PURGATORIO CANTO 16 Summary and Analysis
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- Analysis of Canto XVI of Dante’s Purgatorio. We are HALFWAY THROUGH !!
Books mentioned:
"Spiritual Direction from Dante", Paul Pearson of the Oratory, www.amazon.com...
"Convivio", Dante Alighieri www.amazon.com...
TEXT FROM DANTE's "IL CONVIVIO", Book 4, Chapter 12:
"And so I say that human desire is increased not only by the acquisition of knowledge and of riches, but by every kind of acquisition, although in different ways. The reason is this: that the supreme desire of each thing, and the one that is first given to it by nature, is to return to its first cause. Now since God is the cause of our souls and has created them like himself (as it is written, “Let us make man in our own image and likeness”), the soul desires above all else to return to him.(52)
And just as the pilgrim who walks along a road on which he has never traveled before believes that every house which he sees from afar is an inn, and finding it not so fixes his expectations on the next one, and so moves from house to house until he comes to the inn, so our soul, as soon as it enters upon this new and never travelled road of life, fixes its eyes on the goal of its supreme good, and therefore believes that everything it sees which seems to possess some good in it is that supreme good.(53)
Because its knowledge is at first imperfect through lack of experience and instruction, small goods appear great, and so from these it conceives its first desires. Thus we see little children setting their desire first of all on an apple, and then growing older desiring to possess a little bird, and then still later desiring to possess fine clothes, then a horse, and then a woman, and then modest wealth, then greater riches, and then still more.
This comes about because in none of these things does one find what one is searching after, but hopes to find it further on. Consequently it may be seen that one object of desire stands in front of another before the eyes of our soul very much in the manner of a pyramid, where the smallest object at first covers them all and is, as it were, the apex of the ultimate object of desire, namely God, who is, as it were, the base of all the rest.
And so the further we move from the apex toward the base, the greater the objects of desire appear; this is the reason why acquisition causes human desires to become progressively inflated."
English translation used for this video:
Allen Mandelbaum, Purgatorio, Second Book of the Divine Comedy (California Dante) www.amazon.com...
What a Canto!!!
Even on first reading line 82 really jumped out at me.
I haven’t read Solzhenitsyn but I’ve heard his quote many times “the line separating good and evil passes. . . right through every human heart.” This canto, that quote and Chesterton’s “mea culpa” is the answer to the human desire for scapegoating. It might have been written 700 years ago but it’s still true today.
Thanks for your videos!!
Thank you Johanna for your comment! I also think about that gorgeous quote by Solzhenitsyn when I read Dante - it’s as if he is saying “Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso are all intertwined in our hearts”. And I fully agree with you that this canto gives such a pointed answer to our desire for scapegoating.
Halfway. My goodness. Thank you for keeping going and carrying me along, guiding us not through thick smoke but certainly through mists of uncertainty at times. Your explanation of this complex canto was pellucid.
Thank you Roz. I hope youtube will still be around when I finish Paradiso 😄😄 Also happy to learn a new word from you - had to look up “pellucid”, I love it!
Thanks for the very clear analysis of the central canto and its difficult points. You helped me a lot. With all the references in the comments to Israel and Jewish writers, including Saul Bellow, I remembered a quote I heard from Isaac Bashevis Singer. When asked whether he believed in determinism or free will, he said, "Oh, we have to believe in free will: we have no choice." Thanks again!
Thank you, Jon. In my next video (Purg. 17) I will address the various theories about “what is the ‘real’ center of the Divine Comedy”, that’s an interesting point because various scholars have different opinions. I love that quote by Isaac Singer! : ) Have you ever read “The brothers Ashkenazi” by his brother, Israel Joshua Singer? It’s one of my favorite novels.
Thank you so much! You bring Dante to my life in a much more complex way. On a lighter tone, we are dressing as Dante and Virgil for Halloween.
Ha! That’s a fabulous idea! May I try to guess… you will be Virgil?
