It is not a theological arrangement but a philosophical one; not a theoretical exposition—save for the marvelously concise discourse of Virgil in Canto XI-but what might be called a case-system presentation of classic examples of evil in its outward social manifestations. The theoretical approach had already been tried in Dante’s first work after his exile, the unfinished Banquet (Il Convivio). Here he had set out along the scholiast’s favorite way—a commentary on an established text—with the purpose of making available to the un-Latined the corpus of philosophy as he had found it. Yet when only about one-third complete, this ambitious task had been abandoned, with no word of explanation such as that which terminated his only preceding work, the Vita Nuova.

These two works together, the tender autobiographical effusion and the unfinished encyclopedia, or more precisely the experiences they represent, are of central importance to the Comedy. The Vita Nuova in particular is as essential to a deeper understanding of the Purgatorio as the Florentine events and Dante’s part in them are to an understanding of the Inferno. Without a knowledge of at least the outline of his rapturous, remote love for Beatrice, the many allusions to her lose their meaning and the growing tension as the poet mounts to the top of Purgatory cannot be fully felt. Of even greater significance is the knowledge that Bea. trice died in 1290, and that, in the ten years between then and the supposed date of the Comedy, Dante had been unfaithful to her memory; without it, we are puzzled by her severe reproof when she confronts him in the Earthly Paradise. An understanding of the allegorical meaning with which Dante invested both earlier works and their relationship explains another of her reproofs and illuminates the poet’s spiritual biography. No one reading the Vita Nuova can doubt that its characters are real persons, especially the object of its idealized love. Likewise when Dante describes how deeply he was affected, in his grief after Beatrice’s death, by the obvious compassion shown by the “Lady of the Window,” he was clearly describing how his grief was being lessened by his interest in another woman; and the remorse with which this little book closes is obviously sincere. Twelve or more years later, when he begins the Banquet, Beatrice has gradually become a sacred abstraction relegated to Heaven, having no further role in this life, while the “Lady of the Window” has become “daughter of God, queen of everything, most fair and noble Philosophy.”

Dante threw himself into his new love with such characteristic single-mindedness that, soon, as he him self tells us, “it drove out and destroyed every other thought” (Banquet, II, xii). At some point thereafter—and, since so little of this book dedicated to philosophy was written, it was probably not many years—there must have occurred another crisis like that at the end of the Vita Nuova, but much greater. Dante must have realized the peril in his overdependence on secular wisdom and on his own faculties, and he readjusted his scale of values in such a way as to re-establish the superiority of revealed truth. This crisis is probably represented in Canto I of the Comedy, for it is doubtless from this futile and dangerous self-reliance that Dante is there rescued by Virgil. In the Comedy it is evident that the lover, now definitely returned—both to Beatrice and to her sacred significance—wished to make public confession and amends for his error by weaving it very fittingly into the fabric of his Mount of Purification. Indeed, to the reader thus prepared to understand it, this second cántica can be seen to contain a monumental act of atonement. To clarify his intent and achieve greater effect, Dante planned this episode to occur in a sequence similar to the original. Since all the deviations sprang from the Vita Nuova, some way had to be found to recall that work and its experiences to the reader without disrupting the poem’s artistic unity. This he achieved by a device so effective, so subtle, and at the same time so obvious that its secret has rarely been perceived. To see this we must examine the Purgatorio itself.

Among the distinguishing features of this division of the Comedy is what might be called its “middle” character. Whereas the Inferno is all darkness and the Paradiso is all light, the Purgatorio is a mixture of the two in its alternation of day and night. This comes about naturally, since it is imagined as a mountain rising in the middle of Earth’s southern hemisphere opposite Jerusalem. Arriving there at dawn on Easter Sunday, Dante and Virgil spend four days and three nights in its ascent. As Hell had its vestibule, so Purgatory begins with an “ante-Purgatorio,” the whole base of the mountain up to a certain height. Then comes a gate, and Purgatory itself begins. The poets reach this point in the first night, during Dante’s sleep; it is Canto IX. During the second night they are in the fourth or middle one of the seven vices, Sloth, and again Dante falls asleep; this is Canto XVIII. The end of Purgatory itself is reached, and Dante falls asleep for the final time, in Canto XXVIL The scheme thus revealed is a series of 9’s. At this point, no one familiar with the Vita Nuova can fail to be alerted, remembering the pains its young author had taken to associate the number 9 with Beatrice, because she was herself “a nine, that is, a miracle.” When one sees further that there are precisely three of these 9’s, and that each has a vision associated with it, he cannot help recalling how Dante first saw Beatrice at age 9, saw her again at 18, and concluded the Vita Nuova at 27; and that there was a vision associated with each of those three 9’s. Dante has accomplished his purpose; the alert and knowledgeable reader is prepared for the confrontation with Beatrice. To make this doubly sure, he has the latter say, in her rebuke,

“This man was such, in his vita nova,”

where the last two words have the unaccustomed, though legitimate, meaning of “childhood” or “youth.” The only specific term Beatrice employs here to identify Dante’s transgressions is pargoletta, an endearment used by the poet in a love lyric not addressed to Beatrice. That they are meant to include Dante’s overemphasis on secular studies is made clear two cantos later, where she explains her use of lofty words and concepts:

“They fly so high,” she said, “that you may know
what school you followed, and how far behind
the truth I speak its feeble doctrines go;

 

and see that man’s ways, even at his best,
are far from.