As we argued in Chapter 4, Dante does not just adopt ethical content from Peraldus’s De vitiis for his poetic treatment of Purgatory, but also appears to assume the role of vernacular preacher against vice. Approaching the first terrace of Purgatory with this context in mind, then, our leading question becomes: How does Dante-poet, as preacher, seek to convert his reader, a sinner, from pride to humility? The terrace of pride is particularly interesting in this regard, because the medieval Church arguably provides its implicit backdrop. This should not surprise us. Although medieval preaching did not occur exclusively within ecclesial walls, much of it did. Preachers used the church setting, liturgy, and the congregation of sinners – and not just the church’s architecture, wall paintings, and sculpture – to frame, support, and structure their sermons.
In the terrace of pride, Dante makes repeated references to church architecture and art. This is the terrace of ‘visibile parlare’ [visible speech], a familiar trope in theological discussions about the power of religious art to effect moral conversion of the heart.Footnote 1 One thirteenth-century treatise emphasises that ‘pictures and ornaments in churches are the lessons and the scriptures of the laity … paintings appear to move the mind more than [verbal] descriptions; for deeds are placed before the eyes [of the faithful] in paintings, and so they appear to be actually happening’; another affirms that religious images ‘excite feelings of devotion, these being aroused more effectively by things seen than by things heard’.Footnote 2 We know that Franciscan and Dominican preachers drew upon the ‘emotional intensity of religious paintings’ and even ‘used a repertoire of gestures known to their audience from paintings’.Footnote 3 Dante exploits this visual evangelism to the full, explicitly highlighting the empathetic effects of visual art on the viewer: ‘la qual fa del non ver vera rancura / nascere ’n chi la vede’ [so that what is not real causes real discomfort to be born in whoever sees it] (Purg. x, 133–34).
Dante not only stresses the power of ecclesial art in the terrace of pride, but also gives the terrace an architectonic substructure. The poet first opens the door of Purgatory (like the door of a church) to his reader (Purg. ix, 73–138). He then challenges his reader to imagine three carvings of humility on the cliff walls, carvings which evoke the sculptured reliefs of medieval churches (Purg. x, 28–96). The group of penitents are compared to corbels holding up a church roof (130–39), and the group’s posture is related to church rites of public penance.Footnote 4 Within this liturgical space, the souls (and the reader with them) recite the Pater noster (Purg. xi, 1–24), thereby praying for others (whether in this life or in Purgatory). In the governing analogy, the three souls whom Dante-character encounters are like the church’s congregation: they are exempla taken straight from life and immediate history (58–142).Footnote 5 The examples of pride, moreover, are compared to sculptured tombstones in a church (Purg. xii, 16–24).
Much as a medieval preacher would encourage the congregation to meditate on their own lives in relation to the lives of the saints, to fellow Christians on Earth and in Purgatory, and to the damned in Hell, so Dante encourages his readers to meditate upon their own lives in relation to the reliefs of humility, to the three penitent souls (near contemporaries of Dante) marked by pride, and to the damned or demonic exempla of pride on the terrace floor. This parallel is further strengthened by two particular characteristics of the terrace of pride. First, it is the only terrace of Purgatory in which the pagan example of virtue turns out to be a saint (we meet Trajan again in heaven). Second, Dante – as we shall see – deliberately excludes saved souls (such as Adam) from his examples of pride, all of whom are damned. In this way, Dante’s vision of the terrace of pride models an exercise in spiritual conversion. This, again, should not surprise us, as medieval preachers commonly spurred people to penance through visions of Purgatorial suffering.Footnote 6
The terrace of pride is framed by three examples of humility (Purg. x, 34–93) and twelve (or thirteen) examples of pride (Purg. xii, 25–63); its centrepiece is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls (Purg. xi, 37–142). These three groups fall into three different cantos, and scholars have typically addressed them on their own.Footnote 7 With each group, questions have arisen about Dante’s choice of exempla, and scholars have been particularly puzzled by Dante’s list, and ordering, of the exempla of pride (which has become recognised as a crux of its own). In this chapter, I read these three groups together as a triptych, and propose that Dante’s choice of exempla becomes understandable when we interpret them in relation to Dante’s moral purpose for the terrace as a whole. I argue that Dante 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 to the three exempla of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan). By relating these three parts of the terrace and by drawing on a range of theological contexts, I show how Dante models a spiritual exercise of conversion from pride to humility.
In the first part of this chapter, I argue that the theology of the Incarnation underscores Dante’s depiction of the three examples of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan), and I show how Dante invites his reader into an empathetic engagement with them such that he may become, like Mary, a portatrix Christi [a Christ-bearer]. In the second part, I suggest that Dante sets up deliberate contrasts, and parallels, between Mary and Omberto; King David and Oderisi; and Trajan and Salvani.Footnote 8 In the third part, I argue that the three exempla of humility also provide counterfoils to the three groups of four prideful exempla and, indeed, that this organisational principle provides some possible interpretative solutions to Dante’s ordering of these exempla.
