Annotating Purgatorio 5.103–129

Purgatorio 5.85–129 presents Dante’s encounter with the soul of Buonconte da Montefeltro and highlights the supposed final moments of that man’s life. Mortally wounded in battle and in peril of dying outside the state of grace, Buonconte utters the name of Mary and sheds a tear of repentance. An angel takes possession of his soul just before a demon can snatch it. Apparently in a fit of pique the demon contrives that Buonconte’s body at least will not be graced with a Christian burial. Scholars of course have commented on all of this, but in my view annotations of the passage in which Dante describes the demon’s manufacture of a storm fall short of what a reader might reasonably expect. Particularly the commentary tradition pays minimal attention to theological aspects of the story. Dante’s imaginative explanation for why Buonconte’s body was never found, to be understood properly, I will argue, must be seen in light of what we might call Christian folklore. In this article, a note written in gratitude to the most subtle and exciting teacher I have ever studied with, I will sketch out this Christian lore and suggest how it serves to frame our appreciation of Dante’s art.

An example of typical commentary on Dante’s passage is found in Singleton’s notes to Purgatorio 5.104–114. Whereas Singleton takes care to illustrate the beliefs that devils and angels contend over the souls of the dying, and that a single tear may save souls in such dire situations, he offers only terse support for the proposition that demons can conjure storms. On this matter one finds little else in the annotations of other major English editions or translations of the Purgatorio.¹ Amazingly, even Patrick Boyde’s discussions of meteorology and of demons in Dante’s works say virtually nothing about this passage.² In turn, Alison Cornish’s learned treatment of meteorology in the passage only hints at the theology that lies behind it, both technical and popular.³

Let us begin with technical theology. Dante’s commentators all adduce Aquinas’s Summa theologica, finding various passages relevant to the notion that devils can control weather artificially: chiefly 1:112.2, but also 1:110.3 and 2.1:80.2, which together argue that angels can move material agents to produce particular atmospheric effects. Given that hard evidence for Dante’s knowledge of the Summa is rather scant, it seems better to cite Aquinas’s commentary on Job 1:12–20, which provides a coherent statement of the piecemeal observations made in the Summa. Adduced long ago by Graf, whose general reference has been neglected by later scholars, this commentary allows that demons are able to induce perturbation of the air, to stir up winds and to make lightning fall from the sky.⁴ Although corporeal matter, Thomas remarks, does not obey angels, good or bad, in taking forms, corporeal nature must obey a spiritual nature with respect to local movement. Therefore, whatever things can be done by local motion alone, these things, through natural power, can by done by both good and evil spirits. Yet winds and rains and other perturbations of the air of this kind are able to be made solely by the motion of vapors resolved from the earth and water, with which the natural power of a demon suffices to obtain results of this kind. It is one thing indeed to rain from a natural course of events, because it is God alone who ordains natural causes to this end; it is another thing sometimes to make use of natural causes ordained by God for the purpose of rain in order to create rain artificially or sometimes to produce wind as it were in some extraordinary way.⁵

This commentary makes clear that demons are not rulers of the air or the elements in any systemic or hierarchical sense. Aquinas touches on this matter as well in discussing Ephesians 2:2, where Saint Paul makes reference to the “principem potestatis aeris huius, spiritus, qui nunc...