Purgatorio (2 page)

L’anonimo fiorentino (1400)

Filippo Villani (1405) (Latin) (
Inferno
I only)

Filippo Villani (1405) (
Inferno
I only)

Giovanni da Serravalle (1416) (Latin)

Guiniforto Barzizza (1440) (
Inferno
only)

Cristoforo Landino (1481) (up to
Inferno
XXI)

Alessandro Vellutello (1544) (up to
Purgatorio
X)

Pier Francesco Giambullari (1538–48) (Italian) (
Inferno
only)

Giovan Battista Gelli (1541–63) (Italian)

Benedetto Varchi (1545) (Italian) (
Paradiso
I & II only)

Trifon Gabriele (1525–41) (Italian)

Pier Francesco Giambullari (1538–48)

Giovan Battista Gelli (1541–63)

Benedetto Varchi (1545) (
Paradiso
I & II only)

Trifon Gabriele (1525–41)

Bernardino Daniello (1547–68)

Torquato Tasso (1555–68) (Italian)

Torquato Tasso (1555–68)

Lodovico Castelvetro (1570)

Pompeo Venturi (1732)

Baldassare Lombardi (1791–92)

Luigi Portirelli (1804–5)

Paolo Costa (1819–21)

Gabriele Rossetti (1826–40) (
Inferno
&
Purgatorio
only)

Niccolò Tommaseo (1837)

Raffaello Andreoli (1856)

Luigi Bennassuti (1864)

Henry W. Longfellow (1867) (English) (up to
Purgatorio
XXXIII)

Gregorio Di Siena (1867) (
Inferno
only)

Brunone Bianchi (1868)

G. A. Scartazzini (1874; but the 2nd ed. of 1900 is used)

Giuseppe Campi (1888)

Gioachino Berthier (1892)

Giacomo Poletto (1894)

Hermann Oelsner (1899) (English)

H. F. Tozer (1901) (English)

John Ruskin (1903) (English; not in fact a “commentary”)

John S. Carroll (1904) (English)

Francesco Torraca (1905)

C. H. Grandgent (1909) (English)

Enrico Mestica (1921)

Casini/Barbi (1921)

Carlo Steiner (1921)

Isidoro Del Lungo (1926)

Scartazzini/Vandelli (1929)

Carlo Grabher (1934)

Ernesto Trucchi (1936)

Dino Provenzal (1938)

Luigi Pietrobono (1946)

Attilio Momigliano (1946)

Manfredi Porena (1946)

Natalino Sapegno (1955)

Daniele Mattalia (1960)

Siro A. Chimenz (1962)

Giovanni Fallani (1965)

Giorgio Padoan (1967) (
Inferno
I–VIII only)

Francesco Mazzoni (1965–85) (Italian) (
Inf.
I-VI;
Purg.
XXX;
Par.
VI)

Giuseppe Giacalone (1968)

Charles S. Singleton (1973) (English)

Bosco/Reggio (1979)

Pasquini/Quaglio (1982)

Robert Hollander (2000–2007) (English)

Nicola Fosca (2003–2006) (Italian) (
Inferno & Purgatorio
complete)

*Not yet available

NB: The text of the
Purgatorio
is that established by Petrocchi,
Dante Alighieri: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata
, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994 [1966–67]), vol. III. (This later edition has five minor changes to the text of this
cantica
, which is thus essentially the same as the earlier text.) All references to other works are keyed to the List of Works Cited found at the back of this volume (e.g., Aust.1933.1), with the exception of references to commentaries contained in the online Dartmouth Dante Project. Informational notes derived from Paget Toynbee’s
Concise Dante Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1914) are followed by the siglum
(T)
. References to the
Enciclopedia dantesca
, 6 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–78) are indicated by the abbreviation
ED
. Commentaries by Robert Hollander are (at times) shorter versions of materials found in both the Princeton and the Dartmouth Dante Projects.

(1)  
History of Purgatory.

It is important that a contemporary reader realize that the word “purgatory,” as it is used in Dante’s poem, while indicating a location in which suffering occurs, is used to denote the place in which every single soul is in progress toward salvation. Thus the current American slang use of the term to indicate an experience of harsh punishment—as though it were hell—is not a useful indicator of what the reader will find in the second part of Dante’s
Comedy
. In that world, to come to purgatory is to arrive at the threshold of heaven, and to arrive there in a state of grace.

The idea of purgation has a far longer history as a concept than as a name for a place. Le Goff
¹
finds the first use of the noun
Purgatorium
in a sermon of Petrus Comestor written between 1170 and 1180. Several biblical texts, however, combine to make two notions central: II Maccabees 12:39–45 suggests the efficacy of prayer for the dead, while Matthew (5:25–26, as well as 12:31–32) and Paul (I Corinthians 3:10–17) present at least a general sense of expiation postmortem.
²
In Paul’s words (3:13), “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” Thus the purgatorial refining fire lay ready for later Christian thinkers as a way of conceptualizing the salvation of souls after the death of the body. This process bridges the time between death and the Last Judgment, a period that essentially remains a lacuna in the Bible itself. By Dante’s time, theologians who attempted to deal with the lack of definition of the precise nature of “particular judgment,” that is God’s judgment of the individual soul upon the death of the body, realized that they needed to establish the nature of the divine decision that separated sinners from the saved immediately after death, since the Bible only posits the final judgment as described in the Book of Revelation. And once posthumous expiation and the prayers of the living became the crucial facts that clarify, for believers, both their own hopes and their responsibility with regard to their loved ones, it was almost inevitable that someone should invent a physical place in which this expiation of the souls of the dead might occur.

