Reading While Protestant

Finding Truth in Dante’s Purgatory

Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash

My first encounter with Dante reminded me of the boat ride down the Wakulla River. Wakulla Springs is a nearby state park and wildlife sanctuary that offers a glimpse of old Florida. The riverboat ride takes boatloads of tourists up and down the river, which was the setting for several older Tarzan movies. While the scenery is breathtaking, the tour consists largely of repeated views of alligators and box turtles. The guide calls out with a cadence throughout the ride, “Al-li-ga-tor on the left! Al-li-ga-tor on the right!” My experience of reading Inferno was similar. It seemed to me an entire book of Virgil, our tour guide, calling, “Tor-men-ted shade on the left! Tor-men-ted shade on the right!”

Purgatory, on the other hand, was breathtaking. I supplemented the dry translation assigned for my course with a reading of Anthony Esolen’s vibrant rendering. I was able to see beyond the tour of torment to a journey of the soul – a straightening will and developing sight. It was both beautiful and true. The trouble then was not in the book itself, but in trying to discuss it with fellow Protestants. There is a seemingly uncontrollable impulse when imaginative literature collides with a Protestant understanding of justification. This impulse is at its peak with Purgatory - an instinct to berate Dante’s doctrine before he can get a word in. That is works righteousness! That is not in the Scriptures! Not only is this intellectually lazy, but it cheats the reader out of the beauty, grace, and truth that Dante depicts.

I do not argue that a doctrine of indulgences for the expiation of sins is no big deal. (It is important to note that Purgatory was not enshrined as a doctrine of the Catholic Church until the Council of Florence in 1439, over a century after Dante; the Purgatory of Dante’s day was not the same Purgatory that led to the Protestant Reformation.)¹ However, Dante’s work is not an argumentation for Purgatory – it is a poem. Faithful reading means reading according to the terms set by the author; the primary way the author chooses the terms is by selecting a genre. The Divine Comedy is imaginative literature, and as such, engages in imaginative world-building. In it, Dante gives us an imaginative vision of what it means to be healed and prepared for heaven.

After losing my father, I was confronted with an impoverished vision of the afterlife. Kind and loving well-wishers offered thoughts of him in a heaven meant to comfort – a sort of eternal group hug of the departed. It seemed cheap and false and gave me no solace. (Not to mention the comical image of my father expected to dole out hugs). Of course, I did not have much to offer myself as an alternative, other than that there should be a wedding feast and it should be good. In God’s providence, some months later I was scheduled to study Dante in graduate school. What I found was not “works righteousness”, but a true and hopeful imaginative vision of what awaits the faithful.

Dante paints a poetic, spatial representation of the afterlife. He was concerned was codifying medieval cosmology, providing a vivid model of the universe in verse. Purgatory, like Inferno and Paradise, is structured in circles or terraces. This is a highly complex medieval cosmology, in which there is a sophisticated interplay between free will and planetary influence, which could alter the states of mind and imagination.² Dante begins his journey on Good Friday, following the path that Christ took in the harrowing of hell. This is a descent to the center of the earth, followed by Purgatory, an ascent up the mountain. After passing through ante-Purgatory, he journeys through seven levels, each representing one of the seven deadly sins. It is a journey to heal first love perverted, then love defective, and finally, love excessive of a secondary good. Through this journey, creatures purify themselves so that they may be beautiful in returning to their Maker.³ To encourage those in the circle of Envy, Dante declares,⁴

                         O people who can rest
Assured to see the light of Heaven someday,
Your desire’s only care and only quest,
May grace soon melt the film of sin away,
That from a conscience finally made clear
May fall the river of your memory

Removing the “film of sin” comes through straightening the will and restoring sight, so that the redeemed may be able to see the beatific vision. “I climb that I may be no longer blind,” says Dante.⁵ The sight that Eve once longed for will be freely given.

Finally, Virgil, his un-baptized guide, can progress no further; he must remain in Purgatory. In his parting speech, Virgil says,

I have brought you here with understanding and with art. Take henceforth your own pleasure for your guide…Free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its pleasure; wherefore I crown and miter you over yourself.⁶

Dante, at last, meets his beloved Beatrice, the guide of reason giving way to the guide of revelation. In a final act of purification, he meets a spring flowing from the will of God descending in two directions. First, he must cross the river Lethe, or Forgetfulness, which will remove all memory of sin. The second river, Eunoe, restores all memory of good deeds; only then can he ascend to paradise. Once he partakes in this final sacrament, Beatrice says, “Know that the vessel which the serpent broke was, and is not.”⁷ He is now ready for heaven, where there is no longer a need for the mediation of sacrament.

Imagine a place and a healing so great, so complete that it would be wrong not to follow pleasure – this is a vision to which I can cling. It is a vision that I would not have if I were shrilly bludgeoning Dante with sola scriptura (a doctrine developed centuries after The Divine Comedy). As Protestants, we would do well to heed the words of the poet Elizabeth Jennings⁸:

Surely an Act of the Imagination
Helps more than one of faith
When a doubt brushes us. We need strong passion
to summon miracles. Life after death,
Bread turning into flesh and blood from wine,
I need to cast around
And find an image for the most divine
Concepts. My mind must move on holy ground

Death, like time, is a mystery. Dante invites us in, giving us images of the divine concepts. These images are true: images of rivers that cleanse, blind that see, and hope that awaits. Doctrinal points apprehended by reason are insufficient for sustaining faith in the mystery of chaos and crisis. A wooden faith simply will not hold. Dante says, “Foolish is he who hopes that our reason may compass the infinite course taken by One Substance in Three Persons.”⁹ And so, ascending through this time-honored work of art, imagination enlivened, we find that concepts are concepts no more; they, at last, have become the reality.

1. Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Scolar Press, 1984) 357.

2. Lewis, C. S. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Harper One), https://www.scribd.com/read/176374661/Studies-in-Medieval-and-Renaissance-Literature#

3. Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy. Purgatory, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 171.

4. Ibid, 141, 143

5. Ibid, 283

6. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton. The Great Books of the Western World, ed. by Mortimer J. Adler et al., vol 19, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990), 81.

7. Ibid, 88

8. “Act of the Imagination” by Elizabeth Jennings

9. The Divine Comedy, Singleton, 47.