Purgatorio · Canto XV ·
Purgatorio XV — The Angel of Mercy
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 49 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XV
Before reading
This is the hinge canto of the mountain's middle. It closes the terrace of envy, walks the pilgrim up a stair, and opens the terrace of wrath. In between, it puts into Virgil's mouth one of the Commedia's most carefully constructed pieces of theological instruction — an explanation, prompted by Dante's misunderstanding of what Guido del Duca said in the last canto, of how heavenly goods can be shared without diminishment. The canto contains the structural answer to the sin of envy in three tercets, and then it walks the pilgrim into the smoke of the next terrace as if to test whether he has heard.
Where the canto sits
The afternoon is wearing on. The pilgrim has by now spent the morning on pride and the early afternoon on envy. The light is hitting the mountain from the west; in the canto's first tercets, Dante measures the hour with one of his characteristic astronomical figures. The angel of mercy appears, sings the Beatitude that corrects envy, and erases the second P from his forehead. The climb to the third terrace is steep. While they climb, Virgil teaches. Then they arrive on the terrace of wrath, and almost the first thing that happens is that smoke as black as night closes around them and the pilgrim is again blinded — this time not by sewn eyelids but by the medium of the sin itself.
What it helps to know
The Beatitude the angel of envy sings is Beati misericordes — blessed are the merciful. Each terrace's angel sings the Beatitude that names the virtue opposite to the sin just purged. Mercy is the answer to envy because the merciful soul rejoices at the relief of another's pain; the envious soul grieves at another's prosperity. They are mirror impulses, and the Beatitude is delivered in the exact register that reverses the sin.
The instruction Virgil gives in the centre of the canto is, in plain terms, the doctrine of the inverse mathematics of love. Dante misunderstands Guido del Duca's interdict of partnership in canto XIV — he reads it as a complaint that there is not enough to go round. Virgil corrects him: the line referred to earthly goods, which behave like physical objects (the more you take, the less I have). Heavenly goods behave inversely (the more you take, the more I have, because the goods grow with the loving). The image Virgil uses to explain this is the mirror: each loving soul reflects the divine light back to every other loving soul, and the brightness compounds. The image will return at the end of Paradiso as the central image of Heaven itself.
The three visions of meekness the pilgrim experiences on the new terrace are the examples of the opposite virtue that, on every terrace, precede the punishment. The pattern here is different — they come not as carvings or voices but as full inner visions, ecstatic states the pilgrim falls into and reports as if dreaming awake. The three scenes are: Mary finding the boy Jesus teaching in the temple after three days' search and gently asking why he has done this to them (Luke 2); Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens in the sixth century BC, whose wife demanded he punish a young man who had publicly kissed their daughter and who answered with the canto's quietest line; and Stephen, the first Christian martyr, praying as he was stoned to death for those who killed him (Acts 7).
Hebrew scripture, classical history, Christian New Testament: the same three-tradition equipoise as the voices of envy. Three different traditions, one virtue, all gently answering wrath before wrath has even been encountered.
What to read for
Notice that the angel of envy is announced by brightness so painful the pilgrim has to look away. The newly opened eyes of a soul just purged of envy cannot yet bear the light of disinterested love. The canto is making a small psychological point about how the cure of envy feels.
Notice how the doctrine of the mirror is presented. It is not asserted as theology; it is staged as the answer to a misreading. The pilgrim has heard Guido's line and got it exactly wrong, and Virgil corrects him gently, as a teacher would correct a bright pupil. The Purgatorio's instruction always comes through correction, not through assertion. Pay attention to how often the pilgrim is shown getting things wrong on the way up.
Notice the threshold geometry at the end. The pilgrim enters the new terrace and is immediately wrapped in smoke. He cannot see. Wrath, like envy, will be taught by deprivation of sight. But where the envious sat still under their wire, the wrathful will be walked through the smoke. The body's posture on each terrace is the sin's diagnosis.
