Purgatorio · Canto I ·
Purgatorio I — The Four Stars
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 35 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto I
Before reading
The second cantica opens at dawn. The pilgrim and his guide have just climbed out of the pit at the centre of the earth, through a long narrow tunnel, into the open air of the southern hemisphere. The first thing they see is sky. After thirty-four cantos of darkness, sound, stench, and ice, the Commedia gives the reader a horizon, a colour, and four stars.
Where the canto sits
Inferno ended with the cosmic pratfall of climbing down Satan's flank and finding that down had become up. Purgatorio begins on the antipodes — a single mountainous island in the middle of the southern ocean, on the opposite side of the globe from Jerusalem. The mountain is Purgatory itself; the souls of the saved who still have penance to do climb its terraces toward the Earthly Paradise at the summit. Hell was an inverted cone descending into the earth. Purgatory is the cone's mirror, a real mountain rising from the sea. The whole cantica will be a climb — physical, moral, liturgical — by daylight and starlight, with the sea always behind and the summit always above.
It is also Easter morning. The pilgrim entered the dark wood on Maundy Thursday; he descended into Hell on Good Friday; he is now standing on the shore at the dawn of Easter Sunday. The poem's calendar is exact. The cantica of resurrection begins at the hour of the Resurrection.
What it helps to know
The guardian of the shore is one of the strangest figures in the whole Commedia. Marcus Porcius Cato of Utica (95–46 BC) was a Roman senator and Stoic, a defender of the dying Republic against Julius Caesar. When Caesar won the civil war, Cato killed himself at Utica in North Africa rather than live under tyranny. By every rule the Commedia has laid down in the first thirty-four cantos he should be damned twice over — once as a pagan who lived before Christ, once as a suicide (Inferno XIII consigns suicides to the forest of bleeding trees). Instead Dante sets him here, at the threshold of salvation, as the warden of the mountain. The contradiction is the poem's. Let it stand for now; the analysis after the canto will sit with it.
The four stars are the four cardinal virtues — Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance — figured as a constellation visible only in the southern sky and never seen by post-Edenic humanity except, the poem says, by the primal people. They are a sign that the pilgrim has crossed into a hemisphere where pre-fallen sight is, for a moment, possible.
Near the end of the canto, Cato will instruct Virgil to perform a small ritual. He is to lead the pilgrim to the water's edge, wash the smoke of Hell from his face, and gird him with a particular plant. The plant matters; its property matters more.
What to read for
Read the opening tercets for colour. After the air without a star, after the red light of Dis, Purgatorio opens with sweet color of the oriental sapphire. The colour of the sky is the second thing the cantica announces, after the metaphor of the little ship.
Notice the speech Virgil makes to Cato. He pleads, he flatters, he names the dead wife Cato loved. Watch what argument finally moves the old Roman. It is not the one Virgil seems to think it is.
Notice the canto's ending. Whatever has been gathered will grow back. The poem is making, in the smallest possible gesture, a statement about how grace works on this mountain that it never made in Hell.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The second cantica opened on a different planet. After thirty-four cantos of progressively constrained darkness, sound, and ice, the Commedia gives the reader the sky, dawn, the colour of the sea, and a constellation that has not been seen since Eden. The change of register is announced in the canto's opening metaphor: the little ship of the poet's genius leaves the sea so cruel behind it and runs on better waters. Hell was bottom; Purgatory is surface. Hell was a category of place the damned could not leave; Purgatory is a slope a soul is climbing. The whole cantica's grammar is up, and the canto plants its first verb in the very first sentence — to ascend to heaven becometh worthy.
The canto's external action is minimal. Two travellers walk out of a tunnel onto a beach; an old man with a beard appears and questions them; the elder of the two travellers makes a long speech, the old man answers, and the elder washes the smoke of Hell from the younger's face and girds him with a reed. That is all. Inside the small frame the Comedy has placed one of its most theologically destabilising decisions and one of its most quietly hopeful images.
Cato, the impossible warden
Marcus Porcius Cato of Utica died at his own hand in 46 BC rather than live under Caesar. He was a pagan who lived before the Incarnation; he was a suicide. By the explicit rules the Commedia has spent thirty-four cantos enforcing, he should be in Limbo (Inferno IV) at best and the forest of bleeding suicides (Inferno XIII) at worst. He is instead set here, alone, as the guardian of the shore of the saved. The poem does not pause to explain. Generations of commentators have offered routes around the scandal — Cato is allegorical and stands for liberty rather than literal; Cato will be taken up at the Last Judgement and is here only provisionally; Cato is an exception because his suicide was political rather than personal. None of these readings is entirely satisfactory, and the poem's silence on the matter is the most authored silence in the cantica.