The Incarnation: Carving Humility into the Human Heart
Drawing upon familiar tropes in preaching and pastoral practice, Dante presents humility as the necessary gateway to the Christian moral life and to Purgatory proper. Describing the mountain of pride (‘mons superbiae’), Peraldus cites Jesus’s words to a humble man: ‘Behold, I have left an open door before you, which no one can close, because you have a little virtue.’Footnote 9 Peraldus interprets man’s little virtue (‘modica virtus’) as humility (‘idest humilitatem’), and proceeds to imagine what Jesus might have said to a proud man: ‘By contrast, he could say to a proud man: “Behold, I have left a closed door before you, which no one can open, because you have the greatest vice”, that is pride.’Footnote 10 The Scriptural door of new life – which is closed to the proud but opened to those who humbly submit to Christ – is embodied symbolically by the literal door of a medieval church and, I would suggest, by the entrance to Dante’s Purgatory. In medieval rituals of public penance, the church door could be literally closed to penitents: after a period of penance, they were forced to prostrate themselves before the church door as the bishop prayed over them and, only then, were given absolution and allowed to enter.Footnote 11 In Dante’s Purgatory, the door first appears as just a crack (Purg. ix, 74: ‘un fesso’), and Dante-character must ask humbly for it to be unlocked (‘Chiedi / umilemente che ’l serrame scioglia’; 107–8).Footnote 12 Where St Peter’s representative should err in opening rather than closing, a physical gesture of humility is underlined as the criterion sine qua non: ‘pur che la gente a’ piedi mi s’atterri’ (129).Footnote 13 In a thinly veiled allegory, Dante-character – like a penitent entering a church in rituals of penance – undergoes the sacrament of penance and, on absolution, enters through the door of Purgatory to begin his satisfaction for his sins (the ritually marked seven peccata).Footnote 14
Ascending to the terrace of pride itself, Dante-character immediately sees examples of humility carved onto the marble inner-bank of the cliff which, as Pietro Alighieri’s gloss suggests, bring to mind the reliefs on church walls. Dante is inviting the reader, in this way, to engage in a spiritual practice. The reader must bring to mind or memory (as to a wall) an image of humility. By prayerfully meditating upon the example of humility, it may become an antidote or remedy to the wound of pride.Footnote 15 Before turning to the moral and spiritual content of these exempla of humility, we should note that the very divine art itself is meant to inculcate in the souls of the terrace of pride, and imaginatively in Dante’s reader, a disposition of humility.
Both the three carvings of humility (Purg. x, 34–69) and the twelve carvings of pride (Purg. xii, 25–63) are framed by references to the disparity between the works of man, nature, and God: not only the greatest sculptor of antiquity, Polyclitus, but even Nature would be put to scorn (Purg. x, 32–33); no human artist could match these shadings and outlines which would cause even the most subtle mind to wonder (Purg. xii, 64–66); the dead seem truly dead, the living truly living (67).Footnote 16 At one level, Dante is alluding to the remarkable realism achieved by his contemporaries – the pulpits of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto, and the illustrated miniatures of Oderisi or Franco Bolognese.Footnote 17 Like the poetry of Dante itself, the works of these artists may still provoke a sense of awe and attendant humility before human greatness.Footnote 18 At a deeper level, Dante is emphasising that even the most sublime, novel, and wondrous of human accomplishments is effortlessly surpassed by He for whom nothing is new (‘colui che mai non vide cosa nova’; Purg. x, 94). Thus earthly pride is shown to be foolish not only through comparison to human greatness, but also, and primarily, through comparison to the power and majesty of God.Footnote 19 The works of Creation and of Divine artifice on mount Purgatory should cause man to wonder at the greatness of the Creator: this sense of marvelling, in turn, should lead to a disposition of chosen subjection to God rather than, as is the case with pride, the created being rebelling against the Creator (Inf. xxxiv, 35). It is in this sense that Dante, with Baudelarian sarcasm, challenges his readers to bloat themselves with pride after seeing the power and artistry of God: ‘Or superbite, e via col viso altero, / figliuoli d’Eva’ (Purg. xii, 70–71).
This framing focus on the supreme artistry of God adds the key theological dimension to the examples of humility. Thus, the Annunciation (the first example) is the site of not only Mary’s humility but also God’s paradigmatic humility.Footnote 20 As Beatrice explains to Dante-character in Paradise, man could not descend with humble obedience so low as, disobeying, he had sought to rise upwards: ‘per non poter ir giuso / con umiltate obedïendo poi / quanto disobediendo intese ir suso’ (Par. vii, 98–100). Therefore, God (the highest rational being) became man (the lowest), humbling himself to take on flesh: ‘e tutti li altri modi erano scarsi / a la giustizia, se ’l Figliuol di Dio / non fosse umilïato ad incarnarsi’ (118–20). Through the Incarnation, God – the Creator – chose to become a small part of His creation: ‘il suo Fattore / non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura’ (Par. xxxiii, 5–6). In his depiction of the Annunciation, indeed, Dante allots as much space to the message of God’s humility in redeeming man through the Incarnation (Purg. x, 34–39) as to Mary’s humility in response (40–45).
