The Rivers of Consciousness

(Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII): Lethe, Eunoe, Matelda

Man's memory shapes its own Eden within

~ Jorge Luis Borges

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 eighth Canto of the Purgatorio, Dante enters the divine forest, the Garden of Eden. 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 ⭕️

Dante explores the divine forest - His path is blocked by a stream - A lone woman, Matilda, gathers flowers on the far side of the stream - She radiates love - Proserpina, Venus, Hero - He is in the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden - Matilda explains the breeze and the generative virtue of the plants of the garden - The rivers Lethe and Eunoë - The Golden Age - Virgil and Statius smile.

Canto XXVIII Summary:

After Virgil’s final speech, Dante let “pleasure be his guide”¹ as he walked into the primeval forest laid out before him; the morning light was diffused through the thick greenery, and one can, by simply reading, almost breathe in the rich and fragrant air. Contrast this vibrant and living forest with that dark wood from which Dante began his journey, and the distinction becomes even more enlivening.

In the allegory, the Earthly Paradise is the state of innocence. It is from here that Man, if he had never fallen, would have set out upon his journey to the Celestial Paradise which is his ultimate destination; but because of sin, his setting-out is from that other Forest which is the degraded and horrifying parody of this one. His whole journey through Hell and Purgatory is thus a return journey in search of his true starting-place—the return to original innocence. Natural innocence is not an end in itself, but the necessary condition of beginning.²

Dante walked forward on his own, without guidance, no longer needing to climb or strive, but to enjoy slow contemplation—after so much haste—of the beauty around him, the arrival. He felt the fresh breeze as he listened to the rustling leaves and birdsong, that familiar sound of wind in the trees as heard in the Chiassi, the famed pine forest on the Adriatic coast.

Aeolus, god of the winds, which he was supposed to keep shut up in a mountain and release at will. He is here said to let out the sirocco, the southeast wind that blows across to Italy from the African coast.³

His slow pace brought him deep within the shady wood, hiding the point from which he had entered.

They pass into the forest primeval.
Virgil, Aeneid 179

The Earthly Paradise (drawing) – Alessandro Vellutello

He came upon a stream, a stream of such perfect clarity that even viewed in the shade of the trees, nothing on earth could match it.

This touch concerning a cool perpetual shade is a common feature of ideal paradises for poets who live under the hot Mediterranean sun.⁴

At the stream he stopped and gazed about him, and on the other side of the bank, saw a lone woman, who, like Leah in his dream, gathered flowers as she sang. We do not find her name until later cantos, but here we will introduce her: she is Matilda, handmaiden to Beatrice.

The literal and allegorical identity of this delightful Lady is perhaps the most tantalizing problem in the Comedy. Her name-as we are casually informed in the final canto-is Matilda; and from the fact that she has a name we are entitled to infer that she is no abstraction, but a personality as real and human as Beatrice herself. Beyond this, so far as her literal identity is concerned, all is conjecture.⁵

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Of the many theories concerning her identity and meaning, the one preferred here is that she is the beautiful lady Wisdom who was the joyful companion of God at the creation of the world. As true Wisdom, which perfects the human mind, she is a new version of Dante’s lady Philosophy whom he had come to love after the death of Beatrice. Fulfilling his dream of Leah (Active Life), she is his guide to the garden of earthly happiness and leads him to the lady who is the companion of Rachel in Heaven.⁶

Dante spoke to Matilda, keenly aware of her strong love nature, which shone from her eyes with radiant power:

“I pray you, lovely lady, you who warm
yourself with rays of love, if I may trust
your looks—which often evidence the heart—

may it please you,” I asked of her, “to move
ahead and closer to this river, so
that I may understand what you are singing.

You have reminded me of where and what—
just when her mother was deprived of her
and she deprived of spring—Proserpina was.”
xxviii.43-51

The shining of Cytherea at the hour of the dream has already introduced this touch, and soon Venus herself, burning with love, will be mentioned. The corresponding figure in the pastorella, the shepherdess or maiden, is commonly seen to be in love, and there is a continuing stress on the fact that this lady is enamored.⁷

She reminded Dante of the scene from myth, when Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres—known in Greek as Persephone and Demeter—was gathering flowers, much like Matilda was now, and subsequently abducted by Hades and taken into the Underworld.

