This chapter presents Dante’s Purgatorio as a penitential journey guided by Christian ethics towards God. In the first part, I counter a divergent reading, proposed most powerfully in recent scholarship by John A. Scott’s monograph Dante’s Political Purgatory.Footnote ¹ According to Scott, the summit of Dante’s Purgatory represents ‘that very same Earthly Paradise, which for Dante reflected the happiness attainable through Justice and the teachings of philosophy’.Footnote ² I argue that this now-dominant interpretation represents a false turning in Dante scholarship and propose, instead, that Dante represents the ‘beatitudo huius vitae’ delineated in the Monarchia through the limbo of the virtuous pagans in Inferno iv. As a corrective to the dominant ‘political’ reading, in the second part of this chapter, I explore how Dante forged his vision of Purgatory through two areas of distinctively Christian theory and practice that had risen to particular prominence in the thirteenth century: the newly crystallised doctrine of Purgatory and the tradition of the seven capital vices (or deadly sins) in penitential ethics.Footnote ³ In the third part, I argue that the region embodies an explicit reorientation from natural to supernatural ethics, from pagan to Christian exempla, and from this world to the heavenly city. Thus, this chapter presents afresh a ‘theological Purgatory’, a moral pilgrimage guided by distinctively Christian ethics towards the beatitudo vitae aeternae.Footnote ⁴

Two Contenders for the Beatitudo Huius Vitae: The Earthly Paradise in Purgatory and the Limbo of the Virtuous Pagans

According to the dualistic theory articulated in Dante’s Monarchia, man has two ethical journeys in this life: a journey to a secular happiness achievable by following the teachings of the philosophers and the natural virtues (the domain of the Holy Roman Empire and temporal power) and a journey to an eternal beatitude achievable by following the teachings of Divine revelation and the theological virtues (the domain of the Church and spiritual power).Footnote ⁵ Until recently, as documented in Chapter 2, scholars classified the Monarchia as a minor work and considered its dualistic theory to represent a temporary stage in Dante’s intellectual development, to be left behind by the time he wrote his major work, the Commedia. The new philological evidence, dating the Monarchia to Dante’s intellectual maturity when most of the Commedia was already written, has opened up a revision of this dominant critical approach, with its tendency to view the relationship between Dante’s prose works and the Commedia in terms of authorial palinode.Footnote ⁶

At this important interpretative juncture, I believe that Dante criticism has taken a wrong turn. Scholars who have tried to read the Commedia in light of Dante’s dualism have typically equated the secular happiness – the paradisus terrestris delineated in the Monarchia – with the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Mount Purgatory. Thus John A. Scott correctly observes that ‘all too often, Dante’s poem has been regarded exclusively as a spiritual ascent to God, thus ignoring the totality of the poet’s message, which is bent on leading humanity to both its goals, the one set firmly in this world (Virgil/Emperor → Earthly Paradise) and the other providing salvation and eternal beatitude’.Footnote ⁷ However, he then jumps to what is, in my view, the wrong conclusion: ‘the answers, obvious as they are, need to be stated: yes, the Earthly Paradise is indeed to be found there, situated above Purgatory proper, and it is Virgil, the Aristotelianized poet of imperial Rome, who guides Dante there’.Footnote ⁸ On this reading, the summit of Dante’s Purgatory represents not spiritual beatitude but rather secular, Earthly happiness: ‘that very same Earthly Paradise, which for Dante reflected the happiness attainable through Justice and the teachings of philosophy’.Footnote ⁹

