Purgatorio, Canto 20 with Dr. Jennifer Holberg 

Wonderful thoughtful lecture on Canto 20. Thank you Dr Helberg. Looking at the world now, a Covid world, it seems to be very similar. We have the ultra rich who we read about in the media who get richer every year and then, on the other hand, think about those who volunteer for charities and work for no pay or those who get very little, who keep society going by stacking shelves in supermarkets or cleaners in hospitals.

Thank you, every lecture is a delight, I echo all the comments of this wonderful 100daysofDante Project, learning so much, and appreciating the journey with Dante the Pilgrim

Thank you Dr. Holberg for your wonderfully enthusiastic unraveling of this laborious and complicated canto. Life for people who have no faith can be very unsatisfying and so their end will also bring no satisfaction, but those who believe have God's promise that no matter how difficult the journey, a virtuous life is well worth the effort, and in the end all faithful believers will be more than satisfied. They will be sons and daughters of God and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. "Ad Mejorem Dei Gloriam."

I just love Dr. Holberg!

Thank you so much for this presentation.

Switching to the Hollanders' translation from Longfellow's vastly increased my enjoyment in reading Dante. I have Brian E. Denton to thank for that suggestion. I still look at the Longfellow copy to see Gustave Doré's amazing illustrations. I am taking the opportunity on this first ever reading to just read through the Cantos without diving into the footnotes very much, but Dr. Holberg made it sound wonderful, so I think I'll do that later today. Thank you for the enlightening commentary.

Wonderful presentation - listened twice - the best lecture so far and they’ve all been very good. Glory to God indeed!

That was excellent. Thank you

Excellent! I was quite bogged down with that history stuff, and appreciate your references to other sources.

Glory to God in the Highest, Indeed!

Such a pleasure to listen to you! Thank you.

Excellent! You made it all so clear. Thank you

Excellent!

Dr. Holberg, thank you for your presentation. Avarice is more clear now! This all truly is about what we set our hearts and minds and bodies to. Do we love the things of the earth or the things of God? I am curious to see how this ring differs with the last rings of gluttony and lust. They seem different, in a way, as excess good things. Anticipating the end, I see a full picture of all the 7 Sins coming at the end. This, I expect, will come on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise at the top. It seems we will have a memory of sin even with restored nature. To Paradise, and Beyond! Thank you.

Thank you! What a wonderful presentation!

Canto 20: There appear to be more penitents on the Cornice of Avarice than any previous ones, so that Dante and Virgil are forced to hug its innermost rim to avoid being shoved off! Once more, they hear exhortations to help the penitents in their purgation. The “whip” steering them away from the sin consists of the usual three cords: the Marian - the birth of Jesus in the stable; the Secular - the Roman Fabricus, who chose poverty over wealth; and the Spiritual - St Nicholas (the model for Santa Claus!) who provided doweries for poor maidens so that they could avoid becoming prostitutes. Exhortations leading towards the virtue of Moderation include examples of those whose wealth resulted in terrible consequences in which it is shown that wealth is not nourishing, e.g. Midas who could turn everything into gold, even his food, and rich Crassus whose severed head was filled with a drink of liquid gold. They also meet Hugh Capet, founder of the post-Carolingian dynasty, whose avarice was felt throughout France, the Holy Roman Empire, the papal states and the city-states of Italy. He gives Dante a prophecy about France interfering with Florentine policies as well as with Boniface VIII. The canto ends with an earthquake of unstated origin and voices shouting: “Glory to God in the highest.”

"Glory to God in the highest" is also the first line of a hymn in the Catholic Mass, so when I read/hear that line I immediately think first of that part of the Mass, rather than the carol.

Love the apostrophe to describe an apostrophe. :-)