The humility of Mary, as well as that of King David and Trajan, is therefore set within the context of God’s exemplary humility in condescending to become man.Footnote 21 The angel informs Mary that she is the highest in the order of grace (‘gratia plena’), that the Lord is with her (‘Dominus tecum’), and that he will be called the son of the most high (‘filius altissimi vocabitur’). And yet, Mary responds in utmost humility, as the servant of God (‘Ecce ancilla Deï … fiat mihi secundum voluntatem tuam’).Footnote 22 At the height of his regal and spiritual power, King David dances before the Ark of the Covenant.Footnote 23 He is the humble psalmist (l’umile salmista’; Purg. x, 65) who sets himself in contempt before men – his wife, Micòl, looks down disdainfully and sadly from the grand palace – so as to submit himself to God: he is more than a king in the eyes of faith but less than King in the eyes of men (‘e più e men che re era in quel caso’; 66).Footnote 24 At the height of Imperial power and pomp, Trajan condescends to do the will of the least of his subjects (‘la miserella’; 82).Footnote 25 His dual motive for her redemption – justice and compassion (‘giustizia vuole, e pietà mi ritene’; 93) – echoes in the political sphere God’s motives for man’s redemption in the spiritual sphere. Whereas proud men vaunt their excellence, Dante shows that those who were greatest in the order of grace (Mary), of regal and spiritual kingship (David), and of nature (Trajan) humbly put themselves at the service of others and of God.
At this stage in the narrative, we are shown examples of humility without, explicitly, humility’s reward: ‘the humble shall be exalted’. Gregory the Great, however, had already provided an interpretation of Mary, King David, and Trajan that anticipated the reward for their humility. Dante, in turn, arguably embodies this Gregorian reading in Paradiso. In Moralia. 27, Gregory admires King David more for his humble dancing than for his military prowess in battle because, in the former, he defeats himself; in the latter, he conquers only his enemies.Footnote 26 Having great cause for self-glory and pride, King David resisted, in other words, this primordial temptation. In the Heaven of Jupiter, Dante seems to have Gregory’s gloss in mind: David ‘il cantor de lo Spirito Santo / che l’arca traslatò di villa in villa: / ora conosce il merto del suo canto’ [the singer of the Holy Spirit who transferred the Ark from city to city: now he knows the merit of his singing] (Par. xx, 38–40). In Purgatorio x, 73–75, Dante explicitly identifies Gregory’s reading of Trajan’s act of humility. According to the popular tradition, Gregory was so moved by Trajan that he prayed fervently for his redemption.Footnote 27 Gregory reads Trajan’s humility as foreshadowing the Incarnation and as reflecting a disposition to Christian faith. As we discover in Paradiso, Gregory’s prayers of living hope (‘di viva spene’) led to a miracle: Trajan is brought back to life temporarily and, believing in Christ, he experiences the true love (‘vero amor’) for Christ, such that he merits entry into Paradise: ‘fu degna di venire a questo gioco’ [he was worthy to come to this joy] (Par. xx, 117).Footnote 28 Dante’s description of the ascent and apotheosis of Mary is also mediated through Gregory. In popular tradition, Gregory – meditating in procession upon an icon of the Virgin – heard the first three lines of the Regina coeli chanted by angels, to which he appended the fourth line.Footnote 29 In Paradiso xxiii, the ascent and assumption of Mary as the queen of Heaven is seen as fulfilling the work begun at the Annunciation. As the portatrix of Christ (‘quia quem meruisti portare’), she merits her exalted status.
Mary’s role as portatrix Christi also highlights the way in which Dante encourages his reader to meditate empathetically on these examples of humility. In the tradition of the pseudo-Bonventurean fourteenth-century Meditationes Vitae Christi, the Christian is invited into a spiritual exercise: inhabiting imaginatively the role of Mary, the reader-viewer may become – like her – a vessel of Christ.Footnote 30 As Conrad of Saxony highlights, Mary is the mirror through which Christians see the true image of God in themselves.Footnote 31 For Augustine, Mary’s Annunciation is a paradigm for each soul who conceives Christ in spirit as the seed of salvation: ‘just as the blessed virgin conceived Christ corporeally, so every holy soul conceives him spiritually’.Footnote 32 Indeed, Augustine contrasts the stubborn pride of the pagan philosophers with the humility of heart, piety, and fear of God, which are the first steps on the Christian journey to perfection.Footnote 33 Mary’s Annunciation embodies the humility through which she, in spirit and in flesh, and man, in spirit, may receive Christ and enter the path to salvation and the new life in Christ. By empathetic meditation on Mary’s humility, therefore, sinners may become partakers in the fruit of the Incarnation.
