Conclusion

Summary

This chapter demonstrates the significance of avarice in Dante’s Christian ethics, and in his own moral biography. As Peraldus’s treatise ‘De avaritia’ demonstrates, the sin of avarice may include a disordered love of power and knowledge as well as of wealth, and its opposing vice of prodigality. In particular, amor filiorum [the love of children] is highlighted as a perilous occasion to avarice.

Amor filiorum is the interpretative key to Dante’s terrace of avarice, which is structured chiastically around the figure of Hugh Capet at its centre (Purg. xx, 40–96). The examples of poverty (16–33) and avarice (97–123) all concern the impact of poverty on family dependents; the shewolf (4–15) and the poor shepherds (124–41) emphasise the failure of the Church’s pastors to protect their flock from avarice; the prologue (1–3) and epilogue (142–51) concern the avaricious desire for knowledge. Hugh Capet’s genealogy of ancestral line (Purg. XX) is framed by the avaricious Ottobono dei Fieschi’s genealogy of popes (Purg. XIX) and the prodigal Statius’s genealogy of ethical poets (Purg. XXI–XXII).

Through his poetic cypher Statius, Dante implies that avarice (in its subspecies, and opposing vice, prodigality) was his own sin, and the cause of his overthrow by the she-wolf in Inferno I.

In the penultimate canto of the Commedia, Dante identifies King David as ‘the singer who, grieving at his sin, said “Miserere mei”’(‘[il] cantor che per doglia / del fallo disse “Miserere mei”’; Par. xxxii, 11–12). From the beginning of his poem, Dante similarly presents himself as a sinner turned singer: the very first words of Dante-character, indeed, self-consciously calque (in a conflation of vulgate and vernacular) the same penitential psalm: ‘Miserere di me’ (Inf. i, 65). While the wrath of Achilles provides the narrative impetus for Homer’s Iliad, and Virgil sings of Aeneas’s exile from Troy and his subsequent founding of Rome, it is Dante’s sin and moral failings, then, that orient his own epic narrative.¹ Emerging – at the midpoint of his life – from the dark wood and valley of sin, Dante-character attempts to ascend the delightful hill (‘il dilettoso monte’; Inf. i, 77) of virtue and holiness. But he fails: his love of the good falls short of its proper duty (tepidity, the genus of sloth); he chooses to remain in great misery rather than to undertake the necessary work to escape it (‘ignavia’, a species of sloth); and he is consequently assailed by the three beasts and overwhelmed by the she-wolf (the sin of avarice), turning back to the ‘dark wood’ or ‘perilous sea’ of sin. It is Dante-character’s moral failure, then, that prompts his cry for help and the intercession of Virgil mediante Beatrice (Inf. ii, 49–120), and propels his entire detour through Hell (Inf. i, 91) and his subsequent journey through Purgatory and Paradise.

The consideration of future pain and eternal reward – Peraldus’s remedy for a tepid love of God – becomes, in effect, Virgil’s remedy for Dante: to show him the desperate cries of the damned, those content in the fire of Purgatory, and the blessed people in heaven (Inf. i, 115–20). In the first circle of Hell, Dante-character discovers that even those of impeccable virtue are damned if they lack explicitly Christian faith. Apparently flourishing in moral and intellectual virtue and without the ‘pain of sense’, the virtuous pagans nonetheless experience the poena damni, the perpetual lack of the vision of God. In the other eight circles of Hell, Dante-character discovers that all sinful souls are also punished with the pain of sense, with each punishment ingeniously invented – ‘Ahi giustizia di Dio’ [Ah, justice of God] (Inf. vii, 19) – to fit the gravity of their fault.² Dante presents the principles underpinning this division of evil in terms of natural reason. On one level, this suggests, as Kenelm Foster memorably put it, that ‘most of the evil we meet with in the Inferno is ordinary human wickedness which any man, whatever his faith, could in theory recognize as such’.³ Moreover, Dante’s particular ordering of these evils and his insistence on philosophical moral criteria serve the political extension of his ethics: through his vision of Hell, the poet represents the justice which a Holy Roman Emperor, restored to power, should ideally enact on Earth.

Dante-character’s overthrow by the she-wolf had deprived him of the short path up the mountain (Inf. ii, 118–20). Upon arriving on the shore of Purgatory and returning to the ‘lost way’ (‘la perduta strada’), he feels that his previous journeying had been in vain (Purg. i, 118–20). From the perspective of eternity, all that matters is a soul’s journey to Paradise, which, for Dante, requires the moral teachings of Christianity. In relation to Dante’s ethical theory of ‘two ends’, the limbo of the virtuous pagans represents – in the afterlife – man’s this-worldly felicity; in contrast, Purgatory represents the Christian moral journey to eternal salvation (man’s ultimate goal), a moral journey entrusted to the Church. It is in Purgatory, therefore, that we find Dante’s distinctively Christian ethics.