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 in close succession and made the seam between them invisible. It closed the terrace of envy with the second of Purgatory's seven angels, who sang the Beatitude of mercy and erased the second P from the pilgrim's brow. It then made the climb to the next terrace into a teaching scene: Dante misunderstood what Guido del Duca had said about interdict of partnership in the previous canto, and Virgil corrected him with the longest sustained piece of doctrinal exposition the Roman has yet been given — the doctrine of the inverse mathematics of heavenly goods, illustrated by the image of a host of mirrors compounding the light of one source. The canto then walked the pilgrim onto the terrace of wrath, allowed him three ecstatic visions of meekness in which he saw without his ordinary senses, and finally rolled a great body of smoke across the new terrace until his ordinary senses no longer worked. The canto's whole movement is a series of visions vouchsafed and senses revoked. The pilgrim sees what is given to him to see; the rest is taken away.
The misreading that gets corrected
The doctrine of the canto begins as a pupil's error. Dante turns to Virgil after they have left the envious and asks what Guido meant by the interdict of partnership — the line that had given the terrace of envy its theological key. Dante reads the line economically: there is only so much to go round, and the envious soul, denied a portion, suffers. Virgil replies that the line was not about earthly goods but about heavenly ones. Earthly goods behave like physical objects in a finite world — if you take more, I have less. Heavenly goods behave inversely: the more they are loved, the more they grow, because the loving itself is the substance of the good. The diagnosis of envy is therefore exactly this misreading: the envious soul treats love and grace as if they were money. The poem's whole middle terrace exists to correct that category error.
The image Virgil reaches for is one of the Commedia's most consequential. He compares the souls in heaven to a vast array of mirrors arranged around a single source of light. Each soul receives the divine light at its own centre; each reflects that light to every other soul; and the more mirrors are in the array, the brighter every mirror becomes, because each is receiving not just the original light but the reflected light of every other mirror in the ring. The brightness compounds with the number of lovers. The image will return as the central architecture of Paradise itself — the great rose of Paradiso XXX–XXXIII, in which the saints are arranged as the petals around the central light of God, each mirror of the other.
There is a subtle question worth keeping. Virgil delivers this doctrine confidently, as a teacher delivers a known truth. He is a pagan who never saw heaven and who, by the architecture of his own afterlife in Limbo, is permanently excluded from the mirror-array he is describing. The doctrine he speaks is not his own experience. He has been given the words; he speaks them precisely; he cannot inhabit them. The reader is meant to feel the gap. The most beautiful description of heaven in this stretch of the poem is delivered by the man whose damnation is to be excluded from it.
The three visions and what they refuse to be
On the new terrace the pilgrim falls into three ecstatic visions that the canto reports as ratto — the technical word for the mystic's rapture, the soul caught up out of its ordinary senses into a higher mode of perception. Each vision is an example of meekness — the virtue opposite to wrath — and each is drawn from a different tradition.
The first vision is Mary in the temple, finding the twelve-year-old Jesus after three days of frantic search and saying simply, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Lo, sorrowing, thy father and myself were seeking for thee. The vision is from Luke 2:48 and is given in the exact register of weariness rather than anger — a mother who has every right to scold and who, instead, asks a question. Mary's tone is the canto's first picture of meekness.
The second vision is Pisistratus, the sixth-century BC tyrant of Athens, whose wife demanded he execute a young man who had publicly embraced their daughter in the street. Pisistratus answered, What shall we do to those who wish us ill, if he who loves us be by us condemned? The source is Valerius Maximus, and the line is one of the great pagan examples of the ruler who refuses to convert annoyance into power. The pagan example sits between the Christian ones as the canto's structural insistence that meekness is not a virtue restricted to one tradition.
The third vision is the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who in Acts 7 prayed for his killers as the stones fell on him: imploring the high Lord that he would pardon those his persecutors. The vision is reported in great physical detail — the eyes of the dying man made gates to heaven — and it is the canto's most extreme example, the limit case of meekness, in which the meek man pardons the very act of being killed.
Mother, ruler, martyr. The pattern is one of escalation: from quiet maternal patience, through public refusal of vengeance, to final forgiveness from inside death itself. Wrath has been answered, before the reader has met it, by three of the human conditions in which it would be most natural to feel.
