Commentary Purg XXX 16-18

As will arise all those who will be saved at the Last Judgment, a hundred angels ('ministers and messengers of life eternal') rise up upon the chariot itself to welcome Beatrice, who, in a moment, will come to it.  Where do these angels come from?  We are not told whether they suddenly manifest themselves upon the chariot now just as Beatrice comes, or descended from the Empyrean with her, or with the chariot when it came to show itself to Dante in Eden.  See C.Purg.XXXI.77-78 and C.Purg.XXXII.89-90.

      These Beatricean angels have a pre-history.  In Vita nuova XXIII.7, Dante imagines Beatrice's death and sees a band of angels who return with her to heaven, mounting after a little white cloud, and singing 'Osanna in altissimis.'  Charles Singleton (Sing.1954.1), p. 57, was perhaps the first to make the necessary connections between that scene and this one.  This procession began with voices singing 'Hosanna' ([Purg XXIX 51]); Beatrice returns with her host of angels and again she is obscured by a cloud.  The affinities between the two scenes and the Bible are even more suggestive than Singleton noticed.  In the prose of V.N.XXIII.7 Dante says that he seemed to hear the words 'Osanna in excelsis.'  The precise phrase occurs -- strange as it may seem, given its familiarity -- only once in the Latin New Testament, in Mark 11:10.

      These verses draw Dante's imagining of Beatrice's departure from this life in Vita nuova into obvious relation to his presentation of her return to earth here in the garden of Eden.  In both cases the word 'Hosanna' associates her with Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem: in the Vita nuova, the New Jerusalem that is life eternal in the Empyrean; here, a triumphant descent to earth modeled on Christ's return in judgment.  It is thus that one can answer Peter Armour's question (Armo.1989.1, pp. 56-58): if Beatrice represents Christ (and Armour believes that she does), then how can the griffin also do so?  The griffin stands for Christ as the equivalent of his Church, His mystical body, represented by the chariot.  The reader might imagine a film version of this scene, with all the 'characters' in the procession (but not Dante and Matelda -- or Statius and Virgil) as cartoon figures, and Beatrice played by a living actress.  The Church Triumphant, appearing on this unique occasion in the earthly paradise for the instruction of Dante, is otherwise always located in the Empyrean (whence it will descend for his instruction in actuality, not only symbolically, in Paradiso XXIII), awaiting a future and final series of events.  Beatrice comes as Christ will come in that future, in the Second Coming (his third advent -- see C.Purg.XXX.8-9).  This temporal distinction helps us to understand that there is indeed a difference between the symbolic griffin and Beatrice as figure of Christ to come in judgment, that there is not a question of 'two Christs,' but of two differing kinds of representation of the same Christ.  In [Purg XXXII 89-90] we learn that the griffin has returned to the Empyrean, leaving Beatrice and the chariot behind in the garden, now representing the Church Militant's career from its founding to the fourteenth century.