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Saving Virgil Ed King For charity which is the life of the soul, even as the soul is the life of the body, has no end: Charity never falleth away (1 Cor. 13:8). Moreover, the dead live in the memory of the living: wherefore the intention of the living can be directed to them. —Thomas Aquinas1 Virgil is the only soul in Limbo who appears to suffer damnation twice: first, after his death, when Minos assigns his shade to the First Circle ; and second, after his ascent to the Earthly Paradise, when Beatrice not only displaces him as Dante’s guide but “disappears” him as a continuing character at the literal level of the poem (Purg. 30.49). His fall from Eden into Limbo—if that’s where his shade ends up—re-enacts at an absurdly fast pace the long slow fall of Adam into Hell after the expulsion from the Garden. Damned by the polarizing dictates of typology, Virgil must play the Old Adam to Dante’s New Adam and be cast off into the darkness when Beatrice comes to judge the quick and the dead. The only other souls in the Inferno who might be considered doubly damned are certain traitors in the Ninth Circle such as Branca d’Oria and possibly Fra Alberigo. Their afterlife is strangely doubled in space rather than time. As soon as their souls fall into the deep freeze of Ptolomea (Inf. 33.122–38), their earthly bodies are snatched by demons who spookily animate them from within. Though the original possessors of the bodies may think they have died in a physical sense, their disjecta membra continue to operate in the world above—not as horror-movie zombies lurching across the land but, more frighteningly, as socially well-placed villains coldly plotting the destruction of Church and 83 Empire. Virgil is obviously not like them. He is surely what he appears to be—the noblest of noble pagans. A quick glance at his candidly transparent body—“ombra vedi,” as he humbly reminds Statius [a shade you see] (Purg. 21.132)—would be enough to assure even the most paranoid pilgrim that no body-snatching has occurred, that no treacherous demon lurks within. All the more reason for readers to empathize with Dante-pilgrim’s intense anguish when his “dolcissimo patre” [sweetest father] (Purg. 30.50) is snatched away again by the infernal shadows after coming so far into the Light: any distress or bewilderment at his first damnation is bound to be recalled and intensified by the shock of his second. The loss of Virgil to Limbo, the hopelessness of his unharrowable afterlife, and the Virgilian “look” of Limbo itself, with its Elysian glades and flowery meadows and melancholy shadows, have distressed and bewildered readers of the Commedia since the fourteenth century.2 The disquieting emotions occasioned by the fate of the virtuous pagans in the poem range from exegetical embarrassment about Dante’s unorthodoxy (at the very least) to soul-searching anguish and rebellious outrage at the apparent injustice of the Divine Justice system. Virgil is the lightning rod for these stormy feelings—as Beatrice herself strategically sets him up to be—because he alone among the great souls of Limbo has the heavenly impetus to throw off despair and to hope for a new Harrowing. The impetus is Beatrice’s intercessory promise that she will put in a good word for him on high if he agrees to do her bidding: amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare. Quando sarò dinanzi al segnor mio, di te mi loderò sovente a lui. [Love moved me and makes me speak. When I am before my Lord I will often praise you to Him.]3 (Inf. 2.72–4) If she were just toying with him, it could not have been love that moved her to speak—at least not the blessed kind that “never faileth” (1 Cor. 13:8). Virgil never for a moment doubts the trustworthiness of her charitable intentions towards him. Why should he? Despite his supposedly eternal relegation to the First Circle, he is miraculously released from it through Divine Grace as soon as he accepts Beatrice’s mission to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory. Apart from the Emperor Trajan, whose happy “case” at first seems very different from Virgil’s, no other damned soul has been able to escape from Hell since Christ’s original Harrowing . As Beatrice indicates, the Virgin Mary herself has played...

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