was variously addressed, even among “orthodox” Christian thinkers (Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas had major disagreements about it), partly because its most visible champion was Averroës (see
Inf.
IV.144), the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher who had decided that the possible intellect, which is the potential capacity to perceive universal ideas, existed apart from any particular human agent. An eventual result of such a view was to question or deny the immortality of the individual human soul. Dante’s solution was to make the possible intellect coterminous with the rational soul, breathed into the embryo directly by God. It is not surprising that Dante, whose ways are often extremely freewheeling, simply appropriated the term to his own purpose and, in these few lines, makes the possible intellect “orthodox.” See Cesare Vasoli, “intelletto possibile,”
ED
III (1971).
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67–75.
   These three tercets mark the climax of the argument and nearly shimmer with affection as they describe God’s love for his human creatures, consummated in the breathing in of the rational soul, which immediately fuses with the vegetative and sensitive souls to form a single and immortal entity, capable of intellection and of will.
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76–78.
   God’s love for us creates a new entity, an immortal soul, out of the raw material of nature just as the sun creates a new entity, wine, out of the moisture drawn up from the earth by the grapevine (Jacopo della Lana [1324]). The emphasis is on the new entity’s relation to its formative cause: a human being is the residue of God’s spirit interacting with flesh; wine is a distillation of sunlight and matter.
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79–84.
   At the moment of death (for the role of Lachesis and her two sister Fates, see note to
Purg
. XXI.25–30) the lower faculties of the soul are once again in potential (rather than active) state. The higher faculties of the rational soul, on the other hand, are immediately said to be
in atto
(in action, i.e., fully existing), and more vigorously so than when they were inhibited by the lower souls.

There are three constitutive parts of the intellectual (or rational) soul according to St. Augustine,
De Trinitate
X.18, cited by Daniello (1568): “The memory, the intellect, and the will are the components of a single mind.” These seem to be the sources of Dante’s formulation here.
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