Purgatorio · Canto XVI ·
Purgatorio XVI — The Walking Blind
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 50 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XVI
Before reading
This is the canto of the smoke. The pilgrim has walked into the third terrace blind, and he will walk through this canto blind. There is no scenery to describe; the canto consists of a voice in the dark and the great speech that voice delivers. The voice belongs to a Lombard courtier whose name has not survived in any other source. The speech he delivers is the Commedia's most fully developed argument on human freedom and on the proper separation of Church and State. The terrace of wrath has been given the longest doctrinal speech in the cantica, and it has been delivered in conditions of zero visibility.
Where the canto sits
This canto sits at the exact arithmetic centre of the Commedia. The poem has one hundred cantos; canto 50 of Purgatorio — counted as Purgatorio XVI — is the fiftieth canto of the poem if you read Inferno I as the prologue and start counting at Inferno II, or the fiftieth-and-a-half if you do not. Either way, this canto is the structural middle. Dante placed at his poem's centre not a scene of vision but a scene of blindness, in which a forgotten Italian courtier teaches a future poet that the misery of the world is the fault not of the stars but of human choosing badly.
What it helps to know
The speaker is Marco Lombardo, of whom we know almost nothing outside this canto. The early commentators say he was a Venetian, or a Lombard, or a courtier, or all three; that he flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century; and that he was famous in his lifetime for moral wisdom, generosity, and a sharp tongue. He is one of Dante's unverifiable speakers — a soul placed in the poem at a moment of doctrinal weight whose historical identity is permanently uncertain. The poem chose him for what he could say, not for his rank.
The doctrine the canto turns on has two parts. The first is the question of free will. Dante asks Marco — the canto's pretext — whether the misery of the contemporary world is caused by the stars or by human beings. The medieval astrological doctrine held that the heavens influenced human affairs; the question was whether they determined them. Marco's answer is the Commedia's definitive statement. The heavens initiate tendencies in human souls; they do not compel outcomes. Free will, properly nourished, conquers any astral inclination. In you is the cause — the line on which the speech rests — places the responsibility for the world's misery exactly on the people living in it.
The second part of the speech is the canto's most explosive political argument. Marco describes how Rome, when it was the centre of Christendom's order, had two suns — one for the spiritual government of souls (the Pope) and one for the temporal government of bodies (the Emperor). The two suns ran on two roads, each illuminating its own kingdom, without crowding the other. In Marco's present, one sun has put out the other: the papacy has absorbed the powers of empire as well, and the joining of the sword to the crozier has corrupted both. The doctrine — that the Church should not hold temporal power and that the Emperor should not be subordinated to the Pope — was Dante's lifelong political conviction and the position for which his great Latin treatise De Monarchia was burned by the Inquisition after his death. He is delivering it here through a soul on the terrace of wrath.
The Agnus Dei the pilgrim hears at the canto's opening is the liturgical Lamb of God sung at Mass — Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. The penitents on this terrace sing it in unison as they walk through the smoke. The Lamb is the perfect biblical antithesis of wrath; the hymn is the structural equivalent of the visions of meekness in XV. The terrace teaches by hearing what the wrathful soul could not bring itself to be.
What to read for
Notice that the pilgrim cannot see Marco throughout the entire conversation. The whole encounter is voice-to-voice. The great doctrinal speech of the Commedia's middle canto is conducted in the dark. Dante is making a point about the conditions under which truth gets spoken.
Notice the image of the soul as a child weeping and laughing in childish play. It is one of the most tender pictures in the Purgatorio: the human soul issues from God as a small girl, innocent, capable of every direction, and the world has to form her. The whole moral architecture of the cantica rests on this picture of the soul as a child whose freedom is being trained.
Notice the savagery of the political diagnosis. Now there are none who think to come to God. Marco lists, by region, the few remaining old men of virtue, and the list is short. The middle canto of the Commedia contains its most pessimistic survey of the present age. The doctrine of free will is delivered, with no contradiction, by a man whose conclusion is that almost no one is using 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 a voice in the dark. The pilgrim walked through smoke he could not see through, and from inside the smoke he heard a Lombard courtier — a man whose historical identity has not survived in any other source — deliver the Commedia's most important sustained doctrinal speech. The speech ran from a question Dante asked about the cause of contemporary misery, through a refutation of astrological determinism and a defence of human free will, into a savage diagnosis of the political condition of Italy in 1300. The speaker named the cause of the world's corruption with great precision: not the stars, not original sin, not poor education, but the absorption of imperial power by the papacy and the collapse of the proper separation between the two governing offices of Christendom. The speech took the form of a metaphor — Rome accustomed was two suns to have — that would define Dante's political theology for the rest of his life. The whole encounter was conducted between two men who could not see each other. The middle canto of the entire Commedia sealed its great doctrinal moment inside an act of mutual blindness.
