Symmetrically, we see another mention of free will exactly twenty-five terzine after Canto seventeen as well. As medieval number theory would have us do, we must sum the digits of twenty-five the number of terzine on either side on canto seventeen. That they sum to seven, the number of completeness, is significant. It is as if Dante is calling direct attention towards the terzine between these two points, and emphasizing that the themes of free will and love represent the culmination of his entire journey.
Furthermore, the seven central cantos in the Purgatorio have a distinct pattern of line numbers: , , , , , , Again, summing the digits of each line count we get: 7, 10, 10, 13, 10, 10, 7. On the ends, the number seven is seen framing these seven canti and representing their completeness. Inside the frames, on both sides, is the number ten, representative of perfection. Beyond structure, Dante also uses symbolic numbers to provide meaning to individuals, or groups of individuals.
For a man like Dante, this is one of the greatest honors he could achieve. We will see this juxtaposition of negative being in hell and positive lauded by the poets infuse the story with meaning throughout this canto. In that case the seven circles of walls, each with its gate leading to the castle, may well represent the seven liberal arts, and perhaps also the seven virtues, moral and intellectual, so well known to the pagans.
There is some remnant of these ideas left in our culture, but even if we did not know them, we should now be awakened to the clarity of these connections.
The next set of symbolisms become more complex. We now think immediately to other combinations of spiritual and worldly—the body and soul, the theological virtues and cardinal virtues of which there are 3 and 4 respectively. Drawing a further connection, Scripture reminds us that there were seven days of creation. We now have a fuller understanding of the origins of the importance of the number seven. Another more complex number is eight.
Traditionally, eight is the number representing baptism, redemption, and new life. Not immediately evident as to why, we must look back again to the Book of Genesis.
God created the world in six days, and rested on the seventh day. Tradition tells us that the eighth day represents the coming and salvific actions of Christ. It is thus the eighth day of creation—the ushering of the age of redemption for the sins of mankind.
Baptismal fonts are generally octagonal, reinforcing the connection of the number eight with baptism. Additionally, baptisteries attached to churches have traditionally had eight sides. Eight-sided is the lofty shine to match its sacred use; Eight-angled is the font to show its benefits profuse; With such a number grace and life supplanted human guilt And with such number must the hall of baptism be built [2]. Finally, there are some rather complicated symbolisms in which we must rely on the early Church fathers to help illuminate their truths.
Augustine, commenting on the Book of John, explains the significance of the one hundred fifty-three fish caught by John in chapter twenty-one. He notes that one hundred fifty-three is the triangular number of seventeen. He then exposits that the number seventeen is the summation of seven which represents the divine and ten which represents the number of the Decalogue. Jerome explained that the meaning of these numbers is derived from the hand gestures of married couples and widows.
We begin our exploration of numerology with the Pythagoreans. Their philosophical beliefs had a profound influence on their moral tenets. For example, they held the doctrine of metempsychosis—the belief that the soul does not die, but transmigrates from one body to another—even animal bodies. Their prohibition of eating the flesh of animals then, follows logically. They noticed that underlying the harmonies and melodies in music was a series of numerical ratios, and the proper combination of these ratios produced a certain quality of sound.
It stands to reason then that music was made of numbers. In fact, they took this concept, and extended it to the whole of the universe and everything in it. Numbers were not simply abstract concepts, they were spatial truths. Three points join lines together to create the surface plane, a two-dimensional object.
Finally, four points completes the fundamentals of spatial generation, and gives us the solid, three-dimensional object.
Thus, being itself, in our three-dimensional world, is created through the combination of points, lines, and solids. The Pythagoreans also began the process of assigning symbolic meaning to numbers. The monad became the ultimate unit of being because of its fundamental structure in reality. Four became symbolic for material bodies because it follows from the points, lines, and solids represented by the first three numbers. Five is the symbolic number of marriage, following from the combination of two the first feminine number and three the first masculine number.
