In the 14th canto of his Paradiso, Dante writes, “As viol and harp strung with many strings in their harmony will sound sweet even to one who fails to catch their tune, so from the lights [souls] that there appeared to me, a melody gathered and came from the cross, enchanting me, though I could not make out the hymn.” Whether as mockery for the damned, a means of atonement for those in purgatory, or an expression of joy for the souls in heaven, music plays a noticeable and important role in the Divine Comedy. In hell, Dante describes howling demons; in purgatory he sees an angel ferrying souls from earth while they sing a penitential psalm; in heaven he becomes “as one drunk” hearing the songs of the blessed. Exploring song in the Purgatorio and Paradiso reveals Dante putting parts of the Mass, psalms, and hymns on the lips of souls being prepared for heaven or already enjoying the fulness thereof. Delving into Dante’s cantos, we discover a delightful paradox in the way he sees song as a component both of penance and as an element of beatitude.
Purgatorio
In the Divine Comedy, as Dante passes from terrace to terrace on mount Purgatory, he describes souls singing a total of seventeen times. All of his references are to scripture passages or elements of the Divine Office. Dante is not only using these familiar texts as theologically heavy literary allusions; he is making a moral point as well, showing his readers how their sung prayers, on account of their textual content and musical execution, are valuable in the ascetic and contemplative life. The importance that Dante associates with singing is profound, but in no way original; he isanecdotally teaching what the Church has taught for millennia, namely that the Mass and Divine Office contribute to the Glory of God and the sanctification of souls.
Psalm 113 is the first psalm sung, a summation of God’s power in the soul’s journey from exile to everlasting life. Dante describes an angel bringing souls to the foot of mount Purgatory:
At the stern [of the boat] stood the heavenly pilot—his mere description would bring to bliss. And more than a hundred souls with him. ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’ they sang together with one voice, and went on, singing the entire psalm. Then he blessed them with the sign of Holy Cross.
This psalm’s placement at the beginning of the work sums up Dante’s view of Purgatory: “When Israel went out of Egypt … from a people of strange language.” These souls are coming from Earth—a strange land since the Fall—to the sanctuary of God. Some will have to be purged of lingering stains of that strange land. They will nonetheless have an even higher goal than that of an unfallen world, as is made clear when they pass through the earthly paradise to the Beatific Vision.
This psalm also speaks of how the Jordan and the Red Sea were displaced for the exodus, and how the hills shook when the law was given to Moses; in these events God is showing His complete power in His plan of redemption. For these souls, Purgatory will mean God finishing the work of their creation, transfusing fallen nature with the supernatural capacity to see the face of God. Later they will sing, “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to thy name give the glory … The Lord hath been mindful of us: he will bless us.” These verses bring together both the eternal reward which these souls have been promised and a reminder of their need to be purified from pride, the first sin from which they will be cleansed. Psalm 113 ends with a note on their eternal destiny: “The dead will not praise the Lord … But we will bless the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.” References to the singing of psalms in particular will recur several more times in the Purgatorio. St. John Chrysostom said of praying the psalms for vigils, morning prayers, funerals, and in the monasteries, that “David is first, middle, and last.” One could imagine Chrysostom also saying, “In Purgatory, too, David is first, middle, and last.”
Non-biblical prayers are also sung, and a fine example appears on the terrace of the lustful, where the plainchant hymn Summae Deus clementiae is sung by the souls in the ring of fire which purges them from lust. “‘Summae Deus clementiae’ I then heard sung in the heart of the great burning, which made me no less eager to turn back.” Sung at Saturday Matins, the hymn’s text, especially of verse 3, is a perfect prayer for these lustful souls: “With the proper flames of charity, set our loins on fire so that they may be girt up at all times and ready for Thy coming.”
Their petition makes Dante even less eager to approach the flames, which Virgil urges him to do. “Then they again began to sing,” continues the Purgatorio, “calling on wives and husbands who were chaste, even as virtue and matrimony urge.” Dante pithily sums up how both virtue and matrimony are supposed to give order to sexual relationships—something obviously not supported by today’s popular music, nor something Dante consistently acknowledged. In the Fundamentals of Music, Boethius writes that the soul is most easily molded through what it hears. Recognizing this, Dante presents the highly ordered modes of Gregorian chant reforming the overly sensuous through their ears. To set an example for himself and other lustful people, he presents the monody of the monks, rich with order and virtue, to remedy a perennial vice.
Another hymn is sung in the Valley of the Kings in ante-Purgatory, the ancient and beautiful anthem to the Virgin Mary, the Salve Regina: “Seated in the grass and flowers, I saw souls not visible from beyond the sunken valley. ‘Salve Regina’ was the song they sang.” The monarchs sing, hailing the ultimate Queen, beseeching mercy from their valley of tears. It is a multivalent humiliation: they are male monarchs praying to a feminine ruler, while they term themselves exiles!
