The Epistle to Cangrande classifies Dante’s Commedia as ‘a work of ethics’ (morale negotium, sive ethica): its stated purpose is to lead people from the misery of sin and direct them to the beatitude of Heaven.Footnote ¹ If the epistle was written by Dante, as the balance of scholarship would currently suggest, to read the poem ethically is to read it as Dante originally intended. If this part of the epistle was not written by him, as some scholars still argue, the fact remains that an important early glossator of the poem thought it natural and appropriate to classify the poem in this way.Footnote ² In the narrative itself, the poem’s ethical goal is unambiguous: Beatrice commands Dante-character to write ‘for the good of the world which lives badly’ (‘in pro del mondo che mal vive’; Purg. xxxii, 103). Moreover, as is conventional in ethical treatises, the Commedia is described in medicinal terms: Cacciaguida inspires his descendent with the courage to ‘make plain all your vision … For if your voice is grievous at first taste, it will afterwards leave vital nourishment when it is digested’ (‘tutta tua visïon fa manifesta … Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta / nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento / lascerà poi, quando sarà digesto’; Par. xvii, 128, 130–32). Dante’s poem is ‘vital’ (life-giving) nourishment because it may save its reader from damnation, the second death. Indeed, by depicting the state of souls in the afterlife, the Commedia shows how a person – through the use of his or her free will – may merit eternal happiness in Paradise, warrant eternal damnation in Hell, or require temporary expiation for sin in Purgatory.Footnote ³

Thus, Dante presents his eschatological imagination as at the service of a very immediate practical purpose: the salvation of souls in the here and now. Dante’s primary aim, in other words, was neither to produce an innovative depiction of the three realms of the Christian afterlife nor to write a poetic masterpiece for Christendom to rival the epics of Classical antiquity (although he is justly celebrated for achieving both these goals). Rather, Dante’s imaginative vision and poetic genius served more important ethical and, I would argue, political goals: to transform people’s moral lives and to reform the institutions that governed them.Footnote ⁴ If we avoid the poem’s ethical content, we potentially jeopardize not only the poem’s status as a work of ethics and its function (to lead humankind to salvation) but even its genre as a ‘Comedy’: as the Epistle to Cangrande emphasises, the poem is called a comedy at least in part because – at a narrative level – it begins badly (in Hell) but ends well (in Paradise) and – at a moral level – it aims to effect the same felicitous outcome for its readers.Footnote ⁵ It is my contention, moreover, that a rebalancing in favour of the ethical actually serves to accentuate our appreciation of Dante’s eschatological originality and literary brilliance.

A deeply influential tradition of Dante scholarship, nonetheless, has excluded or downplayed ethical considerations.Footnote ⁶ Arguably, this tendency may have been exaggerated because of the disciplinary preoccupations and emphases of the fields in which the poem has most commonly been researched and taught in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Italian Studies and Comparative Literature.Footnote ⁷ Although there have been significant studies over the last two decades that address Dante’s ethics, most of these emphasise some other aspect or theme of his work. For example, Holmes, Williams, and Lombardi focus on the relationship between ethics and eros; Keen and Honess on the relationship between ethics and politics; Steinberg on the relationship between ethics and law; and Webb on the relationship between ethics and personhood.Footnote ⁸ Only two recent studies in English have specifically focused on Dante’s ethics: Cogan’s The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the ‘Divine Comedy’ and Its Meaning and Boyde’s Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s ‘Comedy’.Footnote ⁹ This sparsity persists despite a growing scholarly interest in Dante’s ethics.Footnote ¹⁰ The time seems ripe, therefore, for re-addressing the question of Dante’s ethics in a more rounded treatment. Where Cogan uses Aquinas as the predominant theoretical framework, Boyde draws principally on philosophical and Classical sources.Footnote ¹¹ In this book, I explore, in addition, the influence of broader Christian contexts on Dante’s ethical vision.Footnote ¹²

