Purgatory: Canto 25, The Ascent to the Seventh Circle

Good morning, Pilgrims. I've caught up with you, having lingered perhaps too long in gazing at the tree, a glutton with time since being thrown off track on the day we entered the sixth cornice. I pray that those of us who purify themselves in this fire of the seventh cornice will be edified by the experience, for to desire is the most natural of human impulses, and those we'll meet here are those who desired too much the fruits of the creation even if they didn't partake in them to a degree that would have increased their hunger. We begin the canto with this question, though -- how can incorporeal shades lose the aspect of well-being and be diminished in their frame and stature? I remember one of our pilgrims had this question early on when it was noticed that Dante passed through Ciacco but was able grab and kick other shades. What's the relationship between corporeality with incorporeality, you asked, and here Statius has answered it for us. Ciacco was so consumed with his mass in life that in death his mass had no substance -- on the sixth cornice, the substance of the souls is wasted as they "waisted" themselves in life.



When Dante prompts Virgil with the question, Virgil answers that it's not that hard of a thing to ascertain but defers to Statius, who has both grace and reason, for the fuller explanation. Statius says that the soul is like a blood that gets into the veins and takes a form and shape of the container that holds it (a response that almost makes Dante the father of hematology -- had he separated veins and arteries and noticed that the heart pumps the blood around the body, he would have discovered the circulatory system three hundred years before William Harvey ended the 1,400-year reign of Galen's anatomy in 1628 with the publication of De motu cordis. It's Galen, then, who in the second century posited the idea of "the threefold circulation of the blood and the theory of humours (blood, phlegm, choler/yellow bile, and melancholy/black bile) that contributed to mental and physical state," whose model Dante is following when he writes "quelle per le vene vàne" in relation to the circulation of the blood. Dante also had no access to the findings of Velasius, who believed that the brain and nervous system were the center of the person rather than the Aristotleian idea of the heart. Naturally, then, he would have considered the heart the center of being with all the allegorical implications that bears, and Galen's belief that the body was the instrument of the soul resonates well with the idea that Statius, who died 107 years before Galen died, is espousing here (for he would have had to have learned of it either on the banks of the Tiber or while he was waiting the period of his life in ante-Purgatory). Galen, for all his belief in one God, likely joined Virgil in Limbo since he was not a Christian (unless he was closeted like Statius) when he died.

The crux of Statius's explanation lies in the generation of the soul from virtue -- the soul is virtue's embodiment (and that explains the focus on this mountain of replenishing virtue through the process of purification since the will of man which is free often chooses the wrong good and sometimes so much of it that the self-good he has chosen turns into a communal evil as we've seen below -- which makes pretty clear sense if we consider that the whole of virtue is greater than the sum of its parts and that if the parts stray from it in varying degrees once separated from the vine, they can do nothing but recoagulate (see the emphasis on the rebuilding of community all the way up this mountain) when grafted back onto it). The incarnation of virtue, then, necessarily forms that shell, or body, we recognize when we glance into the mirror, and it retains the shape even after the shell returns to dust like a plaster statue will remain in its form even after the mold that created it has been stripped away. While our bodies were formed by our parents, then, the soul is formed only by God's grace, so that the perfect soul resides in imperfect (because mortal) flesh with all the imperfections that flesh may cast upon the soul -- to develop a perfect flesh, at least one parent would have to be immortal, and perhaps in this we find the mystery that St. Leander of Seville fought so hard to preserve in his fight against the Arian heresy that denied the divinity of Christ -- two natures in one flesh.

At the end of this explanation, we mark the fire of chastity which purges burning desire, and the whip that these souls shout in mutual acclamation, one body, one voice, in praise of the Lord who says to each "Please come to me" as the poet who calls on death to reunite him with the love and grace of those who've left him behind -- Consummatem est post hic cornice! In this, Dante and Pope have found common purpose of expression, for Pope begins his fourth epistle in exhortation:

Take Nature's path, and mad opinions leave;
All states can reach it, and all heads conceive;
Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell;
There needs but thinking right, and meaning well;
And mourn our various portions as we please,
Equal is common sense, and common ease.

All else beyond a couple of splashes in Lethe and Eunoe belongs to God!

S.