The Harmony of Faith and Reason: When Sight Ends and Vision Begins
(Purgatorio, Canto III): Dante's widened attention, Manfred and Virgil's powers
“Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
Welcome to Dante Read-Along! ✨
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Welcome to Dante Book Club, where you and I descend into Hell and Purgatory to be able to ascend to Paradise. Our guide is the great Roman poet Virgil and in this Third Canto of the Purgatorio, we meet the Late Repentant and the Excommunicated. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, the list of characters here (coming soon), and the list of chat threads here.
In each post you can find a brief summary of the canto, philosophical exercises that you can draw from it, themes, character, and symbolism explanations.
All the wonderful illustrations are done specially for the Dante Read-Along by the one and only Luana Montebello.
This Week’s Circle ⭕️
The crowd of souls scatter after Cato’s words - Virgil’s remorse - The wall of Mount Purgatory - The nature of the shades and shadows - The limits of human reason in comprehending the mysteries of the Infinite - The unity of the shades in Purgatory, the innocence of sheep - Manfred, late repentance, and the excommunicated.
Canto III Summary:
The group of newly arrived souls that had been entranced, along with Dante and Virgil, with the song of Casella, scatter before Cato’s call to action. They are goaded toward enacting Divine Justice, which they undergo gladly, unlike those who suffer torment in payment for the same justice in Hell.
Dante drew close to Virgil, so that they could begin to look for the path up the mountain, but saw a sight that had not yet met his eyes on this journey;
He seemed like one who’s stung by self-reproof;
O pure and noble conscience, you in whom
each petty fault becomes a harsh rebuke!
And when his feet had left off hurrying—
for haste denies all acts their dignity—
my mind, which was—before—too focused, grew
more curious and widened its attention;
I set my vision toward the slope that rises
most steeply, up to heaven from the sea.
iii.7-15
Virgil’s remorse stems from his awareness of having been rebuked by Cato for lingering; fitting, that it would be another Roman like himself who brought that dalliance to his attention. How many times in the Inferno did Virgil urge Dante on,1 and now he finds that he has also lingered, losing sight of their movement forward?
Virgil himself has moved quickly away. He subdues his haste; he recovers his natural dignity, but for a moment we have seen Virgil startled…it will not do to think of Virgil as apt to be flustered, but even he for once can forget. The difference between him and Dante is that the Florentine is delayed by the obscenity of hell, the Roman only by the song of love in the island of Purgatory; yet for that his self-reproach is as deep as Dante’s had been, and Dante says, as Virgil had said, ‘how little the fault!’2
Virgil regained his dignity quickly, regaining that stature that exemplified those souls in Limbo from which he had come, in such contrast to the wild, scattered movement of so many of the souls that they had met in the Inferno, from those running on the burning sands of the blasphemers, to those blindly following the standard flag in Hell’s vestibule, or the lustful, being blown by stormy winds.
The people here had eyes both grave and slow;
their features carried great authority;
they spoke infrequently, with gentle voices.
Inferno iv.112-14
Dante too, turned his mind from Casella’s song and Cato’s rebuke to shift his focus to the task at hand, the towering mountain of Purgatory, the same mountain that Ulysses and his crew had spied on their fateful journey past the straits of Gibraltar.
When there before us rose a mountain, dark
because of distance, and it seemed to me
the highest mountain I had ever seen.
Inferno xxi.133-35
As Dante looked, he saw his shadow on the ground before him; a new sight, as in Hell, without sunlight, others had noticed his corporality through his breathing, his heaviness, but never through his shadow. Yet there was only one; Dante was seized with fear that Virgil had abandoned him. Virgil reassures him that he is not alone, and makes reference to his earthly body in its place of burial, where the sun is setting, as in Purgatory it is rising.
