Purgatorio · Canto III ·
Purgatorio III — The Single Shadow
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 37 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto III
Before reading
The scattering at the end of canto II sent every soul on the shore running toward the mountain — every soul except the two travellers, who had no compass for where to run. They have walked a little inland; the canto opens with them at the base of the cliff, looking up at a slope so steep no human path is visible. The cantica's first encounter with a named soul of the saved comes here, and it is one of its strangest and most politically charged.
Where the canto sits
You are still on the lowest of the mountain's terraces — Ante-Purgatory, the long sloping plain at the foot of the cliff, where the souls of the late repentant must wait before they can begin the climb proper. The mountain has seven cornices above this plain (one for each of the deadly sins), and a gate that admits the soul to the proper climb. The gate is still several cantos away. What lives on this lower ground are categories of soul that Dante has invented for the cantica — souls saved at the last moment, by repentance so late or under circumstances so adverse that the Church on earth would not have recognised them as saved at all.
What it helps to know
A piece of physics matters in this canto. Shades do not cast shadows. The pilgrim's living body does. The poem has been quietly setting this up — Casella's translucent embrace in canto II was the first hint — and here the difference between the living body and the bodies of the dead becomes the canto's structural pivot. When the pilgrim turns and sees only one shadow on the ground at his feet, his momentary panic — the fear of being left alone — is the panic of a man who has just discovered, retrospectively, what kind of body has been walking beside him for thirty-six cantos. Virgil will explain. The explanation is a small theological essay on the suffering of bodies that should not, by the laws of pagan physics, be capable of suffering at all.
The principal soul of the canto is Manfred of Sicily (1232–1266), illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the last Hohenstaufen king of Sicily. He was a Ghibelline — supporter of imperial power against the papacy — twice excommunicated by Pope Innocent IV and by his successors, and he died in battle at Benevento in 1266 fighting Charles of Anjou, the papal champion. After the battle his body was insulted: stripped, identified by a stone-pile rather than buried in consecrated ground, eventually exhumed by order of the Pope and re-deposited on the banks of the river Verde, outside the kingdom of Naples, so that no Christian earth might receive him. He was, by every official judgment of the Church Dante lived under, damned.
Dante places him here, on the slope, on the way up.
The political stakes of this placement are enormous. Manfred is the Commedia's first explicit and named challenge to the assumption that the Church's earthly judgments map onto God's. Watch how the canto's argument is built.
What to read for
Read the opening shadow scene for its physical comedy turning slowly into theological seriousness. The pilgrim's panic is real and it is also the poem's way of teaching you the rule.
Notice when Manfred names himself. He names himself with a smile. Notice what he asks of the pilgrim — not vengeance, not memorial, not vindication, but a message to one specific living person. The economy of prayers from the living for the dead is the doctrine on which the entire cantica of Purgatorio rests, and it is announced here as a personal favour.
Listen for the canto's most devastating small phrase about what God's mercy actually is. It is six words long in Italian and Longfellow translates it almost as compactly. The poem is making, in the figure of an excommunicated battlefield king, one of its most heterodox statements: that the institutional Church can be wrong about who is saved.
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 canto did three things at once and made each one teach the other. It introduced the cantica's defining physical asymmetry — the living body casts a shadow on the slope, the bodies of the dead do not — and used the asymmetry to deliver a small treatise on what kind of suffering bodies are capable of bearing in the afterlife. It introduced the cantica's first category of late-repentant souls and showed them moving as a flock, slow, curious, gentle, susceptible to being startled. And it placed at the centre of the canto one of the most politically inflammatory portraits in the entire Commedia: Manfred of Sicily, twice-excommunicate Hohenstaufen, dead in battle against the Pope's army, his body exhumed and dumped on the river bank by ecclesiastical decree — placed here, smiling, on the road up. The canto's argument is the placement. Dante does not need to say the Church was wrong. He shows you Manfred climbing.
The shadow as theology
The first half of the canto is built on the missing shadow. The pilgrim turns and panics; Virgil explains. The explanation is one of the most quietly heterodox passages of the early Purgatorio. The bodies of the dead — Virgil tells the pilgrim, then later confirms to the assembled shades — are capable of suffering despite being insubstantial, and the how of this capacity is something not even the highest pagan philosophers could explain. The point being made is that the Christian doctrine of the suffering of disembodied souls is the precise place where pagan rationality must stop. Aristotle could not get here. Plato could not get here. Virgil cannot get here. The shadow Dante's body throws onto the slope, and the absence of Virgil's, is the visible marker of the limit of pagan understanding the Comedy will return to at every step of the climb.
The other shades are frightened of Dante's shadow. They draw back as a flock of sheep would. This too is doctrine. The body that casts a shadow is the body of a man still in the world of moral choice; the bodies that do not are the bodies of souls whose choices are now in the past. The flock's instinctive withdrawal is the proper response of the dead to the still-deciding.
Manfred, and the politics of placement
Manfred of Sicily died at Benevento on 26 February 1266, fighting Charles of Anjou — the French champion deployed by the papacy against the Hohenstaufen claim to southern Italy. He was twice excommunicate. His body, after the battle, was first piled with stones by the soldiers who recognised him, then exhumed by order of Pope Clement IV (acting through the Archbishop of Cosenza) and re-buried outside any Christian jurisdiction — by the convention of the time, the absolute mark that the Church considered him damned.
Dante puts him at the foot of Purgatory.
The placement is one of the most authored political acts in the poem. Manfred himself names what saved him: after I had my body lacerated by these two mortal stabs, I gave myself weeping to Him, who willingly doth pardon. The conversion happened between the second wound and death — between the strike and the falling. By every visible measure he died unrepentant; the only witness to the act of contrition was God. The Church's verdict was wrong because the Church could not see what the dying king had time to do in the gap between blow and end.