As Nicola Fosca points out, a reading which equates the secular goal of Dante’s Monarchia with the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory is held by ‘molti dantisti’ and sustained by the authoritative Bosco-Reggio and Chiavacci Leonardi commentaries. He concludes, not unreasonably, that the Monarchia has had, thus far, a negative influence on interpreters of the Commedia.Footnote ¹⁰ Scott’s own argument draws in particular on the thesis of Charles S. Singleton, an influential earlier twentieth-century proponent of a similar dualistic reading. Like Scott, Singleton argues that Dante-character, on reaching the summit of Mount Purgatory, attains only the ‘rule of reason over the lower parts of the soul, of which Aristotle and Plato spoke’.Footnote ¹¹ Singleton also similarly maps the scheme of the Monarchia onto the Mount of Purgatory: ‘For in the poem is not Eden the first goal, and does Virgil not guide to Eden by the natural light of the philosophers? … is not the celestial paradise the end to which Beatrice leads, as the light of grace and revelation …? So that here too, in respect to the second goal, treatise and poem would seem to agree.’Footnote ¹² Nonetheless Singleton recognises a flaw in such simple mapping: in the poem, unlike in the treatise, the first path is clearly subordinated to the second and leads to Beatrice.Footnote ¹³ Singleton is thereby constrained to present two Edens. In the Earthly Paradise, Leah and Rachel initially represent the active and contemplative aspects of a happiness attainable through natural philosophy (and the guidance of Virgil). They are then transfigured on the arrival of Beatrice: ‘Virgil leads to a justice which the philosophers had discerned and he leads no further. Then beyond the stream, with Beatrice, come the four virtues which are the true perfection of the active life, that is, true justice. A Leah who is a perfected Leah thus comes with Beatrice. And so it must be with contemplation.’Footnote ¹⁴ Awkward interpretative complications thereby appear in what – at first – might seem an ‘obvious’ reading.

Dualistic readings which equate the Earthly Paradise of Purgatory with the secular happiness delineated in the Monarchia have also led to some interpretations entirely at odds with the commentary and critical traditions. Thus Peter Armour’s reinterpretation of the griffin (traditionally identified as a figure for Christ) as the ‘supreme temporal guide of mankind on earth … the Empire alone, the Empire of Rome’ is underpinned by his conviction that the Earthly Paradise in Purgatory depicts ‘the first of mankind’s two God-given goals – that happiness in this life which, as every reader of Dante knows, is not in his opinion in any way within the sphere of competence of the Church’.Footnote ¹⁵ John A. Scott, in similar vein, berates the Enciclopedia Dantesca which ‘still reports that “All the commentators, both ancient and modern, are agreed in recognizing Jesus Christ in the griffin”’.Footnote ¹⁶ But Scott’s motive for a different interpretation is similarly underpinned by his identification of the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory with Dante’s secular goal: ‘It would surely have been strange if, in that very same Earthly Paradise, which for Dante reflected the happiness attainable through Justice and the teachings of philosophy, the poet had placed no signifier of the imperial office and its divinely appointed mission to guide the human race, humana civitas, to the beatitudo huius vitae.’Footnote ¹⁷ For it is not at all strange if the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory is not the ‘very same Earthly Paradise’ depicted in the Monarchia. Far from being obvious, Scott’s dualistic reading requires an interpretation at odds both with the wider medieval context and with the commentary tradition of the Purgatorio.Footnote ¹⁸

As I suggested in Chapter 2, there is another way to read the poem in dualistic terms which does not entail such revision of traditional interpretations of Purgatory. I would argue that Dante’s Commedia is indeed underpinned by his dualistic theory, but that Dante represents man’s secular goal not in the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory but rather in his theologically original Limbo of the virtuous pagans (Inf. iv, 67–151). In the Monarchia, Dante depicts man’s path to his temporal goal as directed by philosophical teachings which are to be put into practice through the moral and intellectual virtues (‘per phylosophica documenta venimus, dummodo illa sequamur secundum virtutes morales et intellectuales operando’; Mon. iii, xv, 8). The early commentators of Inferno iv unanimously interpret the seven walls encircling the noble castle of Dante’s Limbo allegorically to represent philosophical teaching (most commonly the seven liberal arts) by which the rational soul liberates itself from the sensual appetite.Footnote ¹⁹ The seven walls of the Limbo of the virtuous pagans parallel and counter-balance, therefore, the seven terraces of Purgatory. Dante-character then encounters, within a beautiful landscape which directly alludes to Virgil’s Elysian fields, exemplars of the moral and intellectual virtues. The first noble pagan named is Electra, the mythical founder of Troy and the root of the Trojan and Roman race which, for Dante, historically instantiates the true flower of moral virtue.Footnote ²⁰ Amongst the ‘spiriti magni’ of the ‘filosofica famiglia’, Aristotle – the philosopher and the exemplar of human intellectual perfection – holds reign: ‘il maestro di color che sanno’ (Inf. iv, 119–32). Dante thereby represents the happiness of this life (‘beatitudinem scilicet huius vite’) which consists in man’s natural perfection in its active and contemplative aspects, the operation of the moral and intellectual virtues (‘virtutes morales et intellectuales operando’; Mon. iii, xv, 7).Footnote ²¹