I also seek to make a distinct contribution to three wider currents in contemporary Dante scholarship: the reappraisal of Dante’s theology, the re-examination of his intellectual formation, and the renewed investigation of the Commedia’s narrative structure. In considering Dante as Christian sinner and moralist, this book forms part of an increasing cluster of work on Dante’s status as poeta theologus and on the nature of his poem as theology.Footnote ¹³ In terms of Dante’s intellectual formation, I open up new contexts – in preaching and penitential sources – for Dante’s Christian ethics, thereby contributing to a shift of scholarly attention away from more bookish ‘high’ Aristotelian philosophy and rationalistic theology and towards the popular visceral contexts of practical Christianity in Dante’s time.Footnote ¹⁴ With regard to narrative structure, the research for this book coincided with Vertical Readings in Dante’s ‘Comedy’, a collaborative project which systematically explored vertical correspondences between same-numbered cantos across the three canticles.Footnote ¹⁵ Many interpretations of the poem have emerged through the canto-by-canto readings customary in the commentary and lectura Dantis traditions. My reading of three terraces of Dante’s Purgatory ‘horizontally’ – as narrative structural units and as moral regions – opens up new perspectives on individual cantos, as well as on particular interpretative cruces within them, thereby complementing the ‘vertical approach’.Footnote ¹⁶

The book’s argument is organised into three principal parts. In Part I, I present the poem as an ethical and political manifesto: Chapter 1 analyses the complex moral ordering of Dante’s afterlife as a whole, while Chapter 2 reveals the dualistic political argument underpinning the surprising number of classical pagans and contemporary popes that we find there. In Part II, I reframe Dante’s Purgatory in terms of distinctively Christian ethics: whereas Chapter 3 shows how Dante’s Purgatory represents a process of Christian penance, satisfaction, and purification, Chapter 4 distinguishes Dante’s own approach to moral theology from Aquinas’s innovative reforms. The reframing of Dante’s Christian ethics in Part II informs my detailed interpretation of three particularly significant vices and the three terraces of Purgatory devoted to them – pride (Chapter 5), sloth (Chapter 6), and avarice (Chapter 7) – in Part III.

Where some scholars, such as Cogan and Moevs, have tried to set out an overarching moral rationale for the Commedia, I argue, in Chapter 1, that Dante incorporates diverse ethical criteria for the three regions of the afterlife.Footnote ¹⁷ I analyse the complex moral structure of Hell, and argue that a broadly Aristotelian taxonomy of good and evil underpins even its seemingly anomalous, and theologically unorthodox, regions. I emphasise, then, a distinction between this philosophical account of ethics in Hell, and the pastorally oriented account of Christian ethics in Purgatory. Dante structures the seven terraces of Purgatory according to the scheme of the seven capital vices, a standard moral framework for medieval Christian confession. His invention of an antechamber to Purgatory, where souls who delayed their penance are temporarily deprived of the purifying pain of sense (poena sensus), further underlines the fact that Purgatory continues a process that should have begun in this life. The overarching moral theme of Paradise is Christian asceticism, and Dante overlaps a scientific belief in astral influence on human personality with the scheme of the four cardinal and three theological virtues.

In Chapter 2, I turn to the political dimension of Dante’s ethical thought. Whereas critics have tended to emphasise ‘the fundamental difference’ between the ethical–political theories expounded in the Monarchia and the Commedia, I demonstrate their fundamental unity. Dante’s theoretical insistence on the two ethical goals of humankind, the two political structures (Empire and Church) necessary for their pursuit, and the exclusive temporal power of the Empire and material poverty of the Church, lie behind – I argue – two of the most startling surprises in his depiction of the otherworld, in relation to previous traditions both popular and learned about the afterlife. First, of the approximately 300 characters in Dante’s otherworld, 84 are pagans; 51 of these are located in a region entirely of Dante’s own invention – the limbo of the virtuous pagans. Second, Dante depicts at least four contemporary popes in Hell.Footnote ¹⁸ No less than his Latin prose treatise in three books, Dante’s vernacular poem in three canticles served as potent propaganda for the Imperial faction in Italy, and as a controversial manifesto for the radical reform of the Roman Church.

