Augustine wrote that some souls are purified in purgatorial fire and that the duration of this process varies, depending on the state of the individual’s soul at death. With biblical basis in 2 Maccabees 12:42–46, the notion of an intermediary state after death was already widespread in the fourth-century Church – evidenced by the practice of offering prayers and devotions for the dead. William Blake, The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory (public domain) Black says in his introduction to one of the Purgatorio translations I’m reviewing here, Dante’s acute insight into his characters’ most inward motivations and conflicts is accessible to all readers, including secularized modern ones. In addition, there is the very great poetry of it, whose imagery, stories, and language are compelling even without the religious significance that motivates Dante. Purgatorio’s narrative, unlike the storylines of Inferno and Paradiso, includes the sense of time, of day and night, and of earth, color, and personal psychological struggle, which is why some consider it to be the most lovely, humanly relatable part of the Comedy. They are now undergoing the purgation of the accretions of sin by facing their most characteristic flaws in graphic form – the especially arrogant and proud, for example, experience humility by being bent under the weight of the rocks they have to carry. The characters Dante encounters in it are souls of people who had opened their hearts to the spirit, to God, before they died – even just before they died – and who are therefore free from the self-obsessed, desecrating, and egocentric perspective of Hell.
Purgatorio is a story of redemption through a change of heart that leads to confession, renunciation, and contrition. Dante, still guided by Virgil, now starts climbing the holy mountain, progressing level by level in a process of purification that will prepare him to enter the Earthly Paradise at the top of the mountain, reunited with his youthful love and muse, Beatrice, who will then take over as his guide through the spheres of Heaven in Paradiso. The word Purgatory means a place of cleansing or purification. Purgatorio, the second part of the three-part Divine Comedy, picks up where Inferno left off: Dante and the ancient Roman poet Virgil have just emerged from Hell onto the island from which rises the mountain of Purgatory.
Black, preface by Robert Pogue Harrison (New York: New York Review Books, 2021) With reviews of Dante, Purgatorio, translated with introduction and notes by Mary Jo Bang (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021) and Dante, Purgatorio, translated and with a commentary by D.
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