Virgil died at Brundisium…a town on the Adriatic, in Apulia, on his return from Greece, September 21, 19B.C. The reference here is to the transference of his body from Brindisi to Naples by order of Augustus, and perhaps to the epitaph quoted by Suetonius: ‘Mantua gave me the light, Calabria slew me; Parthenope now holds me. I have sung shepherds, the countryside, and wars.’3
As Virgil continues his speech, he makes a curious comparison to his diaphanous body, which casts no shadow, to that of the spheres of the heavens, which are also transparent:
Thus, if no shadow falls in front of me,
do not be more amazed than when you see
the heavens not impede each other’s rays.
iii.28-30
Here he is not referencing the heavenly bodies themselves, such as the planets or stars, but the very celestial spheres within which these bodies rotate. Not only were these spheres transparent, but also the rays of the planets as they shone down:
I say then that this spirit comes upon the “rays of the star,” because you are to know that the rays of each heaven are the path whereby their virtue descends upon things that are here below. And inasmuch as rays are no other than the shining which cometh from the source of the light through the air even to the thing enlightened, and the light is only in that part where the star is, because the rest of the heaven is diaphanous, I say not that this “spirit,” to wit, this thought, cometh from their heaven in its totality but from their star.
Dante Convivio II vi 9
Virgil begins to describe more qualities of these diaphanous shades, such as their sensitivity to pain and heat, all the while being transparent and without solid form. It is a mystery that the limits of human Reason cannot comprehend, just as the intellect cannot comprehend the great Infinite which embodies the mysteries of the Trinity; he urges Dante to be satisfied with the manifested effect which he can comprehend, the quia; the cause of which he says is unknown to mankind, but was satisfied with Christ’s birth.
Confine yourselves, o humans, to the quia;
had you been able to see all, there would
have been no need for Mary to give birth.
you saw the fruitless longing of those men
who would-if reason could-have been content,
those whose desire eternally laments:
I speak of Aristotle and of Plato -
and many others” Here he bent his head
and said no more, remaining with his sorrow.
iii.37-45
Here the exposition of the Christian belief of atonement is set forth, with Christ as the representative of the fulfillment of the longing of souls, contrasted by the unfulfilled longing of the wise souls in Limbo:
We now are lost and punished just with this:
we have no hope and yet we live in longing.
Inferno iv.41-42
According to this doctrine, had they known this fulfillment in Christ and had had those hopes satisfied, then they would have been taken from Limbo with the Patriarchs and had hope of redemption.
With this meditation, they return to the task before them; they find themselves at the foot of the impossibly tall Mount, as steep and foreboding as the coast between the village of Turbia and the fortified town of Lerici in northwestern Italy. Virgil wonders aloud where they should begin their ascent. Dante sees a group of souls in the distance walking ever so slowly, and Virgil, relieved at the hope of assistance, moves to ask them the way.
These are the late-repentant and excommunicated, those whose placement is at the very base of the Mount; they are not yet even in Purgatory proper, but in Ante Purgatory, a sort of vestibule which must be traversed before being able to enter Purgatory itself.
Though they were still far off, upon seeing Dante and Virgil the group crowded together in fear and disbelief; this is not fear of them per se, but according to the commentators, the fear is due to seeing them moving in the wrong direction. All movement in Purgatory, as we shall see, is in a counterclockwise direction up the Mount.
Virgil addresses them and refers to them as “chosen souls, you who have ended well” (73), referring to their repentance at the moment of death; even if they did not live virtuously during their lives, they saw the light at the end, and the truth of that in their hearts earned them this place in Purgatory. Virgil asks them where to begin the path, as he is now eager to begin, still with that rebuke of Cato in mind.
Even as sheep that move, first one, then two,
then three, out of the fold—the others also
stand, eyes and muzzles lowered, timidly;
and what the first sheep does, the others do,
and if it halts, they huddle close behind,
simple and quiet and not knowing why:
So, then, I saw those spirits in the front
of that flock favored by good fortune move—
their looks were modest; seemly, slow, their walk.
iii.79-87
These souls were like sheep with no shepherd; not sheep of blind ignorance, but “gentle and simple creatures, trusting yet timid, moving as a group, in a concord and humility.”4 This well known simile shows the unity of the souls here in Purgatory, similar to the way those arriving on the boat sang in unison; this harmony prevails, compared to the discord of opposition found in Hell.
