Introduction to The Purgatorio

In the opening canto of Purgatory, Dante the poet pictures Dante the pilgrim coming out of the pit of hell blackened by soot and weary with climbing. To Cato, the guardian of the threshold to the mountain, Dante looks like a typical sinner. So he is. His behavior in hell, his weak pity, quick anger, lassitude, and pride still wait for transformation into virtues of compassion, patience, zeal, and humility. Otherwise, why climb the mountain?

In the Inferno sins are punished, in Purgatory sins are purged. For the pilgrim and the reader, the journey literally leads to a higher level of interior commitment in order to acquire virtue and to change one’s life by deepening the inner experience of personal worth and public goodness. By probing the depths of his own humanity and ascending the heights of the human spirit, Dante makes the journey alone and for all. A happy ambiguity exists in the Italian word alta: it can mean both "high" and "deep." In the Divine Comedy, the higher we travel, the more profound the journey inward and the more demanding the search into the mind and heart.
When, in Canto II, Dante meets the souls detained in Antepurgatory, he joins them in listening to Casella sing one of Dante’s own songs which Casella set to music. His behavior — and Virgil’s — is ripe for reproach. The serious business of total spiritual change has yet to begin, as Cato vigorously reminds the sluggards:

"What negligence and what delay is this?

Race to the mountain and strip off the slough

Which won’t let God be manifest in you!"

                        (Purgatory II, 121-123)

The reprimand affects Virgil more pointedly than it does Dante who appears more interested in his guide’s feelings than in his own failure to move ahead. Only when the wayfarer stands before Beatrice — after Virgil, who has declared him free, has left — and listens to her in the earthly paradise as she reproaches him, only then will he fully realize the personal impact of his long journey, that the path has been followed for his sake to lead him to the "new life" which Beatrice has prepared for him.
Previously, Dante has portrayed his encounters with the damned in hell as a shocking reminder of the evil pervading the world and contaminating even the pilgrim passing through the landscape of pain on his way to the final vision of God. Before writing a line of verse, the poet already had experienced that vision, and from that point of view every step along the way reveals its true purpose and perspective. The transformation that awaits the wayfarer has taken place in the writer’s deepest consciousness. Now he must retrace the winding road by which the mystical height was reached, up the hillside of corrected vices and acquired virtues.
On each of the seven terraces of purgatory the pilgrim’s imagination undergoes a different training in assimilating images of vice and virtue so that his mind will finally be ready for the vision of God. In hell he remained basically an observer, but in purgatory he is a participant in the unfolding drama. Dante staggers as he approaches the cornice of sloth, he cannot see in the place of blind anger, and he burns as he passes through the fiery wall of the terrace of lust. He is the sinner in need of reform and he is the purified soul who will drink the waters of Eunoè to be made whole again beyond confusion.
The spirituality of Purgatory is decidedly modern in its emphasis on the individual as the focus of God’s salvation plan. Humanity, not in the abstract but in the person of Dante, must change if history is to cease its threshing tumult of upheaval and selfish pursuit. Dante must first set his own house in order before leading his readers to straighten out their lives. He has already done so, and the poem now universalizes the experience of one man so that all may come to the same transformation of life, making the crooked straight and turning the reader around in conversion.