@@tomlabooks3263 No! Dante! But of course we are all Dante.
GAHH THE DIVINE COMEDY! This is the one book I could never complete, and I've read War & Peace and Ulysses! So cool to meet a fellow fan of the work! :D
Good to connect with you here! I hope you’ll find my videos useful.
This is one of my favorite cantos! I love the part near the beginning when Virgil guides Dante through the blinding smoke, and I love even more the lines at the midway point. A few months ago, they really helped to rouse me out of a passive stupor I've been stuck in for too long, and inspired me to finally start the process of making aliyah (moving to Israel), which I've wanted to do for at least twenty years but always found excuses to push it off, or let other people talk me out of it with barely any fight. Dante gave me that push to take charge of my own life and stop letting everyone else convince me I should be pursuing a cookie-cutter life path. I even used those exact lines, 75 and 82-83, in both English and Italian, in the personal statement portion of my application! (In addition to referencing and quoting Dante in the other two essays I wrote as part of my required documents.)
Marco Lombardi's lines about free will and predestination also remind me of a line from Pirkey Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), a six-chapter book within the Talmud. "Everything is foreseen until the end of time, yet freedom of choice is granted." It's up to us to make the right choices and not just let life passively happen to us, or blame bad outcomes on outside forces.
What a great quote from the Talmud! Dante describes something similar in Paradise 17:40 I think, that even though everything is depicted in "the eternal sight, [..] this no more confers necessity than does the movement of a boat downstream depend upon the eyes that mirror it." It's a very deep question regarding the free will in life. And btw., best of luck with the aliyah!
Congratulations on your important decision. It’s great to hear that Dante had a positive influence on your choice. Think about that power… 700 years of temporal distance, and still having such a life-altering importance for people who really listen to him. And he’s not even a canonized saint (we all understand why, although I would gladly support his canonization). Visiting Israel has always been one of my dreams. Who knows, maybe one day we’ll meet there! : ) Also I love that Talmud quote, thank you for sharing it. I believe it was Ratzinger who said that Western civilization is Jerusalem, Athens and Rome.
Gosh this is profound ..first a brilliant setting then a mind blowing piece on the truth of free will and the responsibility of faith . This feels like the heart of the Comedies so far ...thank you so much for this journey ...and love that you share your opinions .. I'm going to have to stop and ponder ....I'm reading The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow and I'm getting some sense of the morality of " how anyone plays the cards they receive " in this book. Bellow is another philosopher who felt fiction was the best way to share deep moral ideas ...not a fashionable writer but I'm really getting a lot from him. .
Thanks Hester - I know about Augie March but never read it, so your comment has just granted the Saul Bellow estate an additional copy sold : ). I’d love to hear your thoughts once you’ve read it.
@@tomlabooks3263 great . No doubt Augie is a big picturesque novel and Bellows writing style is singular ...a sort of cross between street talk and the classics that can take some digesting ...but I'm loving the ambition he has in showing how there are shades of grey in most of us and people doing the right thing is sometimes hidden under layers of circumstantial toughness and not limited to demi gods .... I think some of his early shorter books tackle tricky moral dilemmas and he is keen to debunk the macho valiant hero trope of Hemingway etc ..most of his hero's are pretty complicated and always verbose ...
I know envy was a canto or so ago, but I am envious that you're now halfway through! Congratulations! I love that smoke and darkness represent the acrid nature of Wrath. I love your clarification that religion is not comfort but hard work. Even though I don't share your belief in God, I admire the idea of an approach to life that requires constant attention and hard work. (As an aside, Marilynne Robinson once said, "The bible says love your neighbor. It doesn't say you have to LIKE your neighbor." Thus highlighting the hard work that Love sometimes requires).
Hahah it’s great to be halfway, and I still often get that feeling like “someone ACTUALLY wrote this thing”, which still seems impossible to me.
