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After five years in hell,
Lectura Dantis
moves on
Purgatory, from
The Dante Encyclopedia
(2000). Illustration by Robert Turner/Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Never has a group of souls been more eager to go to purgatory. On this crisp fall night near Thanksgiving, fewer than half the seats in Devlin 101 are occupied, but the audience of 40 or so mostly white-haired or balding men and women radiates a bonhomie that fills the room. "Buona sera," Laurie Shepard, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures, greets the group. "We are embarking on a new journey, a most arduous journey." Shepard hands out a diagram of ascending tiers that resembles a wedding cake and asks, "Would anybody like a map of purgatory?"
These pilgrims are part of
Lectura Dantis,
a tradition of public readings of
The Divine Comedy
of Dante Alighieri that has been carried on in various venues for 700 years. At Boston College, the rite began at the millennium, in February 2000, with Canto I of the
Inferno,
the
Comedy's
first part. The reader that night was Franco Mormando, chair of the Romance languages department, which together with the Center for Italian Culture of Newton, Massachusetts, sponsors the meetings. Since then, on a handful of nights a year, "one canto at a time," as Shepard says serenely, this devoted band has savored the 14th-century text that is among the world's greatest poems. Italian-American retirees, professors of Italian, amateur scholars of Dante, graduate students, and the occasional undergraduate celebrate the poet who dared to write his 100 cantos in vernacular Italian instead of Latin. Boston College's
Lectura Dantis
was originally scheduled to take 20 years to complete. It has been accelerated by three years to accommodate those who feared they might be in the real afterlife before it was done.
Tonight's speaker, on
Purgatorio I,
is Professor Rachel Jacoff of Wellesley College, a renowned Dante scholar and, as the buzz among the audience afterward affirms, a generous and incisive teacher. "It's a relief to get to purgatory when I'm teaching Dante," Jacoff begins. "It's too bad many only read the
Inferno,
when two-thirds of Dante's poem is on the saved." Less sexy than heaven or hell, and a place that only exists until the Last Judgment, purgatory did not seize the medieval imagination; almost no images of it exist from Dante's time. Theologians too have been imprecise about it, thereby offering Dante cosmic scope for an idiosyncratic rendering. Reversing the descending cone shape of hell, purgatory in Dante's scheme is a mountain with seven terraces matching the seven deadly sins, ending in a flat-topped Garden of Eden. "This wedding-cake-shaped mountain will have a couple at its top, Dante and Beatrice," Jacoff notes, sending the audience into chuckles with the reference to Dante's deceased muse, who, at the end of
Purgatorio,
emerges from paradise to chastise her sinful admirer into a state of grace.
Purgatory is a "middle ground," Jacoff says, "in process" much like Dante himself, and looking both ways, toward the past and the future. "Time matters" here, Jacoff declares, the only domain of the afterlife in which this is so. Accordingly, Dante frequently notes the position of the sun, the angle of its rays, the shadows it makes. The stars are prominent in
Purgatorio,
too, literally "re-orienting" Dante and the reader, for this place is all about change. The pilgrim emerges from purgatory "renewed and remade": If
Inferno
is about deformation and
Paradiso
about transformation,
Purgatorio
is, Jacoff wryly says, a "reform school."
The figure that presides over
Purgatorio
is Cato of Utica, a choice that has puzzled and even shocked readers for its apparently heretical suggestion that a pagan from the first century b.c., who committed suicide, might be saved. Though Cato professes surprise that Dante and Virgil could pass from hell into purgatory, defying everything he knows about the divine road map, the real question, as Jacoff points out, is what is
he
doing there. Cato killed himself rather than submit to Julius Caesar's tyranny and is associated in Roman history with liberty. Jacoff contends that by locating Cato in this place of salvation Dante is asserting the poet's artistic liberty: He creates his own rules.
It's hard not to be reminded on this occasion of the Church's love of schema—seven deadly sins, four cardinal virtues, three options for the afterlife (four, counting limbo). As the debate over Cato attests, everyone has a place, in a hierarchy that comforts and condemns at once. In a charmingly comic bit, Virgil tries to buddy up to Cato by promising that if Cato gives the two poets passage through his realm, he'll report this kindness back to Cato's wife, Marcia, who, like Virgil, has been consigned to limbo. Cato brushes off this bid, drawing a sharp line between his uxorious past and his rehabilitated present: "She has no power to move me any longer, / such was the law decreed when I was freed." Though Dante leaves room in the
Comedy
for enduring love (in the person of Beatrice), the afterlife that he draws admits what Jacoff calls a "tension between what you leave behind and what you can keep."
THE EVENING, like the
Comedy,
is in three parts: Jacoff's remarks on
Canto I
are followed by her reading of it aloud in Italian and then by questions from the audience. Jacoff's voice is sonorous and lively, and as the long Italian vowels and soft consonants fill the silence, a man in the audience keeps his eyes closed, rhythmically plucking his beard, and smiling—there is no other word for it—beatifically.
Questions come thick and fast from this well-informed group. At some point a man in a tweed jacket asks bluntly, "Why is Cato saved and Virgil not?" Twirling a strand of hair, Jacoff looks thoughtful. "Virgil is the tragedy in the
Comedy.
People are always trying to save Virgil: Every five years someone writes an article" outlining the technicalities on which he might have gotten into heaven. The pathos of Virgil not being saved, she says, led St. Paul, according to a Christian legend, to weep at Virgil's grave.
"The Divine Comedy
is not a Pollyanna-ish book."
A woman in the back row remarks that Beatrice turns into a less feminine woman in this book than she was in
Inferno.
"She turns back into one in
Paradiso,"
returns Jacoff. "Oh, okay. I'm not there yet," the woman replies.
Released from this cozy room a few minutes later, I walk to my car under a cloudy moon that competes with streetlights and the blue beacon of a call box. The last question of the night had come from a first-time reader intrigued by the profusion of light images in
Purgatorio.
Jacoff reminded him that astronomy fascinated Dante, and indeed, before electric lights, practically all light was celestial. If you think purgatory has lots of light, she promises him, "wait till you get to
Paradiso!"
Clare Dunsford
Clare Dunsford is an associate dean in the College of Arts & Sciences. Readings of
Purgatorio II
and
III
are scheduled for February 28 and March 28, respectively, at 7:30 p.m. in Devlin 101.
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