In the past, scholars have tended to start from the Commedia and then either, like Nardi, fail to see any trace of the dualism of the Monarchia or, like Scott, project Dante’s dualistic theory of two ethical goals onto the – apparently obvious – two endpoints of Dante-character’s journey: the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory and Paradise itself. By contrast, if we consider Dante-poet – fully committed to a dualistic vision of man’s two ethical goals (as the later dating of the Monarchia confirms) – setting out to write the Commedia, we can easily imagine him confronting a stark paradox: how to represent a secular, this-worldly goal in a poem which depicts an other-worldly afterlife? In this light, Dante’s innovative creation of the region of the virtuous pagans becomes clearly understandable. Regardless of their literal destiny and apparently unjustified deprivation of beatitude (the focus of most scholarly work on this area of Limbo), the virtuous pagans serve, for Dante, an urgent allegorical purpose because they respond precisely to this critical exigency: the virtuous pagan represents secular human flourishing in a poem which literally depicts the afterlife.

Political readings of Purgatory in terms of philosophical principles have been motivated, at least in part, by the attempt to map Dante’s dualistic theory onto the eschatology of the Commedia. Even on their own terms, such dualistic readings – where the secular goal of Dante’s Monarchia is equated with the Earthly Paradise at the summit of Purgatory – seem forced into internal contradictions and to yield some rather peculiar, or at least untraditional, interpretations. This is not the case with my alternative dualistic reading, in which Dante’s Limbo of the virtuous pagans figuratively embodies this-worldly, ethical flourishing (the temporal goal of the Monarchia). My interpretation has two distinct advantages. First, it enables us to read the poem as informed by Dante’s dualistic vision. Particularly in light of the recent philological evidence, the thesis of a radical shift in Dante’s intellectual trajectory away from a dualistic ethical outlook seems unsustainable now. Consequently, we need to account in some way for the doctrine of two ethical goals (so prominent in the Monarchia) in the Commedia. Second, this alternative dualistic interpretation also defends more traditional readings of Purgatory. The interpretation of Dante’s Limbo of the virtuous pagans, at the rim of Hell, as depicting Dante’s this-worldly goal frees Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise from a forced, overly secular interpretation.

Thus far, we have removed one key obstacle to reading Purgatory in terms of Christian ethics: by providing an alternative location (the Limbo of the virtuous pagans) for Dante’s this-worldly goal, I have shown how one can read the poem as informed by Dante’s dualistic theory without reading the ethics of Purgatory as narrowly philosophical. In the second part of this chapter, I provide a re-examination of the immediate context of and inspiration for the genesis of Dante’s Purgatory. In this way, I show how the moral and doctrinal context of the region’s ethics is distinctively Christian and cannot be viewed within the frame of philosophical principles.

The Genesis of Dante’s Purgatory

Le Goff claimed that ‘Dante more than anyone else made Purgatory the intermediate region of the other world’.Footnote ²² An overemphasis on the originality of Dante’s vision of Purgatory, however, may initially obscure its interpretation. After all, if we imagined that Dante invented his depiction of Purgatory in isolation, his structuring of it according to philosophical principles could be understood as consistent with the region’s audacious novelty as a whole. There is, of course, clear evidence of originality. Some argue that, before Dante, the doctrine of Purgatory was relatively new, and, in Jeffrey Schnapp’s words, ‘little more than a theologian’s abstraction’.Footnote ²³ By contrast, Dante gave Purgatory a precise geographical location – in the southern hemisphere at the antipodes of Jerusalem. Moreover, he drew a completely new image of what this eschatological region of Purgatory might be like: not simply a monochrome corporeal fire, but a mountain divided into different regions with different punishments.Footnote ²⁴ However, his work also contains much content which per se is not original at all. If we were to recast the moral framework and much of the doctrinal material of Dante’s Purgatory into another medieval genre – viewing it not as a vision of the afterlife realm of Purgatory, but as a treatise on Christian ethics, a homiletic handbook or an allegorical moral journey set in this life – it would appear much more familiar. That is, there are clearly discernible contexts which Dante uses in constructing the moral and doctrinal content of Purgatory. I shall examine two of these contexts in turn: the newly crystallised doctrine of Purgatory and the well-established resources of the tradition of the seven capital vices in medieval Christian ethics.