As Gregory’s reading of the glorifications of the three exempla of humility – Mary, King David, and Trajan – is embodied through Dante’s depictions in Paradiso, so the glory of the reader-sinner who takes Mary as his model is also represented in the heavenly rose. Thus, in Paradiso, Beatrice directs Dante-character to Mary as the rose in which the divine Logos took flesh, and also to the lilies, the human souls who through Mary became spiritual vessels of Christ:
Dante’s image of human souls flowering in heaven is taken directly from the mosaics of the Florentine baptistry (where Dante had begun his own life of faith in baptism). This autobiographical resonance underscores the power of religious art imprinting itself on the viewer, and is reinforced immediately following this passage as Dante highlights his morning and evening devotion to Mary: ‘Il nome del bel fior ch’io sempre invoco / e mane e sera’ (88–89).
Three Living Confessions: Reading One’s Sin in the Mirror of Virtue
The centrepiece of the terrace of pride is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls. In the governing analogy between souls in Purgatory and the penitential community on Earth, these Purgatorial souls might be compared to a church’s congregation. As a medieval preacher would encourage his congregation to meditate on their own lives in relation to the lives of the saints, so Dante intends that we should meditate on the three prideful souls in relation to the three exempla of humility inscribed on the cliff.
A counter-position between the Virgin Mary (the first example of humility) and Omberto Aldobrandesco (the first soul stamped with pride) might seem, at first sight, strange. However, medieval preachers commonly attacked the folly of taking pride in one’s noble lineage by making reference to Eve and Mary. For example, Peraldus highlights that God did not make one Adam of silver (from whom all nobles descend), and another Adam of mud (from whom all ignoble people descend); instead, he made one man of mud from whom all descend. Therefore, either everyone is noble because of his blood, or everyone is base.Footnote 34 Did not God create each one of us? Therefore our father is God, our mother Eve (‘Pater noster Deus est, mater nostra Eva’). How, then, can someone despise his brother?Footnote 35 Moreover, Peraldus emphasises that – in the time of grace – God specifically chose persons who were ignoble and contemptible to the world.Footnote 36 The second Eve, Mary – although least in the eyes of the world – becomes the mother of God and the queen of Heaven.
In this vein, Dante characterises Omberto’s pride in his lineage as a denial, or neglect, of this shared ancestry. In a captatio benevolentiae addressed to Omberto, Virgil refers to Dante-character’s body as the burden of Adam’s flesh (‘lo ’ncarco / de la carne d’Adamo onde si veste’; Purg. xi, 43–44). Omberto proceeds to define his prideful disdain – ‘Ogn’uomo ebbi in despetto’ (64) – as a failure to think of Eve, our shared mother: ‘non pensando a la comune madre’ (63).
A note of contemporary polemic can be detected here. The object of Omberto’s arrogance – ‘L’antico sangue e l’opere leggiadre / d’i miei maggior’ [the ancient blood and noble works of my ancestors] (Purg. xi, 61) – bears a close resemblance to Frederick II’s definition of nobility – ‘antica possession d’avere / Con reggimenti belli’ [the ancient possession of wealth with pleasing manners] – a definition Dante had sought to confute in the thirty chapters of Convivio iv. Notably, in the relevant canzone (‘Le dolci rime d’amor’) – as in Purgatorio xi – Dante draws on Peraldus’s argument of common ancestry.Footnote 37 However, he recognises in the Convivio that this argument depends upon a view – that there was a beginning to the human race – which is held by Christians but not necessarily by philosophers and gentiles (‘e dice cristiani, e non filosofi, ovvero gentili, [delli quali] le sentenze anco sono in contro’; Conv. iv, xv, 9). Aristotle posited, after all, that the world (and each of the species including man) is eternal. As Omberto intimates, his arrogance – ‘non pensando a la comune madre’ [forgetting our common mother] (63) – may thereby register an implicit scepticism, or at least indifference, towards Christianity. As Dante underlines in ‘Le dolci rime d’amor’, Christians simply cannot hold this genealogical view of nobility (‘Ma ciò io non consento / Nè eglino altresì, se son Cristiani’; Conv. iv, canz. iii, 72–73). Although Dante employs this auctoritas fidei in the canzone, in Convivio iv itself he confutes Frederick’s genealogical definition of nobility on purely philosophical grounds. He argues that true nobility consists in the excellence of the soul, and that while a virtuous person may ennoble a family tree, a person cannot derive nobility from his lineage.
