Purgatorio and the Virgin

This is a bit belated; I'd intended to write it on Mother's Day, but I figure I can still dedicate it to that day.

One would have sworn that he was saying, Ave;
for in that scene there was the effigy
of one who turned the key that had unlocked
the highest love; and in her stance
there were impressed these words, Ecce ancilla Dei,
precisely like a figure stamped in wax.

In honor of Mother's Day, I have decided to write on Mary our Mother as she has a role in the Commedia; first as she is in the Purgatorio, then as she recurs the themes spoken of in the previous post, and lastly as she occurs prominently in the Paradiso.  When Dante finally enters the Purgatory proper, he is greeted with statues etched into the walls of the mountain of Purgatory:


There we had yet to let our feet advance
when I discovered that the bordering bank,
less sheer than banks of other terraces,
was of white marble and adorned with carvings 
so accurate not only Polycletus
but even Nature, there, would feel defeated.


These statues are so vividly sculpted they almost appear to move; Dante sees these statues as having such supernatural artifice that they, while being in an art form normally restricted to objects of sight and, to a degree, touch, seem even to convey the sound of the angel Gabriel's "Ave" and the great obedience of our Lady, in which the Magnificat has its act.  Dante's entire sensation is so engaged in these works of artistry that he focuses on nothing else, but is drawn into the scene of the Annunciation itself, in the manner of many Franciscan devotional practices of popular piety, such as those practiced by Margery Kempe and popularly attributed to Bonaventure.  This amounts to a sort of minor mystical transport in appearance, although not a real one, but one made in the manner of created artifice which acts analogously.  This vision of the art in the Purgatory foreshadows, partially, the vision of God which the souls enjoy in the Paradise.


There is a very interesting aspect to the order of the presence of beauty in the Divine Comedy, which one sees when one zooms out from the particular canzone one is reading.  In the Inferno, to the souls present there, there is and can be no beauty.  Just as a beast is unable to understand the rational order, so insofar as man makes himself bestial by vice, he loses even the ability to be affected by beauty of the highest sort.  Moreover, the souls in the Inferno are more and more inclined to evil by the order of their sin; the souls who sin the worst lose "the good of intellect" in a worse and worse way.  There is no beauty to the souls in Hell.  Yet there is a certain beauty to the justice of God's putting them there, in the same way as there is a beauty in justice meting out to each their proper due.  Would it be fair to the raped to see the rapist go free, or the murdered to see their killer escape his own consequences?  Perhaps, in one sense, there is a place for leniency, but it is not for the souls in Inferno; they would laugh at leniency; it is the act of the weak, to them.  Or if they would not laugh, they would not react.  They would be indifferent, and the whole act would be hollow.  They dispose themselves against the good of all mercy, all beauty, and ultimately, every love, including that of themselves.


In the Purgatory, though, one has a wonderful recognition that this needn't be the case for all.  It is a humbling thought to realize that the best we could hope for without God's mercy, even according to our own choosing, would be Limbo.  Yet Purgatory is populated!  And with such people!  Cato the Younger is there, a Pagan suicide and a stoic par excellence, and so many other unlikely cases, especially in the Valley of the Princes, in Ante-Purgatory.  Dante puts his closest friend there as well, Forese Donati, perhaps indicating that Purgatory is the state in which Dante persona views himself.  All of these souls proceed under the auspices of Our Lady, singing penitential hymns and hymns of pilgrimage, as they make their way up the mountain which leads to their happiness.  Immediately, one sees the contrast between Purgatorio and Inferno; the souls in Purgatory have art, and that's a strong sensible difference.  But even as art is differentiated in its very existence by its object, so the object of their hymns, and the sense-sculptures which surround them, reveal something about the pilgrimage of repentance and cleansing on Earth as well as in Purgatory, that nothing happens without the intercession and presence of Our Lady.  Analogously, without the star of the sea to guide it, the Church Suffering cannot find her appointed port, as it is through imitation of her example, the result of her obedience, and grace acquired through her as Mediatrix that we are able to find our end at all.

In the Paradise, though, one might think that this isn't the case.  There is no "art", as such, in the sense of artifice or likeness containing a representation of the beauty; but why is this?  The answer is in the fact that He is there, the One to whom all beauty and art points, and the souls who love Him are there, who in their participation in His Love, as we on Earth participate in His Eucharist, possess Him and are possessed by His Love.  In other words, there is no "art", because Beauty Himself is there; artifice would be a distraction.  There is singing, though; and such singing!  This singing serves as an expression of the souls' being directed to Him, receiving Him each in their own manner, and serves to glorify Him in the beauty thereof.

