God’s as earth is from. the heaven
whose swiftest wheel turns above all the rest.“ [XXXIII. 85-90]

It should be emphasized that Dante is not here denying the great value of secular wisdom, especially philosophy, for without it he could not have written the Comedy. His purpose is to put such wisdom in its proper place by making it subservient to God, by whom it was ordained to minister to man’s practical intellectual needs, and by excluding it from all questions touching matters of faith. This message, aside from informing the comedy as a whole, finds its most eloquent expression in the tragic story of Ulysses. It is in the Purgatorio, however, that Dante demonstrates systematically the interrelation of the two wisdoms he believes necessary for the education of mankind for the enjoyment of this life and the life to come.

In contrast with the turbulent complexity of Hell, Dante’s Purgatory is simple, regular, and serene. On the lower reaches below the gate are kept in exile for varying lengths of time those souls who, for various reasons and in various conditions, sought salvation at the last moment. Above, within Purgatory, we find not the multifarious crimes by which vice or sin manifests itself in Hell (or on Earth), but simply the seven Capital Vices that lead to sinful acts. Since the souls here are all saved, and eager to act in accordance with divine will, there is no place among them for violence, malice, fraud, rebelliousness, etc. Each vice is treated on a specific ledge (cornice) that circles the mountain. Souls remain on a given ledge until they feel purged of all slightest subconscious taint of that particular vice, at which point they move up spontaneously.

The educative system employs, first, examples of the virtue opposed to the vice, then examples of the vice punished; the method of presentation is different for each vice, and particularly suited to the posture and condition of the souls undergoing purgation. The Proud, bowed under loads that are proportionate to the gravity of their vice, have ample time, as they creak slowly around, to contemplate marvelously realistic carvings; the Envious, sitting together with their eyes, misused to their sorrow on earth, sewn shut, hear their lessons called out; the Slothful, rushing with the zeal they lacked in life, shout theirs aloud, and so on.

The ingenuity thus called for was admirable enough, but the truly significant feature is the steady pattern of duality, of the interaction of two sets of values. This is most clearly observable in the ordering of the lessons, or examples. First, in every instance, is an example from the life of the Virgin who, Bonaventure said, “... shone with every virtue... and was most free from the seven Capital Vices.” Priority is thus given to sacred learning. Thereafter on every ledge the lessons are drawn alternately from the Bible and classical history, mythology, or literature. Progress up the mountain is possible only while the sun shines, i.e., under the inspiration of divine wisdom. At the same time we know that the stars representing the four Cardinal Virtues are overhead, though made invisible by the sun’s brightness. In other words, divine wisdom is the sine qua non of education, but the virtues Dante identifies with ancient Rome form its subject matter. At night, when no progress is possible in the active way, the stars representing the Theological Virtues are overhead, and men receive divine wisdom through mystical means, such as dreams and visions. At the end of Purgatory proper, Canto XXVII, Dante is awarded his diploma by Virgil, who, telling him that because his will is now free, healthy, and straight he may follow it freely, adds,

“Lord of yourself I crown and mitre you.”

In other words, Dante is henceforth his own philosopher-king and his own bishop-pope; completely educated in the cardinal and theological virtues, he needs no further formal guidance in this life.

The principle of interaction between the classical and the Christian worlds is repeated once again in the pageant at the end of the cántica. Here Dante recapitulates his theory of the history of man’s fall and redemption and the vicissitudes of the church, ending in its contemporary degradation, the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy in Avignon. To represent the church, Dante uses a triumphal two-wheeled chariot. Around the right wheel—indication of their superiority—dance the three Theological Virtues, as maidens each dressed in her appropriate color; around the left wheel dance four others identified as the Cardinal Virtues by their imperial purple. A few terzine later the union of Biblical and classical authority is underlined again by the verses which herald the approach of Beatrice. The first is a paraphrase of Matthew XXI, “Blessed art thou that comest”; the second are the words of Anchises in the Aeneid, VI, 833: “Oh scatter handfuls of lilies.”

To most modem readers, all this may seem of little importance, and certainly not dangerously controversial; things were quite different in the early 1300’s. To form an idea of how different, we do not need to strain our imaginations; we have only to think of certain fundamentalist groups of our own day and in our own country, among whom to suggest that the Bible is not sufficient by itself for every need is to invite serious trouble. Yet Dante was not content with challenging the Church’s adequacy, though in a figurative and more or less covert form. His insistence that secular wisdom stand beside sacred wisdom in the education of the individual implied a much more dangerous challenge: that secular government stand beside sacred government. In simple terms, the world needed a strong civil state independent of the church. Such a theory ran counter to the policy and pronouncements of the Holy See, supreme since its defeat of the last of the Hohenstaufen emperors.