It is surely significant, then, that the second prideful soul, Oderisi da Gubbio, conjures up the elevated world of Paris and Bologna (both referenced indirectly) in which honour (a term repeated three times in five lines), glory, and fame were apportioned according to intellectual and artistic excellence.Footnote 38 Oderisi refers to the arts of illumination, painting, and poetry and, specifically, to Dante’s direct contemporaries (and, most probably, to Dante himself; Purg. xi, 99). These are excellences of soul which Dante advocates, celebrates, and exhibits in his writings.Footnote 39 In Purgatory, Dante nonetheless registers that, from a Christian perspective, a grave spiritual danger of pride arises from pursuing excellence of soul (true nobility), man’s this-worldly felicity. As Oderisi confesses, the great desire of excellence (‘lo gran disio / de l’eccellenza’) impeded him during his life from being courteous to another miniaturist whom he desired to surpass: ‘di tal superbia qui si paga il fio’ [Here we pay the toll for such pride] (88). From the perspective of eternity, Oderisi now recognises his pursuit of honour and glory as entirely vain: ‘Oh vana gloria de l’umane posse! / com’ poco verde in su la cima dura’ [Oh vain glory of human powers! how briefly it stays green at the summit] (91–92).Footnote 40 It is folly to prefer vainglory (which lasts for only an instant) to the eternal glory of Heaven, or to seek a transitory thing when we can have eternal beatitude.Footnote 41 As Dante’s treatment of the virtuous pagans eloquently testifies, excellence of soul has no salvific merit if it is not directed to the glory of God. Thus Oderisi confesses that had he not turned to God, he would be in Hell and not in Purgatory (89–90).
The example of King David, the ‘umile psalmista’, may provide a mirror through which the distortion of Oderisi’s pursuit of artistic excellence may be correctly perceived. It is in virtue of David’s humility, and his acknowledgement of his own sinfulness, that he becomes the vox Dei. Dante refers to King David, the purported author of the Psalms, as ‘[il] cantor che per doglia / del fallo disse “Miserere mei”’ [the singer who, grieving at his sin, said ‘Miserere mei’] (Par. xxxii, 11–12). Oderisi’s pride in artistic excellence (an excellence of the soul) is reflected, therefore, in the true mirror of Christian virtue by King David, who devotes his art to the service of God. It is also in the context of King David that the tacit allusion to Dante’s own poetic supremacy over Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti becomes clearFootnote 42:
In contrast to the intellectual disdain of Guido Cavalcanti (‘ebbe a disdegno’; Inf. x, 63), Dante’s starting point here is not self-regarding vanity, but rather an awareness of his own sin and the need for God’s aid. In other words, Dante-character becomes, like King David, a sinner turned singer. Dante-character’s first words in the poem – in a strange conflation of vulgate Latin (‘Miserere’) and vernacular Italian (‘di me’) – fittingly echo the opening of King David’s penitential psalm. And Dante further asserts his credentials as a new David, a scriba Dei, through his vernacularisation of the Lord’s prayer in this terrace.
The third juxtaposition, then, is between the Emperor Trajan and Provenzan Salvani. In contrast to the ideal of universal empire, Salvani had sought to wield complete political power in Siena for his own ends: ‘fu presuntüoso / a recar Siena tutta a le sue mani’ (Purg. xi, 122–23). Whereas Trajan, at the height of his military power, had sought justice and mercy, Salvani, when leading the Imperial faction at Montaperti, sought to raze Florence to the ground. Like Farinata, who saved Florence on that occasion, he embodies the self-serving internecine power struggles of Ghibellines and Guelfs which Dante will castigate – to the full – in Paradiso vi, 97–111. But, unlike Farinata, Salvani – late in his life – was moved through love for a friend to put aside his pride:
Just as Trajan’s pity for the widow’s plight leads him to fulfil his Imperial mandate of Justice for all, so Salvani – in imitatio Christi – sacrifices his pride and station, undergoing the suffering and humiliation of beggary, to pay the ransom for his friend.
Thus, the three souls stamped by pride in Purgatory – Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani – may be read in light of the exempla of humility – Mary, King David, and Trajan. Omberto’s pride in his family line (an excellence, essentially, of the body) is contrasted with Eve, the communal mother, and Mary, of humble birth. Oderisi’s pride in artistic excellence (an excellence of the soul) is compared to King David, the model of the Christian sinner-singer who puts his art at the service of God. Salvani’s pride in political power (an external excellence) is contrasted with Trajan, who puts his universal power at the service of the powerless in the cause of justice.Footnote 43 Crucially, we encounter Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani in a state of conversion: towards the ends of their lives, they did turn away from sin, and now – in Purgatory – they are still in a process of spiritual transformation. Most noticeably, perhaps, they begin to recognise the good in each other. Where Omberto and Oderisi confess their pride in their own voice, Oderisi speaks for Salvani. Oderisi’s newfound courtesy to Franco of Bologna (Purg. xi, 82–87) is thus seconded by his praise of Salvani. As Peraldus emphasises, praising others is a key remedy to vainglory. In nature, after all, the beholder takes delight in what is seen (as sight takes pleasure in a beautiful colour), but not vice versa (the beautiful colour does not taken pleasure in being seen). So, in human relations, a person should take pleasure from the good in others and not from the praise of others.Footnote 44
Pride As Dante’s Sin
The confessions of Omberto Aldobrandesco, Oderisi da Gubbio, and Provenzan Salvani in Purgatory are also spiritually productive for Dante-character. He recognises in each of them an aspect of pride or vainglory in himself. In this way, Dante models in his own person a spiritual exercise for his reader. In response to Omberto’s speech, Dante-character humbly acknowledges this prideful tendency: ‘Ascoltando chinai in giù la faccia’ [Listening, I bent down my face] (Purg. xi, 73). Dante-character will display not only filial reverence, but a latent pride in family lineage, when he encounters Cacciaguida in Paradise (Par. xvi, 1–27). Moreover, it is clear that pride runs in the Alighieri blood: Dante’s great-grandfather has already spent more than one hundred years on the terrace of pride (Par. xv, 91–93).Footnote 45 Dante’s pride in his own nobility of soul and excellence in poetry is even more pronounced. Dante-character acknowledges how Oderisi’s confession and discourse on vainglory have reduced his pride and instilled in its place good humility: ‘E io a lui: “Tuo vero dir m’incora / bona umiltà, e gran tumor m’appiani”’[And I to him: ‘Your true words instil good humility in my heart, and you reduce a great swelling in me’] (Purg. xi, 118–19). Rising to the apex of political power in Florence at the time of his journey through Purgatory (he would hold office as one of the six priors of Florence from 15 June to 15 August 1300), Dante-character learns through Oderisi’s prophecy that he will be able to gloss Salvani’s humiliation with his own future experience of exile (xi, 139–42).
