“Sharpen your sight, Reader: the truth, this time,
is covered by a thinning veil, and so,
the meaning should be easy to perceive.”
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatory,
Canto VII, lines 19-21.
“I’m reading it all again,” Ryan shared. “I finished Vita Nuova and began The Diving Comedy yesterday. I didn’t sleep well last night, and when I woke, I kept reading.
I made it through Hell. After, I entered into the ascent of Purgatory, and on its first page map of the Seven Storey Mountain, I read the ascension of sins and vices I must overcome. Each sin and vice is a misalignment of Love, a gift of God misdirected and abused rather than enjoyed and embraced as God intends and wills. I looked on the order of sins and storeys and, witnessing, I realized my life has been the mountain’s climb.”
“Where are you now?” Emma asked.
“On the threshold of Paradise,” Ryan answered. “Life has humbled me, and in such, removed me of my Pride. I learned not to desire or seek what others have, especially their Good and Blessings rather than those meant for me, and I am loosened of my Envy. War taught me there is no virtue in violence, inflicted harm, or reciprocated enmity that does not seek an end of love and peace; and in this I found no taste for Wrath. Drink and idleness and celebration of self without consideration and care for others showed me the emptiness of a Slothful life. In the vice of both directions, Avarice and Prodigality, I am nearer to the virtue of balanced love and living somewhere in between. In wanting more and receiving the unseen blessing that is God’s denial, and imparted temperance, my Gluttony was cured…but I am still on the Seventh Storey.”
“And what is that?” Emma asked.
“Lust,” Ryan answered. “To rid it in the Seventh Storey, one must walk through the fires and shouting out their affinity to sins as the fires burn away the sins of impure desires and too much, or misdirected love.
When Dante makes it to this point, staring into the flames, he hesitates. Hell and every story in his climb, he proceeds in trust beside Virgil, but in this final storey, he stalls:
‘It’s time, high time, to put away your fears;
turn towards me, come, and enter without fear!’
But I stood there, immobile—and ashamed.
He said, somewhat annoyed to see me fixed
and stubborn there, ‘Now, don’t you see, my son;
only this wall keeps you from Beatrice.’”
Emma’s face reddened, “Am I your lust?”
Ryan hesitated, feeling the burn of purgation and purification of admittance in the flames. “For all I feel, in all the ways I’m drawn, you’ve never been a lust. It’s always been of Love. You are always a light, a guide that leads me up; and if ever I hurt from thoughts of you, it is in awareness that I have fallen short of who it is God beckons me to be.
Your spirit draws me to become the Greater and Purer Love.”
Emma’s emerald eyes lit in emanation from within.
“Then what happens?” Emma asked.
“He steps into the flames. He purifies his soul, and in walking through the fire, she appears to him fixed by the crown made of Minerva’s leaves—a Laurel crown.
She tells of her witness to his wandering from the path that leads to truth in pursuit of simulacra of the good, which promise more than they can ever give. She prayed for inspiration to come to him through dreams and other means as she sought to save his drifting soul.
I have lived that waywardness. In life and place when I felt rejected and unloved, I sought simulacra of the good—false-love and superficial pleasures that leave emptiness and abasement. In a desire to be loved, and to love, I was drawn to wrong and untrue imitations that left my spirit broken; desires of want and not of love, and I was empty.
In you, a saw True Good—Godliness—in beautiful and simple message—‘be a light in this world’—and you returned me to the path of Truth by inspiration, dreams, and other means. From that day until my first book wrote, I stayed the course of Truth. Falling from the high of its completion, I stumbled in my thoughts—and still do some days.
Beatrice forces Dante to be honest in and with himself by doing so before her.
She: ‘In your journey of desire for me,
leading you toward that Good beyond which naught
exists to which a man’s heart may aspire,
what pitfalls did you find, what chains stretched out
across your path, hat you felt you were forced
to abandon every hope of going on?
And what appealed to you, what did you find
so promising in all those other things
that made you feel obliged to spend your time
In courting them?” I heaved a bitter sigh,
and barely found the voice to answer her;
my lips, with difficulty, shaped the words.
Weeping, I said: “Those things with their false joys,
offered me by the world, led me astray
when I no longer saw your countenance.
And she: “Had you kept silent or denied
what you have just confessed, your guilt would still
be clear to the great Judge who knows all things.’”
The flames of purgation ceased. A burden was released, and Ryan felt the levity of spirit’s rise.
“I know you were never the end state in this life,” Ryan spoke. “You were always the Messenger, the Angel, the Inspiration toward that Good beyond…to which a man’s heart may aspire. Without your sign, I don’t know where I would be in this life or its after.”
Ryan felt a heart flutter light and cool within his chest, faint like the fanning of wings near but never touching but leaving effect of beat and after-wind.
“And what does she say to him as they stand together on the mountaintop?” Emma asked.
“Then she to me: ‘It is my wish that you
from now on free yourself from fear and shame,
and cease to speak like someone in a dream.’
She didn’t want his words of dream and fantasies,” Ryan responded. “She just wanted him—real and comfortable and honest in his truth—and too I’ll try to be.”
“Where do they go from there?” Emma asked leadingly.
“Paradise,” Ryan answered numb in his newfound levity.
“It sounds like a beautiful dream,” Emma spoke. “Do you think it could be true?”
“I pray it is,” Ryan answered.
“So do I…” Emma answered, gazing into the infinite of Heaven above.
They stood on the mountaintop dreaming over precipice only eternity can answer; purified spirits holding to same-shared Hope.
“From those holiest waters I returned
to her reborn, a tree renewed, in bloom
with newborn foliage, immaculate,
eager to rise, now ready for the stars.”
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatory,
Canto XXXIII, lines 142-145