Three beasts, nine circles, thirty-three cantos—they seem so important, and almost familiar, yet their meaning eludes us.
The brilliant mind of Dante placed both overt and subtle references to symbolic numbers throughout the Comedy, the problem with our recognizing them is that Dante wrote for an audience that lived many hundreds of years ago.
When modern readers experience the Comedy , they approach it with a contemporary interpretive lens, which obscures or completely misses references that a 14 th century reader would have readily grasped. In order to truly understand the depth of symbolic references that Dante provides, we must educate ourselves on the recognized meanings of particular numbers—but even more than that, we must recognize the philosophical and scriptural origins of these meanings.
In essence, dark forest is the symbol of earthly life, and erring there means sinful life and delusion. Dante shows that the sins have terrible sizes, and that is why he is lost.
Three animals symbolize the three sins: the Panther — sensuality and power-starving, the Lion — haughtiness and ambition, the female Wolf — cupidity and greediness. Far away a light suddenly appears, from which a stranger comes to help the author, which, then turns out, to be the soul of Virgil.
In the poem Virgil is the symbol of secular life and science, and also rationality. The first part of the poem is entirely allegory. From religious-sententious point of view the dark forest is interpreted as a nature of secular man, full of guilty delusions.
In the poem Christian Dante is accompanied by Pagan Virgil but not by an angel as it was common in medieval literature , because in his lifetime Vergilios was considered to be one of the propagator of Christianity. He leads the author to the Hell and Purgatory, in order to show the path to the salvation of the soul.
The journey begins in the underworld areas. From the very beginning the writer creates a mood by means of symbols. That is there is neither salvation nor outlet from the Hell. At the very beginning of the road the writer meets a bewilderment crowd which was neither innocent nor guilty, neither made good nor bad, and neither was faithful to their friends nor to the enemies. Those are scheming, servile people which are wobbling in the air incomprehensibly, because of the wind.
Virgil explains that those are unprincipled people who turn even by a light wind and take all the forms of wind movements. These people must cross Acheron river, by which the first area of the Hell begins and the other areas are formed.
Crossing river Acheron, Dante and Virgil put a step in first container of the Hell. The author gives an ample explanation about Acheron and the other rivers described in the Hell in the fourteenth song. Inside the mountain of island Crete a giant old man is standing. His head is of gold, shoulders, chest and arms of silver, waist to the thighs of copper, one of the legs of iron, the other of clay.
Every part of the body, except the gold pieces, there are signs of deep wounds, from which tears are dripping.
The symbols can be interpreted in two respects. First, of common philosophical sense, that old man is the allegory of time. Second, of political sense, the symbol of the monarchy or Ancient Roman Empire. The underground world is depicted according to scholastic understanding. In each container the appropriate sinner is punished, the more containers increase and the areas deepen, the heavier sins and their punishments become.
Here the souls of sinners are tormented, they almost do not bear physical punishment, their sinful souls suffer, instead. Dante creates a symbolic image: the writer descends down through the containers and as much he descends as horrible and cold it becomes.
This means mortality of hope, life and nonirrevocability. In the fifth container Semiramis, Cleopatra and Helen are located: here the writer has put the allegorical image of the passions. Then the images become more and more hellish, all of which have their allegorical meaning. The tyrants, up to their withers, are sunk in the boiling blood, purses are hanging from the necks of money-lenders, the weight of which does not let them stand or walk straight.
Dante dressed flatterers a lead-made clothing gilded from the surface, and the faces of fortune-tellers are turned back.
These, as Par. In the first verses of St. Likewise, Purgatorio xi demonstrates the intrinsic dangers of human belief in the absolute value of human production.
In fact, looking at Paradiso xi. The book of God takes centre-stage in Purgatorio xi, where the prayer of the penitent is, in fact, a translation of a Gospel passage. This is the longest prayer in the Commedia , and consequently the longest volgarizzamento of the Bible in the poem. The length of the biblical reenactment is, of course, proportional to the importance of the spiritual message that it announces and that reverberates throughout Purgatory: companionship, humility and compassion are essential to salvation.