As Dante-character’s first spoken words in Purgatorio make clear, he is going on this journey for his own salvation: ‘per tornar altra volta / là dov’io son, fo io questo vïaggio’ [to return another time to where I am do I go on this journey] (Purg. ii, 91–92). Dante-character appears to undergo and share the sufferings of the penitent sinners through each of the seven terraces. Moreover, the souls whom Dante-character encounters seem chosen so as to aid, first of all, his own individual moral situation and needs.⁴ It is in part by addressing Dante’s journey through the seven terraces of Purgatory as, first of all, a personally purgative experience that some of the richness of his treatment of the vices emerges. Why is it that, on the first terrace, Dante-character encounters three souls (all born, like Dante, in the thirteenth century) who show pride in human artistry (Oderisi), in political power (Salvani), and in ancestry (Omberto)? This is surely because these are three particular aspects of pride that Dante himself displays, and indeed acknowledges. The three examples of virtue, then, give Dante models of artistry (King David), political power (Trajan), and humility of birth (Mary), which, leading to the greatest excellence, are nonetheless founded upon a person becoming a humble vessel for God’s will. Similarly, in considering why Hugh Capet should be important to Dante-character on his salvific journey, rather than simply acting as a mouthpiece for Dante’s Imperial and anti-French view of history, the autobiographical dimension of amor filiorum [love of children] as an occasion to avarice becomes clear. Furthermore, from this perspective, it becomes apparent that Dante-character’s battle against severe exhaustion in his quest for wisdom (Purg. xvii, 73–xviii, 87; and xviii, 139–xix, 69) is the second, overlooked drama of the terrace of sloth, framing the penitent souls’ physical exertion (xviii, 88–138).

Dante’s status as sinner does not inhibit, but rather enables, his status as preacher. Dante models for the reader a process of spiritual conversion, whether from pride to humility, or from sloth to zeal. Virgil’s and Aristotle’s pagan moral teaching in Hell seems to derive authority from their own apparently impeccable moral lives, and Cato is similarly presented, on Purgatory’s shore, as the quintessential pattern of the cardinal virtues. Yet Dante’s Christian moral teaching arguably becomes more authentic precisely because the poet-preacher acknowledges his own personal struggles with sin. His appeals to the reader, as Auerbach registered, derive much of their power from this interplay between the personal – the fraternal identification of ‘je m’accuse’ – and the universal – the implied sense of a common fallen humanity, susceptible to vice and requiring God’s grace.⁵ Dante would justify his own confessional narrative, as he did Augustine’s moral autobiography (Conv. i. ii, 14), by its utility to others. Just as Augustine drew on the resources of classical rhetoric in his preaching, so Dante uses his poetic genius to convert his reader, a sinner, from the life of sin to the life of virtue. Indeed, the stated goal of Dante’s poetry is nothing less than the eternal salvation of his readers. This service to God underpins the meta-literary sense of Dante-character’s first words in Purgatory: that, through writing his poem, he will merit a return to Purgatory.⁶

As Dante intended us to read his poem ethically, it should hardly surprise us that, when we do, we appreciate more fully its literary quality and aesthetic élan. In structural terms, where the lectura Dantis and commentary traditions tend to prioritise the formal unit of the canto, I have shown the value of reading the poem through its moral regions. Less important for Inferno, where one canto frequently aligns with one moral region or sub-region, it is vital for Purgatorio and Paradiso, where moral regions (such as terraces and planetary heavens) become more important, and invariably encompass a series of cantos. For example, in Inferno, Dante uses the literary device of chiasmus as the structuring principle of the tenth canto; in contrast, in Purgatorio, he employs chiasmus as the structuring principle of the terrace of avarice as a whole, from the confession of Hugh Capet at its centre (Purg. xx, 43–96) to the twin conversion narratives and parallel genuflections of its outer frame (xix and xxi–ii).⁷ It is only by attending carefully to the precise ethical and poetic effects which the literary structure of chiasmus affords that the full meaning of the episode emerges. Similarly, Dante’s choice and ordering of the twelve examples of pride in Purgatorio xii become clear when we interpret these three ‘quartets’ of prideful examples in relation to the three virtuous exempla (Purg. x) and the three penitent souls (Purg. xi). Many literary details in cantos xvii–xix of Purgatorio are likewise missed if we read them either through the unit of the canto or as part of the ‘four doctrinal cantos’ (xv–xviii). Adopting the unit of moral structure, it becomes evident, for example, that the dream of the Siren (xviii, 139–xix, 69) represents poetically and symbolically the doctrinal content of Virgil’s three lectures (xvii, 73–xviii, 87). It would be fruitful, in my view, to explore the other terraces of Purgatory and, indeed, all the moral regions of the poem in this way.

