Canto XIX -- The Ascent to the Fifth Cornice and Dante's Dream

2005-03-07T22:32:00.000-08:00

"Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted."

The dreams we dream closest to dawn are those that are thought prescient and upon which we might rely to tell us what our future brings. In La Vita Nuova, Dante dreams that Beatrice has died, and writes that "such a frenzy seized me that I closed my eyes and, agitated like one in delirium, began to imagine things: as my mind started wandering, there appeared to me certain faces of ladies with dishevelled hair, and they were saying to me: 'You are going to die.' And then after these ladies there appeared to me other faces strange and horrible to look at, who were saying: 'You are dead.'" We all die, eventually, and we might either go nobly as did Sts. Perpetua and Felicity or feebly as do those who bow to excess. As it turned out for Dante's dream, Beatrice did die, eventually and while still young, and her death in its inspiration of the Comedy was a felix morta for the world's literary canon. The dream of these horrid women, furthermore, mirrors Dante's dream on the mountain, for the lady that appeared to him there was both a beauty and a beast. This dream of the Siren, our first mythological creature on Mount Purgatory, represents for him, however, not the death of his beloved but the reality of those sins upon which he is about to come. The next ledges, then, signify excessive love of the things of this world -- avarice, gluttony, and lust -- and Ciardi notes that the Siren herself, then, signifies not "the Pleasures of the Appetite (for those were given by God for man's joy in His creation), but the Abandonment of the Soul to Excessive Physical Appetite" (450). I think of Salome's dance when I think of this crone, and were it not inappropriate for me to show you the video of the Dance of the Seven Veils, I'd direct you there on braidwood.net.

As Virgil is explaining to Dante the significance of his dream, the poets arrive on the fifth cornice, that of avarice, and meet one of the penitent bound face-down in the dust. In hell, the avaricious are divided into the hoarders and the wasters, and we find them thusly divided here though sharing in the same purification, the contrapasso of which Pope Adrian V (another soul that Kschroeder might want to consider for his project since this is our first pope in Purgatory and he suffers for something that no pope suffered in hell -- moreover, he suffers for beatification, and no soul in hell can claim a fraction of as much*) explains to Dante before requesting Dante leave him to his purification but warn his niece against the sin of his clan lest she not be led "the way the blessed go" (148). No amount of avarice on earth can forestall one's end, and as Pope Adrian V explains, all laws, contracts, and other such things that bind a man to his status in life disintegrate upon his death. It is as Pope writes that "The creature had his feast of life before;/ Thou too must perish when thy feast is o'er!" We ought to prepare ourselves against that day by following Msgr. Griesedieck's advice to "live simply so that others may simply live."

(*The question Kschroeder might ask of Pope Adrian's state concerns the difference between the avarice of which this man is being cleansed and the acting upon it that caused the simoniacs to dance invertedly.)

S.

Purgatory: Canto 19 -- Fifth Cornice: Avaricious...

Canto XIX -- The Ascent to the Fifth Cornice and Dante's Dream