Jacques Hourlier, a monk, considering how the singing of chant becomes prayer through a “mini incarnation” in his Reflections on the Spirituality of Gregorian Chant, says this:
Chant comes to dwell deep within the soul. It shapes the very depths of my being. At the same time, it bursts from my heart and lifts me, in mind and heart, toward heaven. Music has become prayer.
The Valley of the Kings is home to monarchs who perverted their ruling power. Now they must use chant to lift their hearts and minds to heaven, away from worldly concerns, away from the usurpation and misuse of temporal power. A similarly ironic touch occurs on the Terrace of the Wrathful:
I heard voices and each one seemed to pray for peace and mercy to the Lamb of God who bears away our sins. They all began with Agnus Dei, and with one voice and intonation sang the words so that they seemed to share complete accord.
In the Mass, the Agnus Dei is preceded and followed by prayers for peace. This ensemble of petitions emphasizes the way in which peace is inseparably connected to the renunciation of sin and the receiving of communion. The Agnus Dei is the prayer for peace par excellence, for it asks that peace be granted by the remission of sins, the root of all disorder and conflict. The wrathful of Dante’s Purgatorio are doing exactly the opposite of what the Devil tempted them to do on earth; using music, they are repairing fissures in the musical body, instead of creating them. Surely this is an exercise in creating “harmony”! As the great 4th century Christian historian, Eusebius, wrote:
We sing God’s praises with living psaltery … For more pleasant and dear to God than any instrument is the harmony of the whole Christian people… Our cithara is the whole body, by whose movement and action the soul sings a fitting hymn to God, and our ten-stringed psaltery is the veneration of the Holy Ghost by the five senses of the body and the five virtues of the spirit.
With this beautiful vision of unity conjured up for us by the peaceful Agnus Dei, we now turn to the Paradiso, where that prayer’s petition is ultimately realized.
Paradiso
While the souls in purgatory sing only in Latin, one hears both Italian and Latin in paradise. Even though Dante is celebrated as a pioneering vernacular poet, this might seem surprising, as here, above all, we might expect a particularly strong likeness to the Church’s earthly worship—at Dante’s time always in Latin. Perhaps Dante’s use of the mother tongue might well have provided his readers the sense of surprise and strangeness that is a praised effect of Latin liturgy today. However, Dante hints at the existence of an elevated heavenly language which he cannot understand; Cacciaguida, Dante’s great-great grandfather, has to descend from mysterious “words so profound” to Italian so that he can be understood.
Regardless of language, Dante presents heaven as a grand, solemn, and joyful festival. Josef Pieper, in his book In Tune with the World, masterfully writes of the nature of festivity, ultimately concluding that there is no theory of festivity apart from Christianity, and specifically, the Mass:
Whatever the specific content of this thanksgiving [of the Mass] may be, the ‘occasion’ for which it is performed and which it comports with is nothing other than the salvation of the world and of life as a whole. … In practicing the rites of worship men hope that they will be vouchsafed a share in the superhuman abundance of life.
This share in a superhuman abundance of life is conveyed by the semi-liturgical atmosphere of the Paradiso, where there is a special combination of structure and freedom, of a solemn ritual interior and a more personal exterior. The saints are interiorly intent upon the life of the Trinity, while at the same time conversing with each other and the poet. They are not distracted by one or the other and are perfectly integrated.
Dante’s paradise is divided into nine concentric “spheres” which surround earth. Based on the medieval theory of the universe, the first six spheres are the realms of planets, while the last three contain the stars, the “crystal firmament,” and finally the “empyrean heaven,” the center of heaven and the home of the Trinity. According to their measure of holiness, souls are placed in spheres closer or further from the Trinity. In all the spheres Dante witnesses great rejoicing, which frequently expresses itself in song. When Dante reaches the sphere of Saturn, however, he is struck by the fact that it is silent. He asks Saint Peter Damian why the heaven of Saturn is silent:
‘Tell me why, within this wheel, the sweet symphony of Paradise falls silent, which lower down resounds with such devotion.’
‘Your hearing is as mortal as your sight,’ he answered. ‘Thus here there is no song for the very reason Beatrice has not smiled.’
At the beginning of the canto, Beatrice told Dante that if she smiled at him he would be turned to ashes by the radiance of her face:
‘My Beauty,’ she says, ‘which you have seen flame up more brightly the higher we ascend … is so resplendent that, were it not tempered in its blazing, your mortal powers would be like tree limbs rent and scorched by lightning.’