Especially in light of recent philological evidence that dates the Monarchia to circa 1317–1318 when most of the Commedia was already written, it is no longer sustainable to argue that the Latin prose treatise represents a formative stage in Dante’s political theology, one intended to be left behind when he commenced work on his poetic masterpiece.Footnote ¹⁹ Nonetheless, those Dante scholars who have sought to read the Commedia as informed by the dualistic theory of the Monarchia have taken a wrong turn, as I argue in Chapter 3. In Dante’s Political Purgatory, for example, John A. Scott claims that Dante’s Purgatory represents an ethical journey guided by ‘justice and the teachings of philosophy’ towards the ‘beatitudo huius vitae’.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, I offer a way to read Dante’s poem as informed by his dualistic theory without being drawn into a forced reading of Purgatory in overly political terms. I then show how Dante forged his vision of Purgatory through two areas of 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. Thus, Chapter 3 presents afresh a ‘theological Purgatory’ – a region that embodies an explicit re-orientation from natural to supernatural ethics, from pagan to Christian exempla, and from this world to the heavenly city. Dante’s Purgatory represents, then, the Christian moral pilgrimage towards the beatitudo vitae aeternae. In considering Dante’s Christian ethics, therefore, it is appropriate to focus our lens on the seven terraces of Purgatory.

In Chapter 4, I argue that even those scholars who have interpreted the ethics of Purgatory as distinctively Christian have typically turned to the wrong tradition of moral theology in order to do so. Almost without exception, scholars and commentators gloss Dante’s approach to the seven capital vices through Aquinas (and especially the Aquinas of the Summa theologiae). However, Aquinas’s reforms in moral theology were not, in fact, particularly influential in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. More influential, instead, was an older tradition of the vices represented by Aquinas’s Dominican predecessor Peraldus (c. 1200–71). It is to this older tradition that Dante turns in constructing the seven terraces of Purgatory. While Siegfried Wenzel demonstrated the influence of Peraldus’s rationale on the moral order of Purgatory, Dante scholars have not explored the implications of this important connection between Dante and Peraldus for a reading of the ethics of Purgatory as a whole.Footnote ²¹ I demonstrate the major differences between Aquinas’s and Peraldus’s approaches. This comparative critique highlights the characteristics, including the weaknesses, of Dante’s poetic treatment (which clearly follows Peraldus’s treatise). I argue, moreover, that there is a compelling parallel between Peraldus’s De vitiis et virtutibus and Dante’s Purgatory and Paradise in terms of not only ethical content but also ethical form.

The third and fourth chapters lay the foundation, therefore, for Chapters 5–7, which draw significantly on Peraldus’s treatise as a gloss for the Christian ethics of Dante’s Purgatory. In Chapter 5, I reappraise Dante’s relationship with his reader in Purgatorio through the interpretative paradigm of medieval preaching against vice. The terrace of pride is particularly interesting in this context, as the medieval church provides its implicit backdrop. The terrace’s centrepiece is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls (Purg. xi, 37–142), and this encounter is framed by the three examples of humility (Purg. x, 34–93) and the twelve examples of pride (Purg. xii, 25–63). I interpret the three groups together as a triptych, arguing that Dante models a spiritual exercise of conversion from pride to humility in this terrace. As sinner and preacher, he invites his reader to reflect upon the three prideful souls identified (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani), and upon the three groups of prideful examples (delineated by the acrostic ‘VOM’) in counter-position with the three exempla of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan). Dante’s choice of exempla (which has puzzled critics) becomes understandable when, and only when, we interpret them in relation to each other in terms of his moral purpose for the terrace as a whole.Footnote ²²