These three souls – as part of the ecclesia of Purgatory – essentially function as living sermons for Dante-character: they lead him to become self-conscious of his own pride and to adopt, in response, the posture of humility. At the close of the dramatic sequence, Dante-character is described as side-by-side with Oderisi, like an oxen under a yoke: ‘Di pari, come buoi, che vanno a giogo / m’andava io con quell’ anima carca’ (Purg. xii, 1–2).Footnote 46 Even when Virgil commands him to rise up, his mind remains humbled and bowed down in thought (8–9). Dante’s acute awareness of his own sinful pride, indeed, spills over into the next terrace of envy:
This is the only place in the poem that Dante explicitly identifies his own sins in this way: namely, he has sinned gravely in pride, and only lightly in envy. Indeed, he fears his future punishment for pride (when he returns to Purgatory after his death) so strongly that he can already feel the weight of the boulders. The relative gravity of his pride is also signalled when he ascends, much lighter, from the terrace of pride:
This passage further confirms pride as one of Dante’s gravest sins. At the same time, it makes a straightforward allusion to the structuring principle of the seven capital vices – namely, that pride is the source sin from which all the others flow. As Francesco da Buti emphasises, when a person in the humble state of penitence overcomes the great weight of pride, he or she may more easily defeat all the other sins.Footnote 47 Or, in Velutello’s analogy, if one destroys the roots of a tree, all the branches, now dried of sap, are more easily broken.Footnote 48
Pride and Spiritual Death
Like the souls in Purgatory, Dante’s reader, in the opening of Purgatorio xi, voices the Lord’s Prayer in its entirety. Through the acrostic VOM opening Purgatorio xii, the reader is also made to turn his eyes downwards – ‘Volgi li occhi in giuè’ (Purg. xii, 13) – as his eye scrolls down the page (rather than from left to right).Footnote 49 The final stage of the conversion from pride to humility is, then, this meditation upon the twelve exempla of pride, carved on the path under the souls’ feet. Dante-author reinforces the overarching architectonic analogy of the episode by comparing these carvings to tombstones in a medieval church. As the first remedy to vainglory is the meditatio mortis, so the comparison to tombstones (evoking the infernal graveyard of Inferno x) sets into relief the perspective of eternity as a correlative to this-worldly pride. But, through the architectural analogy, Dante also indicates how his reader should engage with these exempla of pride. Alluding once more to the realism of late-thirteenth-century sculpture, Dante highlights that the effigies carved on tombstones may bear the exact resemblances of the dead persons buried: ‘le tombe terragne / portan segnato quel ch’elli eran pria’ (Purg. xii, 17–18).Footnote 50 However, only those who recognise the souls (‘per la puntura de la rimembranza’; 20) truly feel renewed sorrow for their deaths. Similarly, the exempla of pride may provoke sorrow only in those readers who recognise in the exempla’s lives (and spiritual death) a sinful tendency of their own. As Pietro Alighieri comments, the twelve exempla display the tragic end of such pride, and so should move men to purge themselves of this vice and adhere to its curative virtue, humility.Footnote 51
Although it would be a forced reading to simply impose the prevailing scheme – of parallel exempla – onto these examples of pride, such an interpretation actually evolves naturally from the passage’s contextual background. Once again, Peraldus is important here. Of the twelve examples of pride that Dante gives as warnings to sinners, all six Scriptural exempla except for Nimrod (who replaces Adam) are found in the first seven examples listed by Peraldus: Lucifer, Adam, Saul, Rehoboam, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and Holofernes.Footnote 52 Whereas Peraldus’s list also includes exempla of pride who are nonetheless saved, such as Adam and St Peter, Dante chooses purely negative exempla from classical history and mythology: all Dante’s exempla came to a bad end (they are represented here, but inhabit Hell).Footnote 53 The structure of Dante’s list of exempla has puzzled critics, with many attempts being made to find a symmetry or organising principle.Footnote 54 It seems to me that Dante’s acrostic – the first four terzine begin with Vedea; the second quartet with O; the third with Mostrava – divides the list of twelve examples naturally into three groups of four.Footnote 55 The same acrostic technique in the following terzina (the three lines spell VOM) naturally makes of Troy a separate, paradigmatic example. Delcorno has provided a further contextual rationale based on Dominican preaching manuals for dividing the list of twelve into three groups of four.Footnote 56 Those scholars who have accepted this division have attempted to provide a theme, or aspect of pride, which might unify each group of exempla.Footnote 57 However, they have not considered whether Dante might have set these three groups of prideful exempla in counterpoint with the three exempla of humility. Given the acrostic, the preaching context, and these implicit thematic schema, it seems likely that Dante intended these cantos to be read in parallel.
