Purgatory, Canto 33

The Sayers Text of Purgatory Canto 33 (Open PDF)

A Prose translation of Canto 33 (by David Bruce)

Summary

BEATRICE, escorted by Matilda, the Seven Ladies, Statius, and Dante, sets of on foot through the Forest. Calling Dante to her side, she talks to him about the Pageants he has been shown, and prophesies the coming of one who shall avenge the wrong done to Christendom. He discovers that the Water of Oblivion has taken away all memory of his former faults. But now they come to the double fountain-head of Lethe and Eunoë, and Dante, drinking the water of Good Remembrance, feels himself renewed through and through, and ready for his ascent to the Heavenly Paradise.

The Prepatory Lecture

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Questions for Reflection

• What charge does Beatrice give Dante at the beginning of the canto? What might this help us to see about the purpose of the Comedy as a whole?
• Dante often draws on the image of the stamp leaving an impression in wax. How does he deploy that image in lines 79-81? Why would he tie this imagery to Beatrice, given what he has confessed in the previous cantos?
• What does Beatrice say to critique Dante’s school of thought? How can he better align his mind with the divine pedagogy she has to offer him?
• Why can Dante not remember estranging himself from Beatrice’s memory in the past?
• Virgil proclaimed Dante’s will to be perfectly free in Purg. 27. Perhaps surprisingly, Dante depicts the perfection of free will by “making another’s will its own” (131). What does this tell us about the way Dante understands the freedom of the will?
• If Dante has been made morally perfect, restored to Eden’s innocence…why not end the poem here? Why does Dante need to make the journey into the stars?

Purgatory, Canto 31-33 © Jan Hearn

The Images

Eunoë: the name (meaning “good-remembrance” or “good-mind”) is “made up”, as a modern commentator observes, “from Greek words which were well known to medieval culture.” Oddly enough, they do not seem to have been known to Dante’s son Pietro, who, in his Latin commentary on the Comedy, writes the name of the river “Aonius”, and identifies it with the “Aonian waters” mentioned by Ovid: i.e. with the Muses’ fountain of Aganippe in Aonia. Pietro, however, seems to have lacked the curiosity — or perhaps the courage — to ask his father all the questions that we should like to have answered, and at one point (the notorious passage about the three mirrors, Para. ii. 97 sqq.) is reduced to saying to the reader: “Work out the rest, in fact the whole thing, for yourself, for I see nothing and understand nothing.” We may therefore ignore him and conclude that the name Eunoë (which is undoubtedly what Dante wrote) was either the poet’s own invention, or derived from some medieval or post-classical Latin source which was unknown to Pietro and has escaped the search of later commentators. 

Matilda: The function of Matilda is now clearer to us: the handmaid of Beatrice, and of all that Beatrice signifies, she welcomes the soul, instructs it, cleanses it, and brings it, thus prepared, into the presence of the sacramental mystery. She thus figures as all levels the Active Christian life:

1. morally, the perfecting of Nature to receive Grace;
2. historically, the visible and institutional life of the Church as the means whereby it is enabled to become the “true body” of Christ;
3. mystically, the life of good works in the world which is the necessary basis for the life of contemplation.

Mark Vernon's Lecture