Why the canto's blindness is the canto's argument
Wrath is the sin that takes away sight. The angry soul, in the medieval moral tradition Dante inherited from Aristotle and Aquinas, is the soul whose reason has been clouded by passion — the soul that, in the heat of the impulse, cannot see what it is doing. The penance fits the sin: the wrathful penitents on this terrace walk through a smoke that is the physical analogue of the cloud their anger had cast over their own minds. The pilgrim is not himself wrathful; he is here as a learner. But he is made to share the condition of the sin so that the lesson can land in his body as well as in his mind. He spends the entire canto in the dark, and the doctrine he is given is the doctrine of human moral responsibility — the doctrine the wrathful soul cannot bring itself to accept because acceptance of responsibility requires the clarity of mind that anger destroys.
The voice that comes to him in the smoke is named, and the choice of speaker is exact. Marco Lombardo is not a famous man. The early commentators preserved a few scattered anecdotes — that he was a courtier known for moral wisdom, that he had a sharp tongue, that he gave away his money freely — but no historian has been able to reconstruct his life. He is a voice with very little face attached. Dante chose for the centre of his poem a man whose only surviving record is this speech. The middle of the Commedia is built on the testimony of a forgotten witness.
The doctrine of free will
The pilgrim asks the question that the Inferno and the early Purgatorio have both been pressing toward: if the world is corrupt, who or what is responsible? Is it the heavens — the astral powers the medieval astronomy held to influence human dispositions? Is it some kind of curse on the age? Marco's answer is a refutation built in stages. The heavens, he concedes, do initiate tendencies in human souls. The newborn does not arrive empty: temperament, inclination, the rough shape of personality is given by the stars at the hour of birth. But — and the whole speech turns on this but — those tendencies are initiations, not compulsions. The human soul is given, as its constitutive endowment, free volition, which can struggle against any astral inclination and which, if well nurtured, will conquer it. The image is military: free will suffers fatigue in the first battles with the heavens but afterwards conquers all. The doctrine is not optimistic about how easy the conquest is; it is uncompromising about the fact that it is possible.
The premise behind the argument is one of the Commedia's most consequential. If everything were determined by the stars, Marco says, free will would be destroyed and there would be no justice in joy for the good, or in mourning for the evil. The whole structure of reward and punishment that the Comedy depicts — Hell, Purgatory, Paradise — collapses if astrological determinism is true. The speech is therefore not only a diagnosis of the world's misery but a defence of the poem's right to depict an afterlife of moral consequences. Dante is, at the middle of his own work, defending its theological foundations.
The image of the soul as a child
Inside this large argument Marco places one of the tenderest small images in the Purgatorio. The soul, he says, issues from the hand of him who fondles it before it is, like a little girl weeping and laughing in her childish sport. The Italian is a guisa di fanciulla. The soul comes into the world as a child capable of every direction, knowing only that something it cannot yet name has set it down and that it now exists. The world is the training of this child — the school in which her capacity for love is taught to discriminate between what is worth loving and what is not. When the world's institutions of training are functioning, the child grows into a soul that loves rightly. When they fail, she loves wrongly. The image is the canto's positive theology and it is the silent pivot to its political diagnosis. Because the institutions of training have failed, the world is full of wrongly-loving souls.
The two suns
The political diagnosis is the canto's most explosive movement, and it is one of the Commedia's most carefully constructed metaphors. Rome, Marco says, in its golden age had two suns — one for the spiritual direction of souls, one for the temporal government of bodies — and the two ran on parallel roads, each illuminating its own realm. In the present, one has the other quenched, and to the crosier the sword is joined. The Pope, properly the shepherd of souls, has taken the temporal sword as well; the Emperor's office has been swallowed; and the union of the two has corrupted both. The crozier and the sword, fused, work badly together: the one cannot enforce, the other cannot bless. The metaphor is precise to Dante's lifelong political conviction. He held that the proper order of Christendom required two universal offices, Pope and Emperor, each independent of the other, each operating within its proper sphere. The papacy's seizure of imperial power — which by 1300 had been the policy of every major thirteenth-century pope and which had reached its absolutist apogee under Boniface VIII, Dante's personal enemy — was for him the catastrophe that had broken Italy. The doctrine is the same doctrine he would later defend at book length in the Latin treatise De Monarchia. Here it is delivered, in three tercets, from inside the smoke of the terrace of wrath, by a man with no face.
