Purgatory, Canto 10

The Text of Purgatory Canto 10 (Open PDF)

Summary

AS Peter’s Gate clangs to behind them, the Poets begin climbing the steep and narrow zigzag cleft in the rock which leads to the First Cornice. This, when they get there, turns out to be a ledge some eighteen feet wide running all round the Mountain, and, at the moment of their arrival, quite empty from end to end. The face of the clif opposite the mouth of the hollow way is adorned with sculptured examples of the Great Humilities: and while they are examining these, they see a company of the Proud approaching, each one bent double beneath the weight of an enormous stone.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• Why is the first vice purged pride? Why does the contrapasso here involve carrying a boulder on one’s back? How does this purification cultivate the virtue of humility?
• How does Dante illuminate the nature of pride and humility through his comparison of Eve and Mary (10.40-45)?
• What is the role of the carvings in stone? How does Dante seem to be putting the arts and the imagination to moral work?
• Who is Uzzah and why include him on the terrace of pride (10.56-57)?
• What is Dante doing with the image of Emperor Trajan (10.73-93)? Why do you think Dante consciously points out that Virgil is looking at Trajan’s image?
• Who does Dante talk to on the terrace of Pride? Given what we know about Dante so far, why do you think his primary focus on the terrace of the proud is art?

The Canticle in this Canto

Purgatory, Canto 10 © Jan Hearn

The Images

Lower Purgatory: Love Perverted.  (See below for the general summary of Lower Purgatory.)

Cornice 1: Pride. Taken in its wider aspect, Pride (Superbia) is the head and root of all sin, both original and actual. It is the endeavour to be “as God”, making self, instead of God, the centre about which the will and desire revolve. In its narrower and more specific aspect, pride exhibits itself as Vainglory (Vana gloria) — an egotism so overweening that it cannot bear to occupy any place but the first, and hates and despises all fellow-creatures out of sheer lust of domination. Some theologians separate these two aspects, placing Pride in a class by itself, as the generic sin of which Vainglory and the rest are the species: but Dante follows the more usual arrangement which puts Pride and Vainglory together as the first of the Seven Capital Sins.

Lower Purgatory: Love Perverted: There is no actual existing person or thing that is not, in some degree, a proper object of love. The only wrong object of love is the love of harm, which results when love for object A is perverted into hatred for object B. Since God is the source of all good, to hate Him is a delusion and to harm Him is impossible; neither does anyone really hate or want to harm himself. In practice, therefore, Perverted Love is love of injury to one’s neighbour, springing from the evil fantasy that one can gain good for one’s self from others’ harm.

• Cornice 1: Pride (Superbia) (love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one’s neighbour).
• Cornice 2: Envy (Invidia) (love of one’s own good perverted to the wish to deprive other men of theirs).
• Cornice 3: Wrath (Ira) (love of justice perverted to revenge and spite). Mid-Purgatory: Love Defective
• Cornice 4: Sloth or Accidie (Acedia) (the failure to love any good object in its proper measure, and, especially, to love God actively with all one has and is).

Mark Vernon's Lecture