Purgatory

Purgatorio is the second canticle of Dante Alighieri's Commedia, a poem of thirty-three cantos in terza rima (plus an introductory canto) composed in Italian during the years of his exile from Florence. Dante had been banished in 1302 after the political upheavals that destroyed his civic career, and he wrote the poem away from his native city, completing the Inferno first and the Purgatorio in the decade that followed. Where the Inferno depicts souls fixed forever in their sin, the second canticle takes up a harder subject to dramatize: souls who are saved and still unfinished, climbing a mountain in the southern hemisphere toward the earthly paradise at its summit.

The poem's central move is to treat the seven capital sins as distorted loves rather than as a list of prohibited acts. In the middle cantos, Virgil explains that love is the seed of every virtue and every vice, so that pride, envy and wrath are love aimed at the wrong object, sloth is love grown slack, and avarice, gluttony and lust are love pursued to excess. Purgation is accordingly not punishment but re-ordering. On each terrace the penitents undergo a discipline fitted to the sin being undone, meditate on examples of the contrary virtue, and are freed to climb only when the will itself has changed, which Dante marks by an earthquake and a chorus of praise. The mountain rewards slow reading in this way: its prayers, its liturgical singing, its insistence that souls help one another through intercession, and its steady attention to repentance as a shared and ongoing labor.

The canticle reaches its crisis at the summit, where Virgil, who stands for reason and cannot go further, withdraws, and Beatrice appears to confront Dante with his own failures before he is washed in the rivers Lethe and Eunoë. The scene is notable for refusing easy consolation: confession, shame and forgiveness are drawn out as separate stages. The poem has continued to matter because it takes seriously what most spiritual writing passes over, the long middle between conversion and completion, and because it locates holiness in the education of desire rather than in the suppression of it. It has shaped Christian thinking about purgatory, penance and the moral imagination for seven centuries.

Who should read this: readers who want a sustained, imaginative account of how disordered love is healed, and who are willing to read slowly, with notes, in a good translation, ideally after the Inferno. It is well suited to anyone engaged in confession, spiritual direction or the study of the virtues. It is not for readers seeking a quick devotional supplement or a systematic treatise on doctrine, since its argument unfolds through image, allusion and the politics and personalities of Dante's own world.