The doctrinal payoff is delivered next. Manfred is here, but he must wait. The poem invents a specific arithmetic for the excommunicate-but-repentant: thirty times the duration of the excommunication, spent on this lower slope, before the climb proper can begin — unless such decree shorter by means of righteous prayers become. The escape clause is the cantica's whole economy. Prayers offered on earth, by the living, for the dead, can shorten the dead's time on Ante-Purgatory. Manfred's request to the pilgrim — take news to my daughter Costanza, so that she may pray for me — is the first time in the Commedia this economy is named. It is also the doctrinal hinge on which medieval Catholic practice rested. Dante is not inventing the doctrine; he is showing what happens when the doctrine is taken seriously enough to override the verdicts of popes.
A reading the canto allows but does not insist on
The poem does not say Clement IV was wrong. It does not say excommunication is invalid. It says, very precisely, that the curse of theirs is not so lost / eternal Love, that it cannot return, / so long as hope has anything of green. The figure is botanical — finché la speranza ha fior del verde — and it is the cantica's quiet refrain against ecclesiastical arithmetic. Hope has a green flower; while it does, no human curse can reach the part of the soul that turns. Read the line as a doctrine of grace and it is orthodox. Read it as a comment on the man who issued Manfred's exhumation order and it is one of the sharpest political sentences in medieval poetry. The Comedy lets both readings stand.
Famous and meaningful passages
The shadow first seen.
The sun, that in our rear was flaming red, Was broken in front of me into the figure Which had in me the stoppage of its rays; Unto one side I turned me, with the fear Of being left alone, when I beheld Only in front of me the ground obscured. (Purg. III.16–21)
The pilgrim's discovery of his own substantiality. He had not, until this canto, noticed that his body was different from his guide's.
Virgil on his own body.
'T is evening there already where is buried The body within which I cast a shadow; 'T is from Brundusium ta'en, and Naples has it. Now if in front of me no shadow fall, Marvel not at it more than at the heavens, Because one ray impedeth not another. (Purg. III.25–30)
Virgil locates his own buried body geographically (Brindisi to Naples — the actual route by which the historical Virgil's corpse was translated) and then announces the metaphysics that explain his missing shadow. The dead poet keeps the address of his own grave.
The flock startled.
As soon as those in the advance saw broken The light upon the ground at my right side, So that from me the shadow reached the rock, They stopped, and backward drew themselves somewhat; And all the others, who came after them, Not knowing why nor wherefore, did the same. (Purg. III.88–93)
The whole sociology of the late-repentant flock in six lines: the front rank reacts, the rest follow without knowing why, non sapendo il perché. The mass on the slope moves by transmitted instinct, not by individual decision.
Virgil announces the living body.
Without your asking, I confess to you This is a human body which you see, Whereby the sunshine on the ground is cleft. Marvel ye not thereat, but be persuaded That not without a power which comes from Heaven Doth he endeavor to surmount this wall. (Purg. III.94–99)
The pilgrim's living presence is, on the mountain, evidence of divine sanction. Not without a power which comes from Heaven. The canto's first defence of why the pilgrim is permitted at all.
Manfred names himself.
Then said he with a smile: I am Manfredi, The grandson of the Emperess Costanza; Therefore, when thou returnest, I beseech thee Go to my daughter beautiful, the mother Of Sicily's honor and of Aragon's, And the truth tell her, if aught else be told. (Purg. III.112–117)
With a smile. The smile is the canto's authorial detail. The excommunicate king, in line for the climb to Heaven, is happy. He asks for word to be carried to his daughter, the other Costanza, mother of the kings of Sicily and Aragon. The political genealogy is offered as the canto's quiet reminder that this is a real king the poem is rescuing.
The deathbed conversion.
After I had my body lacerated By these two mortal stabs, I gave myself Weeping to Him, who willingly doth pardon. Horrible my iniquities had been; But Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms, That it receives whatever turns to it. (Purg. III.118–123)
The conversion in the gap between wound and death. Horrible my iniquities had been, but Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms — the cantica's most expansive image of divine mercy, delivered by a king the Church damned.
The line on which the canto's politics rest.
By malison of theirs is not so lost Eternal Love, that it cannot return, So long as hope has anything of green. True is it, who in contumacy dies Of Holy Church, though penitent at last, Must wait upon the outside of this bank Thirty times told the time that he has been In his presumption, unless such decree Shorter by means of righteous prayers become. (Purg. III.133–141)
The doctrine in full. The Church's curse does not bind God. The hope of conversion has a green flower. The wait is real, but the wait can be shortened by prayer. The whole economy of the next twenty cantos is given here.
Manfred's parting request.
See now if thou hast power to make me happy, By making known unto my good Costanza How thou hast seen me, and this ban beside, For those on earth can much advance us here. (Purg. III.142–145)
Quei di là molto avanzar ponno. Those on earth can do much to advance us here. The cantica's first explicit invitation to the reader: pray for these souls; your prayers reach them. The Commedia is asking its reader, by canto III of Purgatorio, to enter into the economy it is describing.
What to watch for
Watch the missing shadow. It will return at the entrance to every terrace where the sun strikes the slope. Virgil's shadow-lessness is the visible marker of his limit, and the poem will use it as a graphic recurring sign all the way to the summit.
Watch the late-repentant. Manfred is the first of four named figures in the next two cantos who repented at the last possible moment, in violent or compromised circumstances. The whole opening movement of the cantica is a catalogue of God's mercy on those the world considered lost.
Watch the word prayer. From this canto on, the prayers of the living for the dead is the cantica's working theology. The Comedy will return to it at every terrace. By Purgatorio XI you will hear the souls themselves pray the Lord's Prayer for the living.
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.