one who, in boyhood, is gentle, obedient, modest; in youth, temperate, resolute, and loyal; in ripe years, prudent, just, and generous; and who in age has attained to calm wisdom and perfect peace with God. -THE PURGATORIO P URGATORY is described by Dante as "the place where the human soul is cleansed, and becomes worthy to ascend to heaven." It is the antipodes of Hell and the vestibule of Paradise. It represents the heart's restoration to sanity, as contrasted with the horrors and agonies of wilful and willing sin. In Purgatory we are "saluted by the air Of meek repentance, wafting wallflower scents and all the spirits in it are contenti nel fuoco-happy even in the midst of the burning fiery furnace, because they are "tending all To the same point, attainable by all: Peace in ourselves and union with our God." We here bid farewell to the "hopeless terror" of the "Inferno"; its audacities; its grotesque brutal ities; its indecent fiends; its stench and sludge, and Stygian marshes and crimson rivers, and tettering leprosies, and cruelly congealing ice; and we watch the souls submitted to the moral agencies which are remedies for sin. The poem is intensely human in its interest, and full of the hope and joy, transcending anguish, of those who can cry, "When I awake, I am present with Thee." The chief consequences of grave wrong-doing are three: (1) the debt of just penalty; (2) the evil inclination of the will; and (3) the perverted instincts of the body and of the mind. The poem, in its whole inner meaning, does not bear only on penalties after death, but on the means whereby good habits may be substituted for evil habits in this life. Purgatorial pain is necessary for the satisfaction of the debt; for the rectification of the will; and for the strengthening of the misdirected bodily and mental powers, by which even the penitents are still tempted to do what they hate. Purgatory, then, is "a penitentiary with seven hospitals" for every soul whose sins are capable of cure. It is less a place of punishment than of perfectionment, intended to cleanse, to re-beautify, to disinfect the guilty heart. The three lowest terraces are devoted to the purification of the three passions of the mind, Envy, Pride, Wrath, which are the most deadly of all and which lead to all other sin. The middle terrace furnishes the punishment for Accidia, the moral sloth and spiritual torpor which result from the first three sins and lead to the next three. The last three terraces are for the punishment and cure of the least deadly and destroying of the seven deadly sins-the sensual and earthly, as distinct from the demonic sins, Avarice, Gluttony, and Uncleanness. The first three sins, pride, envy, anger, are the opposite of love; the midmost sin, torpor, is the absence of love; the last three sins, avarice, gluttony, sensuality, are the excess of perverted love. And, as we shall see, there are on each of these terraces of Purgatory, (1) the analogous, inevitable, retributive, self-inflicted punishment; (2) the sferze, or goads and incentives supplied by good examples, and the freni, or curbs supplied by bad examples; (3) the appropriate prayer; and (4) the beautiful, liberating, attendant angel.* The "Purgatorio" abounds in thrilling incidents, and in lessons full of the noblest moral instruction and the deepest spiritual wisdom. As it is, I must be content to give a general sketch of the poem as a whole. I. No sooner had Dante and Virgil struggled out of the abyss where impenitent sin is punished, to the foot of the mountain where sin is purged, than the whole atmosphere of the poem changes. We have left beneath our feet, utterly and for ever, the horror * See all this more fully worked out in the last Italian treatise on the "Purgatorio," "Perez, I Sette Cerchi del Purgatorio." |