I said to the almond tree, 'Friend, speak to me of God,' and the almond tree blossomed.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
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 Twenty sixth Canto of the Purgatorio, they encounter the souls on the terrace of the Lustful. You can find the main page of the read-along right here, reading schedule here, 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 seventh terrace of the Lustful - Encased in flame - Dante’s corporeal shadow - Two groups of souls running in opposite directions - Sodom & Gomorrah, Pasiphaë - Guido Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel.
Canto XXVI Summary:
Dante, Virgil, and Statius walked along the edge of the seventh terrace of Lust, cautiously, between the wall of flame on their left and the windy precipice on their right. As the sun shone on Dante, the colors of the sky were changing with the late afternoon light.
Dante, facing south-southwest, has the sun on his right in the later afternoon. It is now about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., since the sun strikes Dante from the side, which means that it is fairly low in the sky; the azure of the western sky is turned pale by the light. The travelers have thus taken a good long while to climb up from the sixth circle, since it was only 2:00 p.m. when they began the ascent.1
Dante’s shadow cast on the flame caused the spirits within to wonder at his living body. As much as they desired to see him up close, so invested were they in their purgation that they dared not even step out of the cleansing flame to satisfy their curiosity. This common occurrence is one that we have witnessed on every single terrace:2
They would not for one single instant interrupt their penance. It must be noticed that in Purgatory the spirits not only submit willingly to the chastisement imposed upon them, but they actually love it.3
A voice came to Dante through the flame, courteously asking him to stop and speak with them, those of the fire whose thirst was greater than any of the hottest lands, and explain his living state. This was the voice of Guido Guinizelli, poet, of the Ghibelline political party of Florence, and father of the dolce stil nuovo school of poets, that sweet new style that we learned of in canto xxiv.
Guido Guinicelli was a member of the Principi family of Bologna. In 1274 he was expelled from his native city with other members of the Ghibelline party, and is thought to have died in exile. He was the most illustrious poet of Italy prior to Dante, and became the founder of that dolce stil nuovo of which Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante himself were exponents. Dante quotes and speaks of him with admiration, both here and in the De vulgari eloquentia.4
Yet before Dante could answer him, the unusual sight of souls traveling in the opposite direction came to him; rather than the correct, counterclockwise direction taken by Dante and his companions, these souls were traveling clockwise. As the two sets of shades came upon each other, they exchanged a brief and chaste kiss before continuing on their way.
Clearly this presents an aspect of contrapasso, for now these souls, who will prove to be the lustful, exchange in place of their former lascivious kisses the holy kiss as commended by the apostle Paul.5
Salute one another with an holy kiss. Romans 16:16
Dante compared the image of this brief exchange with that of ants on a trail, quickly touching to receive the signal of the path ahead.
Ants getting ready for winter do this: they attack an enormous
Mountain of grain and they carry it off to provision their anthill.
Spanning fields, their black formation snakes across grassland,
hauling spoils: one long slim track. Some lever and trundle
Monstrous kernels, shoulders strained; some enforce the formation,
Bullying idlers along, their entire path seething with labour.
Virgil Aeneid iv.402-407
These souls, after their greeting, called out the exemplas of the terrace of lust, the bridle that will spur toward a lesson learned. The group traveling the wrong direction cried out first, “Sodom, Gomorrah!”, after the biblical cities destroyed for their wickedness. This group represented the element of homosexuality, as understood by the medieval church.
Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
Genesis 19:24-25
The next group called out the sin of Pasiphaë, wife of King of Minos and mother of the Minotaur, the infamy of Crete and guardian of the seventh circle of Hell in the Inferno. Pasiphaë represented the animal nature of lust in her desire for a sacred bull; Poseidon had gifted the bull to King Minos so that he could sacrifice it to the god, but Minos ignored his command and kept the bull. In retaliation, Poseidon cursed Pasiphaë with unnatural lust.
According to legend, Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, was inspired with an unnatural passion for a snow-white bull. The artisan Daedalus built her a wooden cow covered with cowhide and placed it over her. The bull mounted the “counterfeit cow,” and from this intercourse Pasiphaë later gave birth to the Minotaur.6
These two groups, after their cries, fled in opposite directions, just as a flock of cranes might divide and fly, one toward the cold north, the other toward the hot sands of Africa. The first group of shades that had spoken to him drew near as they walked together and Dante granted their wish to understand his living body.
I, seeing their desire once again,
began: “O souls who can be sure of gaining
the state of peace, whenever that may be,
my limbs—mature or green—have not been left
within the world beyond; they’re here with me,
together with their blood and with their bones.
That I be blind no longer, through this place
I pass; above, a lady has gained grace
for me; therefore, I bear my mortal body
across your world.
xxvi.52-61
He explained his journey as granted by Beatrice, and then asked the souls who they were, that their names would be recorded in his works to come. After quieting their own astonishment at the idea of Dante’s living journey, one came forward-the same one who had come forward earlier, Guido Guinizelli, though as yet unidentified to Dante-and spoke.
