Purgatorio, Canto 33 with Dr. Thomas Hibbs
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- Dr. Thomas Hibbs of Baylor University reflects on Canto 33 of Dante's Purgatorio.
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Thanks so much for this; I had discovered TS Eliot this past month on viewing a lecture on Hillsdale College website; so poignant to bring him into the conversation as TS Eliot was very much influenced by Dante. I have always seen life as coming full circle, with the physiological aging process making us more frail and dependent like babies, now I see it as part of journey directed backwards. The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time… And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well…
Thank you for an excellent wrap up of Purgatorio and for adding in the continuum of poets from Homer to Eliot.
Thank you Professor Hibbs for the insight. I will be studying T S Elliott next.
Me too!
Fascinating! Thank you Dr. Hibbs! I love that idea of standing on the shoulders of giants.
What a way to wrap it up, Dr. Hibbs. Thank you for ending simply. This Canto was a stilling effect on the confusion and incredible detail of the last few hyper-allegorical Cantos. Things slow down, and the journey ahead begins once again. He has seen much, and now it is time to experience it more fully in Paradiso. At the end of the sweet mountain of Grace, he is made " pure, and in trim for mounting to the stars." At the end of Inferno, they began the upward direction toward the stars, but now he is actually mounting to them. Big, bright, beautiful, holy things lie upwards.
The connection of Eliot to Dante to Virgil to Homer was well-made. I use that Mediaeval proverb all the time as it is very apt. By building on predecessors, he are aided in closeness to God. Not alone, but aided indeed. This was a very mountainous idea, which tied up Purgatorio well.
I love Purgatorio greatly, but it is time to rise to heaven!
Further up, and further in!
Canto 33: Beatrice is attended by the Seven Virtues who sing a mournful hymn about the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple. She responds, with a paraphrase of the words of Christ to his disciples immediately before the Pascal Mystery, to the effect that dark times would be followed by glorious ones. Metaphorically, the Church would suffer corruption brought on by the current Church hierarchy, but it would endure. She urges Dante to question her but he, reluctantly, declines. Beatrice tells him he is doing this out of the shame for his past sins which he has forgotten, having drunk from Lethe. She informs him that a 515 (perhaps, DXV, an anagram for DUX, leader) will destroy the giant (France) and harlot (corrupt papacy). He is not to omit telling about Eden’s Tree, originally harmed by Adam and Eve, restored by the Incarnation, only to be harmed again by mankind. This Tree, unlike the usual Mediterranean cypress tree, has a tall, wide crown, indicative of the distance of the understanding of God’s knowledge beyond Dante’s ability to comprehend. However, he can carry back a souvenir, as pilgrims would do, having seen Jerusalem or Compostela. Beatrice calls the Lovely Lady by name, for the first time, and requests that Matelda lead Dante (and Statius) to the Eunoe, one of the dual rivers formed by the Will of God. Having drunk of the sweet waters of Eunoe, Dante can remember his faults in a positive light and, by doing so, will be able to avoid future sins by applying his own free will in accord with God’s free will. Having quenched his thirst with the waters of forgetfulness and positive recollection, Dante is like a new plant with new-sprung leaves. The old plant does not cease to exist but is transformed. Forgiven, Dante has gained metanoia, a transformation. He can now rise up to the stars. True Paradise awaits him beyond this Earthly Paradise.
Excellent summation
Thank you for a well-structured talk.
Wow! This hits home. Do we seek our own desires or the desires God has for us?
TRANSCRIPT
33-100 Days Transcript
Well we have made it with Dante to the top of Mount Purgatory and we are now two-thirds of the way through the entire Divine Comedy in purgatory. We have encountered repentant sinners being transformed by grace, enduring punishments befitting their vices and being instructed in the relevant virtues. At the end of his ascent of purgatory Dante reaches the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden. His journey forward from sin and error to grace and virtue has in fact has been a journey backward to the place where the entire human drama of creation, fall and redemption began.