The emblematic contrast between Lucifer, the first example of pride, and Mary, the first example of humility, is reinforced through the figures of Briareus, the giants, and Nimrod. Whereas Lucifer, who raised himself above the Creator (Inf. xxxiv, 35), descended from the noblest to the least (Purg. xii, 25–26), Mary, who became the humble vessel of the Creator, ascended from the least to the most noble (Par. xxxiii, 4–7).Footnote 58 In the works of Virgil, Statius, and Lucan, Briareus – a monstrous giant – presumes to challenge Jove, and Dante presents Jove as a pagan analogue to Lucifer.Footnote 59 Heard of but not seen among the giants guarding the pit of Cocytus, ‘lo smisurato Brïareo’ (Inf. xxxi, 98) prefigures the appearance of Lucifer at the Earth’s centre (Inf. xxxiv, 28–57). By extension, the mythical battle between the Roman gods and the giants depicted in Purgatory may represent analogically the cosmic battle between the good and the bad angels (Purg. xii, 31–33). It also prefigures the attempt of King Nimrod to build a tower to heaven. Dante underscores this syncretism by presenting Nimrod, the king of Babylon (Gen. 10. 9–10), as a giant (Inf. xxxi, 67–81). The pride of Lucifer and the angels in their cosmic battle with God, and man’s prideful attempt to resist the will of God, therefore, find their inverse parallel in the humility and subjection of Mary.Footnote 60 The drama of man’s mad attempt to become like God – to bridge the infinite gap between creature and Creator – is thus dramatized in the first quartet of examples.Footnote 61 The fact that all four examples date from before the coming of Christ highlights, once more, God’s humility at the Incarnation: it takes us back to the Annunciation, where Mary’s ‘AVE’ literally reverses, in a playful wordplay, the human pride of Eve (‘EVA’).Footnote 62
Whereas the first quartet of exempla directly rebel against God, the principal fault of the second group is indifference or impiety towards God. Nïobe, Saul, Arachne, and Rehoboam fail to recognise that their own excellences – in beauty and fertility, political power, artistic ability, and dynastic line, respectively – are dependent on God. Saul and Rehoboam, the two Scriptural exempla, clearly counterpoise King David, the second example of humility. Saul loses kingship of Israel to David because he ignored the word of God: ‘quia proiecisti sermonem Domini, proiecit te Deus ne sis rex super Israel’ (1 Samuel 15:24–26). Rehoboam is King David’s successor and loses the inheritance of Israel: ‘recessit Israel a domo David’ (2 Kings 12:10–11). Rehoboam’s dynastic pride serves to accentuate the disparity with his own life and actions: Dante scornfully highlights Rehoboam’s baseless fear as he flees without being pursued (Purg. xii, 46–48). Saul, by contrast, serves as a particular warning to souls at the beginning of their Christian life (just as his exemplum is introduced here in the first terrace of Dante’s Purgatory). When he was humble, Saul was made a king; when he became proud, he was ejected from his throne.Footnote 63 The mountain of Gilboa upon which Saul kills himself may be interpreted allegorically as the mountain of pride upon which the soul is damned.Footnote 64 In such allegorical readings, Saul is the Old Adam, David the New; Saul is the Synagoga, David is the Ecclesia.Footnote 65 Samuel’s words upbraiding Saul become, then, the words of a spiritual master to a backsliding Christian.Footnote 66 On this allegorical reading, Israel signifies a man seeing God; he who neglects to live the Gospel, by contrast, is banished from God’s face.Footnote 67
Whereas Saul and Rehoboam, in salvation history, counterpoise King David as just king of Israel, Nïobe and Arachne, from classical mythology, counterpoise King David as the humble cantor of the psalms. On account of her irreligion and impiety, Nïobe’s seven male and seven female offspring (the object of her presumptuous boasting) were annihilated by the goddess Latona’s two children (Apollo and Artemis).Footnote 68 Arachne, in her self-conceit, sets up her artistry against God, disowning its Divine origin. Both inversely mirror King David, the ‘umile salmista’, who, acknowledging his sin and unworthiness, becomes the mouthpiece of God.Footnote 69 By approaching these four examples as a group, the intended moral import of these stories on the reader also becomes clear. Ovid emphasises that Nïobe knew Arachne’s story and her fate, but she failed to imbibe the moral lesson. Now, the story of Arachne has become ‘true’ in her own life (Metamorphoses vi, 146–52). Similarly, Rehoboam failed to learn the appropriate moral lesson from Saul’s fate in the history of Israel. These failures of reading in the two Scriptural and the two pagan exempla reveal at the microlevel the danger for Dante’s readers if they do not relate the exempla to their own lives. Dante’s readers, like the people of Thebes after the annihilation of Nïobe’s children, must learn the moral lesson and be moved to religion and piety (Met. vi, 396–99).
