As another school year draws toward its close, it is a good occasion to consider what the whole of an education or “leading out” really entails. Who better than Dante to remind us?

In Canto 27 of Purgatorio, Dante gives us one of the most liberating passages in literature. After his long journey down through the circles of Hell and up through the seven terraces of Purgatory, the Pilgrim has just undergone the excruciating fire that purifies the lustful, and he is about to enter the Earthly Paradise that was lost in the Fall. The ancient Roman poet Virgil has been his guide all the way, even though Virgil himself remains spiritually in Limbo with the other noble souls who lack faith in God and experience “longing without hope.” Virgil has no more to teach Dante because they have “come to a place/in which, unaided, I can see no farther.//I brought you here with intellect and skill./From now on take pleasure as your guide. /You are free of the steep way, free of the narrow.”

Take pleasure as your guide. Who has not wanted to hear that? And Virgil means it. He points out the idyllic natural beauties of Eden and reiterates his instruction:

‘No longer wait for word or sign from me.
Your will is free, upright, and sound.
Not to act as it chooses is unworthy:
over yourself I crown and miter you.’

If the reader of Dante’s Divine Comedy (at the moment, every sophomore at Wyoming Catholic College) does not feel a burden lifted at this point in the poem, then he or she has not been identifying enough with the Pilgrim on his journey.

On the other hand, I don’t think anyone on the faculty is ready to say to the sophomores, “no longer wait for word or sign from me.” Reading about Eden, alas, does not mean that the reader has actually reentered it. Likewise, Freshmen at WCC have read or will soon read the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic: the prisoner, coming up from the realm of shadows (opinions, half-truths), enters by stages the full light of the sun—a brilliant metaphor for what it means to grasp real truths. Like the recovery of Eden, it is immensely liberating to imagine. Both tropes give the reader a glimpse of joy, a pattern for what to desire. But effective as these images are in disposing students toward the good, they leave the thing itself still to be achieved.

Real liberation is much more arduous. In fact, Virgil proves to be mistaken when he says that Dante is “free of the steep way, free of the narrow.” If Virgil were right, Dante would already be another Adam, restored to what St. Thomas Aquinas calls “original justice.” He would exhibit the “wonderfully ordered state of man” in which the body was completely subject to the soul, and “among the faculties of the soul, the lower powers were subject to reason without any rebelliousness, and man’s reason itself was subject to God.” The fact is, Virgil would not be in Limbo if he knew what it took to reconcile man to God. A few cantos later, Beatrice rips into Dante so severely that the attendant angels feel sorry for him. She humiliates the poet by name in front of every reader of the Comedy and at the same time reveals the inadequacy of Virgil’s standard of excellence. Not only does Dante have to undergo the stinging personal rebuke of the woman he loves most, but he still needs to experience the paradisal condition by journeying through the spheres of the Paradiso before he achieves, as St. Thomas puts it, “the immovable repose of his will in the first Good.”

It’s revealing to think how much Virgil’s mistake tells us about the homage to personal sovereignty in our day. Contemporary culture encourages the assertions of the autonomous self. For example, sexual desire is instructed, “Take pleasure as your guide,” and (by way of contradiction) also instructed that it should never let itself be instructed. The will of the individual, coddled (from outside) into thinking that nothing outside itself should ever determine its choices, is told that “not to act as it chooses is unworthy.” This thicket of socially coerced error and contradictory empowerment makes a dark wood indeed.

The arduous curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College (I think especially of our seniors, who are on retreat this weekend as they come toward the end) exists to leads students out of “wandering mazes lost,” as Milton puts it. Those who gladly learn and gladly teach are engaged in the hard work of earning the tradition and freeing themselves from the tyranny of the passions and the false pleasures of contemporary culture. That real liberation is what Dante’s Comedy is all about. Central to our tradition, midway through the journey of our history as Catholics, the poet offers himself as an example of self-willed error, which makes us trust the pleasure of his poem as a sure guide of souls.

Republished with gracious permission from the Wyoming Catholic College Weekly Bulletin.

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The featured image is “Dante in Exile” (circa 1860) by Domenico Peterlini, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.