Last but not least, the Pater noster sung by the souls also establishes the epistemological paradigm chosen by those who will be saved. The narrator in this canto is, perhaps not coincidentally, Thomas Aquinas, the commentator of Aristotle employed by Dante in Inferno xi. At the start of my chapter, I classified this canto as homage to hagiography.
Paradiso xi is, of course, many things at the same time: it is, for example, a panegyric, a lectio more importantly and a commentary to a phrase spoken by the character of Aquinas in the previous canto. This seems to suggest that, like Virgil in Inferno xi, Aquinas acts here as a pedagogue who describes the vita Francisci to explain the decadence of his mendicant order whilst, at the same time, confirming the values that should animate the Dominicans and the Church as whole.
Clearly, the choice is partly motivated by the hagiographical tradition that used biblical models to exalt the Christian values of each and every saint. In particular, Francis and Poverty are transformed into sponso and sponsa like the protagonists of the Song of Songs attributed to Solomon.
This biblical book had been interpreted for centuries as an allegory and figura of the love that unites God and Christ to the Church or the human soul. In doing so, Dante chooses a hagiographical line that was not thoroughly dominant in the Franciscan tradition to call for a radical reform of the Church based on the value of love.
It is plausible that in the Heaven of the Sun, Dante should call Aquinas to testify and attribute to him a demonstration based on the sacred words of the Bible, perhaps reminding the reader that the real auctoritas on both virtue and vice is ultimately the book of God. In other words, the conclusion to which a vertical reading seems to lead us is that only in the light of grace and its manifestations in the world can philosophy make proper sense of the nature of sin and virtue, of damnation and salvation.
True to his earthly loyalty to clarity in order to avoid the confusion that the allusive language of fabulae can cause, Thomas offers the pilgrim the necessary clues to interpret his poetical flurry:. If we read the Elevens vertically, from Hell to Paradiso xi, the reader is invited to consider how teaching and learning, as well as the virtuous life that avoids sin, are moti amoris [motions of love, caused by love].
Significantly for our exegetical exercise, clarity of exposition is also a concern in Purgatorio xi, where Dante rewords the Pater noster in order explain its value to the reader. Significantly he does so to demonstrate that the usurer uses his work neither to advance people, nor to produce goods; he hopes to earn money with money. Clearly we need to make sense of the extreme measures taken by Dante in the explicit of his complex canto.
The discussion on usury was perhaps inspired by the fact that the issue had become more and more slippery at the hands of his contemporaries around the beginning of the s. Interestingly, some historians believe that the first notion of money as capital, the root of our modern economic system, was in fact introduced by the Franciscan John Peter Olivi.
In this canto, there is no doubt that poverty is a focal point of the vita of St Francis: Lady Poverty is in fact the sponsa of a miraculous love story. However, Poverty is not exclusively presented as a Christian bride; Amiclas is also remembered as one of her spouses. My overall feeling is that it has at least as far as Inferno xi is concerned.
Charity is seen as the core of all human activities; only the absence of charity defines vice; art is good as long as it contributes to the appreciation of the rule of love in Creation; and, finally, philosophy is primarily useful in confirming the message of the Bible, the one great poem of love.
The Bible quoted is the Approved King James translation. Migne, vols Paris: Garnier, , , col. Whoever thou art that hast sinned, and hesitates to exercise penitence for thy sin, despairing of thy salvation, hear David groaning. To thee Nathan the prophet hath not been sent, David himself hath been sent to thee. Hear him crying, and with him cry: hear him groaning, and with him groan; hear him weeping, and mingle tears; hear him amended, and with him rejoice.
Inferno , ed. Rassegna bibliografica dantesca , From Communities to Individuals , ed. Purgatorio , ed. Paradiso , ed. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Ravenna, 12 novembre , ed.
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