Scholars have typically failed to appreciate the importance of the vice of sloth in Dante’s biography, as well as its pervasive presence in his Christian moral vision. In Chapter 6, I demonstrate that Peraldus’s treatise ‘De acedia’ profoundly influenced Dante’s poetic representation of sloth. Peraldus opens up the depth and breadth of contemporary understandings of acedia enabling us to understand sloth as truly a scholar’s and a poet’s vice. There are, I suggest, two key narrative dramas in the terrace of sloth: the acute fervour of the penitent slothful and, framing this, Dante-character’s intellectual zeal for knowledge. Virgil’s three doctrinal lectures (xvii, 73–xviii, 87) – on the moral structure of Purgatory, the nature of love, and free will and moral responsibility – are not parenthetical, therefore, to the terrace’s drama. Furthermore, I argue that Virgil’s doctrine is represented symbolically by the dream of the Siren at the close of the terrace (xviii, 130–45 and xix, 1–69). Using Peraldus as a gloss, I identify Dante’s first sin in Inferno i as tepidity (the genus of sloth) and, even more precisely, as its subspecies of ignavia. It is particularly significant, then, that ‘tepidity’ (Purg. xxii, 92) is the post-conversion vice of Statius, Dante’s poetic cypher.

In Chapter 7, I demonstrate the significance of avarice in Dante’s Christian ethics, and in his own moral biography. As Peraldus’s treatise ‘De avaritia’ demonstrates, the vice of avarice may include a disordered love of power and knowledge as well as of wealth, and its opposing vice of prodigality. In particular, amor filiorum [the love of children] is highlighted as a perilous occasion to avarice. I argue that amor filiorum is the interpretative key to Dante’s terrace of avarice, which is structured chiastically around the figure of Hugh Capet (Purg. xx, 40–96). Scholars have typically interpreted Hugh Capet as simply a vehicle for Dante’s political polemic, and have overlooked the profound spiritual dimension of the episode. From a theological perspective, however, Hugh Capet’s confession at the heart of the canto is directly penitential. The examples of poverty (16–33) and avarice (97–123) all concern the impact of poverty on family dependents; the she-wolf (4–15) and the poor shepherds (124–41) emphasise the failure of the Church’s pastors to protect their flock from avarice; the prologue (1–3) and the epilogue (142–51) concern the avaricious desire for knowledge. Hugh Capet’s genealogy of ancestral line (Purg. xx) is, in turn, framed by the avaricious Ottobono dei Fieschi’s genealogy of popes (Purg. xix) and the prodigal Statius’s genealogy of ethical poets (Purg. xxi–xxii). Through his carefully choreographed representation of Statius, Dante also implies that avarice (in its subspecies, and opposing vice, of prodigality) was his own vice, and the cause of his overthrow by the she-wolf in Inferno i.

While I provide an overview of all seven capital vices in Chapters 1 and 3, there are at least five good reasons for focusing in detail on pride, sloth, and avarice.Footnote ²³ First, I seek to show the benefits of interpreting Dante’s Purgatory through the narrative units of its moral structure, and providing such close readings required selection. Second, Dante gives special emphasis to these three vices in Purgatory. Pride and avarice are both ‘root vices’ (from which the other vices may spring), and Dante allots considerable space – three and three and a half cantos, respectively – to the two terraces devoted to them (Purg. x–xii; Purg. xix, 70–xxii, 114). The terrace of sloth, although shorter (Purg. xvii, 76–xix, 69), is structurally prominent as the mid-point of the poem, and the central terrace to which Dante assigns the exposition of the order of love upon which Purgatory is founded. Third, these three vices are representative of three different kinds of vice as categorised by human moral psychology: pride (with envy) is a vice of the intellect, sloth (with wrath) is a vice of the irascible appetite, and avarice (with gluttony and lust) is a vice of the concupiscible appetite. Fourth, Dante explicitly identifies pride as one of his own gravest vices (Purg. xiii, 133–38), while he implicitly identifies prodigality (the opposing vice of avarice) and sloth as key autobiographical vices through Statius, his poetic cypher. Finally, sloth and avarice are the twin vices that Dante associates especially with the moral corruption of the Church: in Dante’s view, the spiritual sloth and worldly avarice of the clergy led to the confounding of the two swords of temporal and spiritual power, and to the consequent disorder of the world.