Of decisive importance for my own reading of Dante’s Purgatory is not just an interpretation through moral structure, and in terms of his own personal ethical journey, but also in light of a reconsideration of his ethical sources. The fact that Dante’s guide through Ante-Purgatory and Purgatory’s seven terraces is the pagan Virgil, and not Beatrice, has led some scholars to argue that the moral order which Virgil articulates (in Purg. xvii) is stated in terms of philosophical principles rather than of divine revelation. In Chapters 3 and 4, I argued that the moral content and form of Purgatory are distinctively Christian, and that Dante turns to the tradition of moral theory and practice witnessed by Peraldus’s De vitiis et virtutibus, rather than to Aquinas’s reforms in Christian moral theology. As I showed in Chapters 5–7, Peraldus’s De vitiis appears to undergird Dante’s poetic treatment in Purgatory, whether in relation to his choice of exempla in the terrace of pride, or his particular treatment of prodigality and indiscreet zeal – the opposing sub-vices of avarice and sloth, respectively. As we have seen, what might otherwise seem like inconsequential details or simply descriptive adjectives in Dante’s poetry can take on much broader cultural and spiritual resonances when recontextualised in the penitential and preaching materials from which, at least in part, it emerged. For example, Peraldus’s treatise on sloth revealed the origin and significance of Dante’s emphasis on tepidity (as the quiddity of sloth) as well as his allusions to many of sloth’s sub-vices. This, in turn, led to a reappraisal of the terrace of sloth as a whole. Although I have focused on the terraces of pride, sloth, and avarice, I have no doubt that a detailed comparative reading of Peraldus’s and Dante’s treatments of envy, anger, gluttony, and lust would reveal further illuminating parallels.

Peraldus’s De vitiis and Dante’s Purgatory invite us to envisage Christian moral life as, first of all, a spiritual battle against the seven capital vices and their offshoots. Should we interpret Dante’s Paradise as, at least in part, a poetic summa on the virtues (as I suggested in Chapter 4)? I have shown that an implicit moral structure, based on the three theological and four cardinal virtues, does appear to underpin Dante’s vision of Paradise, and a comparative study of Peraldus’s De virtutibus and Dante’s Paradiso might prove similarly generative. Nevertheless, the moral tenor of Dante’s Paradiso derives principally from his overarching conviction that the key struggle in the Christian moral life is against the cardinal vices of sloth and avarice, with a tepid love of God leading inexorably to a disordered turning to the world. Dante’s emphases in Paradiso on the absolute material poverty of the Church, on highly ascetic religious practices, and on the religious orders in their pristine state suggest a rather sharp renunciation of the world as a prerequisite for the Christian moral life. It is the clerics’ failure to think on God which, for Dante, leads them to acquire temporal power and wealth. Conversely, it is St Francis’s renunciation of worldly goods which frees his heart to love God fully; where the Church is wedded to Lady Cupidity, St Francis is wedded to Lady Poverty. It is revealing, moreover, that Dante’s ancestral father figure Cacciaguida (‘il padre mio’; Par. xvi, 16) renounces the ‘sweet dwelling’ of Florence (‘così dolce ostello’; xv, 132) to take up the crusading cross (xiv, 106), and – as a martyr in Heaven – describes the world he left behind as ‘the false world, the love of which defaces many souls’ (‘[i]l mondo fallace, / lo cui amor molt’ anime deturpa’; xv, 146–47).

