The Divine Comedy

by Dante Alighieri

  108. one brow was split by a sword wound: See also line 111: a great slash above his breast; Dante obviously intends the souls to be immaterial replicas of the last appearance of the mortal flesh. In future Cantos, however, he does not pursue this idea. See XXV, 34-108, note, for a discourse on the nature of aerial bodies.

  112. I am Manfred: Manfred, King of Sicily, was the legitimized natural son of Frederick II. He was born in Sicily in 1231 and was killed at the battle of Benevento after a defeat by Charles of Anjou in 1266. (See Inferno, XXVIII, 16, note.) He was famous as an Epicurean (see Inferno, X, 14, note) and for his taste for physical pleasures rather than for godliness. In the everlasting internal wars of Italy, Manfred often opposed the Papal States, but was too powerful to be excommunicated while alive. He was nevertheless disobedient to Mother Church and therefore must pass thirty times the period of his disobedience outside the cliff. He has served 24 years to date. Assuming that he was contumacious for half his life (17½ years), his total delay would amount to 525 years, if not shortened by prayer.

  112-113. grandson of the blessed Empress Constance: Constance was the mother of Frederick II. Since Manfred was not a legitimate son, he identifies himself by his grandmother as a delicate way of avoiding any reference to his illegitimacy.

  115. my sweet daughter: Also named Constance. She married Peter of Aragon and bore him three sons. One died before full manhood. Of the remaining two, Frederick became King of Sicily, and Iacapo succeeded his father to the throne of Aragon.

  118. My flesh had been twice hacked: At the battle of Benevento. After Manfred’s defeat and death, Charles of Anjou ordered that every soldier in his army file past the body of the dead Manfred and place a stone upon it. Thus a great cairn was erected to the memory of a fallen warrior.

  124. the pastor of Cosenza: Bartolommeo Pignatelli, cardinal and archbishop of Cosenza from 1254 to 1266. On orders from Pope Clement IV, he disinterred the body of Manfred and had it carried without honors (with quenched tapers) outside the kingdom of Naples, which was then a Papal State. Thus, Clement expelled from Church territory the body of the man he could not expel in life.

  131. the Verde: Various streams may be identified as the Verde. Dante clearly enough implies that Manfred’s body was carried out of the kingdom of Naples and deposited on the other side of a boundary-river.

  139. thirty times: There seems to be no identifiable significance to Dante’s choice of thirty (instead, say, of fifty, or a hundred, or any other multiple).

  Canto IV

  ANTE-PURGATORY:

  THE FIRST LEDGE

  The Late-Repentant

  Class Two: The Indolent

  Belacqua

  Listening to Manfred’s discourse, Dante has lost track of time. Now, at midmorning, the Poets reach the opening in the cliff-face and begin the laborious climb. Dante soon tires and cries that he can go no farther, but Virgil urges him to pull himself a little higher yet—significantly—to the LEDGE OF THE INDOLENT, those souls whose sin was their delay in pulling themselves up the same hard path.

  Seated on the ledge, Virgil explains that in the nature of the mountain, the beginning of the ascent (the First Turning from Sin to True Repentance) is always hardest. The higher one climbs from sin to repentance, the easier it becomes to climb still higher until, in the Perfection of Grace, the climb becomes effortless. But to that ultimate height, as Virgil knows, Human Reason cannot reach. It is Beatrice (Divine Love) who must guide him there.

  As Virgil finishes speaking, an ironic reply comes from behind a boulder. The speaker is BELACQUA, an old friend of Dante’s, and the laziest man in Florence. Because of his indolence, he put off good works and the active desire for grace until he lay dying. In life he made God wait. Now God makes him wait an equal period before he may pass through the Gate into Purgatory and begin his purification. Unless, as Belacqua adds, the prayers of the devout intercede for him.

  But now Virgil points out that the sun is already at its noon-height and that Dante, unlike the Indolent, must not delay.

  When any sense of ours records intense

  pleasure or pain, then the whole soul is drawn

  by such impressions into that one sense,

  and seems to lose all other powers. And thus

  do I refute the error that asserts

  that one soul on another burns in us.

  And, for this reason, when we see or hear

  whatever seizes strongly on the soul,

  time passes, and we lose it unaware.

  For that which senses is one faculty;

  and that which keeps the soul intact, another:

  the first, as it were, bound; the second, free.

  To this, my own experience bears witness,

  for while I listened to that soul and marveled,

  the sun had climbed—without my least awareness—

  to fifty full degrees of its noon peak

  when, at one point along the way, that band

  cried out in chorus: “Here is what you seek.”

