Education is Purgatorial
How to Read Dante's Purgatory as a Parable for Education
*These remarks were delivered as part of the Keynote for Great Hearts National Symposium for Classical Education (February 21, 2025) See the YouTube Here.
Recently I was teaching Dante—we’re finishing Inferno this week—and the relativism of the class made me laugh. Students were castigating Dante as a proud poet who spitefully just stuck people in hell and the story was merely his opinion about the world after death. He seemed to have an entertainingly gory imagination. Done. Well, I’m so glad they figured out how pointless this poem is so that we can all stop reading it—only took us seven hundred years to recognize that it was a waste of time. I’m being a little more cynical. In reality, the majority of the students are loving the journey, even if they can’t quite figure out what it all means.
But like my students, there are those read Inferno imagining it has little if nothing to do with them. What if those in hell want to be there? Which is what Dante depicts. Yes, they’re in pain and suffering. However, it’s like the man who knows the law of gravity, yet choose to walk off the cliff. Or the child who knows that eating a dozen cupcakes in one sitting will make her vomit, yet she wants to taste despite the consequences. The body is made a certain way by a great designer. Gravity is inscribed into the laws of the earth. We have freedom to choose our will rather than subscribe to those natural laws, but we will suffer the consequences. Some in hell will continue to raise their fists at God for designing the world that way—they still want their own will. They’re mad at him for fashioning the world and their bodies and souls in such a way that their desires have caused their suffering.
If you have not read past Inferno, I sometimes say that’s like only knowing about Good Friday without Easter Sunday. There is literally no reason that Friday should be Good without Easter; nor does Inferno make sense without Paradiso. But sometimes people just don’t know what to do with that Holy Saturday. Or, analogously, with Purgatory. While Heaven and Hell are eternal states where the will receives what it desires forever, Purgatory, as Dorothy L. Sayers points out, is different: “Purgatory is not an eternal state but a temporal process, continuous with, and of a quality comparable to, our experience in this world” (Intro Papers on Dante 74). In this realm of the afterlife, the will must learn to desire what it should to be free.
Rather than suffering consequences for their will, as in Inferno, these penitent shades are learning how to counteract their wrong desires. If we read the poem through an educational lens, we may pull back the metaphysical curtain and see features of an implicit curriculum. “Sharpen thy sight now, Reader, to regard/ the truth, for so transparent grows the veil,/ to pass within will surely not be hard” (II.viii.19-21). The poem is to be read allegorically and morally that we who are also on the journey with the pilgrim may be transformed.
As Dante climbs each rung of the mountain, there are a few constants that become the liturgy of the ascent. Each new ring presents him with virtuous exemplars, beginning with Mary the human par excellence for the Christian faith, apart from the God-Man. Those who study character education know that students will emulate the models set before them. Our current culture uplifts celebrities and those with financial success. As my friend Dana Gioia once pointed out, we can name more NFL players or Academy Award winners than we can artists. Might we add to that noble rabbis and pastors, educators, leaders? These virtuous exemplars in Purgatorio come through carved statues, theatrical reenactment, audible remembrances of narratives. And, as Dante exits each ring, he is confronted by their counterparts, also immortalized in art as a caution to the repentant sinner.
In the ring where sinners are purging themselves of pride, for instance, the heroes are those who exemplified humility: David dancing naked before the Ark of God or Mary exclaiming Fiat mihi, even the Emperor Trajan who ruled justly in second-century Rome. Whereas the warnings begin with Lucifer the fallen angel, include the mythical gods Ares and Apollo, to Holofernes and Troy. Dante follows the form given by Jesus in Luke 6 (21-26) when he preaches “Blessed are the poor… blessed are the hungry” as well as “Woe to you who are rich, woe to you who are well fed….” Rather than merely passing on like a distracted guest in an art museum, Dante admits he moves closer to attend “I drew up near the better to behold” the images (10.53), and “gaze[s] on them with great delight—the images of such humility….My eyes, which were content in gazing so….” He has to be propelled by Virgil to keep going because he stares in such amazement at the examples.
Dante himself gives us this experience. Through the beauty of his poetry, the form of his verse, the content of each canto. We try and imagine what he saw. We enjoy his poetry with delight. It’s an amazing thing to share with another who hasn’t yet walked the road with Dante.
If you recall the experience of Inferno, you’ll note how Dante became like the sinners he was among. He faints romantically after the tale of Francesca and Paolo, a victim of lust, swayed by the story she relates of her adultery. Or, his heart hardens to ice listening to the story of Ugolino, who screams at him, “Why are you not weeping?” Similarly, in Purgatorio, Dante the pilgrim participates in each realm, but this time, he is practicing the acts to counter the sin. Those in pride are carrying stones that force their faces down, so they walk hunched over. A corrective to the chests and chins they lifted too highly in life. Dante too walks “neck to neck like oxen at the plow….beside the burdened soul” as he speaks with one, feeling the lowering himself. We too then as readers vicariously experience the lowering of ourselves with him. I often ask students to walk around the classroom with me with their backpacks on, hunched at the hips as we discuss.