Dante dramatizes in the poem this tension in his own moral life between his tepid love for God and his love of ‘the false world’. While scholars typically interpret Dante’s invention of Statius’s secret conversion to Christianity as a means to represent – in the poem – the influence of Virgil on his own poetic and Christian conversion (‘Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano’; Purg. xxii, 73), I have underlined the autobiographical implications of Dante’s invention of Statius’s prodigality and sloth (which, like his conversion to Christianity, have little or no grounds historically or in the subsequent commentary traditions). Indeed, I have suggested that Dante may have deliberately constructed his representation of Statius as, in addition to a poetic cypher, a moral cypher. Dante’s careful quantification of Statius’s sins – 500 years for prodigality (xxi, 68); 400 years for sloth (xxii, 92); 304 years for the sins of pride, envy, and wrath (and Ante-Purgatory); a single day for gluttony and lust – might contribute, on this view, to a speculative and partial profile of Dante’s sense of his own sins. Dante’s relative sinning in pride and envy is registered on the second terrace (xiii, 133–38). With regard to anger, although Dante’s rationale fails to distinguish adequately between righteous indignation at a wrong suffered (virtuous) and an unbounded hatred irrespective of the limits of justice (vicious), the apparently genocidal outbursts against the populations of Pisa and Genoa certainly appear to be examples of the latter (‘ira mala’ [sinful anger]; xvii, 69).⁸ Dante’s relative sinning in sloth and avarice is registered – through Statius – on the fifth terrace. Finally, the effortless ascent of Statius through the terraces of gluttony and lust, and Dante’s emphasis that these are, for him, lighter sins (xxii, 7–8), might suggest the (albeit minority) view that Dante presents himself as relatively unafflicted by these vices.⁹

Dante’s delineation of prodigality as Statius’s pre-conversion sin and of sloth as his post-conversion sin is, I have argued, potentially significant: it may suggest a similar delineation – in Dante’s own moral autobiography – between a particular tendency to prodigality in his Florentine years, and to sloth in his exile. It seems plausible that, in rejecting the ignoble vice of avarice, Dante strayed in the other direction, being overly generous, overly courteous, with his own (albeit limited) temporal goods. Dante strongly implies this through Statius’s staged confession of ‘prodigality’, which immediately precedes Dante-character’s encounter with Forese Donati and the troubled memory of his Florentine past. Shortly after the date of the fictional other-worldly journey (1300), Dante would be forcibly exiled from Florence and stripped of his temporal possessions. His own fate stands in contrast to that of Cacciaguida, who chose to embrace the cross of exile as a penitent crusader, and the ‘noble prodigal’ St Francis, who renounced his possessions to embrace voluntary poverty out of love for God.

Sloth is a sin particularly associated with the contemplative life. As an exiled scholar and poet, it again seems plausible that Dante would have had to struggle especially against the pull of this vice (a struggle, I have suggested, he dramatizes in his own person on the terrace of sloth). By attributing ‘tepidity’ to Statius as his post-conversion sin, Dante also seems – midway through writing his own magnum opus (c. 1310–1315) – to be registering the danger of leaving his own work, through sloth, incomplete, just as Statius, the delayer (status), failed to complete the Achilleid.

What, then, of Dante’s confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise? Dante confesses that ‘present things with their false pleasure turned my steps as soon as your face was hidden’ (‘le presenti cose / col falso lor piacer volser miei passi / tosto che ’l vostro viso si nascose’; Purg. xxxi, 34–36), and Beatrice replies: ‘another time, hearing the Sirens, you may be stronger’ (‘e perché altra volta, / udendo le serene, sie più forte’; 44–45).¹⁰ Dante’s sin is thereby explicitly associated with the terrace of sloth’s protagonist, the Siren. While early commentators interpret ‘Beatrice’ as ‘she who beatifies’ or ‘governing the blessed man’, they take ‘Siren’ as Greek for the Latin ‘attahere’, meaning to pull, drag, or allure.¹¹ In the tradition of nomen rei significans, the siren is an anti-Beatrice who – like sloth itself – drags Dante astray from, rather than guiding him towards, beatitude.¹² The symbolic power of the Siren as a negative shadow of Beatrice is emphasised through their self-presentation in the poem. In the Earthy Paradise, and just before scolding Dante-character for following ‘the Sirens’, Beatrice announces herself ‘Ben son, ben son Beatrice’ [Truly I am, truly I am Beatrice; Purg. xxx, 73], seemingly playing on the etymology of her name by stating that ‘qui è l’uom felice’ [here is man happy] (75). Beatrice corrects, in this way, the self-presentation of the siren – ‘Io son … io son dolce serena’ [I am I am a sweet siren] – who enchants sailors in mid-sea and leads them to moral shipwreck (‘che ’ marinari in mezzo mar dismago’; xix, 19–21).¹³

On this view, Beatrice embodies – in the poem – the Divine wisdom of theology that guides Dante towards beatitude (and she will be, of course, the pilgrim’s guide through the realm of the blessed), while the Siren embodies all the forms of disordered love (the seven capital vices) that turn one away from God. Pietro d’Alighieri interprets his father’s principal sin more specifically, as an immoderate love of poetry and philosophy (symbolised by his excessive love of Virgil), along with a neglect of the study of Divine wisdom (symbolised by his deficient love of Beatrice).¹⁴ From this perspective, and following Peraldus, we might tentatively gloss Dante’s confession in the Earthly Paradise in terms of avaritia scientiae (the cupidity of knowledge) as well as tepiditas (the insufficient love of God).¹⁵ As Augustine emphasised, the rational knowledge of science is ultimately unfruitful because it pertains to earthly things, whereas wisdom concerns knowledge of eternal things, and hence our eschatological destiny.¹⁶

