Purgatorio · Canto XVIII ·
Purgatorio XVIII — Virgil on the Threshold of Assent
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 52 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XVIII
Before reading
This is the canto in which Virgil finishes the doctrinal speech he began in XVII and then the terrace of sloth runs through the picture. The first half is the most concentrated philosophy in the Purgatorio; the second half is the most physically violent purgation the mountain shows. The pilgrim listens, sits still, asks a question, gets the second half of the answer, and then a great crowd of running souls bursts onto the terrace and runs past him into the night. The canto ends with him slipping toward sleep, and the dream he is about to have will be the most disturbing of his three Purgatorial dreams.
Where the canto sits
XVII gave the architecture of the seven terraces. XVIII gives the mechanism of love inside that architecture — the medieval psychology of how love arises in the soul and how the will is supposed to govern it. The two cantos together are the Commedia's central exposition. Then the canto pivots: night is wearing on, and the terrace of sloth must show its penance. The slothful in life would not move; the slothful in death must run, all night, without pause, reciting examples of zeal as they go.
The two examples of zeal — the positive examples on this terrace — are: Mary running through the hill country to visit her cousin Elizabeth as soon as she has conceived (Luke 1, the Visitation); and Julius Caesar pressing his army across the Alps and into Spain at speed to defeat Pompey's lieutenants at Lleida. Christian saint, Roman general. The two-tradition equipoise.
The penitent who breaks from the running crowd to speak is the Abbot of San Zeno of Verona, a Benedictine prelate of the twelfth century, of whom we again know almost nothing outside this canto. The early commentators identify him as a certain Gherardo who died around 1187, but no contemporary record survives. The historical detail Dante gives is that the abbot served under Barbarossa — the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I — who in 1162 sacked Milan, and the canto carries Dante's contempt for the Veronese practice of appointing illegitimate, infirm, and unworthy men to high abbacies (a barb aimed at the powerful Della Scala family, who had given the abbey to an illegitimate son).
The two examples of sloth punished at the canto's close are: the Israelites whom Moses led across the Red Sea but who, through their own faint-heartedness, were all condemned to die in the wilderness before reaching the Promised Land (Numbers 14); and the Trojan men who stayed behind in Sicily rather than press on with Aeneas to found Rome (Aeneid V, where Aeneas leaves them with old Acestes when they refuse the further voyage).
Old Testament, Roman epic. The same two-tradition equipoise as the positives, mirrored on the negative side.
What it helps to know
The medieval psychology Virgil uses requires a small preface. The mind, in Aristotelian-Thomist terms Dante inherited, is created prompt to love — it is constituted to incline toward whatever pleasing thing it perceives. The first movement of love (medieval amor) is therefore not a choice but a natural reaction: the soul cannot help being drawn toward what looks like a good. Where then is human responsibility? Virgil's answer is one of the canto's most precise formulations: free will is not the initial inclination but the power that counsels at the threshold of assent. The soul cannot prevent itself from being drawn; it can prevent itself from acting on the drawing. The yes or no at the moment of consent is the place where merit and demerit live. This distinction will be the canto's deepest theological move, and it is delivered to the pilgrim as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
What to read for
Notice that Virgil ends his speech by refusing the last word. He tells Dante explicitly that, on the question of which loves are necessarily good, his pagan reason can take Dante no further; this is the kind of question only Beatrice will be able to answer. The most authoritative pagan voice in Christendom is being given its limit inside the doctrine itself. Pay attention to how often Virgil now disclaims authority.
Notice the physical arrival of the slothful. They burst onto the page with no warning, shouting their examples mid-stride, sweeping past the seated travellers, and disappearing into the dark. They are gone almost before the pilgrim has registered them. The penance of sloth is delivered as a kind of cinematic blur — exactly the inverse of the long static walks of the lower terraces.
Notice the canto's closing image. The pilgrim, having listened to the longest philosophical speech in the cantica and then watched a crowd sprint past, falls asleep on the stair. Meditation into dream transmuted. The next canto will open inside his dream, and the dream will be the canto's most disturbing image of the failure of properly directed love. The pilgrim is being shown, just at the centre of his climb, what it would mean for his own will to misperceive what is worth loving.
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 closed the doctrinal exposition that XVII had opened and then ran the terrace of sloth through the picture at speed. Virgil finished his speech on love by giving the medieval psychology of how love arises in the soul: the mind, created prompt to love, receives an impression of a pleasing object and is bent toward it; this first inclination is natural love and incurs no praise or blame; the soul's responsibility begins at the threshold of assent, where free will either consents to the inclination or refuses it. The speech ended, as Virgil's speeches now reliably end, with the disclaimer that the last questions are beyond pagan reason and must wait for Beatrice. Then the night was interrupted: a great crowd of slothful penitents burst onto the terrace at full sprint, shouting examples of zeal as they ran. One of them slowed for a few seconds to name himself — the Abbot of San Zeno of Verona, a man known to history almost only by this canto — and to deliver a sharp aside about a recent ecclesiastical appointment. Two examples of sloth punished were shouted by figures further back in the crowd. The crowd disappeared into the dark. The pilgrim slipped from listening into meditation and from meditation into sleep, and the next canto would open inside his second Purgatorial dream.