All of these pieces are about the form of the poem. The content, of course, correlates with the form. The content could be called a seminar, a dialogue of the dead, a symposium as Dante enters into conversation with the souls and then a dialectic argument with his professor Virgil, who he calls admiringly “mio dottore,” “maestro,” “padre Verace,” and “dolce padre.” Of his teacher, he asks questions, knowing that Virgil will delight in them. Of the repentant sinners, he inquires more than about their lives, which is primarily the subject of conversation in hell, but now he’s freer to ask things like, “What’s the cause of sin in the world?” as he does to Marco the Lombard in the realm of wrath. And they enter into a discourse, which becomes a text within a text for Virgil to expound upon.
At the end of this journey up the mountain, Dante is not the same as he was at the beginning. After he exits the realm of pride, Dante realizes that he will be spending some time there in the future. As he climbs the hill, he does not increase in judgment of others but in empathy. Dante realizes simultaneously his nature as the diet of worms and the reality that God has called him to venture on this unique spiritual journey. Virgil tells the guardian of the mountain, “tis liberty [Dante] seeks” (II.i.61-62, 71). The goal is freedom for his will. To learn to submit to the Master’s design and paradoxically be free. At the conclusion of the journey, Virgil’s final words from teacher to student are: “I’ve brought thee here by wit and by address; Make pleasure not they guide…. No word from me, no further sign expect/ Free, upright, whole, they will henceforth lay down/ Guidance that it were error to neglect,/ Whence o’er thyself I mitre thee and crown” (II.xxvii.130-142). Both King and Bishop of Himself allegorically, Dante will have attained self-mastery by the conclusion of this journey.
It’s a graduation ceremony. And yet, like every graduation, it is also a commencement. Top of the mountain is the return home for it is a return to Eden, “the starting-point,” as Sayers observes (Sayers, 109); “It is also the point to which every [hu]man must return, in order to make a fresh start.” This telos may be disappointing, Sayers notes, “for those who make a fetish of progress—is that it finds itself exactly where it originally set out from. Like Chesterton’s traveler who went all round the world to discover England, man has journeyed through the troubles of Earth and the vision of Hell and the steep ascents of Purgatory simply to come home.” However, it is a true story. Education is about rehumazining, purging ourselves from the dross collected by the malformation caused by a society that’s confused liberty with license. We teachers are the Virgils who hope to move our students to the place that Dante arrives, where the embodied soul can go forward without us, trusting its own will as its guide.
If you want to read Dante during Lent, follow the Ascend Podcast. Myself and Jenn Frey join the conversation on cantos I-V of Inferno.
Flannery O’Connor’s 100th Birthday
On March 25 (the same day that Dante enters Hell), Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925. Her centennial approaches! Celebrate by reading her unfinished novel Why do the Heathen Rage? or listening to my talks on O’Connor via the Great Courses on Audible. Or, an oldie (last year) but goodie: my conversation with Amy Julia Becker.
Recently I celebrated by speaking at her home in Andalusia (Milledgeville, GA).
Books I recommend
I’ve been looking forward to my friend Heidi White’s book for years! Having heard her speak on the relationship between duty and desire, I have been in anticipation of the full-fledged book. Now it is here, and I cannot wait to read it!
People do not get Beth Allison Barr right—I’ve known Dr. Barr tangentially for over a decade but better in the past 2-3 years. Twice within the last six months, I’ve heard men disparage her to me that don’t know her AT ALL. Nor have they read her work. They knock her argument based on what they’ve heard, not what they’ve read and wrestled with. Barr tells the truth about women in the church, and I am thrilled by everything that she teaches me.
She’s not a feminist in a negative sense. She is a Christian humanist; she knows that women are human, as Dorothy L. Sayers reminds us. Her work is grounded in deep research of church history, and she is serving Christ’s body by sharing it with us. This recent book looks at 150 books for ministers’ wives from 1923-2023. It also details the role of “pastor’s wife” which was primarily conceived of in the Reformation era, but has no biblical or Scriptural founding. As a pastor’s wife herself, Barr loves her vocation but recognizes that it isn’t all encompassing. Her calling is beyond the wife of her husband and includes writing this book.
“We have taken a position never mentioned directly in Scripture and turned it into the highest ministry calling for contemporary evangelical women, allowing it to supplant other ministry roles.” —Becoming the Pastor’s Wife
Get a copy!
HIGH SCHOOLERS, read great books at Pepperdine!
Come read the classics at Pepperdine for a week this summer with Dr. Amos Rothschild from St. Thomas Aquinas College! The theme is CUNNING; you’ll read excerpts from Homer’s Odysseus. Euripides’ Medea. Chaucer’s Pardoner. Shakespeare’s Iago. Please join us!