In the sphere of Saturn, souls remain silent so that Dante may remain intact. Is this not reminiscent of the silent Canon in the traditional Latin Mass? No human music is beautiful enough for it, nor any speech lofty enough. It is silent so that the act of prayer may be more concentrated and not lose its potency; but, paradoxically, this gives rise to even more joyful noise. Silence is not the end but a beginning. This silence is a profound preparation, for, in the next realm of heaven, song arises on six occasions! Dante breaks from his regular pattern of one sung text per level of heaven: Saturn is silent and the Starry Sphere abounds with six.
This is the full scheme of singing in the Starry Sphere of the Paradiso:
23.97 Gabriel sings to Mary.
24.113 The host of heaven sings the Te Deum in Italian, “with such melody as is only sung above.”
25.73 Obscure Sperino in te appears in a conversation with Saint James.
25.98 Sperent in te sung by the blessed (cf. Psalm 9).
26.69 Santo Santo Santo sung by Beatrice and the other blessed.
27.1 “‘Al Padre, al Figlio, a lo Spirito Santo gloria’ cried all the souls in Paradise, and I became drunk on the sweetness of their song.”
The impression of the Starry Sphere is one of “sober inebriation” where the blessed are filled with great joy that bursts out in so many songs, most of them liturgical in character. The blessed celebrate Dante’s conversation and instruction by Adam in the previous canto:
‘To the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, glory,’ cried all the souls of Paradise, and I became drunk on the sweetness of their song. It seemed to me I saw the universe smile, so that my drunkenness came now through hearing and through sight. O happiness! O joy beyond description! O life fulfilled in love and peace! O riches held in store, exempt from craving!
The song of Dante’s paradise seems to be very like Saint Benedict’s “work of God” or Opus Dei, the saint’s phrase for the continual and abundant praise of God in singing “psalms and spiritual canticles.” Silence and song are remarkable auditory aspects in the lives of Benedict’s monks. Music can spring from their silence—and what music! The melismas of Gregorian chant are some of the most beautiful ways we can begin to express wordless jubilation when faced with the ineffable. We can neither express it in words nor refrain from expressing it. The only thing left is to sing of it. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on Psalm 33, describes such song as expressing “an immense breadth of joys,” the welling up of a gladness words cannot express, which is ultimately beatitude, utterly beyond our expression.
Man is unified in heaven, his contradictory and disjointed desires reordered to their final end. Dante, ever the courtly love poet, allocates the first and last songs to the great Lady of the Court of Heaven, the Blessed Virgin Mary, melding secular and sacred into a single unity of right love. In the heaven of the Moon, the Ave Maria is sung by Piccarda, a nun who was forced by her brother to leave the convent. Thus the final song in the Divine Comedy occurs in the penultimate canto of the poem, as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux points out great saints and patriarchs in the rose of heaven, and explains to Dante that the Blessed Virgin is the only person who can make him able to see God. In presenting these songs to her, he splendidly transforms secular love poetry into a voice of heavenly prayer and intercession. The Marian touch is reminiscent of her recurring and prominent place in the office and Mass of all Catholic liturgies. Not only does Dante end with Gabriel’s song in canto 32, but the last canto of the poem, canto 33, is home to a poem within a poem, Saint Bernard’s prayer Vergine Madre, which makes up almost a third of the last canto. It is Dante’s parting homage to the Virgin Mary.
“Whoever sings for my sake”
Dante, the inebriated pilgrim, understands in his interactions with the blessed that true worship hidden in the bosom of the Trinity cannot but give rise to the jubilation of song. This exploration of Dante’s cantos has hopefully helped to unveil the expiatory and beatific nature of song. It is no different for us, here and now in the 21st century, than it was in 13th century medieval Italy. Praising the “great musical tradition of the Church, which has in Gregorian Chant and polyphony two of its highest expressions, as Vatican II itself states (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 116),” Pope Benedict XVI said to musicians, “you, who have the gift of song, can make the heart of many people sing in liturgical celebrations.”
Perhaps if Dante were writing today, he would depict a Purgatory for those who did not “share complete accord” with the teaching of the Church about the value of singing chant “with one voice,” or who did not sing as “virtue and matrimony urge.” The doctrine of song lyrically presented in the Comedia cannot be lightly dismissed, given its harmony with the Church’s teaching and praxis for so many centuries. If, then, we want to find ourselves speedily passing through Purgatory, we must joyfully and promptly begin to follow what has been handed onto us. If we fail, we risk having to ask with Dante the cause of our incomprehension of heavenly things: “Why is it that Your longed-for words soar up so far beyond my sight [that] the more it strives, the more it cannot reach them?’” Beatrice answers, speaking of the Church: “‘So that you may come to understand,’ she said, ‘the school that you have followed and see if what it teaches follows well my words, and see that your way is as far from God’s as that highest heaven … is distant from the earth.’”