Virgil eases them by explaining Dante’s corporeal state, and that his presence is sanctioned by Heaven; he asks that they should lead the way. One soul spoke out, asking for Dante’s recognition, and offered a sight that Dante had never seen in Hell before identifying himself—a smile.
He is Manfred, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and grandson of the Empress Constance. He begs Dante, upon his return to Earth, to let his daughter—also named Constance—know that he repented at the moment of death, and was in Purgatory, not in Hell as she may fear.
Whatever need drives a sinner to penitence, neither the number of his sins nor the scandal of his life nor the depth to which he has fallen will exclude him from forgiveness if only there be a complete change of his will; but God receives into the ample bosom of His love His prodigal sons who turn back to Him.
Bonaventure, Sermones de Tempore
He admits to his terrible sins during life, chronicled by Brunetto Latini to include the murder of his father and brother, and murdering two—and attempting to murder a third—of his nephews.
Manfred became king of Sicily after serving as Regent for both his half-brother Conrad IV and of his nephew, Conradin, leaving Manfred the next in succession after their deaths. However, being both an infidel (Manfred was said to have been an Epicurean) and a Ghibellene, he was excommunicated. He died in battle, defending his land and titles, against Charles of Anjou, who was given them after Manfred’s excommunication.
He was a handsome man, but just as dissolute as his father, or even more. He played music and sang, and liked to see jugglers, courtiers, and beautiful concubines around him. Manfred always dressed in green. He was generous, courteous, and debonair, so that he was much loved and enjoyed great favor. But his whole life was Epicurean; he cared neither for God nor for the saints, but only for the delights of the flesh. He was an enemy of the Holy Church, of priests, and of monks.
Villani Cronica VI.46
To the request of some of his followers that Manfred’s body should receive honorable burial, Charles replied that he would willingly have granted it, had Manfred not been excommunicated. For this reason he would not have him laid in consecrated ground, but caused him to be buried at the foot of a bridge over the Calore. Upon his grave was made a great pile of stones, each one of the army throwing one upon it as he passed. Subsequently, it is said by command of Clement IV, the archbishop of Cosenza caused the body to be disinterred from its resting place in Church territory and had it cast unburied upon the banks of the river Verde, outside the limits of the kingdom.5
This sets the stage for a theological exposition on the nature of repentance, excommunication, and the authority of the church in matters of the heart, which they, even with their authority, could not possibly know.
Excommunication denied one of participating in the sacraments, crucial practices for medieval Christianity; partaking of them faithfully with the right spirit ensured the merit necessary to earn placement in Purgatory or even in Paradise. Proper burial, while not a sacrament, was also important; for Manfred to be left to the open air was a violation. We are reminded of the body of Palinuris, in the Aeneid, which had to be buried properly before Aeneas could take his journey into the Underworld. It was left to the elements much as Manfred’s was.
Despite the Church’s curse, there is no one
so lost that the eternal love cannot
return - as long as hope shows something green.
But it is true that anyone who dies
in contumacy of the Holy Church,
though he repented at the end, must wait
along this shore for thirty times the span
he spent in his presumptuousness, unless
that edict is abridged through fitting prayers.
iii.133-141
That shore, where the penitent must wait for thirty times the number of years that they were unrepentant before advancing up the Mount, is the very place upon which they stand; Ante Purgatory. The fitting prayers of those still living, prayers said to hasten the souls of the dead toward Paradise, bring them merit, and hasten their journey. This is why Manfred twice asks Dante to encourage his daughter Constance to say prayers for him, to help him advance along the way more quickly.
Hence the suffrages of the living profit the dead in two ways even as they profit the living, both on account of the bond of charity and on account of the intention being directed to them. Nevertheless, we must not believe that the suffrages of the living profit them so as to change their state from unhappiness to happiness or vice versa; but they avail for the diminution of punishment or something of the kind that involves no change in the state of the dead.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III, q.71 a.2
💭 Philosophical Exercises
“Anxiety is freedom’s possibility; this anxiety alone is, through faith, absolutely formative, since it consumes all finite ends, discovers all their deceptions.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
We seem to be obsessed with human remains, especially, when they belong to geniuses or saints. In 828 AD, two Venetian merchants were tasked with smuggling the body of St. Mark from Alexandria, Egypt, which had fallen under Muslim rule. Fearing desecration by the new authorities, the merchants - Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello - hid the saint’s body beneath layers of pork and vegetables to avoid inspection. They safely transported the sacred remains to their native Venice.
