Purgatory: Canto 20 -- The Hoarders and Wasters -- The Whip and Rein

Chris Martin asked a good question at lunch yesterday -- when the voice of Cain (not Carradine of Kung Fu) shouts "All men are my destroyers!" as the rein of envy in canto 14, is it Cain who is thus shouting? Verily, I say unto thee that it is not Cain (for he is probably cooling his jets in Caina in the 9th circle of hell) but a radio broadcast, an echo, as it were. The first three ledges are interesting in that regard, then, for, successively, it's something outside the penitent that serves as the whip and the rein of each capital sin. On the cornice of the proud, it was television. On the cornice of the envious, it was radio. On the cornice of the wrathful, it was a hologram like Star Trek's holodeck. It's not until we get on the ledge of sloth that we actually see the penitent themselves being held accountable for the recitation of the whip and the rein -- in the train of zealots racing around the ledge, we find that the foremost shout the whip and the hindmost shout the rein. On our present ledge, that of the avaricious, we find that everyone is involved in shouting the whip and the rein and that the whip is shouted in daylight and the rein at night as the mood strikes each of those whose souls cleave to the dust. And why not, of course, when everyone feels the power of the earthquake of creation's JOY every time a new soul makes it to God -- what a whip!


An Earthquake that could Shake the Heavens would be Significant -- such is God's Joy when one of us makes it

This is a movement toward developing community, then, if the individual senses (where each person sees and hears these whips and reins singly) lead into the communal (where the group is able to goad themselves as a group on to perfection). What is happening here is the same thing that Pope is writing about when he notes that,

Heav'n forming each on other to depend,
A master, or a servant, or a friend,
Bids each on other for assistance call,
Till one man's weakness grows the strength of all (II, 6, 249-52).

There is also a ripple through all the senses here as the visions lead into acoustic engagement and the acoustic leads into the tactile -- this means that the penitent are becoming more totally invested in their penance, underscored by the fact that Hugh Capet turns Dante's offer for prayers down: "Not for such comfort as the world may give/ do I reply . . . but that such light/ of grace should shine on you while yet you live" (40-2). Once filled with the necessary zeal that the angel of the previous ledge would have given all who have ascended this far, the souls are sufficiently far along in their journey to God to pursue the rest of the distance themselves. This is not to say that they do so "alone" -- rather, their wills are sufficiently turned toward God for them to be "comfortable" in their progress.

This encounter with Hugh Capet (who, like the rest of the penitent on this ledge seems through his response to Dante to have dedicated himself, like St. John of God, to an active regard for others while pursuing his own salvation) is of interest to the Italians at the time Dante is writing it, for at this point in history (as Fr. Witt will discuss on the activities board), the papacy has been moved "by" (and this is an area of scholarly contention) Philip IV to Avignon under the pontificate of Clement V. As the story goes, Philip IV not only suppressed the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13, 1307 (and Friday the 13th has been a bad luck day ever since), but he also forced Clement V's compliance with it and used the leverage to rob the Templars of whatever wealth he could get from them (which wasn't much, leading to much speculation over the past 700 years as to what happened to the gold of the Templars and whether it was smuggled underground to fund the various secret societies that sprung from the hydra -- the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Scottish and Yorkish rites of masonry, etc.). Of course, this was a black moment in the history of both Church and State where the subjugation of the Church by the French king was perceived by some as a stranglehold -- as a Babylonian Captivity. If one could say something was worse than this, it would have been Philip IV's kidnapping of Pope Boniface VIII, whom Dante hated with a passion, if you'll recall, reserving for the man a space in the third bolgia of circle eight in hell. Dante is sympathetic with Boniface VIII on this point, though, because, as Ciardi notes, it's not the man who was humiliated, but the Office of the Pope -- the Vicar of Peter -- and the same love for the Office that drove him to sentence Boniface VIII to hell is the love he's using in condemning Philip IV for abusing it.

That Hugh Capet laments this states of deterioration is important here because we'll see it again in Paradise. Anything that turns us away from the power of love -- and the temporal is as important as the eternal for beings who are both material and spiritual -- is a bad thing, which is why the corruption of man through sin is so utterly wrong. It is also why we are given inspirations to turn ourselves, like the sunflower, back to the Sun. To do this, we use both reason and a natural impulse toward the good, which work together, as we might infer from Pope, as well as they work apart, for "reason raise o'er instinct as you can,/ In this 'tis God directs, in that 'tis man" (Epistle 3, II) Love, though, ultimately triumphs over all -- a point which Dante underscores in directing his love of God's creation (Beatrice) back onto the Creator. He writes in an earlier canto, "The power of Love borne in my lady's eyes imparts its grace to all she looks upon. All turn to gaze at her when she walks by, and when she greets a man his heart beats fast, the color leaves his face, he bows his head and sighs to think of all his imperfections. Anger and pride are forced to flee from her" (XXI, 2). Sure, Dante's in love with Beatrice, so he endows her with supernatural gifts, but on the most simple level he's seeing within another person the light of God's love and warmth and is able, as a result, to see through that person to God in ways that Paolo and Francesca never got around to doing. He underscores this with today's contribution, "I felt a sleeping spirit in my heart awake to Love" (XXIV, 7). So, Sean, what's the difference between the two loves? Had Dante ever caught Beatrice, married her, and bedded her, would he have still had the inspiration to write the Comedy, or, with the dream fulfilled rather than deferred would his poetry have dried up like a raisin in the sun? (to mix whatever metaphors and thoughts one might).

S.