« Danteblogging - Purgatory Canto II | Main | Danteblogging - Purgatorio Canto IV »

August 26, 2010

Danteblogging Purgatorio Canto III

Purgatory Canto III

The first tercet of Canto III ends with an excellent 4-word statement of the method of Purgatory: it is the place ove ragion ne fruga, "where reason winnows us" (III.3). If Hell is a place where the souls have rejected and still reject Divine Reason, Purgatory is the place where the souls learn to increasingly conform themselves to that pattern. Dante has just compared the scattering souls at the end of Canto II to pigeons scattered from a wheat field, so the verb frugare, "winnow," is especially pointed.

The souls the pilgrims first met in Hell were the indecisive, who were condemned to perpetually chasing a flag as fast as they could fly. The first established group of souls Dante meets here are moving slowly, deliberately. They are "a happy flock" (III.86), the excommunicate.

Dante meets Manfred, King of Sicily. His father Frederick was in the circle of the heretics and his aunt Constance will show up in Paradise -- our first example of this sort of family division. Manfred explains the technical effect of excommunication. Excommunication doesn't damn a soul to Hell -- popes can't do that, souls damn themselves or not -- but for every year he lived excommunicate he has to wait here on this beach before starting to climb the mountain.

However, that time can be shortened by the prayers of the living -- and we see here for the first time a shift in Dante's relation to the dead souls. While in the Inferno he or Virgil offered fame in exchange for conversation or help (e.g., Antaeus), here the souls will ask or Dante will offer to carry word to their survivors. Manfred asks:

See now if you can bring me happiness,
  revealing to my daughter the good Constance
  the law that binds me here. For we can gain
Much profit from what prayers on earth obtain.

I wonder about the 14th Century! How many early readers of Dante came across the name of a relative or friend in Purgatory and offered up a prayer? Surely some!

Click here for all the Danteblogging and none of my other ramblings.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 26, 2010 11:35 AM