Adding to the store of images for the development of a place to be known as “purgatory” are a series of visions of the otherworld, studied by such scholars as Rajna,
³
Le Goff, and Morgan.
⁴
Le Goff demonstrates the lateness of the development of purgatory as a distinct place, beginning perhaps with Petrus Comestor and St. Bernard ca. 1170–80,
⁵
and underlines the major role of Dante in establishing the later sense of the place and of its function.
⁶
Cherchi
⁷
has shown that, among these writers, Gervase of Tillbury in particular presented a separate world of purgation that had a number of salient points in common with Dante’s and which may have in fact suggested themselves to the poet, either because Dante knew his work (
Otia imperialia
, ca. 1210) or was acquainted with its tradition through other sources.

It is fair to say that by the thirteenth century Christian thinkers were ready to accept the idea that heaven and hell were not the only otherworldly kingdoms. Le Goff reminds us that, in a sermon in the early thirteenth century, no less a personage of the Church than Pope Innocent III referred to the realm of purgatory and that the Council of Lyons in 1274 called on Christians to believe in its existence. Such understandings surely lie behind Dante’s: “Now I shall sing the second kingdom, / there where the soul of man is cleansed, / made worthy to ascend to heaven” (
Purg
. I.4–6). Dante’s “second realm” thus accorded with the emerging general sense of exactly how the soul may increase its worthiness between death and the Last Judgment. (While Catholic doctrine allows that those who never actively sinned will bypass purgatory for direct access to paradise, Dante does not deal directly with this question; nonetheless, it seems likely that he shared this view.) We should recognize Dante’s originality in setting the mount of purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem, the unique landmass in the southern hemisphere and the site of the birth of humankind. We should also be aware of his involvement in a search common to all Christians for an understanding of the nature of the soul’s life between death and Judgment. Whether or not he may have been prompted, as D’Ovidio believed, by a passage in the
Aeneid
(VI.567–569), in which Rhadamanthus exacts confession of crimes from anyone who has delayed atonement until the final hours of life,
⁸
it seems clear that Dante is essentially responding to Christian formulations of the soul’s pre-eternal afterlife. What is perhaps most surprising is that this lone poet’s imagination of what this place must look like and how it functions simply became the standard source of information about purgation for many who thought of it after. Purgatory has many creators; its definitive shape, as most ordinary Christians eventually came to think of it, is essentially Dantean.

(2)  
Ante-purgatory.

Dante’s second
cantica
(we will learn that name for each of the three parts of the work only at
Purg
. XXXIII.140, a few lines before the second canticle’s conclusion) is divided into three large pieces: ante-purgatory (Cantos I–IX), purgatory proper (Cantos X–XXVII), and the earthly paradise (Cantos XXVIII–XXXIII). If the second of these has a tradition that predates Dante, the first is essentially his own creation.

In Dante’s hands, the process of purgation presupposes the notion that some souls may have come farther along on the road to final penance than others, as we learn almost immediately from a comparison of the first two souls we meet who are involved in active purgation, Omberto Aldobrandesco and Oderisi d’Agobbio. It may seem surprising that Oderisi is less afflicted by Pride than Omberto,
⁹
even though he had died some forty years after him and thus had not been purging his pride as long as his companion. However, ante-purgatory itself is based upon a similar conception, one that may have been unique to Dante. While all the saved are, in some real sense, equally exalted (none of them wants more of heavenly bliss than he or she experiences, as we are told by Piccarda Donati),
¹⁰
their souls are in highly varied states of purification as they enter the afterworld. Indeed, some of them are not yet ready even to begin the process of repentance. And thus Dante has, as far as we can tell, invented this place of “prepurgation.” His decision to do so reflects the notion that some saved sinners were less fully worthy than others and had to spend time on the lower slope of the mountain in order to make up for either of two conditions that impeded their freeing themselves from sin. The first of these groups gathers together the excommunicate, who must spend thirtyfold the amount of time that they were excommunicated in punishment for the insubordination that brought about their severance from the Church. Dante, however, gives back with the other hand what he has taken away with the first. We cannot imagine that many prelates would have acceded to the idea that anyone who had died under the ban of excommunication could possibly be saved. And that the first saved soul we meet after Cato of Utica (whose salvation remains a shock to readers even to this day) is that of the excommunicated, lecherous, murderous Manfred reminds us that Dante is not one readily to be swayed by ecclesiastical (or any other) authority. And Manfred is not here alone, but as the leader of a flock of other excommunicated souls, and the Christian image of a flock of sheep (
Purg
. III.79–87) that presents Manfred and his fellows itself stands as a reproof of the certainty of certain churchmen—including popes—in the justness of their judgments. Further, we learn from Manfred himself (at
Purg
. III.140–145) a crucial law of all of purgatory, that prayer from those still alive and in God’s grace may reduce a soul’s time in purgatory. The efficacy of prayer is thus another potential gift bestowed upon reformed sinners.

The second group in ante-purgatory includes all those who were saved despite the belatedness of their repentance. Their period of purgation is thirty times less onerous than that of the excommunicate, a single unit of time for each that they were behindhand on earth, moment for moment, year for year. These souls are themselves divided into three categories: those who were sluggish in their devotion to God; those who died unabsolved; and those who—and the largest group here involves negligent rulers—loved the world too much. Once again Dante is essentially relying on his own authority in the creation of this zone for his poem. And, as though the creation of ante-purgatory were not invention enough, Dante has added another area to purgatory, one even less potentially licensed by the Church, a sort of pre-ante-purgatory alluded to in the second canto. From Casella we learn (
Purg
. II.94–105) that there is a “staging area” somewhere near Ostia, the seaport of Rome, where saved souls gather before they are selected, with some having to wait their turn longer than others, for their journey through the Gates of Hercules across the seas to the huge mountain-island that stands, the highest point on earth, at the antipodes of Jerusalem.