Although the Church had given an official stamp to the doctrine of Purgatory only at the Council of Lyon in 1274, the existence of an intermediate realm, between Hell and Paradise, was well established by Dante’s lifetime.Footnote ²⁵ At a practical level, the suffragia mortuorum (‘masses, prayers, alms and pious works by which the living assisted the souls of the dead from purgatorial pains’) were integral to medieval religious life.Footnote ²⁶ At a theoretical level, medieval theologians – citing passages from Scripture stating that sins would be tested, punished, or cancelled by fire on the day of judgement – had put the flesh and blood on the doctrine of Purgatory. Outside vision literature, however, theological description of the region remained distinctively unimaginative, depicting it as a purgatorial fire. Aquinas, for example, gives a clear rationale for Purgatory. Mortal sin turns man away from God as his ultimate end. Through repentance, sinners are ‘brought back to the state of charity, whereby they cleave to God as their last end’ and, freed thereby from the eternal punishment of Hell, they merit ‘eternal life’.Footnote ²⁷ Through venial sin, man does not turn away from his ultimate end but does err with regard to the means leading him to God. Although venial sin may be expiated by the fervent Divine love of particularly holy souls, the general rule is that venial sin, like mortal sin, retains the debt of temporal punishment even after due repentance.Footnote ²⁸ The primary purpose of penance, therefore, is to repay this debt. In addition, penance has a curative purpose: the sinner must be cured from vice and made virtuous and holy. What, then, of a person who dies before being able to complete his or her penance? And what of those – all bar the most exceptional saints – who die before becoming holy and virtuous if, as Aquinas states, ‘no one is admitted to the possession of eternal life unless he is free from all sin and imperfection’?Footnote ²⁹ The afterlife region of Purgatory responds, as a theological necessity, to both these questions: it completes the debt of sin and it cleanses the soul of imperfection. Whereas the intensity of purgatorial punishment corresponds to the debt (the sinner’s guilt), the length corresponds to the soul’s imperfection (the ‘firmness with which sin has taken root in its subject’).Footnote ³⁰ The twofold pain of Purgatory – the delay of the divine vision (poena damni) and the corporeal fire (poena sensus) – is thus spiritually necessary. Furthermore, as with earthly penance, this satisfaction is desired by the souls as their means to restore friendship with God.Footnote ³¹

Dante thus inherited some key doctrinal points about Purgatory but, for its description, he inherited only a generic condition, the corporeal fire. This left him with considerable imaginative freedom to describe and structure his own depiction of Purgatory. Why, then, did he choose the tradition of the seven capital vices? It seems at first glance an odd choice, as we might reasonably expect the seven vices to structure Dante’s Hell. But, as we saw in Chapter 1, Dante does not structure Hell according to the vices: the vices of pride, envy, and sloth are not mentioned explicitly in the Inferno, and the other four vices (lust, gluttony, avarice, and wrath) are categorised, ostensibly in line with Aristotle’s Ethics, as sins of incontinence, occupying just one part of Hell (and only five of thirty-four cantos). A principal reason for Dante’s choice is that the tradition of the seven capital vices had come to play a dominant role in thirteenth-century Christian ethics, homilies, and confessional practices.Footnote ³² In response to the renewed emphasis on confession encouraged by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215–16), preachers found in the theory of the seven capital vices a popular and psychologically productive approach to moral evil.Footnote ³³