The third quartet of exempla highlights the effect of an individual’s pride on society as a whole. The folly of vanity in corporeal beauty and possessions is embodied by the first sinner of Dante’s third group, Eriphyle, who betrayed her husband, sending him to a certain death, to gain a necklace intended for a goddess (‘lo sventurato addornamento’). Eriphyle’s vanity also causes, albeit indirectly, the Theban war, just as Helen’s vanity had led, ultimately, to the destruction of Troy. The contrast with Trajan is, in this context, striking: Trajan prefers the administration of justice on behalf of a poor widow to the vanity of Imperial pomp. Moreover, the widow who demands justice for her son’s death inverts the story of Eriphyle, whose son, avenging his father’s death, made his mother’s necklace truly dear (‘caro’) by taking her life (Purg. xii, 49–51).Footnote 70 The three Imperial and military leaders who follow – Sennacherib (king of Assyria), Cyrus (emperor of Persia), and Holofernes (Assyrian general) – also provide clear counter-examples to the just Emperor Trajan. Gregory the Great emphasises that a king’s pride leads to the destruction of his people.Footnote 71 A scourge of God’s providence (2 Kings 19:25), Sennacherib and his army are miraculously annihilated because of his presumption against the God of Israel. Just as Eriphyle’s betrayal led to the destruction of Thebes, so Sennacherib sought to destroy the city of Jerusalem. Also like Eriphyle (his pagan foil), Sennacherib is murdered by his sons.Footnote 72 The matricide of Eriphyle and the patricide of Sennacherib are immediately followed by the twin decapitations of Cyrus and Holofernes. Cyrus is another failed emperor: his conquests for Persia are presented as entirely bloodthirsty.Footnote 73 Most significantly, Cyrus’s savage decapitation serves as the pagan analogue to the decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes by the Jewish widow Judith.Footnote 74 Whereas Israel is saved from Sennacherib’s army by God’s direct intervention, Israel is saved from Holofernes by the virtue and courage of Judith.
The two outside enemies of Israel (Sennacherib and Holofernes) thus balance the two failed leaders of Israel (Saul and Rehoboam). The backdrop to these four Scriptural examples is, in other words, Jerusalem. This is particularly significant given the climax to the sequence of exempla, Troy:
Troy’s prideful fall leads to the foundation of the Roman imperium by Aeneas, whose arrival in Italy – in Dante’s syncretic view of global history – coincides with the birth of King David (Conv. iv, v, 6). The temporal power of Israel, however, is ultimately subjected to the Roman Empire because, in the Christian era, the true Jerusalem is in Heaven. The final image of the city of Troy in ashes and ruins is, therefore, also a pagan analogue for the earthly Jerusalem which – for its proud rejection of Christ and its continued belligerence against Rome – was destroyed by Titus (Par. vi, 82–93).Footnote 75
These parallels between the three ‘quartets’ of prideful examples and the three exempla of humility are striking and, in each case, illustrate both sides of the comparison. We better understand King David as a model of humility in kingship (Purg. x, 49–72) in relation to his predecessor Saul and successor Rehoboam, and as a model of humble artistry in relation to Nïobe and Arachne (Purg. xii, 37–48). The same is true for the counterpoint between Mary and Omberto, King David and Oderisi, and Trajan and Salvani. In this way, medieval preachers used exempla to articulate the true path of the Christian moral life, as well as the potential stumbling blocks along the way. Reading Purgatorio x–xii as a triptych does not just provide possible interpretative solutions to particular hermeneutic cruces in individual cantos, then. Instead, from the perspective of penitence, this ‘parallel reading’ illustrates how a sinner (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani were Dante’s near contemporaries) might reflect upon his or her own life in relation to models of virtue. Dante-character embodies this process for the reader, recognising aspects of his own pride through the lives of the three souls he encounters. As we see Dante adopting in Purgatory the role of a vernacular preacher against vice, it is clear that Dante does not intend that we, as readers, simply provide a detached theological reading of the terrace of pride. Rather, at every point in the narrative, Dante seeks to engage his readers directly, to provoke the prick of conscience that might lead to conversion. Auerbach was surely right, then, when he saw in the opening poem of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal an echo of Dante’s address to his reader as ‘hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’.Footnote 76
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