LECTURE TRANSCRIPT Canto 20 of the Purgatorio can seem a bit much. So many illusion, so much French history, so much talking, there is a lot packed into this canto so it’s easy to feel bogged down as you’re reading. But canto 20 with its focus on the avaricious or the greedy has some really important ideas contained within it. You’ll remember than in canto 1 of the Inferno we first come face to face with the she-wolf that represent avarice at line 49, “and now a she-wolf came that in her leanness seem wracked with every kind of greediness, how many people she has brought to grief”. I this the sight of the she-wolf that Dante says, “brought my spirit down so low with fear that seized me I lost all hope of going up the hill”. Notice those lines from Inferno are echoed here in Purgatorio in Dante’s condemnation found in lines 10-12, “may you be cursed you age old wolf who take more prey than any other best to feed your bottomless appetite.” For Dante, especially given his Franciscan commitments, greed is one of the most pervasive of sins, and in many ways we can read canto 20’s excesses as mirroring the sin these penitents are working through. For example, we know that greed has indeed claimed many souls because Dante and Virgil have to wind their way carefully along this terrace as if they were, “hugging the battlements” there are just so many penitent here. Also that Dante doesn’t do anything just once in this canto, for instance at the opening he not only addresses the she-wolf, as we saw, but then he addresses the heavens. Later Hugh Capet will do the same double addressing himself. By the way, the technical term for this kind of address to a person or a personified thing like she-wolf or the heavens is called an apostrophe. Anyway, this happens over and over so watch for that throughout. With the theme of greed in mind then it also shouldn’t surprise us that Dante pilgrim begins this canto wanting more. Sure it’s more conversation with pope Adrian which concluded in canto 19 but it’s a subtle reminder of the human desire towards wanting more than we should have. Though Dante reluctantly acknowledges Adrian’s better judgment and moves on to follow Virgil he begins this canto unsatisfied. Just as the penitents among whom he walks were unsatisfied in life. Speaking of canto 19, it is where we are first introduced to the avaricious. As a reminder, we learned there that because the avaricious were so driven by the acquisition of earthly goods and by the pursuit of earthly aims like power instead of going after heavenly things, these penitents are now bound hands and feet and lay motionless stretched out face down towards the earth. In this posture of stillness they tearfully contemplate their relentless chasing of all that the world deemed good. As we’ve seen elsewhere in purgatory, here in canto 20 part of what the penitent spend time contemplating are good examples: they study people who were able to not do the thing they are now repenting for, people in this case who instead lived lives of virtuous humility and generosity. Starting of course with the Virgin Mary, humility herself, who did not seek status and gave birth to Jesus in the lowliest of places. After her comes a Roman example, Fabricius, and a Christian one, Saint Nicholas. These examples are all provided by Hugh Capet who ends up taking the bulk of the canto from lines 40 through 123 to narrate French history through his own family tree. Now this long recitation of Hugh’s wicked family and their doings can get overwhelming especially if you try to figure out who’s who and when things happened and whatnot. It’s important to note that Dante’s rendering here isn’t totally in keeping with the historical record. If you’re interested in the precise history you shouldn’t depend on Dante’s version. Instead, I hope you’re using a good edition, I like the Hollanders and Mark Musa’s and using other history texts to help you get the back-story right. But I don’t actually think that historical accuracy is the point of Hugh’s oration. Dante is writing a story after all, so even if you understand nothing about the Capetian dynasty, you can still take away several things from Hugh’s long speech. Number one, notice his excess of storytelling. Hugh is repenting of his avarice on this terrace but his style of speech still reflects the besetting (set?) of his life. We might say that he rather greedily takes up much of the canto with his talking. Two, one of Hugh’s most important lines comes at the beginning of his recitation where he says at line 43, “I was the root of the evil tree that casts its shadow over all of the Christian lands so that good fruit is rarely gathered there.” This line is a direct echo of 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is the root of all evil”. This verse is the very definition of avarice. As the root then of his family, Hugh is acknowledging how his choices towards wealth and power set the tone for generations to come. Three, thus without even understanding the details of every Philip, and Louis and Charles, we can see that this is a story of a deeply dysfunctional family, one where greed has warped generation after generation until finally members of this family are so awful that it has personal consequences, the willingness to sell a daughter for example, as well as very publicly political ones including the ruin of Italy because of Frances insatiable desires. The ways in which these French machinations and Italian politics played out, even as part of Dante’s own exile, would have felt very personal to him. But more than that, the ripples of corruption go everywhere. Hugh concludes his speech by sharing with Dante that the penitents spend their days thinking on Godly examples but their nights remembering stories of other avaricious people. And while we get three examples of the good people in the canto’s opening perhaps unsurprisingly there’s a long list of the greedy. Eight examples jam-packed into 15 lines. This list, drawn from classical mythology and all parts of the bible, Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament, reminds us a final time that greed has always been around in all times and in all sorts of truly damaging ways. Take a minute and unpack each story that Dante references to get a sense of the spectrum of greed he wants us to consider. But on Dante’s road toward sanctification, it’s critical that the canto doesn’t end in grim stories of the greedy. Instead an incredibly powerful earthquake rocks Dante and Virgil followed by the singing Gloria in Excelsis Deo-glory to God in the highest. Many of us will be familiar with this Latin from Christmas carols and it helps us understand the powerful take away from this canto-yes, we are all touched by greed, it is awful and rapacious and damaging, personally and corporately, most of us are pursuing money and possessions, status and acclaim, now as much as in Dante’s time. Hugh’s long story shows the way that greed for the wrong things misshapes individuals and families, kingdoms and really the world. And yet, though Dante doesn’t understand the earthquake yet in canto 20, the Gloria that is sung is already telling us the antidote to greed; the life and work of Jesus. Harkening back to the example of Mary, at the canto’s opening Dante ends the canto by returning to the humility of Christ’s birth to a lowly young girl in a humble place and then revealed first to ordinary shepherds. The invocation of the incarnation here reminds us too that the corrupt power of families, like the Capetians, will never endure. Instead human systems are rectified and redeemed by a God who sends his own son, and through Christ’s death, invites sinners to become sons and daughters in the family of God. And for all the avaricious folks who have struggled with wanting the best, the most, only Christ’s birth is the greatest, celebrated in the highest. The canto’s ending right their and our priorities urging us toward the highest pursuit, the pursuit of Christ. Dante is confused by the earthquake and he finishes the canto perplexed and humbled. But now his quest for knowledge is for the things of God rather than the things of earth. That’s a vital lesson in canto 20. Glory to God in the Highest indeed. Thanks again for the 100 Days Project!