He said that the shades going in the opposite were, what in Dante’s time and in Biblical records was called sodomy, hence the name called out earlier in the canto. Guido’s example of this is from a story that had circulated about Julius Caesar:
On such a day anyone could say anything he wished to the person who was having a triumph. Thus the story is told that when Caesar was being led into the city in triumph, someone said: “Open the gates for King Baldy and the Queen of Bithynia!” This referred to the fact that he was bald and that he had lain with the King of Bithynia. Another, with the same vice in mind, said: “Hail, King and Queen!”7
Guido said that they group of shades that he was with—traveling in the correct direction—had given in to their baser lusts and acted indecorously, referring again to Pasiphaë and her expression of the lower, animal nature, implying that they had bypassed reason in that indulgence:
Our sin was with the other sex; but since
we did not keep the bounds of human law,
but served our appetites like beasts, when we
part from the other ranks, we then repeat,
to our disgrace, the name of one who, in
the bestial planks, became herself a beast.
xxvi.82-87
Be it known that things should be named from the distinguishing nobility of their form; as man from reason, and not from sense nor from aught else that is less noble. Hence when we say that a man is living, it should be understood that the man hath the use of his reason, which is his special life, and is the actualising of his most noble part. And therefore he who severs himself from reason, and hath only use of his sensitive part, doth not live as a man, but liveth as a beast.
Dante Convivio II.vii.3-4
There were so many souls on that terrace, Guido said, that he did not even know them all; and here he formally introduced himself. Realizing whom it was he spoke to—the father of the sweet new style—Dante felt the rush of joy as Hypsipyle had felt upon reuniting with her sons:
Lycurgus, king of Nemea, whose son Archemorus, while under the charge of Hypsipyle, was killed by a snake. One day as Hypsipyle was seated in a wood near Nemea with the child, the seven heroes who were warring against Thebes passed by and, being thirsty, asked her to show them a fountain. Hypsipyle thereupon put down the child upon the grass and led the warriors to the fountain of Langia. When she returned, she found Archemorus dead from the bite of a serpent. Enraged at the death of his child, Lycurgus determined to put Hypsipyle to death and was proceeding to put his resolve into execution when Thoas and Euneus, Hypsipyle’s two sons, opportunely arrived and saved her.8
So moving and transformative was this meeting that Dante took the time to absorb the information and gather his thoughts.
And without hearing, speaking, pensive, I
walked on, still gazing at him, a long time,
prevented by the fire from drawing closer.
When I had fed my sight on him, I offered
myself—with such a pledge that others must
believe—completely ready for his service.
xxvi.100-105
Guido himself was so absorbed by Dante’s story, so moved that even the forgetfulness of the river Lethe could not remove it from his mind. Guido wanted to know why Dante looked at him so adoringly; it was the effect of his precious and beautiful poetry, written in the vernacular just as Dante himself did, and its lasting imprint.
Guido, though, deflected the compliment and pointed Dante to a genius of the craft of poetry, Arnaut Daniel, who wrote in Provençal, his own native tongue.
The spirit pointed out by Guido is Arnaut Daniel, who flourished as a poet between 1180-circa 1210…He spent much of his time at the court of Richard Coeur de Lion. Arnaut is said to have been the originator of the sestina, a form of composition which Dante imitated from him.”9
Guido considered Daniel the better poet when compared to the poet of Limoge—Guiraut de Bornellh—another popular poet of their day:
They credit rumor rather than the truth,
allowing their opinion to be set
before they hear what art or reason says.
xxvi.121-123
The more popular poet will have the better report; but how important it is to judge such poetry by the art of the form, rather than by popular opinion! The poet Guittone mentioned was Guido d’Arezzo, popular in his time but a “labored and clumsy” poet.10
Guido asked that as Dante climbed higher, to the cloister of the heavens, if he would say a prayer for him, the Paternoster, Our Father. Only parts of it applied to them, and the last line, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” was not necessary, since here in Purgatory they could no longer be tempted.
Guido moved on to continue his penance, and Dante approached Daniel, who graced him with a poem, blending grief and joy and asking to be remembered as Dante ascended.
Daniel retreated back into the flames.
💭 Philosophical Exercises
Nothing is nearer to us than heaven. The earth is beneath our feet, and we tread upon it, but heaven is within us.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Looking out my window at this blustery English summer, I see an autumn leaf being tossed aimlessly on the wind, gliding without direction. It reminds me of the souls of the lustful in the Inferno, swept up in an eternal storm. They, too, were carried by the winds, not of nature, but of their ungoverned desires, like ships lost at sea, rudderless and without course. In Dante’s vision, these souls are punished for having surrendered reason to appetite.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll direct my reader to the earlier post where we explored the circle of Lust in the Inferno.
A little further down the slope of the abyss, we encountered those who were violent against nature, a circle often referred to as that of the sodomites, where Dante shares a hauntingly tender conversation with his old mentor, Brunetto Latini. It may seem strange to describe anything in Hell as beautiful, and yet this exchange remains one of my favourite moments in the Inferno.
The phrase: “If you pursue your star, you cannot fail to reach a splendid harbour,” is engraved so deeply into my heart that I no longer need to copy it into a notebook as a reminder, it dwells within me.