The scheme of the seven capital sins is both simple for a beginner and immensely rich in terms of psychological depth and complexity. The focus is not just on sins committed but, crucially, on character traits or tendencies which need to be corrected in the Christian’s moral journey in this life.Footnote ³⁴ It is natural to suppose that many Christians (Dante included) may have structured their own confessions through this morally transformative scheme.Footnote ³⁵ Dante could draw on direct literary precedents such as Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto which, like the Commedia, begins in the wood of sin and closes with the author confessing the seven capital sins in causal order and admonishing his reader to do the same.Footnote ³⁶ Widely diffused treatises on the vices were also available, such as, most significantly (as we shall explore in Chapter 4), that by the Dominican William Peraldus. Moreover, the vices and corresponding sets of virtues were central to the popular Christianity of Dante’s immediate cultural context, as is clear from model sermons of the time or the ethical use of the vices in visual culture.Footnote ³⁷ For example, Alan of Lille’s outline of the appropriate content (faith and morals), audience (public), and material (the use of authorities) in preaching; his emphasis on the use of examples (which make doctrine more familiar and, thereby, more efficacious); and his chapters on each of the vices and corresponding virtues in the overarching context of Christian confession and penitence provide a telling parallel with Dante’s approach in the Purgatorio.Footnote ³⁸

In light of this wider context, we can readily understand why the penitential tradition of the vices appealed to Dante as he envisaged the terraces of Purgatory, but not when he organised the circles of Hell. Penance makes sense of three key doctrinal purposes of Purgatory: (1) it realigns the soul from a disordered pursuit of earthly goods to God as its ultimate end; (2) it repays the debt for sin; and (3) it frees the soul from all vice and imperfection. These purposes are equally true of the Purgatorial afterlife as of Christian penance in this life (for which an extensive literature existed).Footnote ³⁹ Dante, therefore, projects the familiar ethical material on the seven capital vices onto the unfamiliar context of Purgatory. The result is, at a literal level, a vivid depiction of an otherwise uncharted eschatological region – Purgatory – and, at an allegorical level, a representation of Dante’s Christian ethics: the very guidance on an individual’s journey to spiritual salvation which Dante felt the institutional Church of his time, misdirected by its grasp of temporal power, was failing to administer.

From This World to the Heavenly City

The Christian context of penance strongly suggests that Dante’s Purgatory is anything but a philosophically guided journey to a temporal happiness ‘of which Aristotle and Plato spoke’. Nonetheless, the fact that it is Virgil, rather than Beatrice, who guides Dante-character through Purgatory and that it is Virgil who expounds, as in the corresponding episode in Hell (Inf. xi), the moral structure of Purgatory (Purg. xvii) has led many Dante scholars to conclude that the moral doctrine he espouses is therefore philosophical.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such a view had previously been strengthened by the lack of a direct source for Dante’s apparently original organisation of the vices. Despite Siegfried Wenzel’s intervention, which located Virgil’s discourse within the context of penitential Christian ethics, the view persists that the doctrine espoused by Virgil is within the bounds of pagan thought.Footnote ⁴¹ For many reasons, however, such a view is unsustainable.

First, Dante sets the entire discourse on the vices within the overarching context of the relationship of love between the Creator and His creation, between God (‘’l fattore’) and man (‘sua fattura’). As Dante highlights through the voice of Marco Lombardo in the previous canto, each soul is created in simplicity and ignorance and is thereby easily led astray by lesser goods from God (its chief good):

The ethical principle is that each soul, created by God, has an inbuilt desire to return to Him. This principle is epitomised by the opening of Augustine’s Confessions: ‘fecisti nos, Domine, ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te’ [God, you made us for you, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you].Footnote ⁴²

Furthermore, the souls in Purgatory are explicitly directed from the earthly to the heavenly city. Indeed, as Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount counterpoises our earthly life with God’s kingdom (Matthew 22: 36–40), so, on Mount Purgatory, the beatitudes provide spiritual nourishment for the penitent souls and direct them to the eternal happiness in the life to come.Footnote ⁴³ As the philosopher Ralph McInerny, commenting on Dante’s use of the beatitudes, affirms:

McInerny highlights the ‘enormous difference’ between ‘morality or ethics – philosophical or natural accounts of how life should be led’ and ‘Christian revelation’, between the broadly philosophical organisation of Dante’s Inferno and the distinctively Christian ethics of the Purgatorio.Footnote ⁴⁵

This ethical reorientation from the secular to the spiritual is evident from the first two terraces which purge the gravest vices of pride and envy:

The proud pursue excellence not to magnify God like Mary but, rather, to exalt themselves and to put down their neighbour: the ‘superbus’ literally wants to walk above others (‘nam superbire non est aliud, quam super alios velle ire’).Footnote ⁴⁶ The envious are saddened by the excellence of others lest it diminish their own and, instead of desiring good for their neighbour (as Mary desires that there be more wine at the Marriage of Cana), they take pleasure (spite) in their neighbour’s failures and misfortune. In both cases, the end is hatred of one’s neighbour.