What the canto does say, plainly, is that the old Roman's face was lit as were the sun before him by the four cardinal virtues. The pagan suicide is irradiated by the four moral virtues that pagan Rome itself produced and that pagan Rome itself believed sufficient — Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance. Cato is the Commedia's wager that a life lived entirely by those four can, somehow, be redeemed by them. It is a wager the poem makes once, here, and for one named pagan. Limbo's silent crowd is not given this exemption.
Virgil's plea and the argument that works
Virgil's speech to Cato is a small masterpiece of pagan rhetoric — flattery (the canto in his honour), the invocation of his dead wife Marcia in Limbo, an offer to carry word of him back. Cato cuts the flattery off. Marcia in Limbo, he says, can no longer move him; that traffic ended at the harrowing of Hell. The argument that actually moves him is one Virgil makes in passing, halfway through: the pilgrim seeketh Liberty, which is so dear, as knoweth he who life for her refuses.
Now may it please thee to vouchsafe his coming; He seeketh Liberty, which is so dear, As knoweth he who life for her refuses. Thou know'st it; since, for her, to thee not bitter Was death in Utica, where thou didst leave The vesture, that will shine so, the great day. (Purg. I.70–75)
The vesture, that will shine so, the great day. The line is the canto's most overt promise about Cato's future, and it is delivered as if in passing. The Last Judgement will resurrect Cato's body, and the body will shine. The poem will not say more.
The reed and the four stars
Where Hell's defining absence was stars, Purgatorio's defining presences are stars and one humble plant. The four stars are the four cardinal virtues, named obliquely in the brightness of Cato's face. The reed is humility itself — the humble plant — and its property is the key to the whole cantica. It is pliable, it bows to whatever current touches it, and as he culled the humble plant, such it sprang up again. The girdle of pride must be replaced by the girdle of bending. Penitence on this mountain will not be a stripping but a re-clothing.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening invocation.
To run o'er better waters hoists its sail The little vessel of my genius now, That leaves behind itself a sea so cruel; And of that second kingdom will I sing Wherein the human spirit doth purge itself, And to ascend to heaven becometh worthy. (Purg. I.1–6)
The whole change of cantica announced in two tercets. Better waters; second kingdom; to ascend as a verb in the infinitive — purpose, not yet achievement.
The sapphire dawn.
Sweet color of the oriental sapphire, That was upgathered in the cloudless aspect Of the pure air, as far as the first circle, (Purg. I.13–15)
A colour. The first thing the cantica gives the reader after Hell is a colour, named in a jewel.
The four stars.
To the right hand I turned, and fixed my mind Upon the other pole, and saw four stars Ne'er seen before save by the primal people. Rejoicing in their flamelets seemed the heaven. O thou septentrional and widowed site, Because thou art deprived of seeing these! (Purg. I.22–27)
The constellation that the northern (post-Edenic, post-Fall) hemisphere cannot see. The pilgrim has crossed into a sky that has not been seen since paradise. The political reading is also present — Christendom is the widowed site, the four cardinal virtues no longer ruling its public life.
Cato in his light.
I saw beside me an old man alone, Worthy of so much reverence in his look, That more owes not to father any son. A long beard and with white hair intermingled He wore, in semblance like unto the tresses, Of which a double list fell on his breast. The rays of the four consecrated stars Did so adorn his countenance with light, That him I saw as were the sun before him. (Purg. I.31–39)
Cato as a portrait — the only sustained portrait the canto allows itself. The light on his face is the four virtues. The poem renders the impossible warden with reverence and silence.
The argument from liberty.
He seeketh Liberty, which is so dear, As knoweth he who life for her refuses. (Purg. I.71–72)
The line is Virgil's, but the diagnosis is the poem's. The whole Commedia is a treatise on libertà in a register Cato can hear because he died for it.
The girding and the regrowing reed.
Then came we down upon the desert shore Which never yet saw navigate its waters Any that afterward had known return. There he begirt me as the other pleased; O marvellous! for even as he culled The humble plant, such it sprang up again Suddenly there where he uprooted it. (Purg. I.130–136)
The closing miracle. The plant of humility renews itself the instant it is taken. The first picture in the cantica of how grace is going to operate on the mountain — not by depletion but by replenishment.
What to watch for
Watch the four stars. They will be joined, in canto VIII, by three more — the three theological virtues. Pagan virtue holds the dawn; Christian virtue, when it arrives, will hold the evening.
Watch the humble reed. The same plant of bending will reappear at every step of the climb. Pride is the first sin the mountain will treat (cantos X–XII), and the reed is already its silent counter-argument.
Watch Virgil's authority. In Hell he overrode gatekeepers with a six-word formula. Here, on the mountain, he is questioned, corrected, occasionally chastened. The slow demotion of Virgil that will end with his disappearance in canto XXX begins, very gently, on this shore.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.