Latini was a poet, yet we find him damned for eternity in Hell, not for his verse, but for his sterility of purpose. His life was devoted to the pursuit of fame, not to the creation of a masterpiece that would bear fruit beyond his death.
Once again, I would like to draw my reader’s attention to the earlier post that explored this canto in detail. What we witness in this part of the Inferno is the merging of two circles: the lustful and those who were violent against nature.
If the circle of lust in Inferno was governed by the incessant wind that tossed the damned souls left and right, symbols of their lack of direction, then the terrace of lust in Purgatory is governed by fire, the fire that purifies and forges raw metal into a splendid sword. Here, the vices of lust and sterility both distortions of romantic love converge once more. Yet unlike in Hell, they now await refinement, to be aligned with purpose, and ultimately, to become fruitful.
Every vice is called a vice for a reason. While cultish dogmas label vices to control and manipulate, true belief discerns vice as that which leads the soul to ruin.
Many modern scholars have focused on Dante’s seemingly progressive view of same-sex love, arguing that by placing such souls in Purgatory, alongside others guilty of lust, he grants them the possibility of salvation.
It’s important to note, however, that the term homosexuality was not coined until 1868, over five centuries after Dante’s time, by the journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Dante himself did not possess a term in his vocabulary that corresponds directly to our modern classifications of sexual identity.
I will leave it to the scholars of Dante to debate and clarify the historical and theological implications of this. What I want to focus on, however, is Dante’s deeper view of love—one that echoes Cicero’s conception of friendship: a true friendship is not an alliance in vice, but in virtue. For Cicero, real friendship is a bond that nourishes and elevates both souls, rooted in the desire for the good of the other.
One cannot linger on this terrace without reflecting on the profound alliances between certain great minds. They were alliances not only of love, but of shared vision and mutual elevation. Consider Pierre and Marie Curie, Eleni and Nikos Kazantzakis, Vera and Vladimir Nabokov. If you know anything about these relationships, you’ll know there was far more than affection between them. These were unions of intellect and spirit, where each partner became the other’s mirror, editor, guardian, and muse.
These relationships were furthest away from lust, and the closes to what we will witness in Paradiso.
The lustful we find in Purgatorio were those whose love was fruitless, temporary, ephemeral. Caesar, who became ‘the queen of Bithynia’ or Pasiphaë (more on her in themes) who birthed the infamous creature who had to be hidden into the labyrinth.
Dante is clear that lust is not only sterile but gives birth to beasts and labyrinths that are hard to escape or unmake.
This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭
(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)
I. The Cretan Bull
The myth of the Cretan bull is particularly compelling, for it was King Minos, the husband of Pasiphaë who, in Dante’s Inferno, is entrusted with assigning each soul to its proper circle of damnation.
Here, we hear the strange and tragic tale of Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë. Consumed by an unnatural desire for the Cretan Bull, a passion the gods refused to satisfy, she turned to Daedalus, the master craftsman. At her request, he devised a hollow wooden cow, enabling her to deceive the beast. From this union was born the Minotaur.
It is striking how ancient Greek myth consistently warns us of the dangers inherent in technology. Daedalus’ creations - the wooden cow that enabled Pasiphaë’s deception, the labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur, and of course the fateful wings of Icarus remind us that while technology may grant us powers beyond our natural limits, it always comes with a cost. Every gift of mastery risks becoming a trap.
II. Troubadours and Poets
Here, we encounter two poets of love once again, but their role stands in stark contrast to the poetry that Paolo and Francesca once read in the circle of Lust in the Inferno. Unlike the seductive verses that led to ruin, the poets in this terrace sing of a love that is fruitful, a love that unites partners and elevates them toward God. Their verse is not a flame that consumes, but one that purifies and guides.
Quotes 🖋️
(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):
They credit rumor rather than the truth, allowing their opinion to be set before they hear what art or reason says. ~ lines 121-123
Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Purgatorio 624
In Purg. xi.73, Oderisi begs Dante to walk stooping beside him; in xiv.124, Guido del Duca begs him to depart as he is more desirous of weeping than of talking; in xvi.142, Marco Lombardo will not listen any more to him for fear of leaving the pitchy smoke; in xviii.115, the penitents beg him not to ascribe it to any discourtesy if they leave him, but only to their wish to move on; in xix.139, Pope Adrian begs Dante to pass on and not retard his penitent weeping; in xxiv.91, Forese leaves him because he says that in that kingdom the time is too precious. (Singleton, 626)
Singleton 625
Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory 278
Singleton 627
Singleton, Commentary on the Inferno 186
Paget Toynbee, Dante Studies and Researches 113
Singleton 640
Singleton 642
Sayers 279
Vashik, thank you again for your guidance through these Cantos, our very own Virgil. I simply wanted to let you know I'm still here, still reading and appreciating. The state of the world in these times is pretty heavy and much on my mind, the relevance of Dante's masterpiece often (all too) painfully relevant. I find it challenging to put words to most of my thoughts at present, so I'm grateful for the words of others such as yourself.
>It is not believed that it is a coincidence that Dante wrote about Daniel in eight lines, as that was the favored amount of lines per stanza that the troubadours preferred to write.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaut_Daniel
Genius...just genius...