Crucially, the root of pride and envy is the competitive pursuit of temporal goods and status. Indeed, Dante links pride and envy by listing four kinds of earthly things – power, favour or fortune, honour, and fame (Purg. xvii, 118) – by which people may measure themselves against others. As such temporal goods are finite, our own pursuit of them implies that our neighbour will have less (which may lead to pride – the desire to put down one’s neighbour), while our neighbour’s pursuit of them implies that we will have less (which may lead to envy – sadness at our neighbour’s good). As Guido del Duca exclaims in the terrace of envy, ‘O gente umana perché poni ’l core / là ’v’ è mestier di consorte divieto?’ [O human race, why do you set your heart where sharing must be forbidden?] (Purg. xiv, 86–87).

By contrast, spiritual goods multiply the more they are shared. Thus truth, goodness, or love do not diminish from being shared but, like a ray of light in a mirror, increase in each person (Purg. xv, 70–72). Freedom from the twin vices of pride and envy is only possible, therefore, when the soul is directed away from the competitive pursuit of secular attainments and instead towards God as its ultimate end. Having witnessed the proud souls punished bent over double by massive boulders, Dante exclaims:

Dante-character encounters Omberto Aldobrandesco, who took pride in the past (his noble ancestors); Provenzan Salvani, who took pride in the present (his political dominance of Siena); and Oderisi, who took pride in the future (his artistic glory). All this pride is short-sighted – the proud are ‘weak in mental vision’ – because beyond the corruptible world in time (subject to past, present, and future) is the eternal perfection of the heavenly city. As Sapia reminds Dante in the terrace of envy, she was only a pilgrim in Italy because everyone is a citizen of the true city: ‘ciascuna è cittadina / d’una vera città’ (Purg. xiii, 94–96). Christians, therefore, must not place their hope in earthly prowess and happiness (their ‘backward steps’).Footnote ⁴⁷ Nothing by which one may puff oneself up in this life will avail the immortal soul (the butterfly), which must leave its corruptible body (the chrysalis) at death and return to its Creator for judgement. Christians, as pilgrims in this life, should thus fix their sight on their immortal destiny and fly to God, rather than remain defective in the pride of the flesh (‘like worms in whom formation is lacking’).Footnote ⁴⁸

The early commentators emphasise that Dante’s invective against the ‘proud Christians’ underscores the fact that the realm of Purgatory (and the Christian pilgrimage of penitence in this life) is explicitly unavailable to pagans.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, this ethical direction would be completely alien from a pagan perspective, as its demands surpass the requirements of the natural law. When it comes to the disordered love of lesser goods (avarice, gluttony, and lust), the souls in Purgatory are not directed to a virtuous mean as in natural ethics, but rather to the supernatural ethical goals of poverty, abstinence, and chastity. Furthermore, their ultimate goal is not intellectual contemplation of the truth (the speculative perfection of Aristotelian ethics), but, through embracing the cross and suffering of Christ, the union of their souls with God in the beatific vision.

Notably, Virgil’s doctrinal speech at the centre of the canticle does not give a specific explanation of the quiddity of the three vices of excess, ostensibly because it is good for Dante-character, combatting sloth, to discover it for himself.Footnote ⁵⁰ This delay also allows Dante-poet, with typically caustic irony, to save the explanation of avarice for Pope Adrian V. A key point of this episode, equally for the institutional Church as for the individual Christian, is that the way to God – the corresponding virtue to avarice – is not the prudent or just distribution of temporal goods (appropriate to the secular sphere of conduct), but rather radical poverty. Poverty, to be spurned according to natural ethics, must be actively desired by those seeking the kingdom of Heaven. Pope Adrian V explains that avarice had extinguished his love for every good: his soul, fixed down on earthly things (‘le cose terrene’), had been unable to taste heavenly things (‘in alto’; Purg. xiv, 115–23). By contrast, St Francis took Lady Poverty as his bride, opening up an ever-increasing divine love: he was, as Dante states in Paradiso, seraphic in love (‘serafico in ardore’; Par. xi, 28–117 (37)).