Our Lady is there too, precisely in that place where Dante personaggio receives the Beatific Vision.  She is immediately preceded by her knight, St. Bernard of Clairvaux.  What is her significance?  Is she standing idly by, basking in the glow of her Son, but otherwise the same as every other soul?  This is not the case.  Dante persona was already aware of the cosmological understanding of the planets, and the angelic movements thereof, and the role the planets astrologically play in the formation of the human soul under the views of the time.  This itself, he knew, came about from the need for higher orders of perfection to deliver the act of the lower, even down to the speciation of particular plants and the formation of inanimate things.  The Protestant understanding of Kierkegaard and others in his line have no time for such mediations in between the person and God, conflating mediation and obstruction; and indeed, the vision of God in Paradise is immediate, so one might wonder whether the truth of that claim insofar as it is true is present in the Comedy.  Yet Catholics believe better.  We have a Church, with a hierarchy, revealed by God, and this hierarchy reflects the heavenly order as an established image of beatitude.  Yet we realize that this mediation, far from an obstruction, is the appointed vehicle by which souls arrive at their beatitude, represented, in part, by the ship driven by an angel at the beginning of the Purgatorio, or Dante's warning in the Paradiso regarding his ship:


O you who are within your little bark,

eager to listen, following behind

my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,

turn back to see your shores again: do not

attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,

by losing sight of me, be left astray.


Unless we are fed, he claims in the next few verses, by the "bread of angels", philosophy and theology (and more literally, the Eucharist, the "bread from heaven containing every blessing") we cannot follow his "ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas".  Yet what is the vehicle on Earth by which we obtain this Viaticum?  The answer is the Church that Christ established, in her Magisterium and her role in administering the Sacraments.  This is made more poignant by his reference to "singing"; it is the souls in Purgatory and Paradise that sing, and it is the Psalms and Thomistic hymns of adoration that they sing.  Their singing is a mark of their Catholicism.  This was somewhat funny to me, because as I was reading for this note, I was reminded of the attempt by the Geneva Bible to claim that Dante, by his criticism of particular Popes, made himself a prophet of Protestantism.  This verse makes that rather silly, as one must assume a very esoteric interpretation to get around Dante's reverence to the "bread of angels."  While it is true that the bread of angels is theology, it is important to remember also that Dante's sources all thought of theology as revealed in Christ, who founded the Church, which Dante clearly respected in his zeal for reform, or else his biting critiques make no sense.  It would not make any sense at all for a Catholic to critique a Protestant for not being Protestant enough, or vice versa.  Moreover, it would be a complete anachronism in Dante's time.


In any case, Dante's cosmological order reflects the mediation of Creation itself through different orders of perfection.  This is a trouble for some when he gets to Paradise; the souls are in different rings!  Why would the blessed souls, who all love God with all their being, be so divided?  The answer is to say, in the Thomistic style, that they are "in a way divided, and in a way not."  Yes, they are in different places, each according to the species of their sin in life, but as Piccarda shows us in the orbit of the Moon, this, His Will, is their peace, as it serves to bring them to glory in God's mercy and justice at the same time.  It is merciful that they are there at all, and it is just that they are there in such a way.  This also defies the conception of some Protestants that man is sinful at all times, and his sin is merely covered over by God, like "snow-covered dung."  These souls have been made worthy to be in His presence, to receive Him, even as we (should and will) say in the Mass: "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only speak your Word and my soul shall be cleansed."  Moreover, they are not equally "there", since equality with God or the other souls is not something to be grasped, but they are there in their appropriate orders, and more happy thus than if they were all in the same ring.  In this, we see another way in which beauty in Creation reflects the Paradise; the order of things on Earth is a mere analogy to the Just order of Heaven.


On this cosmological order, one would expect a very logical thing, that God is at the center, and indeed he is. But arriving at the center, we see something else; Our Lady is right there present, like the closest orbit herself, almost indistinct, such that Dante can be at the very center of things and still see fit to look to her.  Moreover, he cannot immediately look at God, but must first cede himself to the direction of a further order, the one who takes over after Beatrice as mediating guide, namely, St. Bernard.  If Dante is to enter into the erotic mysticism of the direct vision of the Bridegroom, he requires Bernard's intercession, as Bernard's joyous appointment; and even Bernard does not do it himself.  Canto 33 begins with one of the greatest prayers to Our Lady ever put to paper, and I will reproduce it here:


Virgin mother, daughter of your Son,

more humble and sublime than any creature,

fixed goal decreed from all eternity,

you are the one who gave to human nature

so much nobility that its Creator

did not disdain His being made its creature.