Thank you for sharing that great quote by Robinson, she’s such a treasure. I really appreciate you, Roz and everyone else who’s so open to enjoy christian literature from a non-faithful point of view. The soul-stirring, after all, must be very similar.
The way I put it with my atheist friends is, there is often more understanding between two highly curious, enquiring minds, no matter what their faith is, than between two minds who share the same faith but a different intensity of desire. p.s. I thought of you yesterday as I watched an old comedy show by Eddie Izzard… what an absolute genius.
i knew what his answer would be as soon as you posed the question...what a blessing to the world is g.k. chesterton.
We would need many more Chestertons today, in our world of whiny babies, lazy minds and pointed fingers.
Halfway! I'm glad I signed up to go on this adventure with you and I'm looking forward to the back half. I'm obviously a bit behind, it's been a busy month, and I hope to get caught up in September. Free will is something I think about frequently and it was interesting getting Dante's take on it. I also appreciated your comments about religion. Organized religion gets a lot of criticism and some of it is justified. You did a good job highlighting a criticism that isn't justified. At it's heart, religion is about teaching and living the best life possible.
Yes! Can’t believe we’re past the 50% line : ) Fully agree with you that some of the criticism against the catholic church and organized religion in general is justified. Thank you again for coming on this long and slow journey : )
You're on a roll!! Let me get a cup of tea - to enjoy this fully! :)
😂😂
Great work, and congrats with 50 cantos!! The talk with Marco Lombardi is one of my favorite parts of the Purgatory. And the idea of the Free Will has taken me a long time to grasp, but I love the aspect that without the freedom to choose our actions - we wouldn't "exist" in a sense, there would be no soul at all. Which goes against all my convictions! And Dante the Writer's anger reflected through Marco here on the terrace of Wrath is also amusing. I still keep pondering the idea of the necessity of a "Good Sheperd", it's a bit back to your quote from Convivio that we need knowledge to exercise our Free Will in accordance with the Good.
As you said - this canto is very dense with deep topics! :)
Thank you Richard. You’re right about Dante’s anger through Marco, I didn’t think about that. And Dante is often writing in an “angry” mood, or at least we could say that he is rarely not upset about something.
This canto is incredibly rich, a bit like a very strong wine - and we need to remember that here we have a genius re-writing concepts that have been pondered and written by other geniuses before (St. Thomas and Augustine) so for us mere mortals I’m not sure one lifetime will be sufficient to grasp all the nuances…
How true that when influencers and those in authority flex their muscles to grab as much power, attention, resources, and control as possible, they are seeking that which can never fulfill their fundamental human longing. Realizing this from the vantage point of an "ordinary person" offers the possibility of reining in our own envy and acquisitive tendencies and helps us see these people in a different and (perhaps) compassionate light.
Wise parents often watch their children make predictable mistakes but that does not deny their children free will or freedom of choice. These parent may know the outcome (what will be determined) but their children certainly don't!
Thanks for your comment, Viktoria. Great point about parents “watching their children making predictable mistakes”. That’s God’s attitude in Dante’s view. He will articulate this metaphor even better in the first cantos of Paradiso.
Very informative and useful, Tom. Thank you!
Grazie a te, Maria !
@@tomlabooks3263 Prego, Tom!
Already at fifty! It really does not seem longer than a month or two ago this started haha And yes! As we were talking the other day, people do not typically turn to religion for comfort. It is strange how this concept got so perpetuated in Western culture when it really doesn't come from anywhere within the three major Abrahamic religions.
It is strange but it has clear reasons and cultural reasons - I’m not equipped to described those reasons well, but I think it’s due to an anti-christian intellectual strain that started around the “Enlightenment” period and was then massively amplified by Nietzsche’s twisted genius. If you’re interested, the relatively recent book “American Nietzsche” has a lot to say about how Big Mustache was in fact influenced by some American thinkers of his times. There is a great youtube interview with the author by Bishop Robert Barron. Anyway… around the buoy and back! We’ll complete circling Dante’s brain next year!