  Often when grapes hang full on slope and ledge

  the peasant, with one forkful of his thorns,

  seals up a wider opening in his hedge

  than the gap we found there in that wall of stone;

  up which—leaving that band of souls behind—

  my Guide led and I followed: we two alone.

  Go up to San Leo or go down to Noli;

  go climb Bismantova—two legs suffice:

  here nothing but swift wings will answer wholly.

  The swift wings and the feathers, I mean to say,

  of great desire led onward by that Guide

  who was my hope and light along the way.

  Squeezed in between two walls that almost meet

  we labor upward through the riven rock:

  a climb that calls for both our hands and feet.

  Above the cliff’s last rise we reached in time

  an open slope. “Do we go right or left?”

  I asked my Master, “or do we still climb?”

  And he: “Take not one step to either side,

  but follow yet, and make way up the mountain

  till we meet someone who may serve as guide.”

  Higher than sight the peak soared to the sky:

  much steeper than a line drawn from mid-quadrant

  to the center, was the slope that met my eye.

  The climb had sapped my last strength when I cried:

  “Sweet Father, turn to me: unless you pause

  I shall be left here on the mountainside!”

  He pointed to a ledge a little ahead

  that wound around the whole face of the slope.

  “Pull yourself that much higher, my son,” he said.

  His words so spurred me that I forced myself

  to push on after him on hands and knees

  until at last my feet were on that shelf.

  There we sat, facing eastward, to survey

  the trail we had just climbed; for oftentimes

  a backward look comforts one on the way.

  I looked down first to the low-lying shore,

  then upward to the sun—and stopped amazed,

  for it was from the left its arrows bore.

  Virgil was quick to note the start I gave

  when I beheld the Chariot of the Sun

  driven between me and the North Wind’s cave.

  “Were Castor and Pollux,” he said, “in company

  of that bright mirror which sends forth its rays

  equally up and down, then you would see

  the twelve-toothed cogwheel of the Zodiac

  turned till it blazed still closer to the Bears

  —unless it were to stray from its fixed track.

  If you wish to understand why this is so,

  imagine Zion and this Mount so placed

  on earth, the one above, the other below,

  that the two have one horizon though they lie

  in diffe
rent hemispheres. Therefore, the path

  that Phaëthon could not follow in the sky

  must necessarily, in passing here

  on the one side, pass there upon the other,

  as your own reasoning will have made clear.”

  And I then: “Master, I may truly vow

  I never grasped so well the very point

  on which my wits were most astray just now:

  that the mid-circle of the highest Heaven,

  called the Equator, always lies between

  the sun and winter, and, for the reason given,

  lies as far north of this place at all times

  as the Hebrews, when they held Jerusalem,

  were wont to see it toward the warmer climes.

  But—if you please—I should be glad to know

  how far we have yet to climb, for the peak soars

  higher to Heaven than my eye can go.”

  And he: “Such is this Mount that when a soul

  begins the lower slopes it most must labor;

  then less and less the more it nears its goal.

  Thus when we reach the point where the slopes seem

  so smooth and gentle that the climb becomes

  as easy as to float a skiff downstream,

  then will this road be run, and not before

  that journey’s end will your repose be found.

  I know this much for truth and say no more.”

  His words were hardly out when, from nearby,

  we heard a voice say: “Maybe by that time

  you’ll find you need to sit before you fly!”

  We turned together at the sound, and there,

  close on our left, we saw a massive boulder

  of which, till then, we had not been aware.

  To it we dragged ourselves, and there we found

  stretched in the shade, the way a slovenly man

  lies down to rest, some people on the ground.

  The weariest of them, judging by his pose,

  sat hugging both knees while his head, abandoned,

  dropped down between them halfway to his toes.

  “Master,” I said, “look at that sorry one

  who seems so all-let-down. Were Sloth herself

  his sister, he could not be so far gone!”

  That heap took heed, and even turned his head

  upon his thigh—enough to look at us.

  “You climb it if you’re such a flash,” he said.

  I knew him then, and all the agony

  that still burned in my lungs and raced my pulse

  did not prevent my going to him. He

  raising his head—just barely—when I stood by,

  drawled: “So you really know now why the sun

  steers to the left of you across the sky?”

  His short words and his shorter acts, combined,

  made me half smile as I replied: “Belacqua,

  your fate need never again trouble my mind.

  Praise be for that. But why do you remain

  crouched here? Are you waiting for a guide, perhaps?

  Or are you up to your old tricks again?”

  “Old friend,” he said, “what good is it to climb?—

  God’s Bird above the Gate would never let me

  pass through to start my trials before my time.

  I must wait here until the heavens wheel past

  as many times as they passed me in my life,

  for I delayed the good sighs till the last.