The smoke as medium of the sin
The canto closes with the smoke. The pilgrim's eyes are taken away from him by the very atmosphere of the new terrace. The other terraces' losses of sight have been external impositions — wire on the eyelids, weights bowing the head. The terrace of wrath's loss of sight is the quality of the air itself. Wrath, the canto suggests, is not a punishment imposed on the wrathful from outside; it is the medium they breathe. The smoke comes from their own anger, fills the air they pass through, and obscures every perception. The teaching is psychological as much as it is theological: the wrathful soul cannot see because of its own anger. The smoke is anger's epistemology.
Famous and meaningful passages
The afternoon hour.
As much as 'twixt the close of the third hour And dawn of day appeareth of that sphere Which aye in fashion of a child is playing… (Purg. XV.1–3)
The sun is three hours past noon — about three in the afternoon — and Dante measures the time by the angle the sun has travelled across the celestial sphere since dawn. The sphere is described as a child, ever playing, because the heavens move ceaselessly. The figure is one of the poem's quietest astronomical jokes.
The brightness.
So it appeared to me that by a light Refracted there before me I was smitten; On which account my sight was swift to flee. (Purg. XV.16–18)
The light is refracted — the angel's brilliance, not yet seen directly, has bounced off the road and struck the pilgrim's eyes. He flinches before he knows what he has seen.
The Beatitude.
Beati misericordes was Behind us sung, Rejoice, thou that o'ercomest! (Purg. XV.38–39)
The Beatitude of mercy as the answer to envy. The hymn carries also a fragment of Revelation 2 — vincenti dabo, to the conqueror I will give — addressed to the pilgrim who has overcome.
The doctrine of compounding love.
That goodness infinite and ineffable Which is above there, runneth unto love, As to a lucid body comes the sunbeam. So much it gives itself as it finds ardour, So that as far as charity extends, O'er it increases the eternal valour. (Purg. XV.67–72)
The first of the canto's two great theological tercets. Divine goodness flows like sunlight into receptive matter; the more ardour — the more capacity to receive — the more is given. The good behaves as a function of the lover.
The mirror.
And the more people thitherward aspire, More are there to love well, and more they love there, And, as a mirror, one reflects the other. (Purg. XV.73–75)
The image that will become the architecture of Paradiso. Come specchio l'uno a l'altro rende. The mirrors compound the light. The more lovers, the more love. The mathematics of envy stood on its head.
Mary in the temple.
Son, why in this manner hast thou dealt with us? Lo, sorrowing, thy father and myself Were seeking for thee. (Purg. XV.88–90)
The first vision of meekness. The mother who has every right to be furious and who asks a question instead. Luke 2:48 in three lines.
Pisistratus.
What shall we do to those who wish us ill, If he who loves us be by us condemned? (Purg. XV.104–105)
The Athenian tyrant's refusal to condemn the young man who had kissed his daughter. Two lines, from Valerius Maximus, that contain a whole theory of when sovereign power should withhold itself.
The stoning of Stephen.
But of his eyes made ever gates to heaven, Imploring the high Lord, in so great strife, That he would pardon those his persecutors. (Purg. XV.112–114)
The third vision. Stephen's dying eyes as gates to heaven — the most extreme example of meekness as a physical posture of the body even as it is being killed.
The smoke.
And lo! by slow degrees a smoke approached In our direction, sombre as the night, Nor was there place to hide one's self therefrom. (Purg. XV.142–144)
The terrace of wrath arrives as weather. The smoke is the air the wrathful breathe. There is no place to hide — the medium of the sin is the medium the pilgrim must now walk through.
What to watch for
Watch the mirror image. It will return as the central architecture of Paradiso — the saints arranged as concentric petals around the divine light, each one reflecting and amplifying the brightness of every other. Virgil is laying the groundwork here for what he himself will never see.
Watch the ecstatic visions. The terrace of wrath will give the pilgrim three of them — the opening three of XV, three more at the end of XVII. The vision-as-instruction is the terrace's signature mode, and it sits in deliberate contrast to the deprivation of sight that surrounds them on the smoke-bound road. The wrathful soul sees too little when angry and too much when shown the alternative.
Watch the next canto open in the dark. The pilgrim will walk through smoke for the whole of XVI, conversing with a soul he cannot see, and the great speech that canto contains — Marco Lombardo's on free will and on the two suns — will be delivered as a voice in the dark, the way the voices on the terrace of envy were heard. The cantos rhyme by what is taken from the senses.
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.