Purgatory: Canto 22 -- The Sixth Cornice, The Whip of the Gluttons

"Blessed are those who thirst after righteousness."

Having lost my post earlier this morning, I briefly felt that I was back in the dark wood of error from which Virgil rescued Dante. Having resumed my place on the cornice of the avaricious, following Dante, Virgil, and Statius to the cornice of the gluttonous, I find once again the true way, and I take from it an allegory of the progress of the soul. In spite of the fact that Statius was born into a pagan world that had already been shown the light of Christ, by 96 A.D., that pagan world was experiencing an upheaval in missionary activity and governmental persecutions of those professing the new faith. That a large number of people continued to go to Limbo, Juvenal among them, even though he died three decades or so after Statius, is evidence of the fact that Limbo can continue to collect those who, though exposed to the teachings of Christ, maintained solidarity with their nascent cultures and did not turn to them. For no other sin is Juvenal, like Virgil, condemned, though we learn from Statius that had he remained a pagan, he would have descended to the circle of the avaricious for his prodigality, denied both the light of reason and the justification of Christ -- such is the pernicious nature of sin.



As for the progress of the soul, let's invest a moment learning from Statius. Statius says that Virgil saved him twice -- both of which kept him out of the 4th circle of hell where the hoarders and wasters crash rocks against one another. In the first case, he read the lines of Virgil's Aeneid, "To what do you not drive man's appetite/ O cursed gold-lust!" and "understood then that our hands could spread/ their wings too wide in spending, and repented/ of that, and all my sins, in grief and dread" (40-5). Once he understood how to engage in right actions and avoid wrong ones, he could have set himself upon the path to Limbo had it not been for that fourth eclogue. Even though Virgil was not referring to Christ in that eclogue (though it was widely believed that he had been), Statius read into it a portent of the missionary teaching at the time and noticed that a lot of these Christians were being persecuted and martyred for their beliefs. His conversion, then, came through the blood of those martyrs whom he tried to save and who baptized him in the name of Christ. He had no wish to offer himself to martyrdom, though, and paid for it on the cornice of sloth.

At this point in their travels, the trio have made it to the next ledge and are accosted by the whip of gluttony in the form of the tree of forbidden fruit. The implication of this ledge is unlike any other on which we have traveled, for the fruit represents a temptation that none of the other ledges have offered to their penitents. Not on the ledge of pride, or on the ledges of envy, wrath, sloth, or avarice were the penitent offered that which would tempt their sojourn. While we don't, as Fr. Earl has pointed out, actually see any of the gluttonous here, we might infer from the fact that the tree is too tapered (in the wrong direction) to climb that there is no chance that the penitent will have any access to the fruit with which it is endowed. One wonders, though, whether apples don't drop . . .

As a postlude to this post, I wanted to bring in some of the materials from the outside readings, especially from our La Vita Nuova cantos since Dante is praising Beatrice in terms he might also have reserved for Mary, Regina Coelis. He writes of Beatrice in canto 26,

"Such sweet decorum and such gentle grace attend my lady's greeting as she moves that lips can only tremble into silence, and eyes dare not attempt to gaze at her.

Moving, benignly clothed in humility, untouched by all the praise along her way, she seems to be a creature come from Heaven to earth, to manifest a miracle." (5-6)

That we should stumble across this at the same time we see the tree of gluttony is useful, for it gives us pause to reflect on our first mother, Eve, who succumbed to temptation, though also immaculately created, and was the first image of God to, like Pandora, bring sin into the world -- a felix culpa that would require her daughter Mary to resolve. That we also look to Mary not only as penitents, but also as itinerants, we, with Dante in canto 27, might exclaim, "Then Love starts working in me with such power he turns my spirits into ranting beggars, and, rushing out, they call upon my lady, pleading in vain for kindness" (4). As Catholics in pursuit of the beatific (rather than beatrice-tic) vision, we know we do not plead in vain. Our creations are meaningful and natural impulses toward God in response to our environment with the charisms given us. For what else might we call art? Every artistic endeavor is a use of that gift, a calling upon Our Lady, a pleading of our soul for our birthright as children of God (even if we don't know it or lose sight of it -- like Cavalcanti or Od'risi). If we add to Pope's advice when he writes in the fourth stanza of his third epistle,

Yet go! and thus o'er all the creatures sway,
Thus let the wiser make the rest obey;
And, for those arts mere instinct could afford,
Be crowned as monarchs, or as gods adored."

the idea that God is author of us, then each of us, like St. Dominic Savio, becomes a saint, sharing our charisms with others as a mirror to reflect his light and a lamp to illuminate through the light of Christ that shines within us the world we call our home. No one, Pius X taught us during St. Dominic Savio's canonization, is unworthy of becoming the saint that we're all called to be.

S.