Canto 28 – Dante, Virgil, and Statius in the Earthly Paradise – Gustave Dore

Near Henna’s walls stands a deep pool of water, called Pergus:
not even the river Cayster, flowing serenely,
hears more songs from its swans; this pool is completely surrounded
by a ring of tall trees, whose foliage, just like an awning,
keeps out the sun and preserves the water’s refreshing coolness;
the moist ground is covered with flowers of Tyrian purple;
here it is springtime forever. And here Proserpina
was playfully picking its white lilies and violets,
and while competing to gather up more than her playmates,
filling her basket and stuffing the rest in her bosom,
Dis saw her, was smitten, seized her and carried her off.
Ovid, Metamorphoses v.552-562

Matilda heeded Dante’s request. As graceful as a dancer, she turned with downcast eyes and moved closer to the bank so that Dante could hear the words to her sweet melody, although he does not enlighten us as to what those words were. When she looked up at him, it was with eyes radiating more love than the eyes of Venus herself.

I do not think a light so bright had shone
beneath the lids of Venus when her son
pierced her in extraordinary fashion.
xxviii.62-64

Cupid, son of Venus, in play, accidentally pierced his mother with one of his arrows, after which she fell hopelessly in love with Adonis:

For while her fond Cupid was giving a kiss to his mother,
he pricked her unwittingly, right in the breast, with an arrow
projecting out of his quiver; annoyed, the great goddess
swatted him off, but the wound had gone in more deeply
than it appeared to, and at the beginning deceived her.

Under the spell of this fellow’s beauty, the goddess
no longer takes any interest now in Cythera,
nor does she return to her haunts on the island of Paphon,
or to fish-wealthy Cnidus or to ore—bearing Amethus;
she avoids heaven as well, now—preferring Adonis,
and clings to him, his constant companion, ignoring
her former mode of unstrenuous self-indulgence,
when she shunned natural light for the parlors of beauty.
Ovid Metamorphoses x.626-638

Matilda wove the flowers she held into garlands, and although the stream was narrow, Dante instinctively knew not to cross it. He felt toward it as Leander had felt toward the Hellespont, the watery strait between Asia and Europe at one time crossed by the Persian king Xerxes and his army in a show of ingenuity and force.

Leander’s lover Hero was a priestess of Venus and lived across the Hellespont from him. He swam it every night to be with her, but one night drowned in a storm. The water of the stream would not open for Dante, would not part as the Red Sea had for the Israelites fleeing Egypt, which brought notes of a flash of hatred into Dante’s heart, so much did he long to be near Matilda.

Dante in the Earthly Paradise – Christopher Dall’ Acqua

These three examples, of Proserpina, Venus, and Hero, all point to classical references of passion, indicating that Dante misread the love nature that Matilda exhibited; hers was the innocent, simple nature of a divine love in its fullest expression.

Matilda began to explain to all three—for yes, Virgil and Statius were still behind Dante—regarding the place where they now found themselves, and that the meaning of her joy could be found in the Psalm the Delectasi:

For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands. O Lord, how great are thy works! And thy thoughts are very deep. Psalm 92:4-5

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We are not to understand merely that Matelda feels delight and joy in these wonders of God’s handiwork, even as Adam must have felt them here. Matilda, by her allusion to the psalm, is telling us that the joy she experiences is the joy of love, and that her song (the words of which we do not hear) is a love song in praise of the Lord who made these things. Thus it is evident at once to Dante, at his first glimpse of this maiden, that Matelda is in love.⁸

She addressed Dante, who stood in front of the other two poets, saying she was ready to answer any questions he may have. Dante’s first question regarded the phenomena of wind and water here in the forest, after learning from Statius earlier⁹ that all weather was contained below St. Peter’s Gate leading to the first terrace.

Matilda confirmed that this place was the very same that was created by God as the dwelling of Adam, making it the Garden of Eden.

Men were to live in the terrestrial paradise (it is now abundantly clear that this must be Eden), each his appointed time, and then were to be transported directly to the Paradise above and to eternal bliss and peace, there in the vision of God. The peace of the earthly Paradise was an anticipation, a token of eternal peace.¹⁰

The top of the mount was so high that it was beyond the storms of earth, but the constant breeze must be accounted for. The very air they felt blowing gently was the same air contained within the first celestial sphere, the sphere of the moon, which moved against the stationary earth, as arranged in the Ptolemaic conception of the universe.

Now, since all of the atmosphere revolves
within a circle, moved by the first circling,
unless its round is broken at some point,

against this height, which stands completely free
within the living air, that motion strikes;
and since these woods are dense, they echo it.
xxviii.103-108

Dante and Matelda – Federico Zuccari

The breeze of Paradise is not caused by any ‘turmoil’ in the atmosphere itself. It is not like an earthly wind, which may change its force or direction at any moment. For what Dante now feels is the daily movement of the whole globe of the ninefold heavens, turning steadily with the Primum Mobile in the one direction about the earth. Since the earth itself is deemed to be fixed in relation to the heavens, objects upon it intercept this motion, which thus produces the swaying and rustling of the leaves, and fans Dante’s forehead like a gentle breeze.¹¹

Matilda moved into a description of the nature of the flora of the forest, and how they reacted to this breeze:

And when a plant is struck, its power is such
that it impregnates air with seeding force;
the air, revolving, casts this seed abroad;

the other hemisphere, depending on
the nature of its land and sky, conceives
and bears, from diverse powers, diverse trees.
xxviii.109-114

There was a generative virtue in this celestial breeze which propagated plant life outside of the need for literal and physical seeds, even going so far as to spread plants to the northern hemisphere on the winds.