The psychology of love in detail
The speech Virgil delivers in the first half of the canto is the most precise piece of medieval psychology in the Commedia. It works as follows. The mind, in its created constitution, has a natural disposition — it is creato ad amar presto, made ready to love. This is its given state. When the senses present it with an object that looks like a good, the mind cannot help turning toward the object; this turning is the first movement of love, amore naturale, and it is not subject to praise or blame because it is involuntary. Wax cannot be praised for accepting the seal pressed into it.
But the mind is also given an innate power that counsels — innata vi che consiglia — which sits, in Virgil's image, at the threshold of assent. The first movement of love brings the object up to the threshold; the innata vi decides whether or not the soul will act on the impulse. Here is where free will lives, and here is where merit and demerit live. The slothful, the gluttonous, the lustful, the avaricious did not sin in the being drawn toward food, sex, money, or rest — they sinned in consenting to the drawing past the measure of the higher good. This is the technical doctrine that organises the upper three terraces; XVIII gives it its mechanism.
The doctrine has an immediate consequence the canto draws explicitly. Because the first movement of love is involuntary, no one can avoid being drawn to many things. The condition of being a creature is the condition of having a great many natural loves at all times. The work of the moral life is therefore not to eliminate love but to govern its consent. The Christian life, in Dante's diagnosis, is not the suppression of desire but the trained refusal to act on every desire that arises. This is the doctrine that will license the entire upper mountain, where the penitents are not freed from their loves but taught to weigh them.
Virgil's growing disclaimer
Watch the moment, near the end of Virgil's speech, when he reaches the question that natural reason cannot answer. The pilgrim has been wondering, as the pupil should, whether the soul is responsible for the kind of love it naturally has — whether different temperaments incline different souls toward different goods, and whether those inclinations are themselves morally weighted. Virgil's answer is a careful refusal. As far as reason here discerns, I can tell thee; from there onward expect Beatrice, for it is a work of faith. The pagan Virgil, the most authoritative voice in Latin Christendom outside scripture, cannot resolve the deepest question his own doctrine raises. He has been getting steadily smaller in this stretch of the cantica; here he becomes explicit about the limits of his light. The disclaimer is the cantica's quiet preparation for his eventual disappearance.
The penance as inversion
The slothful in life would not move toward the good with the energy it deserved; the slothful in death are made to run without stopping. The cure of the sin is its opposite enacted in muscle. The penance is delivered cinematically: a crowd, a sprint, a noise of feet, a shouted example, a passing word, and then the dark again. There are no propped figures here, no long encounters, no protracted speech. The terrace of sloth is the quickest terrace in the cantica because its sin was the slowest.
The two positive examples shouted by the leading runners — Mary running to the hill country to visit Elizabeth, Caesar sprinting his army to Spain — pair Christian saint and Roman general. Mary moves because she has just conceived God; Caesar moves because he must defeat Pompey's legates. The two motivations are profoundly different. Dante allows the parallel to stand without choosing between them: the form of zealous motion is what the terrace teaches, and both figures embody it.
The two negative examples shouted by the trailing runners — the Israelites who died in the wilderness, the Trojans who stayed behind in Sicily — pair Old Testament and Roman epic. Each is a group that would not endure to the end of a journey God or destiny had set for them. The slothful are by their nature not the great obvious wicked but the ones who lacked the final push. The negative examples are exquisitely chosen: groups whose failure was not malice but exhaustion.
The Abbot and the barb
The Abbot of San Zeno is the canto's only named penitent, and as with Marco Lombardo in XVI, his historical identity is almost entirely uncertain. He served, the canto says, under good Barbarossa — Frederick I Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor who sacked Milan in 1162. The early commentators identify him with a certain Gherardo who died around 1187. He is therefore an obscure twelfth-century Veronese ecclesiastic, briefly raised to the Commedia's middle terrace for his slowness in spiritual matters.
The pointed line is what he delivers next: a Veronese figure soon to take his old abbacy is bad of body, worse of mind, and ill-born. The barb is local. Cangrande della Scala, the great Veronese magnate who was Dante's patron in exile, had a half-brother Giuseppe — illegitimate, lame, of poor character — whom the family had pushed into the abbey of San Zeno. The canto, written under Cangrande's roof, contains a sharp denunciation of Cangrande's own family's ecclesiastical patronage. The political teeth of the Commedia sometimes bite the hand that feeds it.
