Michael Jinkins

The tone of the second book of the “Divine Comedy, “Purgatorio” is set from the beginning with Dante’s joyful words, translated here by the poet John Ciardi:

“For better waters now the little bark

and leaves behind that sea so cruel and dark.” 

(Purgatorio, Canto I: lines 1-3). 

What is the cause of this shift of mood from hell to purgatory? Many folks might consider a visit to purgatory little better than a vacation in hell. 

Hope is the key. Movement is the key. Promise is the key. 

While Purgatory was seen as a place in the traditional three-story universe of medieval Christianity, purgation is a process. It is the active work of the eternal fire of God’s love upon the willing soul. It is that baptism by fire that transforms, burning away everything in us unworthy of the divine presence, that is, everything about us unworthy of Love. 

Thus, in purgatory we find souls singing the Lord’s Prayer (Canto XI). Their prayers are not in vain because they are praying for God to (unreservedly) do God’s will in them (Canto VI). And God, who is Love, wills love alone. 

They submit. They trust. They hope. 

And they refuse, as a positive act of love, to have confidence in their own supposed righteousness or their ability to judge others or themselves, both of which (self-righteousness and judgement) are aspects of the false self, those images humans construct and defend like fortresses. They refuse, in other words, that most basic form of idolatry, to make of themselves a graven image, to carve themselves in stone. And because they long to be set free from the false selves in which they might imprison themselves, as the poet and culture critic Clive James writes in his translation of “The Divine Comedy,” “love supplies/ in one quick flash what each soul here is owed.” (Canto VI) 

God’s justice and God’s love correspond perfectly in Dante’s Purgatorio because, as the old Anglican Book of Common Prayer reminds us, God’s will is not that anyone should perish but that all may turn and live. Redemption from the grasp of everything that would enslave us, restoration to our full humanity, reconciliation with community: these are God’s intentions for humanity. And each will happen, through the “awful grace of God,” (Aeschylus) if only we will allow for love to do its patient work in us. 

The delusions that threaten to wrap us in lies, the compulsion to consume that threatens to consume us, the insatiable habit of grasping onto something that will provide security in an ever-changing world: all of this and more lie in ashes. Smallness, hatred, violence, urges and obsessions that harm ourselves and others go up in flames. This is the work of love. 

Purgatory, then, is a vast moving tableau in which we are promised (not threatened) by the fire of God’s love. Like the glowing coal that touches the Prophet Isaiah’s lips, removing from him the lies to which his people had become addicted, so also the fire of pure love touches all parts of the human soul; the dross flares, flashes and burns away; only love remains among the coals. 

Is it possible, then, that those fierce images of lakes of fire where worms never die are ultimately portraits of Divine Love at work? Dare we hope that all humanity might ultimately submit to love, that God’s grace truly is irresistible? 

Such questions become inevitable in light of the power of God’s love. But, there is something else at work in these first two books. To help us see what this “something else” is, let’s look at my favorite passage in this book, and my favorite translation of that passage: Canto VI, lines 1-3 (John Ciardi’s translation). 

Who has not felt like the character described in these lines? 

“The loser, when a game of dice is done,

sadly, and sadly wiser, and alone.” 

Perhaps this is inevitably the picture of the individual before God, brought low, bankrupt, and, finally, taking stock. The player rolled the dice. He cannot blame anyone else. Nor can he really blame the dice. He played. He gambled. He lost. And God, despite all of God’s power, allows room for the gambler to make real choices. God does not violate the gambler’s freedom, although that freedom is exercised in a puzzling universe.