Purgatory: Canto 29 -- The Heavenly Pageant

If MacAllister is right and the Purgatorio is based on the idea of a mass, then we've reached the point in it where the celebrants are processing away from the altar and out of the Church to meet with the people. Mass is ended, therefore, and we should go in peace to love and to serve the Lord. Prior to seeing this holy procession, though, we've been engaged in a minor procession of our own as Matilda has led Dante quite a number of paces down the riverbank until a bend in the river causes Dante to face the sun. The procession at a halt, Dante can do little more than wonder at it, and Virgil, himself, knows nothing about what is going on or what to expect. As astonished as Dante, he has no recourse to his own wisdom to guide him. We see clearly now how little use he would be to us on the road ahead and how we're much better suited, because of our grace, to go on without him. Goodnight, sweet prince, says the bard, parting is such sweet sorrow that we would say goodnight till it be morrow.



Dante's waltz with Matilda parallels his discernment over the woman with the compassionate eyes, the one who engages him with her look, and he decides she must be gracious and that a love might be found. He writes of her in Canto 38 of La Vita Nuova, "A thought, gracious because it speaks of you, comes frequently to dwell awhile with me, and so melodiously speaks of love, it talks the heart into surrendering./ The soul says to the heart: "Who is this one that comes with consolation for our mind, possessing such outrageous strength that he will not let other thoughts remain with us?"/ The heart replies: "O reasonable soul, this is a spirit of Love, tender and new, who brings all his desires here to me; all his intensity, his very life, have come from that compassionate one's eyes who was distressed about our martyrdom" (8-10). Beatrice is his first and only love, though, and it is for her that he will yet wait even though he allows this rekindling of his heart to enable him to take a bride by the name of Gemma Donati, with whom he will sire four children before his exile from Florence, to which he has not yet returned, his body still lying in Ravenna unable and unwilling to come home. His soul, though, moves onward to God because he truly desired it, and here by the banks of the River Lethe, he wishes to swim and enter the pageant of the Church Triumphant. His mantra upon seeing this procession can be no other than that which is written on the breastplate of St. Patrick:

“Christ shield me this day: Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every person who thinks of me, Christ in the eye that sees me, Christ in the ear that hears me.”

S.