Commentary Purg XXXII 109-160

The second pageant in the garden of Eden is both dramatically different from the first and exactly like it. In the first instance we were given a description of the Church Triumphant (which exists as an ideal out of time and can only be gathered once history is done) that comes in a temporal form, moving from Genesis to the Apocalypse before Dante's eyes. Now he sees real history, from just after the founding of the Church until the present, unfolding as a series of events performed in a sort of 'dumbshow' in a single place. However, both pageants are presented as allegories, reflecting history, to be sure, but experienced as though they were literally fictive (e.g., the books of the Bible, the Griffin, the depredations of the Church), requiring the kind of critical procedure that we expect for what Dante himself referred to (Conv.II.i.4-5) as allegory as practiced by the poets. Most of the scenes in the Commedia are presented as 'historical' and are best analyzed (or so it seems to many) with the methods of the 'allegory of the theologians'; for some others, however, that are presented as fictive and thus call for the more usual allegorical procedures, see Hollander (Holl.1969.1), pp. 239-54. For a recent study of the way in which the allegorizing tendencies of the early commentators were continued in the Renaissance, see Porcelli (Porc.1997.2).

The rest of the canto will present the history of the Church and of the empire as these two entities make their related voyages through history. However, for a new interpretation of this entire scene, reversing many long-held opinions about the valences of almost every element in this difficult allegorical passage, see the final paragraph of C.Par.XII.55