PURGATORIO, Episode 167. The (Maybe?) Supremacy Of The Will: PURGATORIO, Canto XXI, Lines 58 - 75

The still-unknown shade on the fifth terrace of Mount Purgatory rounds out his answer to Virgil's questions with some shocking revelations: The souls seem to declare the moment they're cleansed. The will is the only proof that their penance is complete. They stand up. They choose to move on.

Or do they? Is it that simple? Or that theologically explosive?

This passage is easy to overstate, particularly in the modern world. There are actually at least two safeguards on this notion of the supremacy of free will in the unknown soul's answer.

Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[02:02] My English translation of the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XXI, lines 58 - 75. If you'd like to read along or continue the conversation with a comment, please scroll down this page.

[05:13] The supremacy of the will (and of interiority).

[10:10] The supremacy of divine justice (and a counterweight in the argument).

[14:28] The turn to the speaker's autobiography.

[17:06] The pilgrim as a third in an otherwise simple dialogue between two.

[19:31] Rereading the entire answer to Virgil's questions: PURGATORIO, Canto XXI, lines 40 - 75.

And here’s my English translation of PURGATORIO, Canto XXI, Lines 58 – 75

“This mountain trembles when some soul feels

It’s clean, so that it gets up and prepares itself

To climb on high—and that sort of cry seconds that action.

“The will is the sole proof of our purity

And the soul, now free to change its convent,

Is shocked and lets the will have its way.

“Before that, sure, each soul really wishes to rise but that yearning isn’t

Given leeway because divine justice, set against our will,

Makes us suffer as much as we once wanted to sin.

“So I, who’ve been flat out in this sorrow

For more than five hundred years, only now felt

The free will [to head to] a better threshold.

“That’s why you felt the tremor and heard

The pious spirits on the mountain offering praise

To the Lord. May he soon urge them upward.”

In this way he spoke to us and because one is happy to drink

Exactly to the measure of one’s own thirst,

I couldn’t say how much his words profited me.