Then we learn of the purpose and functions of the water in the stream, across which they were speaking; they were regenerative streams, not dependent on the environmental cycles of rain and evaporation, but formed from a supernatural source, twin fountains from which the waters flow.

The Lethe was the river of forgetfulness or oblivion, and the Eunoë restored the memory of goodness, so that upon entering each, the old sin nature is not only purged, but forgotten, and the remembrance of the inherent goodness before the fall restored. Matilda, having answered his question, now offered more; a ‘corollary’, or a gift. It was the insight that the poets of old, with a nod to Virgil and Statius, once wrote of the Golden Age of man, and must have dreamed of this very place upon which to base their claims of a past perfection.

Spring was the only season that there was,
and the warm breath of gentle Zephyr stroked
flowers that sprang up from the ground, unsown.
Later—although still untilled—the earth bore grain,
and fields, unfallowed, whitened with their wheat;
now streams of milk, now streams of nectar flowed,
and from the green oak, golden honey dripped.
Ovid Metamorphoses i.148-154

Dante turned to see Virgil and Statius, still behind him, smile at the truth of Matilda’s revelation.

The Encounter with Matelda in the Earthly Paradise

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💭 Philosophical Exercises

The Myth of Er:"the plain of Lethe," a barren waste, and a "river of Unmindfulness" from which souls must drink before rebirth.

~ The Republic, Book X

Matelda – John Flaxman (1793)

This is one of the most beautiful parallels in The Divine Comedy once one sees it:

Now, though my steps were slow, I’d gone so far
into the ancient forest that I could
no longer see where I had made my entry;

and there I came upon a stream that blocked
the path of my advance; its little waves
bent to the left the grass along its banks.

~ lines 22-27 of Purgatorio XXVIII

… and now compare the lines above with the lines that must sound awfully too familiar to you:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:

~ the very first lines of The Divine Comedy, Inferno, I

I am always in awe when I uncover those poetical, numerical, or thematic threads that weave Dante’s epic into a single, intricate tapestry.

We began our journey in the dark forest, the labyrinth of labyrinths, the maze of mazes, a twisting corridor leading us through the tangled passages of our own vice, a tunnel with a wide entrance and no visible exit. You have experienced this, my reader, in your life, and so did I in mine. The best visual description of this state was made by Piranesi with his drawings of prisons which I included in the very first post of this read-along.

It is easy to draw Hell, but far harder to depict Heaven. Piranesi, a genius without question, could visualise the terrifying labyrinths of the human mind and give form to the unvisualisable. Yet how does one capture in line and colour the state of bliss in which Dante now finds himself?

Two forests: one dark and dense, the other thick and verdant. When we met Dante in the dark forest he did not know where to go, his inner compass was so broken that he did not dare carve his own path. But, look at his state of mind here:

Now keen to search within, to search around
that forest—dense, alive with green, divine—
which tempered the new day before my eyes,

~ lines 1-3, Purgatorio, XXVIII

Dante is eager, keen, his mind and soul are fully alive. Vice suffocates the will, stifling action, silencing the impulse to dare and to live. Mandelbaum’s translation captures this with remarkable precision: Dante is ready “to search within,” “to search around that forest.” You see where I am pointing, my dear reader; perhaps one way to read this canto is to realise that it is not the forest that has changed, but Dante’s perception of it. After all, as you may recall, the mind is its own place, and can make a Heaven of Hell, and a Hell of Heaven.

I.

But of course Dante, and we with him, have travelled a long road through the circles and terraces, confronting the weight of our own foolishness, to arrive here. A gentle breeze brushes his brow in this post-Purgatory realm, and, as the great Dante scholar Benvenuto da Imola explains, it is a sign that all seven letters P, the marks of sin engraved upon his forehead before entering Purgatory, have now been erased. The breeze lifts more than hair and skin; it lifts the heaviness of vice itself, leaving him unchained, light, and free.