The overarching Christian ethical reorientation from natural to supernatural ethics is further emphasised in the ensuing description of gluttony. In Hell, the blind intemperance of gluttony (the failure of reason to moderate the appetite to the food necessary for a person’s health) is eternally punished. In contrast, in Purgatory, the souls are directed to a completely different moral order. The goal here is not bodily health (as a constituent of human flourishing), but rather holiness (‘qui si rifà santa’; Purg. xxviii, 66). The weeping souls sing the verse ‘Labïa mëa, Domine’ of the penitential psalm Miserere – their lips are directed from the satisfaction of sensual appetite to the praise of God (‘et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam’). The souls in Purgatory endure an enforced fast: they circle a tree whose fruits, unreachable, nonetheless let off a powerful scent, which intensifies their hunger and thirst. Their faces are so dark, hollow, and wasted that the skin is shaped by their bones; their eye sockets are like rings without gems and, framing an emaciated nose, clearly spell ‘omo’ [man] (Purg. xxiii, 22–25). This is hardly readjusting to the Aristotelian virtuous mean with regard to eating and drinking.Footnote ⁵¹ Instead, this extreme bodily fasting leads the souls – entirely over and above the order of natural ethics – to spiritual union with Christ:

Despite the extreme agony and the humiliation of the cross (according to his human nature), Christ joyfully cries ‘Eli’ (‘My God’) and submits to the Divine will because of his love for humankind (redeemed through his sacrifice). Likewise, the penitent souls intensely desire to come to the heavenly city and, as the pain (their cross) is the means to their eternal salvation, it is now – for them – solace.Footnote ⁵² In Dante’s geographical symbolism, the penitents join themselves to Christ’s cross in Purgatory at the exact antipodes of Jerusalem, the place of Christ’s crucifixion. It is Christ, therefore, who provides the moral path – the via crucis – in Purgatory. The souls, inspired by the promise of the beatitudes and embracing their penitential suffering, are made ready for the kingdom of God. Moreover, Dante explicitly compares these souls in Purgatory to pilgrims (‘i peregrin pensosi’) who, in this life, must do penance of abstinence and fasting for the sake of the heavenly kingdom.Footnote ⁵³

In this chapter, I have argued that the interpretation of a ‘political Purgatory’ in terms of philosophical principles represents a false turning in twentieth-century Dante scholarship. The motivation for such a reading, at least in part, was the desire to interpret the poem through Dante’s dualistic theory. Scholars who equate the secular, this-worldly goal described in the Monarchia with the earthly paradise at the summit of Purgatory naturally seek to equate the philosophical guidance described in the Monarchia with the ethics of the Purgatorio. The first step in my argument, therefore, has been to dispute such a dualistic reading. In itself, this is not particularly new. After all, many scholars have considered that such a parallel is mistaken. In contrast to them, I have not thereby concluded that there is no evidence of Dante’s dualistic theory in the Commedia – a conclusion that is all but untenable if, as the modern philological evidence suggests, Dante’s intellectual trajectory had not radically shifted away from this theory by the time he wrote the Commedia. Rather, I have presented an alternative way to read the poem in dualistic terms: the Limbo of the virtuous pagans represents the journey by philosophical teaching to moral and intellectual flourishing in this life; the seven terraces of Purgatory represent the spiritual journey to eternal beatitude (beatitudo vitae aeternae). The immediate Christian context of Dante’s depiction of Purgatory reinforces this reading. The use of the seven capital vices in thirteenth-century penitential practice served perfectly the literal and moral purpose of Dante’s Purgatory: it literally describes the temporal punishment and purification of saved souls after death, and it allegorically represents the spiritual penance which all Christians should undergo on their pilgrimage to God in this life. As I have shown, the ethics of Dante’s Purgatory are distinctively Christian and outside the purview of philosophical principles: the penitent souls are directed from this world to the heavenly city, from the virtuous mean to the radical demands of the supernatural law.