Status Updates From Dante's Divine Comedy: A Gu...

Dante has not had a Damascene experience. His is a correction or adjustment, which John works by telling Dante to focus on his soul’s desire. Look inward, the apostle says. It is the most reliable of spiritual instructions: if in doubt, seek to know yourself further, because there you will find God and that which blocks your awareness of God.

Bonaventure continues, Dominicans in Dante’s time, 100 years on, are becoming less attuned. They are growing like tares not wheat, he remarks, in a reference to Jesus’s parable about the weeds that threaten to choke the crop. Criticism is not withheld in paradise. It is spoken with deliberate clarity. But it is not persecutory, like the crusades. The aim is conversion of heart, not the subjugation of populations.

The canto (Purgatorio 32) closes with the devastation brought to the natural world and the human soul. It is a tragedy, one that Dante has known well, when he wandered lost in the forest. The seven visions are moments of history, moments in the collapse of the human spirit, and moments he himself now fully understands.

...dreams can be like that: they can offset delusions, correct assumptions. There is a part of him, a dark part of him, that needs to be known and exposed. It is purgatory’s work. No matter how painful, he must see into his confused heart so it can approach the brilliant heart of the cosmos.

It’s a level of awareness that can cause offense. As an adult, Jesus was to make many remarks pointing to it, and risking outrage. He told people to let the dead bury their dead, that brothers and sisters would fall out over his teaching, that he had come to bring a sword. This way cannot be understood morally. It only seems objectionable, confusing, and wrong.

Arthur pierced him with his lance, so that the sunlight shone through Mordred’s body. The deadly wound is the last time Mordred knew inner warmth.

Dante glances across the lake. He sees a thousand faces looking like dogs, frozen purple with cold. To this day, he adds, when he sees an icy pond in winter, he shudders at the memory.

Virgil and Dante make their escape from the demons fighting among themselves, humbled by the errors that led to the entanglement with the Malebranche. They walk like friars minor, lowly monks, along the top bank between the fifth and sixth bolge. They try not to draw attention to themselves.