Purgatorio · Canto IV ·
Purgatorio IV — The Narrow Scramble
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 38 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto IV
Before reading
After the long stop with Manfred, the two travellers begin the actual climb. The canto is shaped like a hike — a hard scramble up a narrow rock-cut path, a pause at a ledge to breathe, a lesson in cosmography from the guide, and then the meeting with the canto's principal soul, who is sitting in the shade behind a rock and has, at this point in his afterlife, no intention of going any further. The first encounter on the slope proper is with the cantica's most beloved minor figure.
Where the canto sits
You are still in Ante-Purgatory — the slope below the gate, where the souls of the late repentant must wait. Canto III met the excommunicate late-repentants (Manfred); canto IV meets the indolent late-repentants, those who delayed their conversion not from violent circumstance but from ordinary procrastination, and who must wait, the cantica tells us, for as long again as they delayed during life before they can begin the climb proper.
What it helps to know
The canto opens with a small philosophical disquisition — twelve lines on how the soul, when intent on one object, loses track of time. This is not decoration. It is the canto's diagnostic of the kind of soul it will soon meet. The man sitting under the rock has been distracted from his own salvation by the soul's habit of settling into whatever holds it. The canto's opening on the unitary soul is the philosophical brief against the plural soul of the Averroists — a position that mattered enormously in the Paris and Bologna of Dante's time, and that he would treat at length in canto XXV. For now, take it as the poem's quiet way of saying: what you are about to see is one soul's whole attention sitting still.
The mountain's geography matters here. Virgil will pause the climb to explain why the sun appears to move northward across the sky rather than southward as it does in the northern hemisphere. The poem's cosmology is rigorous: Jerusalem and the Mount of Purgatory are exactly antipodal; the sun's apparent path is mirrored. The lesson is offered in the technical language of medieval astronomy — Castor and Pollux, the Bears, the zodiac — and the pilgrim has trouble following it. The episode is a quiet joke at the poet-pilgrim's own expense.
The principal soul of the canto is Belacqua, a Florentine maker of musical instruments — liuti, lutes — whom Dante had known personally. He was, by tradition, the laziest man in Florence. Nothing else is known about him outside this canto and a few mentions in early commentators. He died around 1300. His Purgatorial posture is exactly the posture he was famous for in life: knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them, head down, doing nothing. He has not been changed by death; he has been allowed to be exactly himself, in the shade of a rock, for as long as he was lazy on earth — at which point an angel will admit him to the climb.
What to read for
Read the opening on the unitary soul slowly. It is short. It is the canto's whole interpretive frame for what follows.
Notice the pilgrim's physical exhaustion on the climb. The cantica is unusual among medieval poems in that the body's tiredness on the slope is given full weight. Dante pants, scrambles, stops, asks for help. The reader is supposed to feel the climb in the calves.
Notice the moment when the pilgrim sees Belacqua. The recognition is instant — Dante knows the man at a glance, by his characteristic posture alone. There is affection in the encounter. The poem is at ease here in a way it rarely is in Hell; the cantica is making space for friendship among the saved.
Listen for Belacqua's line on prayer. It echoes Manfred's line from canto III word for word in its theology. The cantica is repeating its central doctrine in a new register — comic, intimate, Florentine — to make sure the reader has it.
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 was the cantica's first sustained piece of climbing. Almost half the lines are spent on physical action — scrambling up a cleft on hands and feet, panting, resting on a ledge — and the body of the pilgrim is given a weight the Inferno almost never accorded it. Hell's bodies were instruments of fear or pity; Purgatorio's body is, increasingly, an instrument of fatigue. The cantica's climb is a real climb, with sore calves, and the poem will not let the reader forget it. Inside that physical frame the canto then placed two of its quieter set-pieces — Virgil's lesson on antipodal cosmography, and the meeting with Belacqua — and tied them, by way of the opening twelve lines on the unitary soul, into a single argument about the soul's tendency to fix.
The opening twelve lines, and the Averroist argument
The canto's first four tercets are a small philosophical aside. The soul, when seized by delight or pain, collects itself wholly to that object; while it is so collected, time passes unnoticed. The aside is doing two things. First, it explains, in advance, the canto's most striking experience — the pilgrim has spent the morning climbing and has not noticed that the sun is now four hours into the sky. Second, it argues, against the Averroist philosophers Dante would treat at length in canto XXV, that the soul is one and not many. The Averroists held that the human being possessed several souls or several faculties of soul, each functioning independently. Dante's tercets argue that the soul's capacity to be absorbed — to lose track of one faculty's data while another is engaged — is itself evidence that the soul is unitary. The argument is technical; its placement is not. The canto is preparing the reader, at its philosophical opening, for the figure of Belacqua: a man whose one soul was collected wholly on rest, and whose afterlife is being lived in the exact posture of that collection.
Virgil as cosmographer, and the slow demotion of his authority
The cosmographical lesson on the ledge is one of the most charming scenes in the early Purgatorio. The pilgrim has noticed that the sun is on the wrong side of the sky. Virgil explains, in the language of medieval astronomy, that this is because the Mount of Purgatory is antipodal to Jerusalem: the same celestial wheel runs over both places, but observed from each end the apparent path of the sun is mirrored. The explanation involves Castor and Pollux, the Bears, the zodiac, and a thought-experiment about imagining Zion and the Mount on either side of one horizon. It is correct, it is precise, it is medieval astronomy at its most confident — and the pilgrim does not quite follow it. The mode is genial, but the structural work is real: Virgil's authority in the Purgatorio is increasingly technical and explanatory rather than commanding. In Hell he silenced gatekeepers with six-word formulas. On the mountain he gives astronomy lectures and the pilgrim asks for clarifications.