There is a subtle and recurrent question in this canto worth carrying forward. Marco is a soul currently being purged of wrath. The diagnosis he delivers is itself extremely angry — a denunciation of the papacy, the secular rulers, and the present age as a whole. The poem allows the reader to wonder whether the man on the terrace of wrath, even in penance, is still wrathful in his analysis. The straightforward reading: prophetic anger is not the same sin as personal anger; Marco's diagnosis is righteous and the Commedia is endorsing it. The more searching reading: the poem is showing us that the diagnosis of the world's misery cannot easily be untangled from the sin of being too angry at it, and that even the soul nearing the end of his purgation can deliver his truths with a sharpness the cleansing has not yet wholly removed. The canto does not insist on either reading.
Famous and meaningful passages
The darkness.
Darkness of hell, and of a night deprived Of every planet under a poor sky… Ne'er made unto my sight so thick a veil As did that smoke which there enveloped us, Nor to the feeling of so rough a texture. (Purg. XVI.1–7)
The smoke is worse than the night sky of Hell. The terrace begins in conditions the Inferno itself never quite reached. The pilgrim has, in a sense, just stepped into a deeper darkness than the one he climbed out of.
The hymn.
Still Agnus Dei their exordium was; One word there was in all, and metre one, So that all harmony appeared among them. (Purg. XVI.19–21)
The wrathful in unison. The Lamb of God hymn is the perfect antithesis of wrath, and the penitents sing it in one voice — the social and prosodic opposite of the cacophony of anger.
Marco names himself.
Lombard was I, and I was Marco called; The world I knew, and loved that excellence, At which has each one now unbent his bow. (Purg. XVI.46–48)
Marco's self-introduction is also his diagnosis. Each one has now unbent his bow — every man has lowered his aim, has stopped striving for the higher excellence Marco loved. The Florentine archery image carries the canto's pessimism in one line.
The defence of free will.
The heavens your movements do initiate, I say not all; but granting that I say it, Light has been given you for good and evil, And free volition; which, if some fatigue In the first battles with the heavens it suffers, Afterwards conquers all, if well 'tis nurtured. (Purg. XVI.73–78)
The central doctrinal tercet of the canto. The heavens initiate but do not compel; the will, if trained, conquers any astral inclination.
The line on which the whole speech rests.
Therefore, if the present world doth go astray, In you the cause is, be it sought in you. (Purg. XVI.82–83)
In voi è la cagione. The most quoted line in the canto and one of the Commedia's sharpest sentences. The misery of the age is not in the stars but in the people who blame the stars.
The soul as child.
Forth from the hand of Him, who fondles it Before it is, like to a little girl Weeping and laughing in her childish sport, Issues the simple soul, that nothing knows… (Purg. XVI.85–88)
One of the most tender images in the Purgatorio. The soul as a small girl, capable of either tears or laughter, knowing nothing, set down by a hand that loves her. The whole moral architecture of the cantica rests on this picture.
The two suns.
Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was Two suns to have, which one road and the other, Of God and of the world, made manifest. One has the other quenched, and to the crosier The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it That by main force one with the other go. (Purg. XVI.106–111)
The most consequential political metaphor in the Commedia. The doctrine Dante would defend at book length in De Monarchia and for which his Latin treatise would be burned by the Inquisition after his death. The sword joined to the crozier is the diagnosis of Christendom in 1300.
The three old men.
Three old men still are in it, in whom rebukes The ancient age the new; and tardy seems Their being summoned by God to better life. (Purg. XVI.121–123)
Marco names — Currado da Palazzo, Gherardo da Camino, Guido da Castello — three Lombard nobles still alive in 1300 who represent the last surviving examples of the old courtly virtue. The list of the surviving good is three. The middle canto's pessimism could not be more compressed.
What to watch for
Watch the doctrine of free will return. Virgil will pick it up at the structural centre of the next canto, XVII, and rebuild it as the foundation of the whole architecture of Purgatory's seven terraces. XVI gives the doctrine; XVII shows how the mountain is built from it.
Watch the two suns extinguish themselves again. The political diagnosis of this canto will return at the very top of Purgatory, in cantos XXXII–XXXIII, as the procession of the corruption of the Church — a great pageant of allegorical animals enacting, in dumb-show, what Marco here states in words.
Watch the blindness. The pilgrim will emerge from the smoke at the start of the next canto, blinking, and the Purgatorio's most cinematic moment of returning sight will follow. Wrath ends, like envy ended, with the recovery of the sense the sin had taken away.
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.