As the Siren is an anti-Beatrice, so Ulysses is the pagan shadow for the Christian Dante. Highlighting the rich tradition of reading Ulysses as a figure for Christ, Michelangelo Picone effectively contrasts the successful models for Dante’s descent into Hell (Aeneas) and ascent into Heaven (St Paul) with Ulysses, the negative archetype for Dante’s unprecedented journey up the seven terraces of Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise.¹⁷ Ulysses’ failed attempt to reach Eden is narrated, of course, in Inferno xxvi, and is referenced explicitly in the opening cantos of Purgatory, and on the terrace of sloth: the sweet Siren (‘dolce serena’; Purg. xix, 19), we learn, turned Ulysses from his wandering path (‘Io volsi Ulisse del suo cammin vago’; 21).¹⁸ Whereas Ulysses’ ardour for knowledge of the world and of human vices and worth (‘del mondo esperto / e de li vizi umani e del valore’) led him to seek out a world without people (‘l’esperïenza, / di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente’; Inf. xxvi, 116–17), Dante literally ‘takes on board experience’ (‘esperïenza imbarche’; Purg. xxvi, 75) of a Purgatorial region populated by Christian souls in an effort to save himself, to die better (‘per morir meglio’).¹⁹

Whereas Ulysses’ tragedy – which might have been Dante’s own – ends in damnation (shipwreck), Dante’s comedy, beginning in the misery of sin, ends in salvation (the port in which his soul eventually finds rest).²⁰ Dante-character’s first words in Paradiso (addressed to Beatrice) – ‘Già contento requïevi’ [Already contented, I rested] (Par. i, 97) – counterpoise his first words in Inferno (addressed to Virgil): ‘miserere di me’ (Inf. i, 65).²¹ Thus the Christian moral journey from misery to happiness, ‘de statu miseriae … ad statum felicitatis’ (Epist. xiii, 15), from Hell to Paradise, is equated to Dante-character’s ascent of the seven terraces of Purgatory. As Dante-character’s first words in Purgatorio (addressed to his Florentine contemporary Casella) highlight, he is undergoing the journey in this life (‘fo io questo vïaggio’) so as to return to Purgatory in the next (‘per tornar altra volta / là dov’io son’; Purg. ii, 91–92). This is the journey of Dante’s Christian ethics: the purging of souls in Purgatory (the ecclesia poenitens) and, figuratively, the purification of penitent souls on Earth (the ecclesia militans).

At a meta-literary level, the pagan Ulysses’ ultimately ‘vain’ and ‘wandering’ (vago) pursuit of secular ‘knowledge’ and ‘virtue’ contrasts with the Christian poet’s journey (‘la navicella del mio ingegno’ [the little boat of my intellect]; Purg. i, 3) in completing – ‘fino a la fine’ [right to the end] (Purg. xviii, 137) – the Commedia. It is striking to note that Hugh Rahner turns precisely to this relationship between Dante’s salvific journey through Purgatory and Ulysses’ tragic shipwreck in Hell, in attempting to sum up the cultural condition of the West in the mid-twentieth century. For Rahner, Dante’s Ulysses embodies the ‘fateful fall of the West into sin’ when it broke from the ‘secure embrace between Hellas and the Church’ in turning away from Christ, and from the eschatological perspective of the world-to-come: ‘For here we no longer have the home-loving Odysseus of the last books of Homer’s epic but an unhappy man whose spirit drives him out of the security of his father’s home into the bold and godless venture of mastering the world by his own strength.’ Rahner asks ‘Will the shipwrecked West master it [the mountain of Purgatory] and so once more become worthy “to soar upwards towards heaven”?’ Only, he affirms, when it ‘has begun to pray with the words of the lofty prayer to the Logos’ in embracing, again, the Christian mystery: ‘All things are yours but ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.’²² Whether or not twenty-first century readers are receptive to the immediate (and, for Rahner, prophetic) urgency of Dante’s Christian ethics, I hope that this book has demonstrated – even to a predominantly secular academy – that approaching the poem as a work of ethics (morale negotium, sive ethica) – as it was originally envisaged – leads to a greater appreciation of Dante’s eschatological innovations and his literary genius.