  Prayer could help me, if a heart God’s love

  has filled with Grace should offer it. All other

  is worthless, for it is not heard above.”

  But now the Poet already led the way

  to the slope above, saying to me: “Come now:

  the sun has touched the very peak of day

  above the sea, and night already stands

  with one black foot upon Morocco’s sands.”

  NOTES

  1-12. THE DOCTRINE OF MULTIPLE SOULS. The original doctrine (the “error” of line 5) was set forth by Plato, who claimed that we have three souls within us, each with its specific function: the Vegetative Soul (roughly corresponding to what we might call the Somatic) which is seated in the liver, the Sensitive (i.e., the Emotional) Soul which is seated in the heart, and the Intellectual Soul which is seated in the brain. Dante’s emphatic concern over this point is easy enough to understand. Plato was, for him, one of the fundamental sources of the truth. Yet here, Plato was putting forth a doctrine impossible to reconcile with the Christian doctrine of the unity of the soul. (If there are several souls in a man, how shall one judgment fit them all?) Aristotle (see XXV, 52 ff.), the Church Fathers, Aquinas, and many others also found it necessary to repudiate or to modify this Platonic doctrine. The fact that Dante had seen himself as a follower of Plato in the Vita Nuova is one more evidence that the Purgatorio is intended, among other things, as a progress of the soul. Dante is correcting his earlier errors and turning his mind to greater sources.

  16. to fifty full degrees of its noon peak: Since one degree of arc equals four minutes of time, the Sun, therefore, traverses fifteen degrees an hour. It is, therefore, three hours and twenty minutes since sunrise, at which time (Canto II) Dante saw the Angel Pilot bring in his cargo of souls. On Easter in the year 1300 the Sun rose a little before 6:00. It is now, therefore, a little after 9:00 A.M.

  25-26. San Leo: An almost inaccessible town on a mountaintop near San Marino. Noli: a seacoast town accessible (in Dante’s time) only from the sea or by treacherously steep steps cut into the cliffs behind the town. Bismantova: a village on a mountain of the same name about twenty miles south of Reggio Emilia. Dante selects three places that his contemporaries would recognize as most difficult to get to, and then says in effect that the climb to them is nothing as compared to the labor of climbing Purgatory.

  30. light: The narrowness of the fissure would make it dark. Virgil’s allegorical character as Human Reason is especially important in this context.

  33. a climb that calls for both our hands and feet: Dante uses this same figure in describing the path that led up from the Bolgia of the Thieves (Inferno, XXVI, 18): “the foot could make no way without the hand.”

  37 ff. Take not one step to either side: The original contains an ambiguity that has led many commentators to understand Virgil as saying “Take not one backward step,” that being the law of the mountain. In context, however, such a rendering seems doubtful. Dante had no least thought of taking a backward step. He has asked, “Do we go right or left,” and Virgil replies, logically, “no least step to either side but upward only.” See also Isaiah, xxx, 21, and Joshua, i, 7.

  41-42. a line drawn from mid-quadrant to the center: of an astrolabe. Hence 45°. Note, however, that the slope is “much steeper” than 45°.

  50-51. my feet were on that shelf: (Literally: “the shelf was under my feet.”) Dante says nothing to explain why a man climbing on “hands and knees” (Italian: carpando) to a ledge above him would not simply crawl onto it (especially if near exhaustion) instead of first standing on it and then sitting down. He might, perhaps, have meant that he crawled onto the ledge, then sat with his knees drawn up so that the ledge was under his feet. Perhaps.

  55-75. THE POSITION OF THE SUN: Dante, habituated to the phenomena of the Northern Hemisphere, is astonished to find that the Sun is on his left (i.e., north) when he faces east. Virgil points out that there is nothing surprising in that, and that as the Sun moves toward the summer solstice it will move even further north (toward “the Bears” of line 65, i.e., Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Big and the Little Dipper) into the zodiacal sign of Gemini, the Twins (i.e., Castor and Pollux). Unless, he adds with something like humor, it should depart from its fixed track.

  Virgil then goes on to a more detailed statement of the case. He asks Dante to visualize the globe with the Mount of Zion and the Mount of Purgatory so placed that they are in different hemispheres but s
hare the same celestial horizon. They are, therefore, antipodal, and since the Sun must pass between them, it follows that when it is on one side of one it must be on the other side of the other, i.e., Zion must always be north of the Sun and Purgatory must always be south of it. Since the two places are antipodal, moreover, the celestial equator is always as far south of one as it is north of the other.

  60. the North Wind’s cave: Aquilon, the North Wind, rules the compass from NW to NE, i.e., for 45° on either side of the North Pole.