The body of Thomas Aquinas also had a strange fate. He was buried multiple times and in different locations. Initially, Cistercian monks, fearing that other orders might attempt to steal the saint’s remains, buried different parts of his body in various locations within the monastery. Aquinas was one of the most prominent scholars of his time, a true genius, and possessing his remains was believed to emit a kind of sacred or magical influence on the surrounding environment. Losing it therefore would mean losing its divine powers as well.
In March 1564, Cosimo de’ Medici, patron of Michelangelo, ordered a secret and clandestine operation to steal the great sculptor’s body from Rome, where he had died, and return it to Florence. According to rumour, the remains arrived under the cover of night, and the man tasked with verifying Michelangelo’s identity was astonished to find that, though the artist had been dead for some time, his body showed no signs of decay and even seemed to emit a radiant light.
Approximately a millennium and a half before Michelangelo, a medieval legend tells that Saint Paul, during his travels, visited Virgil’s tomb and wept. Virgil had died only fifteen years before the birth of Christ, and in Christian tradition, he was believed to have foretold Christ’s coming in his poetry. In his fourth Eclogue, Virgil wrote:
"Now is come the last age of the Cumaean prophecy:
The great cycle of periods is born anew.
Now returns the Maid, returns the reign of Saturn:
Now from high heaven a new generation comes down.
Yet do thou at that boy's birth,
In whom the iron race shall begin to cease,
And the golden to arise over all the world,
Holy Lucina, be gracious; now thine own Apollo reigns."
Saint Paul wept, perhaps, because Virgil was believed to have reached the highest and most inscrutable limits of wisdom and intelligence that a mortal could attain and yet, if fate had been kinder, the great poet might have witnessed salvation. He might have seen the dawn of the new age and found redemption.
In some ways, this legend echoes the story of Julius Caesar standing before the statue of Alexander the Great and weeping. When asked why he shed tears, Caesar replied that by the age of thirty-three, Alexander had conquered the known world, while he, Caesar, had achieved nothing comparable.
Caesar, as history tells us, had a grand and unforgettable fate ahead of him. Virgil, by contrast, was seen as less fortunate. As Kierkegaard put it, “Reason can lead one to the threshold of belief.” Virgil reached that very threshold but since the Divine Truth had not yet been revealed, he stood before the gate without the possibility of stepping through.
But, what does that ‘stepping through’ mean? Does faith mean just accepting supernatural scientifically implausible events without evidence?
As Christopher Hitchens, one of the most articulate atheists, would say: ‘What can be asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence.’
In his ‘A Time to Keep Silence’ Patrick Leigh Fermor notes that:
It is only since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that the Christian West made “belief”—the acceptance of certain creedal propositions—“the first postulate” of religious life.
In the West, we have developed a culture that is rational, scientific, and pragmatic; we feel obliged to satisfy ourselves that a proposition is true before we base our lives upon it, and to establish a principle to our satisfaction before we apply it.
In the premodern period, however, in all the major world faiths, the main emphasis was not on belief but on behavior. First, you changed your lifestyle and only then could you experience God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Dao as a living reality.
In this beautiful worldview, faith is not the acceptance of dogma or blind submission to authority. It is not the imprisonment of the mind within a closed system of thought. Rather, faith is about transforming one’s attitude toward life, it is about changing one’s behaviour, one’s way of being.
Here, faith and reason are not in conflict but in harmony. They sustain and deepen one another. As Boethius, who was himself a Christian thinker profoundly shaped by classical philosophy, reminds us, wherever possible, one must unite faith with reason.