Belacqua, and the canto's most loved figure
Almost nothing is known of Belacqua outside this canto. The early commentator Benvenuto da Imola identifies him as a Florentine maker of musical instruments, uomo accidiosissimo — the most slothful of men — known in life for sitting in his shop all day and answering, when asked to do anything, what is the use? Dante had clearly known him. The recognition in the canto is instant and unspoken; the pilgrim sees the posture and names the man without ever having heard him speak. The encounter is, in the Comedy's repertoire, almost unique in its tenderness. There is no rebuke. There is laughter at Belacqua's negligence, but the laughter is the laughter of fellow citizens — the wit of the new style turned on a man who is past being hurt by it.
What Belacqua says is, theologically, the canto's pivot. He confirms, in a Florentine drawl, the doctrine Manfred had stated at the foot of the slope:
First heaven must needs so long revolve me round Outside thereof, as in my life it did, Since the good sighs I to the end postponed, Unless, e'er that, some prayer may bring me aid Which rises from a heart that lives in grace; What profit others that in heaven are heard not? (Purg. IV.130–135)
The arithmetic is exact: as long again as the lifetime of delay, the soul waits outside the gate. The escape clause is the same as Manfred's: the prayer of a soul in grace can shorten the wait. The cantica is repeating its central economy in every register it can find — royal and political with Manfred, civic and comic with Belacqua. The doctrine is the same. The casing changes.
The unitary soul's hidden joke
The canto's structural elegance is that its opening philosophical aside and its closing comic encounter are the same argument in two registers. The aside says: the soul, when seized by an object, gathers all itself onto that object and loses track of time. Belacqua is that aside made flesh. His soul was seized in life by rest and gathered itself wholly to it; his afterlife is the time he failed to notice slipping past while he sat. What's the use of climbing, he asks. The Angel of God who sitteth at the gate would not let me go. The doctrine is straight, but the voice is the voice of a man who is, even now, finding his predicament more entertaining than urgent. The canto's affection for him is the cantica's first instance of God's affection for a sinner who is, in some unkillable way, still himself.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening on the unitary soul.
Whenever by delight or else by pain, That seizes any faculty of ours, Wholly to that the soul collects itself, It seemeth that no other power it heeds; And this against that error is which thinks One soul above another kindles in us. (Purg. IV.1–6)
The aside frames everything that follows. Whatever the soul attends to, it attends with all of itself.
The pilgrim alone on the slope.
O my sweet Father! turn thee and behold How I remain alone, unless thou stay! O son, he said, up yonder drag thyself, Pointing me to a terrace somewhat higher, Which on that side encircles all the hill. These words of his so spurred me on, that I Strained every nerve, behind him scrambling up, Until the circle was beneath my feet. (Purg. IV.43–50, approx.)
The cry to my sweet Father and the answer up yonder drag thyself. Virgil's address to Dante in the Purgatorio is increasingly paternal, and the cantica's verbs of climbing — strain, scramble, drag — are unsparing.
The cosmographic lesson.
If Castor and Pollux Were in the company of yonder mirror, That up and down conducteth with its light, Thou wouldst behold the zodiac's jagged wheel Revolving still more near unto the Bears, Unless it swerved aside from its old track. (Purg. IV.61–66, approx.)
Virgil's pedagogy at its most patient and most opaque. The whole celestial mechanism is offered in a hypothetical. The pilgrim does not, on first hearing, quite follow.
Belacqua's posture.
And one of them, who seemed to me fatigued, Was sitting down, and both his knees embraced, Holding his face low down between them bowed. O my sweet Lord, I said, do turn thine eye On him who shows himself more negligent Then even Sloth herself his sister were. Then he turned round to us, and he gave heed, Just lifting up his eyes above his thigh, And said: Now go thou up, for thou art valiant. (Purg. IV.106–114, approx.)
The body curled into a perfect triangle of stillness. More negligent than even Sloth herself his sister were. And Belacqua's reply — a sardonic compliment to the climbing pilgrim — is the cantica's first joke at the expense of the pilgrim's own earnestness. Now go thou up, for thou art valiant. He means: I won't be coming with you.
Belacqua's theology.
Belacqua, I grieve not For thee henceforth; but tell me, wherefore seated In this place art thou? Waitest thou an escort? Or has thy usual habit seized upon thee? And he: O brother, what's the use of climbing? Since to my torment would not let me go The Angel of God, who sitteth at the gate. First heaven must needs so long revolve me round Outside thereof, as in my life it did, Since the good sighs I to the end postponed, Unless, e'er that, some prayer may bring me aid Which rises from a heart that lives in grace; What profit others that in heaven are heard not? (Purg. IV.123–135, approx.)
The most relaxed exposition of the cantica's central doctrine. Prayer that rises from a heart that lives in grace. The qualifier matters: the prayers of the saved-and-still-in-grace shorten the dead's wait; the prayers of the unredeemed do nothing. The economy is precise, and Belacqua delivers it without sitting up.
What to watch for
Watch the bodies on the slope. From here on the cantica will keep noticing that the pilgrim tires and the shades do not; the contrast becomes a structural marker every time a long climb is described.
Watch the verb postpone. Belacqua postponed his good sighs; the late-repentant of canto V will be people who postponed their conversion to the very last instant. The whole opening movement of the cantica is a catalogue of postponements forgiven.
Watch Virgil's authority. He has begun the cantica as the explainer, the cosmographer, the patient teacher. By Purgatorio XXX he will be gone. The arc of his diminishment begins, very gently, in this canto's lecture-pause on the ledge.
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.