The closing slide into sleep
The canto ends as it must end — the pilgrim, who has spent the night listening to philosophy and watching a sprint, slips from thought into reverie and from reverie into sleep. The slide is given as a single soft tercet. The mountain forbids climbing after dark, and the night has now consumed the energy Virgil's doctrine has required to receive. The pilgrim is exhausted. The next canto opens inside his dream. The dream — the dream of the femmina balba, the stammering woman made beautiful by his own gaze — will be the most disturbing image in the cantica of what it would mean for the will to consent at the threshold to a love that is not what it appears.
Famous and meaningful passages
The mind made ready to love.
The soul, which is created apt to love, Is mobile unto everything that pleases, Soon as by pleasure she is waked to action. (Purg. XVIII.19–21)
The founding tercet of the canto's psychology. Creato ad amar presto — the soul as a thing constitutionally tilted toward love.
Love as inclination.
And if, when turned, towards it she incline, Love is that inclination; it is nature, Which is by pleasure bound in you afresh. (Purg. XVIII.25–27)
The first movement is nature, not virtue. The soul cannot be praised or blamed for being drawn.
The threshold of assent.
Innate within you is the power that counsels, And it should keep the threshold of assent. This is the principle, from which is taken Occasion of desert in you, accordingly As good and guilty loves it takes and winnows. (Purg. XVIII.62–66)
The structural keystone of the speech. Innata vi che consiglia / de l'assenso de' tener la soglia. The threshold of assent — soglia — is where free will lives.
The disclaimer.
Therefore, as far as reason here discerns, I can tell thee; from that point forth await Beatrice, for it is a work of faith. (Purg. XVIII.46–48, paraphrased; the exact tercet appears earlier in the speech.)
Virgil's now-routine handover of the deepest questions. The pagan reason can take the pilgrim to the threshold of doctrine; only Beatrice can take him over it.
The arrival of the crowd.
So through that circle, with swift pace and slow, Behind us came those people of the good will… (Purg. XVIII.94–95, paraphrased)
The sudden burst of motion into the canto. The slothful arrive in full sprint; the picture changes from doctrine to cinema in two lines.
The leading cries.
Mary in haste unto the mountain ran, And Caesar, that he might subdue Ilerda, Thrust at Marseilles, and then ran into Spain. (Purg. XVIII.100–102)
The two examples of zeal. Maria corse con fretta a la montagna — Mary's visit to Elizabeth in three Italian words. Cesare, per soggiogare Ilerda — Caesar's lightning march to Lleida in three more. The cantica's tightest pairing of Christian and pagan zeal.
The abbot.
I was San Zeno's Abbot at Verona, Under the empire of good Barbarossa, Of whom still sorrowing Milan holds discourse. (Purg. XVIII.118–120)
The canto's only self-naming. Buon Barbarossa — good Barbarossa — the Emperor whose sack of Milan still grieves the city. The line is delivered with the careful courtier's tact of a man who knows that loyalties to the Empire still matter to the readership.
The two examples punished.
Sooner were The people dead to whom the sea was opened, Than their inheritors the Jordan saw. (Purg. XVIII.133–135)
The Israelites who would not enter the Promised Land — Numbers 14. Sloth as the failure to finish the journey God has begun.
And those who the fatigue did not endure Unto the issue, with Anchises' son, Gave themselves up to live without renown. (Purg. XVIII.136–138)
The Trojans who stayed behind in Sicily with Acestes — Aeneid V. Sloth as the choice to live without renown rather than press on with the founder.
The slide into sleep.
And so I lapsed from one into another, That in a reverie mine eyes I closed, And meditation into dream transmuted. (Purg. XVIII.143–145)
The canto's closing tercet. E 'l pensamento in sogno trasmutai. Meditation passes into dream in a single line; the second great dream of the Purgatorio is about to begin.
What to watch for
Watch the dream. The femmina balba — the stammering woman made beautiful by Dante's own gaze — will be the most disturbing image in the Purgatorio of what it would mean for the threshold of assent to consent to a love that has been seduced. The doctrine just delivered will be tested on the pilgrim's own imagination as he sleeps.
Watch the diminishing of Virgil. In XV he taught with confidence; in XVI he was absent from the great speech; in XVII he taught from the stair; in XVIII he disclaimed his own limits and handed the deepest questions to Beatrice. The man who has guided the pilgrim through Hell is preparing the reader for his disappearance at the summit.
Watch the angel of the next canto. The terrace of sloth ends, like every terrace, with an angel singing a Beatitude. The Beatitude for sloth will be the qui lugent — blessed are they that mourn — and the reasoning will be one of the most beautiful pieces of cross-mapping in the cantica.
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.