That love whose warmth allowed this flower to bloom

within the everlasting peace was love

rekindled in your womb; for us above,

you are the noonday torch of charity,

and there below, on earth, among the mortals,

you are a living spring of hope. Lady,

you are so high, you can so intercede,

that he who would have grace but does not seek

your aid, may long to fly but has no wings.

Your loving-kindness does not only answer

the one who asks, but it is often ready

to answer freely long before the asking.

In you compassion is, in you is pity,

in you is generosity, in you

is every goodness found in any creature.

This man who from the deepest hollow in:

the universe, up to this height, has seen

the lives of spirits, one by one now pleads

with you, through grace, to grant him so much virtue

that he may lift his vision higher still

may lift it toward the ultimate salvation.

And I, who never burned for my own vision

more than I burn for his, do offer you

all of my prayers and pray that they may not

fall short that, with your prayers, you may disperse

all of the clouds of his mortality

so that the Highest Joy be his to see.

This, too, o Queen, who can do what you would,

I ask of you: that after such a vision,

his sentiments preserve their perseverance.

May your protection curb his mortal passions.

See Beatrice how many saints with her!

They join my prayers! They clasp their hands to you!


This is the last "song" heard in the entire Comedy, the greatest one expressible, wherein the most fervent lover of our Lady among fallen men, so fervent in his love of God, so self-sacrificing that he alone retains his body before the second coming, pleads her with, not just all of his being, but that of all of the saints, including Beatrice especially, that Dante could see God without mediation and retain some semblance of the truth, goodness and beauty of that vision, and persevere in its grace when he returns to Earth.  This is, so to speak, Dante's marriage aria, in which the entire curtain is torn away and he is allowed into the Holy of Holies.  And this in an entire canzone of having that curtain opened in drastic ways!


And what an aria!  In it is illustrated at once our Mother's glory and humility, that she, who through perfect obedience allowed herself to be the new Ark, the way by which He chose "His being" made "a creature."  In order to understand the significance of all of this, we must return to the examination of the cosmological order briefly, "return from such great heights," or at least look down awhile.  At every procedure upwards over the mountain, and in every transition from ring to ring, Dante is able to look down and see more and more of Creation reveal its order, particularly when he reaches beyond the sphere of the fixed stars.  Yet Creation is finite, and not enough to satisfy the desires of the human soul, man whose mind is, according to Bonaventure and Boethius, a "potential All."  Man's happiness is nothing less than God Himself.  So with each procedure upwards and inwards, man sees more and more of the secondary causality of the natural things, the saints, the angels.  Each has agency in their diversity over the unity of the created and blessed order of things.  What, then, does it mean, that Our Lady is closest to God Himself, so close that she is "the one who turned the key", the one who opened the door to beatitude by giving us the Way Himself?  She is the ultimate secondary cause of the order of all things other than God, the "fixed goal decreed from all eternity."


In a humble stable in Bethlehem, we are accustomed to think, the most important event in our lives or anyone's life occurred, Christ was born into the world, and this is most true.  Yet a new level of beauty reveals itself in the fact that that blessed Nativity, and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, was ordained to occur through Mary from all eternity.  Without her, we are nothing at all.  If by nature we long to fly, as "all men by their nature desire to know" and thus to participate in the order of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars", without her raising our nature through being most humble of all, through her humility giving human nature so much "nobility" (and that, of course, by the supreme grace of God) we have no wings.

This month is her month.  Were we in a perfect world, the entire month would be spent in Marian devotion, feasting, planting flowers, dancing and generally celebrating this month dedicated to her, Our Lady, the one by whom human nature bloomed in grace.  Sadly, we are not; we are forgetful and feeble folk, living in our little shire, with dark riders looming all about.  Yet if we can just once this month take a day, just to acknowledge the sheer love we ought to have for our Mother, even as we take a day to celebrate mothers everywhere, we would be playing a sweet theme in the symphony of Love that is Creation just for her.  And she deserves as much as we may give.