The first two books have covered a great deal of ground for the particulars of Dante’s own quest the final cantos of purgatory have been especially dramatic. Virgil, his trusted guide, has departed and Beatrice has appeared. Her beauty aroused his youthful devotion, her intervention as an instrument of divine providence made possible the entire journey of the comedy but their reunion I as harmonious as Dante has perhaps hoped. She is if anything an even more demanding teacher than Virgil ever was. She repeatedly chastises him for his excessive love of her bodily beauty and more generally from the manner in which he ahs allowed his intellect and will to stray from what is truly beautiful, the ultimate good found only in God.
In the form of a military general, Beatrice is hardly interested in small talk or in revisiting her past relationship with Dante. She orders, repeatedly orders him, to write about what he has seen in the earthly paradise. Dante is to address his written work to those she says who life the life that is a race to death. The notion of a race to death is ironic since no one except the consciously despairing runs toward it, nor do we compete to see who gets there first. But our mortal nature tends inevitably toward that end, even as resists acknowledging this most obvious fact, the question for all of us running the race is what will have been the shape of our lives leading up to death and what will be the state of our souls at that movement.
Will our lives have been characterized by aimless meandering, dominated by the whims of vague passions or will they have been shaped by a quest for the truth? But even a love of knowledge or wisdom will not be sufficient, the question for all of us running the race is what will have been the shape of our lives leading up to death and what will be the state of our soul at that moment? Will our lives have been characterized by aimless desire, dominated by the whims of vagrant passion or will they have been shaped by a quest for truth?
But according to Dante, even a love of knowledge or wisdom will be insufficient. Beatrice criticizes Dante for following a school or a teaching that is discordant from her own. Some have speculated that Dante’s school was that of philosophy or natural reason. But the critique cannot mean that Dante should completely abandon philosophy or reason, or even pagan learning. Virgil has indeed been left behind but the wisdom he provided is not repudiated. Moreover the vision of the good in the earthly paradise features personifications of the virtues, not just the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love but also the four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance celebrated among the ancient pagans
Beatrice could well be targeting a tendency in Dante for preferring natural reason and natural virtue to faith and grace. In fact, it is precisely because natural virtue and reason are noble that they are temptations for a soul like Dante’s. Even when they miss the mark, pagan heroes often exhibit an admirable greatness. As we reach the summit of Mount Purgatory with Dante, we might recall another character who caught a glimpse of Mount Purgatory. In canto 26 of the Inferno, Dante encounters Ulysses who provides a kind of postscript to Homer’s Odyssey. In his restless desire for experience and knowledge, Ulysses leaves home again in search of adventure. He travels beyond the known world and just as he catches sight of Mount Purgatory he suffers shipwreck and he and his men perish.
The tone of that canto indicates that Dante detects in Ulysses a certain grandeur. He is a kind of tragic hero undone by his excessive desire for experience. His is a restless and proud spirit much like Dante’s own spirit was and would have continued to be apart from the gift of faith and the reordering of his soul for grace. What Dante sees as a tragic fault in Ulysses is celebrated for its own sake in the poem Ulysses written by the 19th century Victorian Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who praises the ancient hero for always roaming with a hungry heart. A response to Tennyson on Dante’s behalf is made by perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century, TS Eliot. Toward the end of his work The Four Quartets he writes, we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning.
Eliot affirms the human need to avoid a final resting in time and space but he does not counsel roaming aimlessly in search of ever new experiences. Instead he portrays a goal-directed journey that leads paradoxically backward just as Dante’s journey does, we arrive where we started to know the place for the first time, as we pass through the gate of Eden and into the earthly paradise.
There is a lesson here not just about the human condition but also about great works of art. Just as Virgil is in conversation with home and Dante is in conversation with both of them, so too Elliot picks up the threads of tradition and is in conversation with all three of these poets, in addition to poets nearer to him in time and place, such as Tennyson. In the way Dante builds upon his predecessors and others have built upon Dante, we find confirmation of the truth of the medieval proverb, that in the study of wisdom we stand on the shoulders of giants.
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Interesting posting. The most powerful understanding and explanation of why we believe what we believe. Many truths revealed in the book The Land of Meat and Honey by Dr. Shmuel Asher. Many of his books are found on Amazon. Soul Revolution, The Greater Exodus, The Asher Codex. Recently published The Essene Law with translation and commentaries. Must reads!!
Thank you, Dr. Hibbs, for your astonishingly wonderful presentation.
Thank you.