‘sanza più aspettar, lasciai la riva, prendendo la campagna lento lento’

'without delay, I left behind the rise and took the plain, advancing slowly, slowly'

You can, and perhaps must, dissect each line of this canto if you wish to grasp how a healthy mind and soul feel. Notice, my dear reader, how Dante writes “without delay” and yet follows it with “advancing slowly, slowly.” It is the perfect balance of a harmonious life: never to procrastinate, and yet never to rush. A lesson of such beauty and poise that I, too, hope to embody it in my own life.

Heavenly birds wheel through the air above Dante, birds we have not heard since the journey began. In the dark of the Inferno there were none; on the steep slopes of Purgatory, still none. But here, at last, we hear them: winged symbols of a mind restored, of thoughts light and free.

II.

Throughout Purgatory, we have seen how Dante the pilgrim first encounters examples of virtue worthy of imitation, models of chastity and moderation, and then, how Dante the author contrasts them with their opposites: the souls who drowned themselves in vice.

In this canto, Dante encounters two rivers, Lethe and Eunoe, that spring from the same source yet serve different purposes. Lethe comes from the Ancient Greek for “forgetfulness” or “oblivion” (the root we also hear in the word lethargy). In educated Russian circles, one sometimes hears the expression кануть в Лету (kanut’ v Letu) to sink into Lethe, meaning to vanish into oblivion. Here, Lethe’s purpose is to wash away the lingering power of vice that once ruled a soul’s life.

I have lingered over this idea. We have journeyed through the Inferno to learn the vices that lead to ruin; we have climbed the seven terraces of Purgatory to learn misura - how to measure ourselves. And now, at the very end, are we to forget the hard-earned lessons of this ascent?

It seems a fair question. Yet, as my reader will recall, the aim of our journey was not to catalogue evil but to reorient the soul entirely toward the good. There is little profit in preserving the memory of a wrong path once the right one is found. If you have wandered into a dead-end road and at last discover the way forward, what need is there to keep looking back?

The other river that Dante must cross is Eunoe, which etymologically stems from eu (good) and noe (nous i.e. intellect, memory). So after we forget the dirt and evil we have met and straightened in us, we must wash our mind and soul in the river of good intellect, which revivifies the memory of good.

III.

My reader may sense that, though my reflections have grown lengthy, I have scarcely touched the surface of this canto. We have traversed so much and yet so little. But there is one last thing I wish to draw your attention to: Dante is no longer following anyone. For his entire journey he has walked in the footsteps of others -Virgil, Cato, Statius, and more. Now, for the first time, he moves forward by his own will.

Statius and Virgil remain beside him, yet they are silent.

There is a quiet splendour in this moment, the beauty of a mind made clear, a soul acting as it was meant to act: freely, of its own accord. Once the will is fixed on the good, every path it chooses will be virtuous.

When I examine my own mind, I know that if it resembles a drawing by Piranesi full of dead ends and stairways that lead nowhere it means I am mired in vice. But when I try to picture what a clear mind feels like, how it moves, how it thinks, I imagine the vision of Canto XXVIII of the Purgatorio.

This Week’s Sinners and Virtuous 🎭

(Themes, Quotes, Terms and Characters)

Dante Speaks with Matelda across the Lethe – Filippo Bigioli

I. The Garden of Eden

All the great commentators agree that, in this canto, we stand within the very Garden of Eden. What strikes me, as a reader, is how I had always assumed almost instinctively that Eden must be an ending, the perfect place from which no one would wish to move on. And yet, Dante shows us that a far greater journey still lies ahead.

II. Dante’s Monarchia

Dante takes the idea of the “twofold ends of life” straight from his political treatise Monarchia. One end is “the bliss of this life,” which comes from living to the fullest use of our own powers, symbolized here by the Earthly Paradise. The other is “the bliss of eternal life,” found in the vision of God symbolised by the Celestial Paradise.

The cantos set in the Earthly Paradise are full of these kinds of “doublings,” reflecting both of these goals side by side.

III. Borges and Memory

While it may not be one of my best videos, I’d like to share with you a piece I filmed on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Funes the Memorious about a man who loses the ability to forget, a kind of reverse Lethe. I can’t recommend enough reading the story itself; it’s a brief work, but unforgettable.

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Quotes 🖋️

(The ones I keep in my journal as reminders of eternal wisdom):

Now keen to search within, to search around
that forest—dense, alive with green, divine—
which tempered the new day before my eyes,

without delay, I left behind the rise
and took the plain, advancing slowly, slowly
across the ground where every part was fragrant.

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1. See Purgatorio xxvii.131

2. Dorothy L. Sayers, Purgatory 293

3. Charles S. Singleton, Commentary on Purgatorio 668

4. Singleton 669

5. Sayers 294

6. Mandelbaum 693

7. Singleton 670

8. Singleton 679

9. Purgatorio xxi.43-54

10. Singleton 680

11. Sayers 296