In Purgatorio, Dante is no longer a mere observer but an active participant. While Virgil is dwelling on his mistakes and blindness, Dante at the start of this canto:
I drew in closer to my true companion.
For how could I have run ahead without him?
Who could have helped me as I climbed the mountain?He seemed like one who’s stung by self—reproof;
o pure and noble conscience, you in whom
each petty fault becomes a harsh rebuke!And when his feet had left off hurrying—
for haste denies all acts their dignity—
my mind, which was—before—too focused, grewmore curious and widened its attention;
I set my vision toward the slope that rises
most steeply, up to heaven from the sea.
“My mind, which before was too focused…” — the purpose of our reason is to narrow our attention. Virgil rebukes himself for becoming overly absorbed in Casella’s song, yet it is in the very nature of reason to become captivated by things that are often beautiful, yet ultimately useless.
Meanwhile, Dante reveals a mind-blowing aspect of his psyche, of our psyche, for he says that his mind now “widened its attention.” I wish I had more space to explore this profound dimension of consciousness, which today is being examined by modern neuroscience, including thinkers like Iain McGilchrist.
What does this ‘widened attention’ mean? What exactly is happening to Dante and how can we apply that to our life? What is the philosophical exercise here?
Before, Reason dominated Dante’s mind and served as his sole guide. After all, the entire journey through the Inferno was precisely about restoring Reason to consciousness; refining it, sharpening its ability to discern between good and evil, between what is acceptable and what is not.
At the beginning of the third canto of Purgatorio, however, Dante looks around and sees his own shadow, but not Virgil’s, and becomes afraid that Reason has abandoned him. In truth, Reason is still present, but it has now taken a step back. Reason is still his guide, and Virgil will take him till the end of Purgatory, but Virgil (Reason), as C.G. Jung would say, is integrated in Dante.
(More on Manfred and how our mind likes to hurry in the Themes section below)
This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭
(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)
I. Dante’s Mind Hurries
Virgil and Dante rush toward the souls they see above, but the souls are surprised for the two companions move at a pace unlike their own. In Purgatory, every soul moves slowly, reverently, thoughtfully. There is rhythm in their penance.
I found this detail particularly insightful. Sometimes my own mind resembles a fly trapped in a glass, darting left and right, up and down, frantic in its attempt to find a way out. This, I believe, is a sign of a restless or an ill mind. In contrast, the souls in Purgatory move with deliberate slowness. Their pace allows space for reflection for recognising past errors, and for the patient work of transformation.
II. Manfred: How those who are alive influence the fate of the dead
For Dante, individual soul is directly connected to the Divine justice. Tolstoy was influenced by this as well but that is a whole other conversation. Manfred was not supposed to be saved, for he was excommunicated by the Church. He repented as he died, and by placing Manfred in Purgatorio, Dante says that true transformation of a soul will always be recognised by God.
This canto ends on these verses which I believe reveal the connection between the world of living and the world of the dead:
But it is true that anyone who dies
in contumacy of the Holy Church,
though he repented at the end, must waitalong this shore for thirty times the span
he spent in his presumptuousness, unless
that edict is abridged through fitting prayers.Now see if you, by making known to my
kind Constance where you saw my soul and why
delay’s decreed for me, can make me happy;those here—through those beyond— advance more quickly.”
A sin is not a mere violation of a dogma told by a rigid authority, sin causes harm to the humanity as a whole. There are two ways to reach salvation, the first and the most important one is personal repentance (as Manfred), but also by forgiveness of your mistakes by those who are alive and were impacted.
Quotes 🖋️
(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):
I loved many parts of this canto. One of them I have already quoted above, where Dante praises Virgil and reminds us of his help. In this part, so I do not repeat myself, I would love to quote Hollander’s translations of lines 34-36:
Foolish is he who hopes that with our reason
we can trace the infinite path
taken by one Substance in three Persons
See Inf XXX.130-133, where Dante was rebuked by Virgil for lingering to listen to the arguments between Master Adam the coiner, and Sinon the liar, those falsifiers of words in the tenth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell.
Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice 151
Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on the Purgatorio 45
Singleton 53
Singleton 57-58